12th of Never (Women's Murder Club 12)

I held the mask for Fish so he could get oxygen to his brain. I wanted to know about him and Mackie, how long the escape had been planned, and why, if Fish could love a woman, he had killed so many women so viciously.

But Stone Phillips wasn’t here and there was no time to do the in-depth Dateline interview. Shouts got louder as a lot of men and machines converged outside the car.

The rescue team had returned with power tools to extract Randolph Fish from the wreck of the Ford Crown Vicky. It was highly likely that when the engine was lifted, Fish’s blood pressure would plummet and he would die.

I moved the mask away and said, “Randy? I’ve got something important to tell you. Are you listening to me?”

Chapter 103

RANDY FISH HAD all the starch and vigor of a sock puppet. His chin rested on his collarbone. His hands lay limp on the engine block. Could he still hear me?

“Randy? Are you with me, bud?”

I called his name several times, and then he exhaled a groan.

“Randy, listen to me. I’m sorry to have to give you some bad news. Your injuries are severe. Your lower body, your internal organs are crushed. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Your injuries are not survivable.”

He took in a breath, spoke on the exhale.

“Need doc …”

“Doctors want me to tell you that you have very little time.”

A moment passed and Fish didn’t inhale. Was he still alive? Or had he wandered down the tunnel toward the light?

“I’m tough,” he said.

He was making a joke as he faced death, with thoughts of loved ones who might also be dying or dead. I thought of Ben, the little boy who’d survived the horrific crash, and I felt sorry for Randy Fish.

Which pissed me off.

Fish was a sexual predator who had maimed, tortured, raped, and murdered his victims, getting off on causing as much pain as he could. He had never confessed and had never expressed remorse. He was filth, a heinous psycho, one of the worst.

But I needed him to trust me, to tell me where he’d hidden the unrecovered bodies. It wasn’t easy to find the right words.

“A miracle could happen, Randy. No one is giving up. But to be honest, you probably only have a few minutes left.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them.

“You want to get right with people who love you, Randy. You want your son to know that you helped the parents of those dead girls—”

“Sonoma,” he said thickly.

“What about Sonoma?”

“Dow off …”

Dow off? What was this? Had his mind veered to the stock market?

Fish’s head dropped forward even farther. He was blacking out, but I squeezed his arm and I think the pain brought him back. He tried hard to give me answers. He spoke in broken sentences punctuated by moans, and somehow, using the GPS on my phone, asking questions that required one-word answers, I was able to get Fish to string together enough words to give me a picture and a map.

There was an abandoned typewriter factory, Dow Office Machines, in Sonoma. Fish had dumped the girls in the woods behind the machine shop.

I named the murdered girls whose bodies had not been found and he nodded at each one, but when I said “Sandra Brody,” he shook his head no and then said, “Not mine.”

A week ago, about eight of us had bushwhacked through the woods with cadaver dogs, dug up old deer antlers, and had our hopes raised, then shattered, so that Fish could smell fresh air.

He’d been messing with us then.