She stepped in front of Simon, raced around the corner, and then, with her flashlight and service weapon drawn together and pointed directly at his face, she yelled, “Police! Hands up!”
He stopped and looked straight at her, then started swearing. She stared into the eyes of a killer, a man who hadn’t stopped since the very first time, when his stepdaughter had died in his arms.
She looked at Rick’s stepfather and asked, “How do you keep your wife from knowing all this is going on?”
“She thinks because I take my drugs that she can take hers. She thinks it’s safe for her to sleep when I am.” He gave Kate a rough smile. “Little does she know what comes out to play when darkness falls.”
“She has no idea, does she?” Kate asked.
“No,” he said. “How the hell did you figure it out?”
“It got to the point where there were really no other options, and there could only be one choice,” she replied quietly.
He shook his head. “No way. I worked really hard to pin these on my stepson.”
“Yeah, you did, and it worked the first time, didn’t it?”
“Of course, and then I picked two in Alberta at different times,” he told her, laughing.
“And two in Saskatchewan.”
Immediately the smile fell from his face. “You found those, did you?”
She nodded. “How many overall?”
“I don’t know that I counted,” he replied, with a sneer. “What does it matter to you?”
“It matters to the families who would like closure.” She approached slowly. “Put your hands over your head.”
“No, I don’t feel like it. What will you do about it?”
She immediately cocked the gun. “I’ll shoot you.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he told her. “I knew the game would be up soon. You were sniffing around too damn much, and I couldn’t figure out how to throw you off.”
“Once we found the last crime scene,” she noted, “there really weren’t too many other options.”
He stopped and stared. “You found her? You found Lacy?”
She nodded. “Unfortunately we didn’t find her fast enough.” She shifted, so she could take a quick look at who he’d been yelling at earlier. And there was her missing persons’ victim. As she turned her head back again to see him, he had moved.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she stated. “I might as well put a bullet through your head right now.”
From her side, the woman, her voice faint, said, “Please do, dear God, just do it.”
“You just focus on staying alive. I mean it,” she snapped. “I mean it. We’ve worked really hard to find you.”
The woman started to cry, and Kate heard Simon’s voice gently speaking to Chelice.
Kate aimed her gun and repeated, “Hands up and don’t give me any of your shit. Then get down on the floor where I can see you.”
“Nope, you’ll have to shoot me in cold blood. Of course you can’t do that.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked, but inside she was just pissed enough, wondering how she would get this guy to cooperate, without… and then she smiled. “You know what? I don’t really need your cooperation.”
And, with that, she lowered her weapon and blew out his right knee. Screaming, he dropped to the ground, unable to sustain himself on his feet.
“That’s police brutality,” he roared.