Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(3)

The guards, satisfied that Tor was securely restrained, left the way they had come. But Pine could hear them right outside the door. She was sure Tor could as well.

She imagined him somehow breaking through the glass. Could she hold her own against him? It was an intriguing hypothetical. And part of her wanted him to try.

His gaze finally fell upon her and held.

Atlee Pine had stared through the width of glass or in between cell bars at many monsters, a number of whom she had brought to justice.

Yet Daniel James Tor was different. He was perhaps the most sadistic and prolific serial murderer of his, or perhaps any, generation.

He rested his shackled hands on the laminated surface, and tilted his thick neck to the right until a kink popped. Then he resettled his gaze on her after flicking a glance at the badge.

His lips curled momentarily at the symbol for law and order.

“Well?” he asked, his voice low and monotone. “You called this meeting.”

The moment, an eternity in the making, had finally come.

Atlee Pine leaned forward, her lips an inch from the thick glass.

“Where’s my sister?”

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.





Chapter

2



T?HE DEAD-EYE STARE from Tor didn’t change in the face of Pine’s question. On the other side of the door where the guards lurked, Pine could hear murmurings, the shuffling of feet, the occasional smack of palm against a metal baton. Just for practice in case it needed to be wrapped around Tor’s head at a moment’s notice.

From Tor’s expression, she knew he could hear it, too. He apparently missed nothing here, though he had eventually been caught because he had missed something.

Pine leaned slightly back on her stool, folded her arms across her chest, and waited for his answer. He could go nowhere, and she had nowhere to go that was more important than this.

Tor looked her up and down in a way that perhaps he had used in sizing up all his victims. There were thirty-four of them confirmed. Confirmed, not total. The actual number was feared to be triple the official count. She was here about an unconfirmed one. She was here about a single victim not even in the running to be added to the tally of this man’s zealous depravity.

Tor had escaped a death sentence due solely to his cooperating with authorities, revealing the locations of three victims’ remains. This revelation had provided a trio of families some closure. And it had allowed Tor to live, albeit in a cage, for the rest of his life. In her mind, Pine could see him easily, perhaps smugly, striking that bargain, knowing that he had gotten the better end of the deal.

His victims were dead. He wasn’t. And this man was all about the death of others.

He’d been arrested, convicted, and sentenced in the midnineties. He’d killed two guards and another inmate at a prison in 1998. The state where this occurred did not have the death penalty, otherwise Tor would have been on death row or already executed. That had led to his being transferred to ADX Florence. He was currently serving nearly forty consecutive life terms. Unless he pulled a Methuselah, he would die right here.

None of this seemed to faze the man.

“Name?” he asked, as though he were a clerk at a counter checking on an order.

“Mercy Pine.”

“Place and time?”

He was screwing with her now, but she needed to play along.

“Andersonville, Georgia, June 7, 1989.”

He popped his neck once more, this time to the other side. He stretched out his long fingers, cracking the joints. The huge man seemed one enormous jumble of pressure points.

“Andersonville, Georgia,” he mused. “Lots of deaths there. Confederate prison during the Civil War. The commandant, Henry Wirz, was executed for war crimes. Did you know that? Executed for doing his job.” He smiled. “He was Swiss. Totally neutral. And they hanged him. Some weird justice.”

The smile disappeared as quickly as it had emerged, like a spent match.

She said, “Mercy Pine. Six years old. She disappeared on June 7, 1989. Andersonville, southwestern Macon County, Georgia. Do you need me to describe the house? I heard your memory for your victims is photographic, but maybe you need some help. It’s been a while.”

“What color was her hair?” asked Tor, his lips parted, revealing wide, straight teeth.

In answer, Pine pointed to her own. “Same as mine. We were twins.”

This statement seemed to spark an interest in Tor that had not been present before. She had expected this. She knew everything about this man except for one thing.

That one thing was why she was here tonight.

He sat forward, his shackles clinking in his excitement.

He glanced at her badge once more.

He said eagerly, “Twins. FBI. It’s starting to make sense. Go on.”

“You were known to be operating in the area in 1989. Atlanta, Columbus, Albany, downtown Macon.” Using a tube of ruby red lipstick taken from her pocket, she drew a dot on the glass representing each of the aforementioned localities. Then, she connected these dots, and formed a familiar figure.

“You were a math prodigy. You like geometric shapes.” She pointed to what she had drawn. “Here, a diamond shape. That’s how they eventually caught you.”

This was the something Tor had missed. A pattern of his own creation.

His lips pressed together. She knew that no serial murderer would ever admit to being outwitted. The man was clearly a sociopath and a narcissist. People often discounted narcissism as relatively harmless because the term sometimes conjured the clichéd image of a vain man staring longingly at his reflection in a pool of water or a mirror.