Don't Be Afraid (13 page)

Acutely aware of the gun pointing at her, Amy scooted across the leather seat with her hands in the air. She dropped them to push open the car door.

“Hands up! Keep them where I can see them!”

She shot them back up and nudged the door open with her knee. It was a long drop from the SUV. She slipped out of the car, landing on the garage floor with her arms wobbling from the effort to keep her balance in heels.

Without taking his eyes or his gun off her, the cop reached back a hand and pushed a button on the wall. The garage door rose with a whir, folding into the ceiling and there stood another cop with his gun aimed straight at her.

“Turn and face the car,” cop number one ordered.

“Listen, I’m the one—”

“Face the car!”

Angry, as well as afraid, Amy did as he said, turning slowly, her hands still up in the air. “Please listen—”

“Put your hands on the car, palms down!”

Amy smacked her palms down on the cold metal. “I’m the one who called the police, damn it!”

Cop number two moved closer and then Amy flinched as the first cop’s hands touched her waist and then moved quickly over her body, patting her down.

She blinked back tears and held still, resisting the urge to kick the guy. He stepped back after a few seconds.

“Okay, you can turn around.”

Suddenly, they wanted the information she’d been trying to give them all along. Who was she? What was she doing in the car? What was she doing with the photos?

She explained as quickly and coherently as she could, realizing that they hadn’t found Meredith yet. Cop number one stepped back into the house. Cop number two led her outside to the patrol car she hadn’t heard pull up, just as another police car, siren loudly blaring, came up the drive, followed by an ambulance.

Amy sat in the backseat of the patrol car, under some hybrid of house arrest. Car arrest? They hadn’t actually said she was being arrested, but they had, very pointedly, advised her to stay.

More patrol cars screamed up the drive, followed by plain cars and a coroner’s van. Soon the quiet neighborhood was filled with the squeal of sirens and the static rasp of police radios.

Amy saw Detective Juarez arrive with his partner and hurry into the house. Then she was interviewed by a seemingly endless stream of police officers, all of them quizzing her about the same things: What time did she find the body? Where was she before that? Did she know the victim?

She had no idea how much time passed, only that it seemed to go on forever. It was like Sheila all over again, only this time the detectives wanted her to stay.

At some point, she began to shake all over. The paramedics said it was shock. She didn’t even register who they were until the man handing her a blanket addressed her by name. Then she realized that he was the same emergency response worker who’d done such a great job with Emma. She saw his dangling ID, Ryan something. She tried to focus, trying to tell him that this death was the same as Sheila’s, but he didn’t seem to know what she meant.

“It’s okay, Ms. Moran, you just need to sit here and let us take care of it.” He guided her from the patrol car to the back of their truck and she waited there, the rough blanket around her shoulders.

She’d forgotten all about the lawyer and her husband until they pulled up with their son. They’d gotten lost and had clearly been bickering until they saw all the police. Amy briefly explained the situation.

“Cool!” the young boy declared when he saw the cops and the ambulance, but his parents looked horrified.

“I’m so sorry this didn’t work out,” Amy said, striving to sound professional and knowing how absurd it was to even care under the circumstances. “We’ll try and reschedule at the earliest possible time,” she said, as if it were something as innocuous as bad weather preventing them from viewing the property.

Ryan appeared with a bottle of water, holding it for her because she couldn’t manage, water slopping over the sides as she choked down a mouthful.

“Easy,” he said. “It’s okay. Just slow down and drink it.”

When she was finished, she thanked him, apologizing for her nerves. “Just a little shaky,” she said.

“Totally understandable,” Ryan said. “Was she a friend?”

“No. Just a client. I’m a realtor.” Amy indicated the Braxton Realty sign that had finally been posted in the yard. “I’m selling her home. Or I was. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

“Are you sure there isn’t someone I can call to be with you? Your husband?”

“I’m not married,” she said, then realized that he was looking at the wedding band she still hadn’t taken off. “Well, I’m separated. Divorce in the works. So no, I don’t have a husband to call.”

“Maybe a friend?”

“My closest friend in this town is dead,” Amy said, the tears she’d held back suddenly spilling over. “She was killed just like this woman.”

“Jesus! That’s terrible!” He reached past her and found some tissues for her in the ambulance. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

“I wish there was more I could do.”

His partner came around to the back of the truck. “We got another call we got to take.”

He frowned and walked around the side of the vehicle with her while Amy mopped her face and blew her nose, trying to regain some sort of control. Ryan reappeared.

“Look, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. Another emergency. But we could drop you off at the hospital on our way.”

Amy shook her head. “No, I’m okay. I don’t need the hospital. I just need to get home. Emma needs me.”

He frowned again, clearly ambivalent about leaving.

