The Bride Collector

42
“WHAT ABOUT A trip to the beach?” Casanova asked, pacing the park lawn in his long robe and slippers. “I would really love to take a trip to the beach. No offense, Allison, dear. This park is lovely, the setting is beautiful, the mountains, the sky, the birds all perfect to set the mood. But I would rather do a different kind of bird-watching, if you catch my drift.”
Allison’s eyes twinkled. She looked at her four children, as she had come to feel about this bunch. Roudy, the persistent sleuth, had dressed today as always in plaids (which he mistook for tweeds), a bow tie, and today even a pipe (albeit smokeless) that Allison had given him a week earlier when they’d found Paradise.
Andrea, the young one, let her blond hair flow with a breeze that rustled up the park’s summer greens. Her eyes were on the skateboard park two hundred yards down the hill. “I see some birds flying down there,” she said.
“The more naturally clothed variety is what I had in mind,” Cass said.
Andrea faced the self-appointed love guru. “You have a dirty old mind, Cass. Just because a girl has a bikini on doesn’t make her natural. Not at all.”
Casanova didn’t miss a beat. “You could watch the hunks, Dre. Sweat dripping off the corded muscles of bodybuilders pressing massive weights on the beach. While I give them pointers on bird-watching.”
“Sounds disgusting,” she said.
Paradise giggled.
Allison looked at the girl she now thought of simply as her favorite, though she would never call her that aloud, particularly not in front of the others. Paradise sat on the grass with her legs folded back to her right, leaning with one arm hooked over Brad Raines’s knee. There were two things about this picture that filled Allison with more joy than an ex-nun should be allowed.
One, Paradise was in a park, forty miles from CWI. The agoraphobia that had once cauterized the flow of her life was now gone.
Two, Paradise was in the arms of a man, and such a man as Brad Raines, whom they all thought might be God incarnate by the way they jumped at his every comment. They were all heroes in their own minds, but Brad was the one true hero. Even in Allison’s mind.
After all, he loved Paradise. And Paradise loved him. That alone made them both heroes.
He had also brought in the Bride Collector, though Roudy took plenty of credit for cracking the case. To Allison’s understanding, Paradise had apprehended the killer as much as Roudy or Brad.
Paradise had made the call that narrowed the authorities’ search to a narrow strip along the Kansas–Colorado border near the town of St. Francis. Within fifteen minutes they had identified nineteen potential locations that fit the Bride Collector’s MO—abandoned barns, shacks, silos, a couple of old farmhouses. In all, thirty-two state troopers, state police, and local police had been pulled into duty and dispatched to those nineteen locations with strict orders to approach with extreme caution.
Fifty-four minutes after Temple made the call to the chief of police in St. Francis, Sergeant Robby Bitterman rolled to a stop seventy-five yards from Sam Warner’s old abandoned equipment barn on the north side of his wheat fields, surprised to see it lighted. He had called for backup, then gone in on foot and, for the first time in his fifteen-year career, used his sidearm to kill a man. A single shot through the head from twenty feet.
The officer had shot Quinton, but Paradise had taken his power already, his power over her, over them all. God had reached down and saved his favorite. Why her and not the others, Allison didn’t know.
Whether or not Paradise really had seen something in Quinton’s spirit—his ghost or his past—neither she nor Paradise knew for certain. These things were mysteries to them all.
To see Paradise now, only a week after that harrowing night, shining like all young women in love should, Allison wasn’t sure she could have wished a different scenario upon them all. Paradise had approached her and asked if, now that she was learning so much about love, she should become a nun. Allison freed her from the obligation immediately, and Paradise had run off with a light step and relieved smile.
“Have you talked to him yet?” Roudy asked, sidling up to Brad. “The man upstairs, I mean.”
“To Temple you mean?”
“That’s the one. I really do think I’ve earned it. I’m sure you would agree.”
Allison stepped in. “We’ve all earned a lot these last two weeks, Roudy. But sometimes it takes a while to get comfortable in our new skin.”
He looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. “Please, Allison, I was born comfortable. Don’t mistake any eccentricities on my part as being less than perfectly capable or smooth as silk in the halls of justice.”
“Never. But their world is still a new skin. It may take time before they fully understand your… talents. No?”
That made him pause.
“Well, I see your talents,” Brad said. “And so does Temple. Frankly, you might have some challenges accepting their talents. They don’t see the world the same way you do.”
“True,” Roudy said, lifting a finger. “I see your point.”
“I’m not sure you want the office you asked for. It would require a lot of travel.”
“True. Good point.”
“I think it would be much easier to bring copies of the unsolved cases to you, to sift through at your own pace, unencumbered by the clumsy efforts of less insightful men and women. Don’t you?”
“Now that you put it that way, I do. A very good point indeed.” He marched back toward Allison. “So then, we should be getting back. No time to waste.”
Paradise was looking up at Brad. She winked at him. “Not so fast, Roudy. You may not need to adjust to your new skin, but some of us might like the adjustment.”
“I vote for the beach,” Cass said.
“Does this mean you’ll be moving out, Paradise?” Andrea asked, nibbling on her fingernail.
“We all move out sometime.”
“No, I can’t.” Andrea paced on the grass, suddenly very nervous. “It’s too dangerous out here! I don’t think I can ever live out here again.”
“But why would you, my dear?” Roudy asked. “I need you. You don’t expect me to handle the caseload my reputation will now heap upon me all alone, do you? We have cases to solve, lives to save!”
“Did you ever think Paradise would be out here?” Allison asked, ignoring Roudy.
“No.”
“There you go, then. Anything and everything can change in the space of one day. Not that you’d want to change.”
Andrea’s eyes darted over to Paradise. “Do I want to, Paradise?”
The girl didn’t reply immediately. The hillside grew quiet.
“I don’t know.” She looked at the horizon and her features softened. She was still the same Paradise Allison had always loved. No makeup, jeans and a T-shirt. She’d taken up a new interest in grooming, and she decided that she liked her jeans long, to the ground, and her blouses colorful, a yellow tank top today, layered with a white one.
But she was the same girl who’d always possessed extraordinary wisdom and beauty.
“If you find someone to love, maybe then you want to be with them.”
It was a tender expression of her love for Brad. They all seemed to understand and appreciate the breakthrough Paradise had made, but they were still courting their own delusions.
Unwilling to let an opening go to waste, Cass broke the silence. “And you know that I can help you with that, Andrea. If you want to be in love or make a man fall madly in love with you, I need only a day or two. They’ll be crawling all over you.”
“See, now there you go, spoiling a perfectly good moment,” Andrea cried.
“I can’t help it. I’m mentally ill.” But Casanova was smiling.
“Aren’t we all,” Brad said.
And that did silence them all, this time with a kind of finality that none of them wanted to upset. They were the same, he was saying. And there was nothing kinder he could have said to them.
Brad kissed Paradise on the top of her head. He caught Allison’s eyes, smiled gently, and winked.
She returned the wink.
And that, she thought, said it all.
The End

Sixty queens there may be,
and eighty concubines,
and virgins beyond number;
but my dove, my perfect one, is unique,
the favorite of the one who bore her.
The maidens saw her and called her blessed;
the queens and concubines praised her.
SONG OF SOLOMON

SIX




ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TED DEKKER is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels. He is known for stories that combine adrenaline-laced plots with incredible confrontations between good and evil. He lives in Austin with his wife and children.