Better Off Dead (17 page)

"I'm not calling the police," she insisted.
Her voice slurred and I realized she had been drinking. Liquid
courage. "I saw what they did to that other woman who accused
him."

That other woman who accused him. She had to
be talking about Brookhouse. She had to. A lightning bolt of
adrenaline ran through me. If she named him, I could go after him
without fear of having the wrong man.

"We have to meet," I told her. "Now. I'll
come over to your house. I won't tell anyone. Just let me know
where you live."

"No," she said. "I don't want you to know
who I am."

"Please," I begged her. "Please just trust
me."

She was quiet for a moment, thinking it
over. "Do you know where the Tobacco Trail crosses University
Drive?" she finally asked.

"Yes, but it's not a great place to meet.
Not enough street lights. It's dark. Too dangerous."

"I know it's dark. That's why I want you to
meet me there."

"No," I said. “Too dangerous."

"Listen," she told me, her voice growing
sharp. "I'll park on the road that leads to the Bulls Stadium.
There are lots of lights there. I'll be able to tell if anyone is
following me. Just meet me at the base of the bridge that goes over
University Drive. I'll be there in half an hour."

That would barely leave me enough time to
get there. "So soon?" I asked.

"I can't do it any other way." Her voice
fell to a whisper. A television set blared in the background. "My
husband will be home around eleven. I have to be back by then. My
kids are in bed. They're old enough to leave alone for a while, but
I have to make it quick."

"I'll be there," I promised, then hung up
the phone. Food forgotten, I ran for the front door. I wanted to
get to that side street before she did, not only so I could get a
look at her license plate, but because I didn't trust her
instincts. I wanted to make sure she wasn't being followed.

I caught a glimpse of startled faces as I
stuck my head in the living room. "Back soon," I promised.

"Back?" Burly said. "I didn't even know you
were home." He was sitting next to Helen, showing her his famous
disappearing ace card trick.

"She's agreed to meet you?" Fanny called
after me.

"Yes," I yelled back and took the front
porch steps two at a time. This was the break I needed.

She never showed. I risked every stoplight
and every stop sign to get there early. But the woman never showed
up. I waited in pitch blackness at the base of an old railroad
trestle that had been converted into an historic walking trail
paved with a wide asphalt band. Traffic whizzed past on University
Drive. Cars pulled into the Amoco station on the corner, radios
blaring, the beat of heavy bass rattling their windows. A wino
wandered past, stinking of urine, never knowing I was sniffing him
from inches away.

I waited another hour. Still she did not
come.

My bad feeling grew worse with every passing
minute. By eleven, I could stand it no longer and walked down to
the Amoco station to use the pay phone to call Helen's house. One
of these days, I'd have to break down and get a cell phone. Hell,
my brain was already pickled. Why not radiate it, too?

Fanny answered the phone like she had been
sitting on it, waiting for it to hatch.

"It's me. She didn't show. Did she call
back?" I asked.

"No," Fanny said. "But Marcus called. He was
very upset. He said to tell you, 'It happened again.'"

"It happened again?" I repeated dumbly.
Don't let it be her, I thought. Please don't let it be her. I
exhaled heavily. "Did he say where he was?"

"He's working late," Fanny said. "They
called him in."

"Ah, shit."

"Not her?"

"I don't know." I was silent, thinking.
"Don't wait up for me.”

"I'll pray," Fanny promised.

I thanked her and hung up, but even then I
knew it was too late for prayer. Even prayers sent up from someone
as pure-hearted as Fanny.

Marcus met me outside in the parking lot of
the police station. "I've only got five minutes," he said. "They
think I'm on a cigarette break."

"What happened?"

"Some woman got raped and murdered over by
the soccer fields off Broad Street."

"A coed?" I said, and god help me I asked
this almost hopefully. The woman who had called me said she had
older children. She was no coed.

But Marcus shook his head. "Not a coed. I
don't know a lot. Her car was forced off the road near the Farmer’s
Market, you know that dark corner near the railroad tracks?"