“Then at least let’s get you somewhere warm,” he said, ushering her up to the house. They were stopped in the hall by the young cop. She was to wait outside, he apologetically told her, and the detectives would come to talk to her soon.

“She’s not waiting outside, it’s too cold,” Ryan said. “If you want her here, then she needs to sit inside.”

So she was ushered into the living room and offered one of the vast club chairs near the fireplace. Twenty minutes of feet tramping up and down the stairs and loud voices followed, but every officer who passed by the room ignored her.

She suddenly thought to call Chloe, pulling out her cell phone and trying to steady her voice while she explained, without detail, what had happened.

Emma was asleep and breathing fine, Chloe said. She’d just checked on her. That relieved some of Amy’s anxiety, but she kept thinking of the photos she’d found and the similarities between this death and Sheila’s.

She glanced at her watch and realized that the cab she’d taken to Meredith’s house would be arriving any minute to take her back home. As she got up to check on it, Detectives Juarez and Black finally came downstairs and over to talk to her. They looked grim and Juarez jotted down details of what she said while Black kept giving her searching looks that she found disconcerting.

“What time did you say you made it back here, Mrs. Moran?” he said.

“I’m not sure. Seven? Seven-fifteen? I went home after the last showing and made my daughter dinner. I came here as soon as the babysitter arrived.”

“And Mrs. Chomsky was expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“But you let yourself into the house?”

“I wasn’t expecting Meredith—Mrs. Chomsky—to be home. She knew there was a showing and usually that’s done without the owner on the property.”

Detective Black gave a grunt that might have been acknowledgment or dissent and he produced the manila envelope that he had tucked under one arm.

“What were you doing with these photos, Mrs. Moran?”

Amy sighed. Not this again. “As I explained to the other officer, they were in the car. I found them.”

“Weren’t you putting them in the car?”

“No!”

“You’re a photographer, Mrs. Moran. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.” She should have seen this coming, but she hadn’t. Now going into the car seemed like the stupidest thing she’d ever done.

“Didn’t you take these photos, Mrs. Moran?”

“No!”

“And the photos of Sheila Sylvester?”

“Absolutely not!”

He simply stared at her, a slight smile—or was it a smirk?—hovering around his lips. Detective Juarez didn’t say a word, but he’d taken the mailer from his partner and was examining the photos.

“You could have taken these photos, though. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Moran?” Black said.

“I could have, but I didn’t.”

“Where were these photos developed?”

“I have no idea,” Amy said.

“You can’t tell from the photos?”

“Sometimes there’s a serial number,” Amy said, holding out her hand for a photo. Juarez passed one to her and Amy caught a brief glimpse of a naked Meredith gazing at herself in a mirror before flipping the photo over to examine the back.

It was clean and she flipped back to the front, looking less at the photo itself than at the quality of the photo, reducing Meredith’s black-and-white image to so many pixels.

“I think these are digital prints,” she said after a minute. “They’re probably produced from a computer printer.”

Black simply nodded, but Juarez was staring intently at the other photos.

“How can you tell that?” he asked.

“This is high-quality paper,” Amy said, “but the resolution is ever so slightly different from regular film.”

“So these could be done on a home computer? Not a photo lab?”

Amy nodded. “You have to have a little expertise, but you don’t have to be a professional photographer to do this.”

“But you could be, right?” Detective Black said. It was definitely a smirk.

“I didn’t take the photos, detective,” Amy said, tersely. “Either set. I think I’ve given you as much information as I can and I really need to get home to my daughter. Now.”

She didn’t wait for their permission to leave, just turned and headed for the door.

“Do you have any trips planned, Mrs. Moran?” Detective Black called after her, surprising Amy. She turned to shake her head at him.

“Good,” he said and gave her a sinister smile. “Don’t leave town.”

Guy stretched out on his couch and switched on the TV, wondering if there was any coverage yet. Surely at least one young, intrepid reporter had listened to a police scanner and arrived in time to pick up an exclusive.

Not that the police would have much to say. There wasn’t any danger of leaving incriminating evidence behind. He’d taken care of that immediately, just as he always did.

It was simple, really, a matter of making sure that everything that came into proximity with the body was disposable, and slipping off those paper clothes and the latex gloves, bagging them and sending the bag down an incinerator chute of a neighboring apartment building.

Underneath the medical supply store paper pants and smock, he always wore regular clothes: cheap, dark denim jeans and a Hanes T-shirt, clothes for the masses and sold in masses at low-cost warehouse stores, which was exactly where he’d bought them. Generic sneakers were covered in paper hospital booties, easy to slip on and off and also easy to burn. He’d taken to covering his hair with the plastic shower caps found in most major hotel chains.

