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  “You’ve been working for me for five years. You’ve hated me all this time?”

  Carlotta glared at Isabel. “I’ve hated you a lot longer than that. You and all the beautiful people.”

  “Is… is that why you killed those poor women? How could you do such a thing?”

  Carlotta wrinkled her nose as if she smelled a foul odor. The hairy mole above her lip waved unattractively as she did so.

  “They are part of the problem too. They are almost worse than you because they are normal people instead of someone on a movie screen. Just like you, they sell beauty. The only worth they have is their good looks. They sell it like you sell yours. Now their beauty is mine to decorate my woodlands.”

  Isabel looked at her curiously. “This land is yours? How can you afford it?”

  Carlotta gave her an arrogant smile. “Oh, what a revelation! Ugly people can be rich too! I inherited a large amount of money from a visionary man who knew I had a great destiny. He knew that one day I would fight a woman just as clever as I was, but who chose the side of evil, chose to defend this sick society that puts beauty over substance. At first I resisted this destiny. I took the money and tried to go my own way. I immigrated to the United States and tried to become a model or a singer or an actress. I got nothing except an offer to play a wicked witch in a low-budget children’s film. You know what the director said to me? He said, ‘You have the perfect face for it.’

  “He was my first victim. I didn’t preserve his skin for my collection, I hadn’t thought of that yet. I wish I had. I’d use him as a piñata. His body got dumped in the California desert.

  “It was after that when I realized my teacher was correct about my destiny. I would never achieve my dream, but I could achieve his. I knew my rival would go into law enforcement, and had moved to the East Coast. So I moved here too, and used my show business contacts to get a job as a cleaning lady with models and singers. Eventually you hired me.”

  “So you’ve wanted to kill me all this time?”

  Carlotta shook her head. “Don’t flatter yourself. I wanted to kill beautiful people, and when the time was ripe I wanted to trap my rival by kidnapping a star and getting her on the case. I was lucky I got such a big star.”

  Isabel stared at her maid in confusion. “This doesn’t make any sense. You are completely mad. Who is this person? What has she ever done to you?”

  “Her name is Erin Bond. You’ve never heard of her. She’s just one of the little people to you. A private investigator. A childhood friend I haven’t seen in many years, Eddie Waters, tricked her into taking the case. The man who taught me taught Erin too. We are both his tools in the world, and the funny thing is we don’t even know each other!”

  Carlotta let out a shrill mocking laugh.

  “So what do these two have against me?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all. It’s not about you, fool. It’s about me fighting Erin. You’re just convenient bait. A trap to start a fight between good and evil. And trust me, I’ll win and vanquish evil.”

  “You’re not good, Carlotta, you’re completely insane. I don’t even know what you’re talking about half the time.”

  “That’s because of your little mind! I was lucky, even though I was born ugly and grew up poor. When I was a child, my parents got a work visa to leave Mexico and go work in England. My father got a job in construction and my mother cleaned houses. One morning I was taken on the way to school, taken by the man who would make me great.”

  “You were kidnapped?”

  “No, I was saved.”

  “Look, Carlotta, whatever that man did to you was wrong. I’m sorry you suffered but that’s no reason to spread more suffering around the world.”

  “Suffered? You are so stupid, Isabel. I didn’t suffer. He made me strong. I was only seven when he took me, a little whiny girl who cried every minute for her mother. But he made me strong, gave me a purpose in life. And now my life’s work will soon come to fruition. I’ve followed Erin’s career. She’s clever and resourceful. She’ll find this place sooner or later. When she does, she’ll find you decorating the forest, and she’ll find me waiting for her. I’ll hang her hide right next to yours.”

  Sheathing her knife and clipping the gas mask to her belt, Carlotta opened the padlock to Isabel’s cage while the singer cowered as far away as she could.

  “Time for the reckoning,” Carlotta announced as she swung the cage door open with a loud creak.

  Isabel flung the roll of toilet paper at her face, holding the end so it unwound. For a moment Carlotta was blinded by the length of white paper, just long enough for Isabel to leap at her and slam into her midriff with her full weight.

  The two women fell in a tangle. Isabel recovered first, clawing at Carlotta’s eyes with her long, bright red nails before grasping the knife and drawing it.

  She brought it up to Carlotta’s face but before she could strike the maid grasped Isabel’s wrist with an iron grip. Isabel struggled, but Carlotta was far stronger and moved the knife away, then flipped over to get on top. With her free hand, Isabel raked at Carlotta’s face, but the maid gave her a smack across the jaw that momentarily stunned her.

  Carlotta slammed Isabel’s knife hand against the concrete, the singer’s knuckles striking the hard surface with a clack. Isabel’s fingers opened and the knife fell away. Carlotta scooped it up and held it to the singer’s throat.

  “I must say I’m impressed, Isabel. You learned something in all those silly action movies you starred in,” Carlotta said with a chuckle.

  Hauling her up, she twisted one of Isabel’s arms behind her hard enough to make Isabel yelp in pain.

  “Time to go for a little walk,” Carlotta whispered into her ear.

