Page 25 of Her Last Refuge

A door banged open somewhere below, then slammed shut again. She caught a flash of movement two levels down—dark clothing, a quick turn—and kept going.

They closed the distance on the next landing. The figure tried the exit door, shoved it hard with one shoulder, then harder with both. The door didn’t give. He’d apparently panicked beyond control and inadvertently trapped himself. He spun just as Rachel and Novak reached the bottom of the stairs, weapons still low but ready.

The man was breathing hard, hands already half-raised. In the low light of the stairwell, Rachel recognized the face.

Brian Spencer…the nurse who had walked her through the east wing on her first visit. He looked younger in the harsh stairwell light, though she suspected the immense fear in his eyes also had something to do with that.

“Hands where we can see them,” Rachel said.

Brian’s hands went up the rest of the way. His chest was heaving. For a second he looked like he might try the door again. Then the fight went out of him all at once, and he sagged back against the metal. Rachel saw the complete collapse coming on within the man like a tidal wave.

“I wasn’t—” His voice cracked. “I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. I swear to God I wasn’t going to hurt anyone.”

Novak kept his weapon trained while Rachel holstered hers and pulled out her cuffs. “Turn around, Mr. Spencer.”

Brian turned and started to tremble. For a handful of seconds, he simply muttered “Oh God, oh God…” over and over in a high-pitched whine. By the time the cuffs clicked into place, his entire body was shaking.

“What were you doing, sneaking in here?” Novak asked. The amount of venom in his voice actually concerned Rachel a bit.

Brian started talking right away, the words tumbling out in a rush that sounded half like a confession and half like a plea. He did it in huge bouts of weeping, drawing in wet breaths and expelling them in cries that carried out the words.

“They’re not going to remember,” he said. “That’s the whole point. They don’t remember. They…”

“Remember what?” Rachel asked.

“Cash in the drawers, the little jewelry boxes, the stuff the families don’t even check because what’s the point when they can’t keep track of it themselves?” The words came out wet and rushed, almost like one long, singular word. “I never took anything that mattered. I never touched the ones who still had people coming every week. Just the…the advanced ones. The ones who—” His voice broke completely and he went to his knees, bawling in shame and fear.

It was the kind of ugly, helpless crying that had nothing performative in it. She’d seen this before; it was a man’s response to understanding that he had come to the nasty, filthy bottom of himself and it had cost him everything. Rachel felt a cold disgust settle low in her stomach. There was pity there, too, but it was the disgust that rose up sharp and heavy.

She thought of the residents sleeping on the floors above them, some of them already stirred by the noise of the chase. She thought of the families who trusted this place with the last vulnerable years of people they loved. But more than that, she thought of Brian’s careful, professional kindness during the tour. He’s worn that mask exceptionally well.

“You’re under arrest,” she said, and the words came out flatter than she intended. “Theft from vulnerable adults. We’ll sort the rest of it at the station.”

Somewhere above them a nurse’s voice was raised in question, and then another. Seconds later, someone overhead slapped on the stairwell lights. The quiet of the facility had been thoroughly broken as doors were opened and people began to murmur. The night staff would be dealing with agitated residents for the next few hours, it seemed.

Rachel looked at Brian Spencer’s bowed head and the cuffs on his wrists. Yes, he was guilty…but not of murder. He was not the person who had folded Ruth Durst’s hands on her chest and left Howard Pelham arranged the same way. He was a thief who had counted on silence and forgetting. He was not a killer. But Rachel wondered if he had taken anything from them before they’d died. And if so, how their passing had made him feel.

She glanced at Novak and saw that he looked just as disgusted as she felt. His jaw was clenched and he made sure to let Rachel lead Spencer up the stairs—perhaps afraid that he might act a little too aggressively in that simple act. Then they marched Brian Spencer out of the stairwell and into the disrupted quiet of a building that was no longer sleeping, while somewhere else out in the night, the person they were actually looking for remained free.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Cecilia Brand had reached the part in her novel where the detective finally had a name for the killer…and it was the sister! Though it was after midnight, she was now in absolutely no hurry to put the book down. The bedside lamp cast a soft circle of light over the pages, not bright enough to bother her husband, Mitch, sleeping soundly next to her. Mitch had started snoring twenty minutes ago, which meant nothing aside from the return of Jesus was going to wake him. She glanced at him once and almost smiled. Forty-one years of marriage had taught her that waking him mid-snore was impossible. Besides, she’d gotten used to it many years ago.

She turned another page and wondered idly if she’d actually finish the book tonight. She only had another sixty pages or so and it wasn’t like she had anything to do tomorrow. At seventy-eight years of age, she rarely had anything to do the next day. She knew she had to get better about getting out and doing things, though. She was relatively healthy for her age but she knew she was on a very limited clock…her and Mitch both. Maybe they needed to start making more plans, even if it was just going out to eat one more night a week. Or maybe they could finally make it out to the Grand Canyon like they’d been talking about for the past twenty years. Or were they too old for that?

She didn’t know. What she did know was that as of late, she rarely had plans for the following day unless it was a doctor’s appointment or a—

A sound from the back of the house broke her concentration. It was barely a noise at all, just a short, sliding noise. She couldn’t quite place what it was. Maybe it was one of those random, odd noises the fridge made sometimes. Cecilia lowered the book and listened. She knew that old houses made noises—theirs in particular. She had lived in this one long enough to catalogue most of them: the settling of the floorboards near the kitchen, the way the pipes knocked when the water heater kicked on, the almost musical hum of the ice maker in the fridge.

No, she thought. This came from the opposite direction, back on the other end of the hallway.

The spare room sat at the end of the short hallway, the one they used for storage and the occasional guest who never quite arrived. And when she thought of that room, she thought she knew what the sound might be. It sounded like a window shifting in its frame…not being opened but sort of creaking and settling. She knew that temperature changes could do it.

She sighed and told herself not to get too worked up about it.

The house remained quiet for several seconds. Then the motion light in the hallway clicked on. It threw a thin, pale bar of light under the bedroom door.

Now, that was new. That light only came on when her or Mitch got out of bed to go pee in the middle of the night…which for her was at least two times. She had never seen that thing go off when there was no one in the hallway.