By far the hardest thing about the whole operation was getting the paper bag containing the paper clothing safely down the incinerator. A resident stopped him once, eyed him suspiciously and informed him that strangers weren’t allowed to dispose of their garbage in that building. He pretended to be a visiting family member and that had been the end of it. But now he was much more careful, scanning the halls for busybodies before making the drop-off.

He took another sip of his vodka tonic, feeling the effect on an empty stomach, but without the energy to make a meal. Maybe he’d order a pizza later.

It was always like this after a kill. The energy that buzzed through his body in the days or weeks before was gone. He was like an artist or a showman. Everything went into his creation and then he was spent. Once or twice he’d actually slept twenty-four hours straight through after a kill.

Flipping idly through the channels, he came to rest on one of the so-called reality shows. Bunch of whiny people forced to compete against each other in some luxurious house, but he couldn’t figure out what they were competing for. Such a bunch of complainers, all of them. A little hardship and all they could do was whine and cry about the unfairness of it all. As if life came with some guarantee of fairness.

There was no equity in life; there never had been. You had to make your own fairness. They should stop whining and get to work, Guy thought, just as he had. He hadn’t sat about bitching that his mom hadn’t loved him. No, he’d worked hard, gotten his education, attended a good college on a scholarship and graduated at the top of his class.

Had his mom said she was proud of him then? No, but you didn’t see him going on some talk show to complain about it. Stiff upper lip. That’s all you had in life, that, and your determination to get ahead.

He took another sip of his drink, enjoying the icy shock against his throat. He didn’t mind icy drinks in icy weather or hot drinks in the sweltering heat. He was impervious to things like weather. He’d trained himself to be that way, to be stronger than the elements.

In college, he’d taken advanced psychology courses and seen experiments researchers did with hypnosis, submerging the arms of hypnotized test subjects in icy water and recording their reactions. Though their brains registered the pain, the test subjects were able to withstand it under hypnosis.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, he’d studied hypnosis, transcendentalism, spiritual ecstasy and even drug-induced euphoria, learning about separating the body and the brain and harnessing them both. He practiced self-deprivation, fasting to extremes and working the muscles of his body until he felt his joints humming like a machine.

He could have been a contestant on one of these reality shows, maybe best suited to the one in which participants had to forage on deserted islands. Only it would be stronger if they weren’t content with foraging for coconuts, bananas and little bits of fish. No stupid games, just one: the hunt. He’d have hunted down the weaker contestants, picking off the plump ones first, roasting the juicy bits over a campfire.

He chuckled, thinking of pitching that concept to network executives:
Lord of the Flies
meets
Survivor
. He took the last few swallows of his drink, sucking the ice cubes free of any lingering vodka, and forced himself off the sofa and into the kitchen. Into the dishwasher with the glass. Into the liquor cabinet with the vodka. Into the fridge with the tonic. He carefully wrapped the lime he’d cut a wedge from and refrigerated that as well.

Only after everything was in its place did he leave the kitchen and head to the bathroom for his shower. Standing under the dual-head spray in the glass-enclosed shower cubicle, he allowed the events of that evening to replay in his mind. It was his treat to relive it, his reward for a job well done.

He’d liked killing this woman almost as much as Sheila. Maybe more. She so clearly needed to be taken down, this bitch who thought she was better than everybody else, who had claimed so much more than she deserved with that little plastic doll’s body.

The look on her face when she’d noticed him. He rubbed soap slowly over his body, closing his eyes and remembering the fear in her eyes. He’d run the gun along her body just for fun, not because he’d really needed to count the vertebrae to know where he needed to shoot. He could feel her hot breath against his gloved hand and he’d known she was pleading, begging him to spare her life. That power was such a rush.

He’d told her that she didn’t have to worry, that he was going to display her at her best, and he’d shoved the statue high inside her, ramming it in her cunt, feeling the force of her screams against his hand.

The hand with the soap trailed down his body, circling his navel before dropping lower. He soaped his penis with long, languid strokes, leaning against the shower wall as he watched it rise.

Nailing that dead weight to the wall was an effort, but he’d taken his time to get it just right, standing back to admire his exhibit.

Amy had arrived soon after, just as he’d known she would. He’d waited in the bathroom linen closet this time. Chancy, that move, but he’d calculated correctly that calling for help would be her top priority. At one point, she’d stood so close to him that he could have touched her hair and he would have liked to do that, to run his hands through that long, silky mane. She had it tied back. He didn’t like that. Women should wear their hair loose. He’d made Violet do that, taking out whatever holders she’d put in it, freeing her hair so that it swam around her shoulders.

Thinking of Violet made his erection flag and he pushed her out of his mind. He thought of Amy again, thinking of freeing her hair, of wrapping that mane around his hand, of pulling her to him by her hair. He pictured those frightened eyes staring at him, those lips parted for him, that whimper one of desire for him.

He came with a yell, shooting all over the glass of the shower walls.