Three Times a Lady

Chapter 28

Dana came to again twenty minutes later, woozy and nauseous from the effects of the powerful drug still coursing through her system.

Shaking her head hard to clear away the fresh scattering of cobwebs in her frazzled brain, Dana pulled herself up off the ground and punched 911 into her cellphone before pacing the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office for ten solid minutes while waiting impatiently for the cops to arrive.

Dana forced herself to not cry during the interminable six hundred seconds. Wasn’t easy. Her head was killing her and her body temperature had soared to a feverish level despite the bitterly cold wind that was whipping in off the lake and knifing viciously through her traumatised body. Still, the bitter cold couldn’t touch her right now. Nothing in the world could touch her right now. Not today and maybe not ever again.

Dana stomped back and forth in front of her car: twenty feet forward and twenty feet back, tracing and re-tracing the same path until she’d worn a patch three feet wide into the snow. Sweat rolled down her temples and plastered her short blonde hair to her forehead. More sweat seeped into the armpits of her shirt beneath the leather bomber jacket. Still more perspiration flooded into her palms. Her ears rang. Her skin crawled. Her stomach churned. Her Glock – useless as the goddamn thing had been tonight – rubbed the left side of her ribcage raw, until Dana’s entire left side had been turned into a painful hunk of tenderised meat.

Dana ignored the pain and sweat and nausea and paced on, the gun continuing to shift back and forth inside its holster and further mutilating her side. But it was a good kind of pain. The kind of pain Dana needed to feel right now. It was like working a loose tooth back and forth and actually enjoying the way it hurt, unable to keep your fingers out of your mouth for the life of you. Unable to keep yourself from wanting the pain.

More importantly, it was the exact opposite kind of pain than what Dana had experienced only half an hour earlier. The kind of pain that violated your mind every bit as much as it violated your body. Probably more so.

One thing was for certain: with every last cell in her body Dana wanted revenge. Needed revenge. With everything she’d already been through in her thoroughly f*cked-up life, she was sick and goddamn tired of playing by the rules. Constant subjectivity was way too much to ask of anybody, much less a person in her already-weakened psychological condition. After all, there were limits to what the human spirit could endure, no matter how tough you thought you were or how many inspirational posters they tacked to the walls in warm, safe office buildings. Stupid, third-grade-level posters that urged you to keep on keeping on, to keep on trucking, to continue trudging through the muck of everyday existence and to look at the trash all around you and convince yourself it was actually flowers.

When everything was said and done, though, Dana knew that there were no atheists in the foxholes of life. No matter what anyone said to the contrary, when you’d reached the breaking point that every person in the world possessed you got down on your f*cking knees and you prayed to God in a trembling voice to please, please, please take away the other kind of pain. To relieve the agonising pressure. To grant you sanctuary from the hellish reality of your everyday life, if only for moment or two.

That said, snapping mentally wasn’t an option for Dana at this point. Not now and not ever again. The only option left now was the one where she made everything right again – by not playing by the rules, if necessary. Dana needed to restore proper order to the world. To bust the bad guys asses so hard their grandchildren felt it. To make sure they paid for their crimes until it hurt. To make sure they paid for their crimes until it hurt their descendants. Hurt them all the way down to their goddamn souls. And not the good kind of pain, either. The other kind of pain. It’s exactly what the killers and drug dealers and child molesters deserved.

Not to mention the motherf*cking, piece-of-shit rapists.

Dana shook her head violently and cursed a blue streak beneath her breath while she tried desperately to organise her jumbled thoughts. Once again, an unspeakable nightmare had just invaded her life and reinforced her entire purpose for breathing. As an FBI agent, Dana had been tasked with making sure that the human trash piles littering the world rotted away in prison for the rest of their natural-born lives. As a woman who’d just been raped, however, she needed something more than that. Needed to make the animals hurt like they’d made her hurt. No other option remained. No matter how much it might seem that way sometimes, the bad guys weren’t in charge here.

Or, in this case, the bad girls.

Dana clenched her fists into tight balls at her sides and resisted the urge to throw punches in the air, once again fighting back the insistent tears pooling in her eyes and feeling angry with herself for even considering tears at this point. Tears were for weak people, losers, schoolchildren. Still, how another woman could take part in the violation that had just been savagely foisted upon her was completely beyond Dana’s comprehension, beyond her ability to understand.

With more than a quarter-million rapes reported across the world each year, Dana knew that she wasn’t alone. Not even close. Still, that knowledge didn’t make her feel in the least bit better about what had just happened to her. How could it? Nobody on the Titanic had taken comfort in the knowledge that so many others were sinking down to their watery graves with them, had they? Hadn’t taken solace from the fact that they’d have plenty of company in their icy tombs for eternity. Not unless they’d been complete f*cking a*sholes who’d deserved to die anyway.

Worse, the astronomical number of reported rapes didn’t even scratch the surface of the problem. One National Crime Victimization Survey showed that just thirty-nine per cent of all rapes and sexual assaults in the United States were reported to law-enforcement officials each year. And less than ten per cent of all male-on-male rapes were ever reported, with the victims most often believing it was a personal matter or fearing reprisal from the assailant.

