Bad Desire

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Praise for the Writing of Gary Devon

Lost

Edgar Award Finalist

“
Lost
is the kind of novel that will play havoc with readers who enjoy a long night's sleep. In fact, once you start this book, forget about sleeping, eating or whatever until you're done. [Gary Devon] comes through with a book that deserves serious consideration as a minor American classic.” —
Philadelphia Daily News

“One of the most original riveting pieces of storytelling in years.” —
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“I've heard books described as gripping, and I might even have used the term myself. I don't think I really knew that it meant though, until I picked up
Lost
…. The writing is remarkable, dark, and exquisite.
Lost
is a real find.” —
The Washington Post Book World

“Gripping … Mr. Devon has written a novel of appealing originality.” —
The New York Times

Bad Desire

“Devon follows his praised first novel,
Lost
, with an account of forbidden love and serial murder that thrills from intriguing start to chilling finish.” —
Publishers Weekly

“From the masterly depiction of his ice-eyed killer to his chilling Hitchcockian ending, Gary Devon blows away every other psychological suspense writer around.
Bad Desire
is a stunner. Buy it. Or beg, borrow, steal it. But read it.” —Martha Grimes,
New York Times
–bestselling author

“
Bad Desire
is a very good read. A fine psychological thriller.” —Mary Higgins Clark,
New York Times
–bestselling author

“Gripping and suspenseful.” —Ira Levin,
New York Times
–bestselling author

Bad Desire

Gary Devon

PART

ONE

1

His name was John Howard Beecham, but there was not a soul still alive who could have looked at him and sworn who he was, not mother or family or kin. Over the last few years he had had his face altered twice, the first time in Quebec and then more recently in Mexico City, both times thinking that he had enough money to quit this business and live in quiet seclusion. But money had a way of running through his fingers.

He had been a good-looking man who wanted to look ordinary, and for the most part he had what he wanted—at the age of forty-nine, he looked different than he had before and, also, years younger. He knew only the illusion was important. There were some things, of course, that couldn't be changed—his crow black eyes, for example, inherited from his grandmother who had been a full-blooded Creek Indian. He thought strangers remembered his eyes. Sometimes he felt it when they looked at him, and he had to keep telling himself that as long as he didn't get caught, it didn't matter. But it worried him excessively. An idle mind, his grandmother had scolded him, is the devil's playground.

Taking the southern route, he had come to California from Biloxi, Mississippi, where there were now two outstanding warrants for his arrest on charges of first-degree murder. The warrants had been issued several months apart for men of different names and descriptions, but Beecham knew who they were for. In the past ten years, he had murdered sixteen people, men and women alike.

It was 8:55 on a Monday morning when he arrived in Los Angeles, stepping down from the bus and walking straight through the station to the street. Beecham carried an oversized gym bag, nothing else. He wore a clean blue chambray work shirt rolled at the cuffs, sturdy khaki trousers with a military cut and brown calfskin Wellingtons. He looked like a common worker, someone, he thought, who would remain anonymous in the early crowd.

On the sidewalk, he experienced a moment's disorientation, but he wasted no time, setting out toward a red Avis sign a few blocks away. From Los Angeles, Beecham would have an hour's drive north, up the coastal highway to a town called Meridian. He would arrive there a day early, exactly as he wanted it. Still keeping a deliberate pace, he crossed the intersection, all but hidden in the flow of clerks and shop girls on their way to work.

A tropical front had moved in; for the third week in May, the weather was surprisingly hot and humid. Not much different, he thought, from New Orleans. But he paid it no mind. For Beecham, things were always pretty much the same.

The stores were beginning to open for the day; interior lights were coming on behind the large plate-glass windows facing the street. He passed the window of a jewelry store where a man was setting out watches, a dress boutique with its haughty mannequins, a department store where multiples of the same product filled each separate section of window display. A shiver crept up his spine and sank into the roots of his hair. He stopped and looked behind him, always wary, checking to see if he had somehow been followed, but no one was rushing at him from behind; nothing unexpected had happened.

