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“Twenty-two thousand square feet.”
“Wow. That’s impressive.”
“You should see inside. They hold the four big seasonal events for Destiny—Summer Solstice on June twenty-first, Halloween, which costumes are required, a Christmas party that will blow your mind, and Dragon Week, which is celebrated in March.”
“Dragon Week? The O’Learys are crazy for dragons, aren’t they?”
“Just Patrick. Ethel tolerates it, but Sam, his brother, loves to rib him about it every chance he gets.”
“Why is Mr. O’Leary so passionate about dragons anyway?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself. I want to see your face when he tells you.” Eric touched her cheek. “We better get going. You don’t want to be late on your first day.”
“I hear the boss is a tyrant.”
“You hear right. Let’s go.”
They turned left, continuing their morning walk.
The circle connected the two parts of the street together. The one that was between The Knight Mansion and The Steele Estate ran east and west. The one that connected the exclusive neighborhood to the rest of the town ran north and south.
At the intersection of North and East Streets, Eric stopped again. “What do you think of our downtown, Megan?”
Why did everyone who lived here have such pride about this place? Maybe it was because Destiny was unlike anywhere else in the world. Most likely.
“It’s beautiful.” She glanced at the dragon statue on the opposite corner from where they stood. Phoebe had called it The Red Dragon. Passion. The memories of last night swirled in her head, and she felt her body suddenly start tingling. She glanced over at Eric, who was staring at her with his intense blue eyes.
“Red Dragon is something, isn’t she?”
“I thought it was a he?”
He shrugged. “I guess it depends on your perspective, little one.”
Don’t fail me, knees. Not now. Not here.
Chapter Thirteen
Scott sat on a bench facing a prison cell similar to one he’d seen in a movie, only in this version he was in the role Foster played. Kip Lunceford was the stand-in for Hopkins.
Kip ha
dn’t changed much in the last five years, same dark hair, ears tipped out slightly at the top, and blue-gray eyes. Six foot tall, he stood at the back of his cell leaning against the wall. His clothes were different, though, prison orange.
Calling in a favor, Dylan had only gotten him ten minutes with Kip. The facility in Atlanta was a maximum-security prison, but they’d still built an area just for Kip. The gruesome details of what had happened in the years after the traitor was taken from Megan’s home were in the file beside Scott.
After Kip’s conviction, the feds had sent him to Beckley, West Virginia, to a medium-security facility. It made sense to them since his crimes were nonviolent in nature back then.
Kip had the run of the place in less than a week, controlling the entire prison’s computer system from a terminal in the prison library. After a few months, Kip had started using his unique access to open exit doors, turn off surveillance cameras, and leave without the on-duty guards’ knowledge.
The FBI had no suspects and no leads for the seven connected murders of gay men in the Beckley area for over a year until by happenstance the prison’s computer system came up for an audit. A talented technician named Paula Childs, a single mother of three, noticed some discrepancies. The lead auditor on the project told her to move on, but the woman couldn’t let it go. She found the evidence that proved Kip had been leaving the prison whenever he felt like it.
In less than three days, the FBI had solved the case. Kip was the serial killer. The creep had confessed with a smirk. When asked why he’d committed such horrific crimes, Kip had flippantly told them he’d done it because he could and was bored. The prison psychiatrist’s notes on his sessions with Kip were gruesome. Things like “I loved seeing them beg for their lives” and “there’s nothing like seeing a worthless wretch scream their last breath” were just a couple of the heinous words of the madman documented in the file. The one that stuck out the most to Scott was the final entry in the shrink’s records. “Trust me, Doc. If I ever get bored again, I’ve a got a long list of scum to take care of and there’s no prison that can hold me.”
Since West Virginia abolished the death penalty in 1965, Kip received seven back-to-back life sentences, which went on top of his previous life sentence for a total of eight.
Kip was moved to a high-security prison in Marion, Illinois. He was not allowed to use any of the computers in the place, as the warden feared he might do what he’d done in Beckley. The warden had been smart to worry. One of the guards gave him a cell phone. With it, Kip broke into the prison’s network, taking it over as he’d done before. The guard’s bank account suddenly had over three hundred thousand dollars deposited into it from an offshore source that the FBI, to this day, hadn’t been able to track down.
Kip left Marion for a suburb of Chicago, where Paula Childs had just relocated with her kids. Paula was shot in the head twice and in the chest once. The kids, thankfully, had been away at their grandparents’.
