If Looks Could Kill (12 page)

Cooter was gurgling. Chris imagined that even from three cells down she could see the whites of his eyes. That made MacNamara smile, and it was a terrible smile. Chris had seen a lot in her young years. She had never seen anybody look quite as ferocious as the chief did at that moment, with his eyes stark and the smear of spit on his face.

"Now, maybe you scared the people here before," he said, his voice now perfectly calm, delivered in deadly earnest, which made it twice as frightening. "But you haven't dealt with me. And I'll guaran-fucking-goddam-tee you, that if you ever try anything this stupid again, I'll just open the door and beat the dogshit out of you." Yank. Slam. Gurgle. "Understood?"

Mumble.

Chris found herself grinning.

"I asked you a question."

Cooter managed to answer, even with his nose flattened against the grate and blood trickling down into his mouth. "Yeah."

"You ever try somethin' like this again, and I'll rip off your dick and stuff it up your ass. Got it?"

Pause. Slam. "Yeah."

Mac nodded, his body rigid, his eyes narrowed, focused completely on the suddenly hapless Cooter. "Good. I'd hate for you to make a mistake and think I wasn't serious about beating into oatmeal. 'Cause I'd rather deal with goddamn turtle rapers than one stupid piece of white trash shit like you."

Cooter must have answered, because Mac let him go. Behind Chris, Elvis was still wheezing and, behind him, Marsha was canceling the call for help. Finally satisfied that he'd gotten his message across to the prisoner, Mac turned away from the cell, and Chris saw what Cooter had seen. Not just anger. Not just power. Madness.

He was shaking. Chris saw it when he lifted his cap to wipe at his forehead. She saw white-hot wildness cool in his eyes. Saw him deliberately fight for control.

It amazed her. This was the man who had been so completely in command the other night when he'd faced off with her. The man who had had the insight to leave her to her friend until she was ready to talk to him. Always calm, always rational. As carefully put together as his uniform.

There was, it seemed, another side to Pyrite's new police chief, and it had nothing to do with simple prisoner control. He'd let something loose in this claustrophobic little room that still battered at the thick old walls, and Chris thought again of that Chicago pension he'd walked away from.

Then he lifted his eyes and found her sitting there in the doorway, her chin in her hand, like a spectator at a ballgame. Mac came right to attention. Chris saw the chagrin, saw the sudden unease. Not just normal police reticence, the idea of civilians being exposed to the kind of reality that cops think only they've ever handled. It was more, as if he'd surprised himself. As if that explosion had caught him as unawares as it had Cooter.

Chris reached over to pick up the napkin Mac had brought with Cooter's lunch. "You know how to speak hooze-fuck," she said, handing it over. "The town will be relieved. They didn't listen to me when I told 'em that white trash knows no jurisdiction."

For a very long moment, Mac didn't move. He was still breathing a little hard, the light picking up the sheen of sweat on his forehead. He didn't say anything, but Chris could almost hear the suspicion and confusion. She wasn't surprised. Mac was an outsider. He was on probation, and she suddenly had the power to hurt him.

But Chris knew exactly how it felt to be an outsider.

Finally, he stepped on up and accepted the napkin. "Is all of Oz like that?" he asked dryly, swiping at his face.

She carefully climbed to her feet, masking her own set of shakes, and flashed him a bright grin. "Cooter's the wonderful wizard himself."

Pulling off his hat again, Mac just shook his head and walked on up to her, finally noticing the pool of congealed liquid that had been Cooter's lunch on the floor.

"And I thought I'd miss home."

Chris laughed. "Like I said. Some things are universal."

She caught that surprise in his expression again. That hesitation that spoke volumes about experience and expectations. He'd lived within an almost cloistered society, where only Chicago cops mattered, where no one else understood or forgave. He'd expected to be the prophet in the wilderness. It made Chris want to laugh all over again.

"You OK, Elvis?" he asked as they stepped back into the office.

Elvis looked like he feared for his life all over again. Chris didn't blame him. That had been an impressive display in there. She had no doubt at all that the new chief's reputation had just been made, and that by dinner the entire town would know.

"I—I'm real sorry, Chief," he stammered, hand still around his sore throat. "I never seen it comin'."

Mac waved off the apology with an offhand gesture. "Surprised me, too. Doesn't say much for my second day here, does it?"

By the time he made it back out into the street, Mac was Elvis's newest idol. One of the sheriff's deputies was pulling around the corner, but Mac deliberately turned the other way, once again matching his stride with Chris's.

"Hooze-fuck?" he asked dryly.

Her attention ostensibly on the dove gray clouds that were massing over the Baptist church steeple, Chris merely smiled. "It's an endearment I picked up in St. Louis's third district."

Mac didn't say anything, just walked steadily along. And Chris, her eyes still on the slow roil of thunderheads, came to her own decisions.

"All right." She pulled to a stop, eyes deliberately forward, chest once again tight. "I'll admit it. I was a social worker. Case worker for Division of Family Services. A short and sadly uninspiring career spent among Cooter's brethren in St. Louis who, considering the fact that they would procreate with whatever immediate relative happened to be in the room, provided me with a lot of business."

She'd balanced the scales now. An admission of her own to match his. Enough, she hoped, that he wouldn't need more. Her stomach was churning with even that much.

"How'd you end up here?" he asked.

