Free Make them Cry by Keven O’Brien Page B

after he’d left. She’d passed out on the bed. Anyone could have slipped in.
    Maggie tried to adjust her eyes to the darkness. If there was a clock on the nightstand, she didn’t see it. Still, she felt someone hovering over her.
    Blindly, she reached for a lamp at her bedside. Her hand fanned at the air for a moment. She kept expecting the intruder to grab her by the wrist. She felt so vulnerable and helpless. At last, she found the lamp and fumbled for the switch.
    She squinted in the light. The rest of the room was still shrouded in darkness. But at least she could see that no one was standing near the bed. And she could find her way to the bathroom. Maggie threw back the covers and hurried into the John. She peed, flushed the toilet, then gulped down a glass of water. Before wandering back to bed, she checked the door to her room. It wasn’t locked. She pressed the button in the center of the doorknob and fixed the chain lock.
    Climbing back into bed, she switched off the light. As she drifted off, Maggie thought about checking the closet or behind the drapes. Just a few minutes before, she’d been so sure someone was in the room with her.
    If that was true, she’d just locked him inside. As far as she was concerned, he could go ahead and kill her. She didn’t care. Her brother was dead. She’d made an ass out of herself with this sexy priest. She was miffed at her sisters and ex-husband. And tomorrow, she’d have one hell of a hangover. If someone killed her in her sleep, he’d be doing her a big favor.
     
    When Maggie woke up again, it was morning. She crawled out of bed and staggered toward the bathroom. But she saw something that made her stop dead. She squinted at the room door. She didn’t understand. Hadn’t she set the chain lock a couple of hours ago?
    She couldn’t have dreamed it. Yet now the chain lock was off. It didn’t make sense.
    The only way someone could have unlatched that chain was if they’d already been in the room with her when she’d woken up last night.

Chapter Nine
    The church basement seemed quite different with the overhead fluorescent on and birds chirping outside. Morning light filtered through the small windows. The statue of St. Joseph looked benign now. For this return trip to the catacombs, Jack wasn’t alone, and he didn’t have to climb though a window. He and Father Garcia had come down the basement stairs.
    Jack was tired and blurry-eyed. He’d left Maggie Costello at the Lakeside Inn at 1:30 this morning. He couldn’t have caught more than four hours of sleep. Tom Garcia, on the other hand, was full of energy. He smelled of Old Spice and cigarettes.
    Walking amid the dusty, discarded altar decorations, they reached the crypt door. “Last night on the phone,” Garcia said, “you mentioned you’d checked out this place ‘following a lead’?”
    “That’s right,” Jack replied, pulling the key from his pocket. “But I can’t really talk about it.” He nodded ahead at the tunnel-like cavern. “I’ll show you what I found here and let you draw your own conclusions.”
    Garcia frowned. “I don’t understand.”
    “You’ll see what I mean,” Jack assured him.
    They started down the center of the catacombs together. Garcia kept looking left and right as they passed the shadowy nooks. “Jack Murphy, you must have more balls than a Christmas tree to come down here alone in the dead of night.”
    Jack directed his miniflashlight on the floor so Garcia could see all the shoe prints. “Looks like the boys who come down here are usually in pairs. If I remember right, the tracks veer to the left pretty soon.”
    They found the final resting place for Monsignor Thayer Swann, but the votive candles weren’t there anymore. Jack trained the flashlight around the base of the marble slab. “Someone’s been down here,” he said. “Everything’s gone. There were scented candles and a bag full of bedding, pillows, and a comforter.”
    Garcia frowned at him.