The Bride Collector

26
LIGHT PEEKED THROUGH a dozen cracks in the barn’s high roof, but there was no other indication of what time it might be. Morning, Brad guessed, but it could be afternoon. A sack had been over his head when he’d climbed out of unconsciousness, and he’d been sedated at least twice since then.
The picture, now clear, was one only his worst fears could have conjured up. He’d been taken, drugged, stuffed in a trunk. Now he faced his end as Nikki had faced hers. After spending so many hundreds of hours putting himself in the place of killers and their victims, he found himself actually in that position. In and of itself, it was more surreal than terrifying.
But the killer had called Paradise, and the claws of dread were encasing him. He felt nauseated.
They were in an old barn with graying planks for walls and dirty hay for a floor. The stale scent of grain and old horse manure hung in the air. Sagging eight-by-eight timbers spanned the sloping roof overhead, begging for an excuse to fold under the weight they supported. An old dilapidated relic.
His wrists were tied together behind a splintering four-by-four post. He sat on the damp ground, facing the killer’s stage. Several large wool blankets with wide red and black stripes, the kind for sale at roadside stands that advertised Native American souvenirs, had been spread out and bordered by railroad ties. On one end the killer had constructed a makeshift planked wall against a large pile of hay bales.
Two pegs stuck out of the boards three-quarters of the way up. On either side of his wall, the Bride Collector had placed candles on two wood barrels. It took little imagination to understand that he’d prepared the wall to drain his seventh victim.
The details had filtered through as he woke. But the one piece of information that dominated his mind sat on an old folding chair ten feet from him, legs crossed and arms, studying him in silence.
This was the Bride Collector, and he looked somewhat similar to the drawing Paradise had labored over as she’d excitedly pulled at her memory. But there were some key differences that might throw the team off, he thought. Small details that forensic artists would focus on, knowing how important they were.
In person, the killer’s mouth was full but looked flatter than on the sketch. Paradise had drawn the distance between his eyebrows and hairline too narrow, giving him a more sinister appearance than he had in flesh and blood. And his eyes were wider as well. But a forensic artist would be rendering a more accurate drawing today, maybe already had.
He was a large-boned man who at first glance would inspire confidence. Nothing about him looked suspect. His dark hair was short and well groomed. His hands were manicured. His eyes were dark, but not deep-set or threatening. He was handsome, like so many serial killers.
He wore gray slacks and a light blue short-sleeved button-down shirt, the kind that might pass for an auto mechanic’s shirt with a MIDAS or GOODYEAR logo on the pocket.
Apart from the phone call to Paradise, the man hadn’t uttered a single word. But his intentions loomed in Brad’s mind like a shadow in a darkened doorway.
“You should be feeling better now,” the man said. His voice was soft and low. Matter-of-fact. “You call me the Bride Collector, which is appropriate, all things considered. But you can call me Quinton now. My last name is Gauld.”
Quinton Gauld. Brad cleared his parched throat. “You don’t care if I know your real name.”
“Not now, no. My task on earth is nearly finished.”
“You’re going to kill me.” A simple statement of fact.
“I don’t know yet. Only if he tells me to.”
It was a lie, Brad thought. Only a fool would leave him alive after this, and the killer had proven that he was anything but a fool. The real issue now was his final victim. God’s favorite.
Then again, if the man was as psychotic as his notes suggested, gripped in the fist of an uncompromising delusion, he might not be lying.
The phone call Quinton had made played through Brad’s mind again. The thought of this man even looking at Paradise knotted his gut with deep offense, and he had to swallow to hide it.
The killer was luring her out. It was almost as if he’d orchestrated all the events of these past two weeks to this end. To lure Paradise out of the Center for Wellness and Intelligence. But why?
He could still see the picture of the beautiful girl Paradise had shown him yesterday. Angel Founder. Angie, Paradise’s sister. They’d had the identity of the seventh victim in their sights the whole time. But it still made no sense to him.
“You’re luring Angie. Angel. She’s your seventh victim.”
Quinton just looked at him.