Dana stretched her neck, feeling like a prizefighter preparing to enter the ring. She knew exactly how those other victims felt. But she didn’t fear reprisal from her primary assailants in the least little bit. They were dead, after all – killed by the woman dressed in black. What Dana did fear, however, was what she’d to do to the sadistic bitch who’d killed the rapists when she finally caught up with the conniving whore.

Horrible thoughts crept into Dana’s mind. Thoughts of how she might murder another human being in cold blood and actually get away with it.

First things first, though. Before she could do anything else, Dana needed to find the woman. Luckily for her, though, as an FBI agent, that’s precisely what she was best at doing. The best in the entire world, according to Newsweek’s recent cover story.

Dana clamped her teeth together until her jaw began to ache. Rape had always been a crime that she’d despised almost as much as murder. And why not? It was practically the same thing. Rapists took lives, too, even if their victims survived the brutal attacks. There were lots of different kinds of deaths, after all. The death of innocence. The death of a getting a good night’s sleep. The death of knowing that you could walk freely around your fellow man without becoming a victim. In Dana’s mind, the perpetrators of rape deserved nothing less than the death sentence. Or, at the very least, total castration. And their accomplices – cowardly jackals like the woman in black – should be held every bit as accountable as the hyenas that had performed the animalistic acts of invasion in the first place.

Dana stopped pacing when the squad cars and ambulances finally came racing up to the scene, sirens screaming and blue-and-red lights flashing. Two uniformed cops emerged quickly from the lead vehicle and ushered the looky-loos who’d come outside the coroner’s office to see what was going on back inside the building. Five minutes later, yet another squad car pulled up to the scene. This one held Gary Templeton inside and brought the total number of emergency vehicles in the parking lot to more than twenty.

Dana immediately took Templeton to one side and gave him her fabricated version of events while Templeton’s boss set up a perimeter around the crime scene. Even in a city as violent as Cleveland – a city with a homicide rate that had shot up eighteen per cent in the past year – no less an authority than the chief of police himself had rolled out of his warm, cosy bed to brave the frigid winter conditions when he’d been informed that two men had been brutally murdered in a municipal parking lot, an incident that marked the fourth multiple-victim murders of the year in the besieged city. If Dana had her way, though, there would have been three dead bodies here tonight instead of just two. And she sure as hell wouldn’t have been one of the ones they’d be zipping up into a body bag.

Dana closed her eyes. After all these years on the job and of never quite understanding how a human being could take another’s life without remorse, she was starting to see exactly how you could be driven to murder. Hell, she was practically getting a limo ride there herself.

Dana refused Templeton’s offer to go inside the coroner’s office building where it was warmer. More heat was the last thing in the world she needed right now. The intense rage boiling in her chest could have powered all of Ohio’s nuclear power plants for an entire year, if not longer.

‘At least let me get you a blanket,’ Templeton persisted, huge puffs of foggy breath issuing from his mouth as he spoke. ‘It’s f*cking freezing out here.’

Dana shook her head. Like she’d noted earlier, the cold couldn’t touch her now. Nothing could touch her now. And she was sorry to say that she didn’t give a shit what anybody else was feeling at the moment, including Gary Templeton. Whatever petty problems they had – including something as insignificant as being cold – couldn’t compare to her problems right now. ‘I said I’m fine, Gary,’ Dana snapped, not even attempting to keep the sharp knife-edge of irritation out of her voice.

Templeton lifted up his eyebrows on his forehead, no doubt remembering Dana’s promise from earlier in the day to keep things professional between them from here on out. ‘Whoa, take it easy, Dana,’ he said, holding up his hands with his palms facing her in a placating matter. ‘What’s wrong? Other than these two dead bodies here, I mean. Is everything else OK, though? You’re acting really f*cking aggressive right now.’

Dana took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. No matter how hard it was for her to accomplish, she couldn’t let Templeton suspect what had really happened to her here tonight. This shit was personal now. She didn’t need anybody getting in the way of her revenge. ‘I’m sorry, Gary,’ she said, shaking her head and dropping her gaze to the pavement. ‘It’s just that…’

The words died in Dana’s throat when her gaze landed on the gold hoop earring that was lying on the ground near Templeton’s feet. Her heart stopped beating dead in her chest. Her mouth flooded with stomach acid.

Templeton followed Dana’s stare down to the ground but didn’t notice the earring lying there. Thank God for small favours. Lifting up his gaze again to meet hers, he asked, ‘What?’

Dana held Templeton’s stare and forced herself to not look down at the earring again. If everything went well for her, the earring was one piece of evidence that would never make it into the official record. ‘It’s nothing, Gary. I’m just completely f*cking exhausted right now. It’s been a really long day and an even longer night. Can’t I just give you my statement and go home? I really need to sleep.’

Templeton pursed his lips, looking annoyed. Luckily, though, he didn’t push the issue. Something in Dana’s eyes must have told him that it would have been the wrong move at this point. ‘Of course,’ Templeton said, removing a pen and notebook from the pocket of his trench coat to record her statement. ‘So, what happened here, anyway? What did you see?’