  Still twisting Isabel’s arm, Carlotta led her to the far end of the large basement to a closed-off section obscured by wooden paneling and a door. Carlotta slammed Isabel against the wall, and as the singer took a moment to recover, Carlotta opened the door and flung her inside.

  Isabel’s eyes widened as she saw a tool rack right into front of her. On it hung a seemingly endless variety of knives, saws, hammers, and hooks. Isabel lunged for the nearest tool to use as a weapon, but got flung around by a strong hand and ended up sprawled across a table. Within moments Carlotta had laid her out and secured her wrists and ankles with leather straps bolted to each corner of the table.

  Isabel begged her to stop. Through eyes flooded with tears, she saw Carlotta turn her back on her and start selecting various implements from the tool rack, which she laid out on a side table a few steps away. She took her time, making a show of her leisurely pace, while whistling the tune Whistle While You Work.

  She set her gas mask on the side table next to the tools she had selected, then picked up a sharpener and started honing each tool one by one, giving special care to her skinning knife.

  Isabel prayed. Now there could be no denying it. Carlotta had finished playing with her. Isabel would die in the next few minutes.

  Carlotta took a heavy pair of tailor’s shears and leaned over Isabel. Smiling, she put the shears’ blades to either side of Isabel’s nose.

  “Shall I cut off your nose to spite your face?” she asked, chuckling as Isabel whimpered. Then she gave a little shrug. “I know. Predictable joke.”

  She brought the shears to the neckline of Isabel’s dress and cut down all the way to her hem. Isabel shivered when the cold steel touched her flesh.

  Carlotta yanked the cloth away and cut apart Isabel’s bra and underwear as well.

  “Such a pretty dress,” Carlotta tut-tutted. “And worth more than what you pay me in a month. But you won’t need it anymore. You’ll be nude forever, just like those immortal images of you on Wall Street.”

  Tossing the cloth into a garbage can in the corner, Carlotta moved over to a small refrigerator on the far wall Isabel hadn’t noticed before. From it she retrieved a hypodermic needle and a small, clear vial. Pressing the needle through the foil cap of th
e vial, she withdrew the hypo’s plunger and filled the barrel with a milky liquid.

  Carlotta held up the hypodermic needle so Isabel could get a good look. “See this? It’s a muscle relaxer that will paralyze you. It won’t knock you out, though, and it won’t dull the pain as I cut your skin off. In fact, it will help with the work because it will keep you from tensing up. Flaying you will be as simple as skinning a dead deer. I studied chemistry and pharmacy at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. One of the best, eh? Not the place for an ugly cleaning lady to go. That’s how I know so much about tranquilizer gas and muscle relaxants. You never respected my intelligence any more than you respected my artistic talents. Oh, but you will now. You’ll see how good I am at delivering pain, and you’ll end up as the centerpiece of my exhibition.”

  Carlotta strolled over to the table on which Isabel lay helpless.

  “Time to get to work.”

  Giving Isabel a gap-toothed grin, Carlotta lowered the hypodermic toward the singer’s arm.

  Chapter 19

  Erin and Eddie wasted an agonizing forty-five minutes getting a rental car and then sped out of New York City and up I-684 to Bedford, one of the most expensive towns in affluent Westchester County. In the meantime, Erin made several desperate calls to Sergio and Captain Wilson, neither of whom picked up.

  “Idiots!” she shouted, slamming her fist against the steering wheel. “They’re shutting me out just when I break the case!”

  “So what do we do?” Eddie asked, sitting in the passenger’s seat.

  “Get up there and save her.”

  “Um, do you have a gun?”

  “I don’t use guns.”

  “We’re going up against a born-and-bred killer and you don’t have a gun?” Eddie said. “I wish you had become a bit more American, Erin.”

  “I have a can of pepper spray in my purse,” she said, hearing how lame that sounded.

  Eddie didn’t reply. Erin picked up her phone and dialed 911.

  “Get me the Bedford Police Department, please. This is an emergency.”

  What followed was a frustrating conversation with some desk sergeant who was polite but dismissive. Erin realized that every police department between here and the Mississippi River must have been getting calls like this since Isabel had disappeared. Telling the sergeant that she was private detective Erin Bond and had been assigned to the case only made matters worse. The tone of the sergeant’s voice turned from dismissive to mocking. Erin wondered how many times her name had been invoked in bogus calls.

  Erin decided to change tack.

  “Look, if you don’t want to send a patrolman over, I’ll just have to take things into my own hands. I and my male companion are going onto Carlotta Sanchez’s property, breaking into her house, and saving Isabel ourselves.”

  As the desk sergeant sputtered a threat, Erin hung up.

  “Won’t they call Carlotta and warn her?” Eddie asked. “That might prompt her to finish Isabel off.”

  “More likely they’ll send a patrolman to take a look. We’re almost there in any case,” Erin replied, her gaze flicking to the GPS.

  They had left the interstate and were now speeding along curvy two-lane country roads hemmed in on both sides by woods. There were no streetlights in this semi-rural area and the only lights they saw were from the far-spaced houses and the occasional car coming the other direction.