“But why? Why not just take her? Why all this extra trouble with me and with—”
“The seventh favorite has to come willingly. It has to be her choice.”
“So you coerce her?”
Quinton uncrossed his legs and lowered his arms. He stared at Brad as if he were charged with the task of educating a stupid child. He finally stood, then walked to the pile of straw and grasped a fistful. Smelled it.
“I don’t want to coerce her. But she doesn’t know who she is yet. Humans are afraid of the unknown.” He turned back, tight-jawed and agitated. “I did try once before. I tried to consummate our relationship. She slapped me. I haven’t been able to have normal relations since. Sometimes life has to deal all of us a little motivation to keep truth in perspective.”
“So all along, this has been about Angel. The rest of us are just pawns? That’s all we are to you?”
“It’s not about me, Brad,” he said, regaining his confidence. “It’s him. I’m only the messenger. Have you ever wondered why most people who say they believe in God and heaven don’t actually want to leave this life to be with him? Not until life has slapped them around enough for them to beg for it. And for the record, a few do fall by the wayside when God calls his bride home. Or haven’t you read the book of Revelation?”
It struck Brad then that, if anything, intelligence was Quinton’s Achilles’ heel. If there was anything he might respond to besides force, which Brad wasn’t in any position to leverage, it would be reason. Quinton’s variety of reason.
But at the moment, Brad’s own mind wasn’t able to engage the man on such a level. He couldn’t shake the image of Paradise back at the center at this very moment, shaking in her room. That this beast would take such a pure, innocent woman only just discovering herself in a dark world and subject her to horror after all she’d been through…
Nausea rolled through his stomach. He swallowed again and tried to focus. He had to keep Quinton talking. He had to move him down a path, any path, that might lead to distraction.
“I don’t want you to hurt Paradise,” he said. “She’s just a pawn to you. Why take another innocent life?”
“None of them is innocent. And he’s still chosen them, despite that. Get your theology straight, Mr. Raines.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. But was Nikki’s mother chosen? Were the two policemen you killed? Am I? Is Paradise? You don’t have to kill others.”
Quinton looked at him with fascination. “That’s what Nikki said. She was begging for her own life. But you’re begging for Paradise, aren’t you? For her life.”
“She’s…” His chest swelled with emotion, choking off his words. “Please, she’s done nothing to deserve this. For the love of God, she’s…”
“For the love of God, Brad? Not for your love? Do you love her?”
Looking into the man’s eyes, Brad saw a darkness that made him want to turn his head away, a deep evil that had fooled itself into thinking it knew what it could not know. Yet here from behind this dark stare came the question that had battered his own mind.
“Love?” Brad asked. “What’s love?”
“You don’t know what love is?” Quinton said. “Then you don’t have the right to speak to me about it.”
“Of course I know what love is…”
“Then tell me, do you love her? Or are you embarrassed by her? She’s an idiot in your small world. You throw people like her in the garbage.”
The accusation bared a strip of raw emotion that surprised Brad. “No, don’t say that.”
“Then why aren’t you in love with her?”
Because he couldn’t be! How could he love someone who…
Brad closed his eyes and bore down on the conflicting emotions. The man had turned the tables on him in a matter of minutes, throwing him into a defensive posture that gave Quinton the power. He had to turn this back around.
He looked back up at Quinton. “You win. The truth is I think I do love her.”
“You love Paradise.” His tone was mocking, unconvinced.
It was odd, sitting here tied to a post, debating with himself about his love for a woman. But at the moment there was nothing more important.
“I think so, yes.”
Quinton stared at him for several beats, then walked up, pulled him roughly to his feet, and, holding his collar with his left hand, slapped him hard across his jaw with his right hand.
Brad’s head snapped back. Pain flashed up his jaw.
Sweat covered the man’s face and it twitched. “God loves her. You don’t. Get that straight.” Quinton released him.
He left Brad standing and walked to a table on which lay a single suitcase. He opened the case and pulled out a blue drill with a battery pack. He squeezed the trigger once, ran it up to full speed, then let go of the trigger and set it down. He pulled out a plastic housing that held silver drill bits and carefully set it beside the drill.
