“You were the caretaker at the poorhouse,” Ruby said.
“You’re—”
“Your daughter.”
Terrence Fulks arrived early to the death house, as he always did on the day of an execution. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the place. No one breathed on the day of an execution. They all waited, and when the horn sounded, they knew that another one of them had gone. It was like a cell leaving a body—like the last exhale.
He sat with Mitchell in the visiting room. He could see the stress aura around the man. It was time.
“Have you seen Ruby?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” Terrence said, with surprise. “I was expecting her here.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe she’s on her way.”
“We don’t have long,” Mitchell said, as if the attorney were getting executed, too, and maybe in a way he was.
The warden appeared outside the door. It was time for Mitchell to go back to his cell. There he would be asked to change into a disposable jumpsuit. Men often voided themselves in the final moments, from fear as much as the poisons, and the prison liked to save on laundry.
Mitchell looked ill. You were never prepared, Terrence thought. People wanted people to think the condemned were at peace when they were executed. The truth was, most went with hands and knees shaking. Some were so incapacitated by fear they could not walk, and had to be carried to their death.
Frank Castle had not moved. He held the bottle in one hand, his face a mask of surprise—and fury.
Ruby thought of all the men she had caught, and how anger was the one thing that tied them all together. They could be young or old, rich or poor, but what connected them was they hated women and loved nothing. They didn’t feel the dawn or the specialness of the day. They were empty inside, except for that swirling, cold tornado.
“Did you know I was alive?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I always figured she got rid of you.”
He was upset, she could see, that her mother had never told him about her, not even under duress.
“Mitchell’s mom didn’t have an abortion, either,” she said.
“So?”
“Does it bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“Because I suspect you did the same thing to Charise that you did to my mom. Nowadays they call it rape, to take advantage of a child like that.”
His eyes glinted. “Oh, she wasn’t a child. Your mom neither.”
She felt a sickness, a revulsion.
“Here’s your life story,” she said. “I think you started killing women when you were still young, and lived around here. Maybe you got scared. Maybe you were afraid of getting caught. So you hit theroad and ended up in Oregon, and you got the caretaker job at the poorhouse. It would have reminded you of where you had come from. A place to exact revenge for all that had happened. I have experience with men like you. You don’t turn against the men that hurt you. You turn against women.”
He was staring into her eyes. He did not like this story.
“I’m sure you killed plenty there, finding women hitching on the highway, or picking them up in the city, where you later tracked down my mom. You buried them in that graveyard along with the poorhouse dead. But then the poorhouse closed, and you had a decision to make. Maybe you were homesick. Or just tired of those cold winters. So you decided to come back to Georgia. You killed Rosanna Higginbottom and took her car. Because you had her car, her husband assumed she’d run away. Once you got back here, you kept on killing. This is why there was a fallow period during the years you were gone. And a spike after your return. Did that worry you, or did you know this was the safest kind of murder to commit?”
He gave a mean little shrug.
She took a deep breath. “Which leads us to that night. You followed Mitchell from the bar. He drove to the gas station, and you saw an opportunity. Two birds, one stone. But one part doesn’t make sense to me. How did you know Mitchell would be at the bar that night?”
Terrence was in the viewing room. None of the relatives of Betty Dubois had decided to come. One of her school friends did show up. The press had set up cameras outside for the press conference. In a black sedan parked nearby, Jerrod Tinsley waited.