I nodded. I knew it. It was a wasteland at
night. People cut through the area to reach downtown quickly when
they were coming in from North Durham.

"No one heard anything, apparently, because
it's a commercial area," Marcus explained. "But she was run off the
road and taken from her car there. The window was broken in on the
driver's side."

I had a sudden vision of a frightened woman
hiding behind an inch of window glass, desperately hoping the car
locks might protect her, honking, watching in horror as the man who
had been stalking her crashed through that glass as easily as
opening the door.

"What did he do to her?" I asked.

Marcus shook his head. "You don't want to
know, Casey."

"I have to know," I told him.

Something in my voice made him look up.
"You're not connected to this, are you?"

"I hope not," I said truthfully. "But she
may have been on her way to contact me. What was her name?"

He shook his head. "That I don't even know.
Not yet."

"What did he do to her?"

But Marcus only shook his head again. "I
can't tell you that, Casey. You know that. I don't know what
they're keeping private and what they're making public. I just
can't do it."

"Why are you at work right now?"

"I'm doing the computer search, looking for
a match on the crime specifics."

"Nationally?" I asked.

He nodded. "There's nothing coming back so
far that matches the details. But it's out there. I can feel
it."

"Because all the others matched?" I guessed,
although I wondered if he would find a match this time. Perhaps the
murderer had had no time to plan this one. He'd had to stop her
from meeting me at all costs.

He nodded. "It's got to be the same guy.
Someone is messing with our heads."

"Do they still think it might be a police
officer?"

Marcus shrugged. "I don't know what
Detective Ferrar thinks. I only know he called me himself from the
scene and got me out of bed and pulled me in to start
searching."

"He called you personally. Why?"

"He trusts me," Marcus said, not without
pride. Which was when I knew I'd never get any details out of him,
not until he knew what it was safe to disclose.

"Thanks for calling me, at least," I said.
"I appreciate it."

He turned to go, but hesitated. "Casey, what
he did to this woman was really sick. I can't see a police officer
doing it. I just can't. I don't know who it is, but whoever it is
likes some really funky shit. You have to help us stop him. Do
whatever it takes. We need a break on this case and I don't care
where it comes from."

"You're telling me to go down to the crime
scene?" I asked.

He turned to look at me again. "I'm telling
you that whoever this person is, he needs to be brought down.
Now."

Jesus, I thought, as I headed toward the
campus. What the hell was this guy doing to the women he raped? And
had he done it to the woman coming to meet me?

The area around the soccer fields was
blocked off. A ring of police cars, yellow tape and determined
officers kept every lookey-loo at bay, including me. I parked
behind a pizza place on Main and hiked back, circling behind some
woods until I was approaching the crime scene from the only
direction not marked by a building or thoroughfare. There was still
a line of officers blocking the way, but they were far from the
eyes of their commanding officers and chances were good I would
know a few of them.

I walked past the perimeter, head down, as
if I were a coed hurrying back to my dorm at one o'clock in the
morning. After skirting three checkpoints, I finally recognized
Hugh Fitzpatrick, a New York City transplant who took a lot of
ribbing from his Durham cohorts about how Hugh fits Patrick and
Patrick fits Hugh. They called him Fitz. He was a good guy, a
little rotund, maybe, and had lost too much of his hair for my
tastes. But he was happy as hell to be patrolling the kinder,
gentler streets of Durham instead of the mean streets of New York.
He was also a bachelor, which may have accounted for why he was
more susceptible to my charms than your average bear.

"Fitz," I hissed at him from the cover of a
mulberry bush.

He looked around, confused.

"Over here. Behind the bushes. It's
Casey."

He checked to see that no one was watching
and joined me in the bushes. "Why the hell are you hiding in here?'
he asked.

"I want to know what's going on and you guys
seem pretty serious about keeping everyone out."