  They pulled out onto a dirt road and drove for a time before their way was blocked by a gate. To either side stretched a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The fence, too, was topped with barbed wire.

  “Now what?” Eddie asked.

  Erin leapt out and ran to the gate, hoping to find a lock she could pick, only to see it was a combination lock. Cursing, she got back in the car.

  “Hold on,” she said, turning the car around.

  “Oh, Erin, you aren’t going to do something dramatic and silly, are you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She did a tight three-point turn, drove the car a hundred yards away from the gate, put it into reverse, and slammed on the gas.

  The car roared down the dirt road and crashed into the gate, which burst open with a squeal of savaged metal. Erin swung the car around, breathing a sigh of relief that none of the tires had burst, and shot up the road.

  “If the police didn’t warn her we’re coming, we just did,” Eddie commented.

  “We don’t have time to be subtle. Isabel could be dead already.”

  An unlit house stood up ahead, a dark bulk looming in the moonlight. Erin parked about a hundred yards away, fearful that Carlotta could have a gun, and switched off the engine and lights. She pulled the pepper spray from her purse, silently agreeing with Eddie that she should have acclimated more to her adoptive country and gotten a gun permit. She also retrieved a small mini-Maglite. Eddie grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment, popped the trunk, ran to it, and pulled out a tire iron.

  They paused by the car, staring at the house. It was a spacious two-story New England-style home, painted white, with a gabled roof and numerous windows covered with pale curtains that looked ghostly in the moonlight. No sound or light came from within. They kept their flashlights off.

  “What other instructions did she receive from your father?” Erin asked.

  “None, really. Just cause a sensational case that would draw you in. He didn’t need to give any more specific orders, because he was confident it would all come to fruition.”

  “Arrogant bastard.”

  “But it all has, hasn’t it? His plan has worked out perfectly.”

  “And how is this grand plan supposed to turn out?” Erin asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “He never said. I think he wanted it to be a battle between good and evil to see which was stronger.”

  “Charming,” Erin said, and started running for the house.

  She saw no need for stealth after their loud entrance, so she simply led Eddie on a sprint across the lawn, zigzagging in case Carlotta and any possible accomplices decided to shoot from the windows. While Erin disliked firearms, she had taken several survival and basic training courses with a community of gun aficionados in Rhode Island, figuring that in her line of work that sort of thing might come in handy. She had also taken some self-defense classes.

  Fortunately, her training wasn’t needed and they made it to the house without being fired upon, or indeed seeing any sign of life within.

  The front door was flanked by two side windows with no curtains. Erin and Eddie peered inside and saw no sign of movement. Hoping they remained unobserved, Erin worked on picking the lock while Eddie gave her some light.

  It proved to be a simple lock that took only moments to pick. Erin never ceased to be amazed how little people protected their homes, even someone with as much need for privacy as Carlotta Sanchez. Criminals she had met had boasted to her that most break-ins were ridiculously simple.

  The door opened to a large front hallway with a sweeping staircase leading upstairs. To their right was a darkened living room. To their left an open doorway led to what Erin could just make out to be the kitchen. All lay dark and silent.

  Just then Erin’s phone vibrated.

  Eddie jumped a full foot in the air. “Oh Jesus!”

  Annoyed, Erin pulled the phone out from her pocket and answered it.

  Captain Wilson’s voice came over the phone.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded, his voice sounding both accusatory and curious. “Why are you implicating Isabel’s maid? And why did I just get a call from the Bedford Police Department saying you threatened to break into her home?”

  “Carlotta is living in a nice house on a large tract of land in one of the country’s richest postcodes. She’s not all she seems.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because I already broke into her house. Please send a squad car. I have a feeling things are going to get quite nasty very soon.”

  �
��You better be right, or I’ll have your license for this,” Captain Wilson growled.

  “I’ll take that chance,” Erin said, and hung up on him.

  Now that all hope of surprise was gone, they flicked on their flashlights and quickly surveyed the ground floor of the house. They found nothing of interest until they noticed a door leading off the kitchen had two sets of locks and metal reinforcement. The door did not lead to the outside.

  “I think this might go down to the cellar,” Eddie said.

  Erin only nodded. The locks were unlocked.

  “Turn off your flashlight,” Erin whispered.

  Even in the dim illumination she could see Eddie go pale. He did what he was told, though, and Erin turned off her own light.

  She eased the door open a crack, feeling from its weight that it was solid wood rather than cheap board like most doors. As she opened it, light shone from the other side. They saw a flight of old wooden steps leading down to a cellar and immediately heard the sound of sobbing and pleading coming from below. Intermingled with this was a low, lecturing voice. Erin couldn’t catch the words. The thickness of the door and a tight seal of rubber had effectively soundproofed the cellar from the rest of the house.

  Erin hoped that meant Carlotta hadn’t heard their noisy entrance.

  At the same moment she realized she hadn’t set her phone on silent. If Captain Wilson called back the game would be up.

  She was about to pull the phone from her pocket when a scream galvanized her into action. Whatever was going on down there needed to be stopped this instant.