A tin bucket sat at the end of the table.
Brad knew he had to keep the man talking. Distract him. The post behind him was only four inches thick and moved with his weight—how would it respond if he threw his weight back against it? How long had it stood here, rotting?
“So, you’re using me as bait,” Brad said, “to lure in your bait for Angel.”
The man spoke without turning. “If only it were that simple. These are complicated matters, Mr. Raines. God, the devil, all that fighting going on in the sky. But this is a love story. Love stories are never without their complications. The fights, the betrayal, the crying… It’s all part of the plan. Including you, the twisted man who doesn’t know how to love a woman. It’s a good thing God doesn’t have that problem.”
Brad wanted to say something. He knew he had to engage the man and talk him down, plant a seed of doubt, earn the upper hand, throw him off. The problem was, he was thrown off himself.
The killer had been the one to plant a seed of doubt, this gnawing question about love. Why hadn’t he been able to love, really love, since Ruby had taken her life?
Because he was fearful, not for himself, but for the woman he might love. When Paradise had said as much yesterday, he’d fallen apart right there on the bench. But not because she was right.
Because she was wrong! He wasn’t that noble. If they knew what he was really like… The FBI, his co-workers, the waitresses at the bars he favored, the women he dated. If they only knew how focused he was on protecting not them but himself, how bothered he was by the failings of others because his standards were so high, how unlikable he was, stripped of all his charms and his quick mind and his face.
If they only knew…
He couldn’t love Paradise because she would learn just how unlovable he was. And because she couldn’t possibly live up to his standards, which was what made him so unlovable.
The realization had crushed him because he knew that as much as he couldn’t love Paradise for these reasons, deep inside he wanted to love her. He wanted to burn all of his standards. Stamp on them together with Paradise as they smoldered. Take her in his arms, far away from everything that had molded him into this monster who required a woman to look and speak and think in a way that met his lofty expectations.
Standing here now, tied to the post, his feelings of shame and desire returned. But with them a very simple thought came to him.
What he’d just said was true. He did love her.
Brad blinked. Why not? Why didn’t he love her?
He was only pretending that he couldn’t love her in order to protect himself. In reality, under all the foolishness that made him so pathetic, he did love her. And maybe, just maybe, he could win her love as well.
His pulse surged, beating now like a pump desperate for more blood so that it could stay alive. Quinton was laying out his tools, preparing to ruin a life because he thought it was the right thing to do, and Brad stood behind him, thinking he had to save this one life, Paradise, who had inadvertently wandered into the killer’s crossfire, a pawn to draw in his seventh victim.
Saving Paradise was suddenly the only thing that mattered to him.
Allison’s words whispered through his mind. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s actually killing God’s favorites. He’s got it backward, you see? He’s not an angel, he’s the devil. Someone needs to correct his thinking.
“They say you’re delusional,” he said, “that you are mentally ill and suffer from delusions of grandeur. That you think God speaks to you because you’re psychotic. But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”
Quinton set a bottle of fingernail polish next to three others he’d lined up. Everything in perfect order.
“You don’t need to worry, Mr. Raines. I’ve decided not to kill you.” He turned around. “And don’t try to patronize me or use your intelligence to talk me down. I’ve been over this before and I know exactly who I am.”
“You do, I can see that now. But you don’t know who I am.”
“You’re Special Agent Brad Raines. You’ve been trying to find and stop me for a long time.”
“Have I? What if I had an entirely different purpose in this”—he looked about the room, then settled back on Quinton—“this mad shambles of a world? More specifically, a different purpose for being here today, with you, before you deliver God’s bride to him for eternal bliss?”
Quinton’s face twitched again, but he wasn’t buying it. An unbelieving smile twisted his mouth.
“What if I could prove it to you?” Brad asked.
“Prove what?”
“That I’m not who you think I am.”
The man looked slightly amused.
“Would you listen to me?” Brad asked.
Quinton hesitated, then pulled out his cell phone and checked the time.
“Okay. So what’s your point?”