She just shrugged. "I made enough money writing to quit."

Chris didn't realize she'd been holding her breath for his reaction until he gave it.

"So, what else did Detective Lawson have to say?"

Chris knew he heard the low whoosh of relief as she resumed normal autonomic functions. Even so, he didn't comment. He just walked steadily along, affording her the consideration of silence. And she took advantage of it, mentally shutting away images and shuffling others forward. Stepping away from revelation and digging into investigation.

Chris noticed that Elmer Masterson had painted the front porch of his white clapboard house a bright yellow green. She liked it. Kind of like invoking the arrival of spring in his own way. Chris could handle all this as long as there were things like brand-new paint on porches to settle her.

"She's coming down here in a few days. Wants to see any correspondence I might have saved. Especially anything from letter writers who think they're possessed by the spirits of dead kings or such. I told her that dead kings didn't seem the type to copycat crimes, but she didn't seem particularly amused."

"I don't think anything short of capital punishment amuses her." He was nodding to himself now, his attention already back on the problem at hand. A quick, decisive man with brainpower to spare and an evident need to solve puzzles. If Chris had made up a personal grocery list of qualities she'd need right now in an ally, she couldn't have thought of one other, except maybe loyalty; but with her luck, that would just have produced Lassie.

Now, if she could only get the chief to constrain his curiosity to only those areas she wanted examined. Chris knew cops like him, and they didn't have a whole lot of respect for No Trespassing signs. Well, this time it was going to have to be different, or she simply wasn't going to get through it.

"We'll get this thing squared away in no time," he promised, half to himself, like a coach urging victory in the second half. "Probably nothing more than a misunderstanding." And Chris, who needed to hear just that right then, believed him.

Four days later, she found the letters.

Chapter 5

She's spent the morning figuring out ways to beat a murder rap. Considering the fact that the crime had taken place rather spectacularly in the suspect's living room, it would be a tricky thing, but Chris was counting on the wonders of the modern forensics lab to finally bail her out. She was hip deep in a treatise on DNA fingerprinting when the knocking interrupted her.

"Go away," she muttered, making a notation on her timeline for normal lab downtime. She had a headache that caffeine and aspirin weren't curing, another nightmare hangover, and she wasn't in the mood for company.

"Come on, Chris!" the distinctively high, piping voice insisted through the door a story below. "Victor's out here ready to wet his pants!"

"You live next door!" she yelled back, massaging the back of her neck. "Use your own bathroom!"

Chris really didn't want company. She was still wiping sweaty palms on her thighs and trying to convince her stomach to stay in place.

If only she had normal nightmares. Falling from a cliff, showing up at the theater naked. Losing her house in a subdivision where everything looked exactly alike. She could handle those better. She had to have dreams straight out of an Ingmar Bergman film festival. The ones she remembered, anyway. Sometimes those were the easiest to live through.

Silence.

Chris looked toward the door, where she could see the two-headed shadow through the milky glass. "Victor?"

Still nothing. Which meant that either she'd turned him to stone right on the spot, or he really did need to talk to her and couldn't gather the courage to insist. It took a second, but Chris finally dredged up a self-deprecating grin. Poor Victor. He didn't deserve both her and Lester to be in a bad mood at once.

"OK!" she yelled, climbing gingerly to her feet and slipping into a pair of shorts to go with the nightshirt that was standard writing attire. A quick check for leftover feathers from the latest one-woman pillow fight that had taken place in the early hours of the morning, a swipe to dry her hands, and she was sliding down the banister and trotting for the door.

Just as she'd figured, Victor stood stolidly in front of her door, head down, cheeks blazing with embarrassment, Lester somehow looking smug alongside him.

"I'm sorry," she greeted them both. "Must be one of those pesky female things. I'm as cranky as Lester today."

That only served to deepen the hue of Victor's cheeks. Lester chuckled easily. "Is that what all the noise was about last night?"

Chris overcame the urge to look over her shoulder one more time, sure she'd see a lone feather fluttering down from the loft. Noise, now, too. It was one thing for her to be visited by nightmares. It was quite another to share the experience. If anybody but Victor lived next door, she'd have long since had her ticket to Fantasyland punched for a one-way ride.

"I had
Gotterdammerung
on the stereo," she demurred. "Lots of tortured-sounding sopranos. You guys are going to have to learn to complain..." Her own distress was suddenly lost when she finally took in the change in her friends. "Lester, what the hell do you have on?"

Victor finally got his eyes up to her, big, brown puppy-dog eyes that always seemed to melt in her presence. It was Lester, of course, who answered. And motioned to the spangled, white jumpsuit he wore.

"Like it?" he demanded brightly. "We've decided to try a little tribute to Elvis. It's working for everybody else."

Chris battled back a laugh. A red-headed, freckle-faced Elvis. It made perfect sense. And then Victor slid the tiny sunglasses on the dummy and flipped up the collar, and Chris lost the fight.

"It's..." It's a red-headed, freckle-faced dummy in shades and a cheesy jumpsuit, she thought.

"Wanna hear 'Jailhouse Rock?"

She shook her head emphatically. He even had little high-topped patent leather boots on. "No, really, I have to... uh, I really... oh, Victor, I think it's going to be a hit."

Victor beamed. Lester threw off a few experimental "Hey, baby's" that sounded disconcertingly real. Chris tried very hard to regain her composure.