"It is serious, Casey," he said. He tugged
on his belt and rearranged his belly above it. "The wife of some
big shot in the public relations department got offed. The husband
broke through the tape and made a big scene. It was pretty grim."
He frowned. “Turns out the poor guy was driving home and saw the
commotion, then cut through downtown and saw his wife's car wrecked
and put two and two together and came racing back here and
collapsed."

"Did he do it?" I asked.

Fitz shook his head. "He's been at some
fundraising dinner in front of a hundred witnesses, or something
like that."

"Did they have kids?" I asked.

He nodded. "A couple. Older, I think. High
school. Maybe junior high. I could get Samson over here for you. He
knows the family, says the victim was a real nice lady. Knew her
from church. Why? You involved in this?"

"God, no," I lied. "What was her name?"

Fitz shrugged. "Let me get Samson for
you."

"No, no, no," I assured him, but it was too
late. He called Samson Jones over. Samson was a real by-the-book
kind of guy who hated my guts and thought all private investigators
should be shot on sight. He took one look at me and made his
feelings plain.

"I should have known you'd be around.
Wherever there's trouble, there's Casey."

"Nice to see you again, too, Sam," I told
him. He was a good-looking guy, if you liked biceps and buzz cuts.
But he was such a dick you couldn't help but hate him.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"I was driving by and saw the commotion. I
wondered what was going on."

"You can read about it in the papers like
the rest of Durham. Time for you to get the fuck home."

Fitz looked a bit taken aback by Samson's
vehemence, but truth be told, it was Sam who was the better
officer. It was just my bad karma I'd run into him.

"Is it related to the other attacks?" I
asked, pushing my luck. Too far, as it turned out.

"You know," Samson said, looking me over,
his cop instincts kicking in. "I think maybe you need to talk to
Ferrar about this." He cupped his hands. "Hey, Ferrar, I got
someone you better question personally," he bellowed across the
field. His voice cut through the night like the mating call of a
horny moose. About twenty people turned around to stare.

"Nice talking to you," I told them both as I
slipped back into the woods.

Samson yelled after me halfheartedly, but I
had no intention of stopping to meet Angel Ferrar. Not tonight. And
not in this lifetime, preferably.

Halfway back to my car, I stepped across the
street, lost in thought, wondering who the dead woman had been in
David Brookhouse’s life and how she had come to be in the basement
of his department's building, to be raped in the first place. I
didn't have to wonder how she had come to be murdered. I knew that.
She had been murdered on her way to see me.

And now I had someone I wanted to see.

Although it was nearly one o'clock in the
morning, it looked like Brookhouse had every light in his entire
downstairs blazing. I parked at the curb and stared through his
living room windows, making no pretense at hiding the car. I knew
he couldn't see my face in the shadows, and I wanted him to know
that someone was watching him. I needed him to know that someone
knew what he had done, that no matter how respectable and upright
and cultured he seemed, there was more than one person walking this
earth who was on to him. He had killed a woman that night, I was
sure of it. And I wanted him to know that someone knew.

It was stupid of me. I could easily have
been recognized. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of his
driveway for a better look. He was sitting on the sofa in his
living room, watching television, the newspaper spread open on his
lap. A cup of something hot sat on a table near his elbow. He had
on a plaid bathrobe and seemed absorbed in the television program.
In other words, he looked every bit as innocuous as your average
husband after a hard day at the office.

He didn't fool me. He was a killer.

And I was a hothead. I selected a hefty
chunk of granite that bordered a flower bed alongside his driveway.
It was about the size of a softball and would do nicely. I gauged
the distance between the living room window and my car. I'd have
just enough time to get away clean.

My wind-up would have done Catfish Hunter
proud. That rock was going a good ninety miles an hour by the time
it hit his window, shattering the glass and setting off an
unexpected alarm. Then the rock kept going, as if under rocket
power. It sailed across the living room and damn if it didn't crash
right through the television screen. Sparks and electrical smoke
poured from it. I hit the ground running, heading for my car. Let
him be afraid in his own home for a change.