DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

“This is it,” she said. She was scared. He could hear it in her voice, and he put a reassuring hand on her arm as she inserted the key in the lock.

She glanced around, double-checking, making sure that no one had followed them, that the security cameras were not on, then quickly pulled open the door and walked inside.

He followed.

He was not sure what he had expected, but it certainly wasn’t this.

Sensors had turned on overhead lights the second they had walked through the door, and they stood with their backs to the entrance looking at—

Nothing.

It was a lab in name only. There were no machines, no beakers or test tubes, no tables. There was no furniture at all. The walls were empty, the floor was spotless. There was only a circular hole surrounded by a low stone wall in what appeared to be the exact center of the room.

Dion wanted to leave. If before everything had been too vague, too nebulous, things were fast becoming far too concrete. The fact that Penelope’s mothers had for years been spending time in here, telling her that they were working in a lab on stains of grape and varieties of wine when in reality there had been nothing in here but this well, scared the hell out of him. The seeming irrationality of it, the fact that he could make no sense of the situation, was what frightened him the most, and he was suddenly afraid for Penelope. He wondered if his mom would let her move in with them, if he could—

Penelope squeezed his hand, moved forward.

“No!” Dion said.

“What?”

“Don’t go near it.”

She smiled, but there was no humor in it. “You think a monster’s going to pop up and grab me?”

That wasn’t exactly what he thought, but it was close.

“I have to know,” she said softly.

He held her hand tightly, and the two of them walked forward into the center of the room. They looked down into the well, expecting to see a black, bottomless pit, or an empty shaft with bones on the bottom. But instead they saw, a foot or so below the stone rim, their own reflections staring back at them from the deep, glassy burgundy surface of wine.

“What is this?” Penelope asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, but on some level, he thought, he did know. For the fear he’d felt before, the worry, was gone, replaced by calm. The feeling that things he didn’t understand were spinning out of control was not there anymore. This room, this well, this wine, all of it felt reassuring to him, comfortable, as though he was now ensconced in familiar surroundings. He breathed deeply. The smell of the wine reminded him of the counselor’s office, of Mr. Barton drinking from the bottle in his desk, and he thought back to the fight with Paul. On one level he was horrified by what had happened, disgusted with himself, but a deeper part of him approved, and as he replayed the fight in his mind, as he thought of the small changes that would have resulted in Paul’s death, he smiled.

“What are you smiling at?” Penelope demanded.

He opened his eyes, looked at her, blinked. What had he been smiling at? The thought of killing Paul? He shook his head. “Nothing.”

The two of them looked down at the well of wine.

“What now?” Dion asked.

“The woods,” Penelope said.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “I knew I’d have to go there ever since I caught Mother Margeaux sneaking into the kitchen the other night. I tried to pretend otherwise, tried not to think about it, tried to tell myself that—that there was an explanation for it, but I knew there wasn’t.”

“Maybe—”

“No maybes.”

He nodded. “Let’s go, then. Let’s see what’s out there.”

38

Horton stood against the wall as the computer checked the prints against those in its files, watching as the split screens flashed by, the left half containing the print off the bottle, the right showing the prints against which it was being compared. The process was automated but not instantaneous, and he knew that it was going to take a long time to go through all of the prints stored in the machine’s memory. In addition to complete sets of fingerprints for all perps arrested in the county during the last ten years, the computer stored the prints of children fingerprinted at birth, individuals who’d undergone voluntary printing, and unidentified prints from other crime scenes. The computer also had the capability of accessing the print files of other departments across the state who were online.

The search had already been underway for nearly twenty-four hours, and according to Filbert, the technician monitoring the machine, it could take twice that long before all fingerprints were compared.

Hell, Horton thought, with his luck the print would probably end up being of someone not even on file.

He took a sip of his coffee, was about to walk back to his office when suddenly the screen stopped moving, the image locking in place. A red light flashed on and off, a small beep sounding. “Lieutenant?” Filbert said, turning around.

Horton moved forward, looked over Filbert’s shoulder as the technician pressed a series of keys. The identification of the print owner was superimposed over the bottom portion of the screen.

Margeaux Daneam.

His mouth was suddenly dry, and he finished off his coffee. He hadn’t suspected this, hadn’t expected it, but somehow it did not completely surprise him. He stared at the name and the winery address beneath it. A ripple of cold passed through him.

“Print it,” he told Filbert.

The technician pressed a key, and a copy of the screen began printing on the Laserjet adjacent to the terminal.

Daneam.

He rubbed the goosebumps on his arms. It was not the fact that a prominent local businesswoman had been implicated in the brutal rape and murder of two teenagers that spooked him. I was everything else. The peripherals. The rise in DUI’s, D&D’s, the other murders, his own drinking and everyone else’s.

The fact that it was all related.

That