Dana relayed the lie she’d mentally rehearsed while waiting for the cops to arrive. Lying to people was something she seemed to be getting awfully good at lately. First Dr Spinks, and now Templeton. But sometimes the truth hurt too much to share with others. Sometimes honesty wasn’t the best policy. Sometime honesty could just go to hell, for all she cared.

And right now was definitely one of those times.

‘I came out of the coroner’s office and these two men were lying dead in the snow with their throats slashed open,’ Dana told the Cleveland cop, gesturing to the rapists, who were now being photographed on their red-and-white background by Doug Freeman, the forensic photographer who’d also worked with Dana on the Cleveland Slasher case. Hell, it was starting to look like a regular class reunion around here. All they needed to do now was to dig her brother’s dead body out of the frozen ground and they’d be halfway home to reassembling the original cast of characters. ‘I called you guys right away when I saw them,’ Dana went on, returning her stare to Templeton. ‘I canvassed the area for any possible suspects at that point but I didn’t see anybody. Then I waited for you guys to arrive – a little bit longer than I cared to, to be perfectly honest. Anyway, now I’m talking to you guys. That’s the whole story. That’s all I’ve got for you.’

Templeton flashed Dana a sympathetic look, but he still had a job he needed to do. ‘You didn’t see anybody when you came out of the building?’ he asked. ‘Nobody leaving the scene? Do you remember any cars exiting the parking lot when you came out of the coroner’s office?’

Dana tried her best to keep her voice even. ‘No, Gary.’ How many goddamn times did she have to say this crap? ‘I didn’t see anything or anybody except for the dead bodies. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have anything else to give you right now.’

Templeton cast a weary eye at the crisscrossed tire tracks that were lacing the parking lot like the stitches on a freshly autopsied corpse. Then he stared up into the dark sky above their heads, from which yet another heavy snow had begun to fall. The snow was wet and sticky, of course – the kind of snow that did an excellent job of blanketing crime scenes and destroying evidence. ‘I doubt that we’ll be able to trace a f*cking thing in this mess,’ he said, sighing heavily. ‘Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’

The law-enforcement part of Dana’s brain empathised with Templeton, but right now she had other thoughts on her mind. Murderous thoughts. It’s why she hadn’t wanted Templeton to see the gold hoop earring and why she hadn’t yet told the Cleveland cop about the woman in the autopsy-room video – even though she knew that Templeton would find out about it eventually. Probably sooner rather than later. Like Jeremy Brown had been, Templeton was a damn good cop, as well. One of the best Dana had ever worked with.

‘I’m really sorry, Gary, but I just didn’t see anything useful,’ Dana said, wanting to get this conversation over with already so she could start plotting her revenge in earnest. ‘Just the dead bodies. Like I said before, I wish I had more for you, but I just don’t.’

Templeton nodded and clicked shut his ballpoint pen. Flipping closed his spiral notebook, he shoved it back into the pocket of his trench coat. ‘OK, Dana. Anyway, I know you’re tired and all, but is there any way you could stick around and help us out for a little while? Half these guys out here are rookies. They’ll probably end up destroying more evidence than they uncover.’

Dana resisted the urge to reach out and grab Templeton by his throat. This was just getting tedious now. She needed to get the f*ck out of there. ‘Nope, can’t do it,’ Dana said, shaking her head emphatically to underscore her resolve and grinding her teeth back and forth in her mouth until she thought that a tooth might chip. ‘Not tonight, anyway. I’m too f*cking exhausted. I really need to go home and sleep. Tomorrow morning I’ll get back to work on finding out who attached the photograph of my brother to Christian Manhoff’s body. This is your jurisdiction, anyway. There’s no need for federal involvement that I can see. Give me a call if you find out something that changes that.’

Templeton rolled his neck on his broad shoulders, looking like a man who’d already been beaten. Dana knew the feeling all too well. ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘It’s just that misery loves company, ya know? Anyway, go on home and get rested up. I’ll give you a call if I have any more questions for you, but I doubt I will. I’m almost certain I’ve got everything I need from you.’

Dana thanked Templeton and knelt down, pretending to tie her shoe. Lifting up her stare, she watched Templeton’s eyes. When he finally looked away, she reached out quickly and plucked the gold earring off the ground before tucking it into her pocket and rising to her feet, practically running to her Protégé.

Thankfully, Templeton cleared out a path for her, waving his arms in irritation and signaling for the squad cars and ambulances to get out of her way.

Dana didn’t make eye contact with the scores of police officers who were processing the scene as she left. Nonetheless, she could feel their curious stares burning into both sides of her face as she manouevred the Protégé out of the parking lot. She could almost hear the thoughts swirling around inside their brains:

There goes that crazy Dana Whitestone chick again. How is it that she’s always involved in this kind of weird shit, anyway?

Dana shook herself and tried her best to reason herself out of her paranoia but it didn’t work. She was convinced that everybody knew what had happened to her tonight. Still, she was much too numb to think straight right now. Much too numb to process the horrific reality of what she’d just gone through. And the fact that Templeton had barely even questioned her story only made her feel that much worse. Then again, lying was something she’d needed to do.

Much like the woman in the black dress had told her, Dana wanted the other woman for herself.