When he turned his head again, Beecham saw himself endlessly reflected in a wall of thin, wire-rimmed glasses, the kind his grandmother had worn before she died. It was as if something from his past reached for him. She could have been standing there, gazing at him a hundred times over.
SEE BETTER!
the sign said.
SEE MORE! ALL SIZES & STYLES. YOUR CHOICE … $9.95
. It occurred to him that glasses might be the last remaining touch needed to disguise his face. If he could find lenses of clear glass, they might soften the penetrating blackness of his eyes. He decided it was worth a try and entered the store.

Two days later, in the town of Meridian, the door of Delaney's Tap & Dine opened and a man came in. He was a medium-size man, rough-looking, dressed in faded work clothes that were clean but a little damp from the sweltering weather outside. He carried a folded newspaper under his arm and he wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses—the air conditioning in the room made the lenses fog. For a moment, he stood inside the door, his black eyes skittering behind the steamed ovals. Then he took the glasses off, wiped them on a handkerchief and reset them on the bridge of his nose.

It was minutes before four o'clock in the afternoon, the slow time of day at Delaney's. The bartender squinted at him and went back to working the daily crossword puzzle in the
L. A. Times
. At the sound of the door closing, the few men at the bar glanced over their shoulders, then returned to the last inning of the Dodgers-Phillies game. Everything, even the noise of the television set, seemed muted to Beecham, like the distant buzz of a saw. He looked at his watch. 3:56. Four minutes early.

The dining area, in the back half of the long room, was deserted, and Beecham walked toward it. At the end of the bar, where a waitress was counting her tips, he ordered a pot of coffee and two cups and paid her with a ten-dollar bill from his folding money. “Keep it,” he said, returning the other bills to his pocket. “I'm meetin' somebody. See to it that we're left alone.”

It was a lot of money for a pot of coffee and the waitress looked at the bill and then carefully looked at him. She had seen him before. He had been at the bar a couple of times yesterday, drinking a beer and leaving and then coming back hours later, but he wasn't from around here. “You'd better watch that one,” she had muttered to Charlie, the bartender. “He's up to no good.” There was something strange about his face, and in his eyes there was a haunted, empty look, like the eyes of a dead man. “He gives me the creeps,” she'd told Charlie.

The waitress put the money into her apron pocket and went to the kitchen in the back. Beecham crossed through the zigzag of tables and took a side booth so he would face the front of the room. As soon as he was seated, he put the newspaper down beside him, near his hip, opened it, and removed the snub-nosed .38 Special it had concealed. Taking a silencer from his pants pocket, he attached it to the barrel with a deft twist of his fingers; then he placed the .38 down along his right thigh, within quick and easy access.

He shrugged to loosen his shoulders, trying to relax, and leaned back, watching the front door. The room was like a long tunnel; at the end of the shaded interior was the saloon's large front window, rippling with sunlight. Outside, along the sidewalk, dry palmetto fronds hung motionless in the heat, and across the street, beyond the rocky seawall, the Pacific looked like stressed metal.

The waitress brought his order on a cork-lined tray—two white cups on white saucers, the chrome pot of coffee, a creamer and a sugar dispenser. As she placed the cups and saucers on the table, she started to ask if there would be anything else, but he stopped her. He took her wrist in his hand and his grip was hard and cold like iron. “Just leave it,” he said. It was as though something mechanical had closed on her flesh and she flushed and drew away from him, returning to her station behind the bar. Beecham did not make any movement to pour the coffee, but sat staring through his glasses at the front of the room.

Behind him, in the area of the rest rooms and the public telephone, a second man stood watching them. The waitress noticed him, but went on washing the beer glasses. It was as if he had wandered in here by mistake, she thought; he seemed out of place in this forgotten neighborhood bar. The back of the room was dim, his tanned face shadowed, yet he appeared comfortably sleek and handsome. Tall, in his forties, he wore a light summer raincoat, which was unbuttoned, showing glimpses of a white shirt and tie. The waitress had never seen him before.

He had his hands in his raincoat pockets as he approached the booth and he kept them there as he slid into the seat opposite the man in work clothes.

Neither of them spoke. For several seconds, they studied each other, coldly, without expression. Then the man wearing the glasses raised his hand from beneath the table, took the sugar dispenser and tipped it above the black Formica tabletop between them. The sugar gushed from the spout, the white grains bouncing and spreading in a wide mound. When half the jar was empty, he set it aside and with the flat of his hand, he spread the sugar into a thin, irregular coating on the black surface. With a blunt forefinger, he began to write in the sugar.