If Looks Could Kill (4 page)

He nodded. "Name of Lawson. Seems to think somebody up there copycatted one of your books. "

Chris wasn't sure what she'd been expecting him to say. Any number of things, actually. There was so much out there he could have brought to her. That one, though, was probably the single problem she hadn't expected. It froze her into incredulity.

"Copycatting?" she demanded, struggling to catch up. "Like murder?"

"Like murder. She'd appreciate a call as soon as you can so she can compare notes."

He didn't even bother to say good-bye, just loped on down the sidewalk to where his unit was parked. Watching him go from the open doorway, Chris was left with a feeling of stunned disbelief.

"Son of a bitch," she breathed, wedging the coffee cup against a chest that was suddenly tight with surprise. Shutting the door, she slumped against it and gave a little laugh, and was embarrassed to admit it was from relief.

Chapter 2

The High School basketball team lost that evening, so Pyrite went to bed early. By eleven the only traffic consisted of an occasional parent looking for a late teen, and by one o'clock, it was just Curtis Marshall's police cruiser crisscrossing the empty streets when he wasn't parked over in the Baptist church lot dozing in between calls. Only street lamps illuminated the silent square, and even the Tip a Few was closed and darkened, the earlier contestants either home or nestled down in the county jail down behind the sheriffs office. Most everyone except the sheriff's dispatcher and the night man at the Sleep Well Motel out on Highway V was asleep. Everyone, that is, except Chris Jackson.

By now the town was used to seeing her lights on all night long. Everybody knew that Chris wrote at night. It seemed appropriate, after all, a mystery writer keeping such odd hours. And it wasn't like you couldn't get hold of Chris during the day if you really needed to. She was usually up and around the town bright and early. Girl just never had needed sleep much, from all accounts.

Sometimes she kept the shades up so that neighbors could tap a hello on the way by. Sometimes, like tonight, she kept them down to signify that she was preoccupied.

She was preoccupied all right. She just wasn't writing.

Chris was pacing. From one end of the open, hardwood floor to the other as the stereo gave forth Metallica and the seagull-and-Cessna mobile that hung from the balcony swung lazily above her head, she measured her steps as carefully as she did her thoughts.

The sense of relief at the chief's news hadn't lasted long. Even if he hadn't exactly hand-delivered disaster to her door, the danger was still there.

She was going to have to call that St. Louis cop in the morning. She was going to have to call her editor, who had evidently gotten the notice about the possible murder even before Chief MacNamara, and had been leaving frantic messages on the machine for the last twenty-four hours.

Trey Peterson didn't handle that kind of surprise well. Come to think of it, Trey didn't handle any kind of surprise well, which was why his voice had sounded so panicked on the answering machine.

If he'd been thinking, he'd have realized that from a purely mercenary standpoint, if someone really had decided to act out one of Chris's books, it would do nothing but boost Chris's sales. The public relations department at Helm Carlson Publications would express public dismay, and then party when the doors were closed. Trey would be interviewed as a stand-in for his reclusive author, and the world would never question the distress in the handsome young editor's eyes. And within ten minutes the order would go out to reprint every one of Chris's back titles, with particular attention paid to the lucky winner of the atrocity look-alike contest.

And Chris, her privacy so religiously protected through seven surprise best-sellers, could very well find her anonymity a quaint footnote in history. The press that had so long wondered about the mysterious author would have a great excuse to camp out at the St. Louis police headquarters, looking for leaks, casting about for C. J. Turner like diviners in search of water. Research departments would chug into high gear digging up every bit of trivia they could find about the mysterious recluse to go with the unfolding story. Eventually somebody would find his way to Pyrite.

To her.

Damn it, anyway.

Chris took a turn through to her kitchen to pop a can of soda, and then headed back out into the living room to raise the sound level just a little on the CD player. She was overreacting, she knew it. It was just one call. One possible murder. One detective with maybe an overactive imagination.

After all, Chris couldn't think of any reason someone would want to pull a stunt like that. She wasn't exactly Elvis, with impersonators showing up at nightclubs everywhere. The press usually relegated her to the eccentrics and oddballs file, and her readers had never struck her as the type to be quite so slavishly devoted they'd flatter her with imitation—at least, she didn't think so.

The vast majority of letters she got from readers were sane, mostly polite, and often enough complimentary. Not one, even the ones from state penitentiaries, had ever expressed a desire to emulate her work. A few wanted to have her baby, and one particular man had expressed a desire to smell her shoes, but that wasn't exactly a class A felony. At least in most states.

All right, so some of the people in her life weren't exactly running on all eight cylinders, but that didn't put them into the psychopathic pool either.

The morning was going to come, and she was going to call that detective up in St. Louis to find out it was all a big, stupid mistake. Not oleander poisoning at all, she'd say with a hearty laugh. It wasn't even the right author. The person she'd meant to get hold of was this Christie character. Know where she lives?

Chris looked at the great-grandfather clock that dominated the front foyer, a grotesque old thing from Germany with sonorous chimes and carved around the face the contorted visages of gnomes that bore a striking resemblance to the CEO of Helm Carlson. If only it were already morning. She was sane in the daylight. She could laugh at Trey's distress and defuse the enthusiasm of the detective. She could at least enjoy the absurdity of the situation.

But it was the night, and Chris didn't survive the night well.

Abruptly she whirled around and cranked up the volume on Metallica again so that the crash of frantic music could flood out the stale itch of fear that had taken root in her chest.

It was going to be all right. She'd worked too damn hard for her peace of mind to offer it up because one gung-ho cop had an overactive imagination. She'd achieved a hell of a lot on simple guts and elbow grease. It was going to take more than one lousy phone call to sabotage it.

Chris even managed a smile at that, tilting her head back to drain the last of her soda as James Hetfield shrieked over her head about love and madness. Yeah, she thought, it should be easy. It should if the sun would just come up a little early. If she could just ignore that bubble of anxiety in her chest that had been stealthily growing the past few months. If she could know for sure that the nightmares were only beginning to resurface because she was tired.

The first time the doorbell rang, Chris didn't even notice. She was standing in the center of the bright, white room, her head back, letting the avalanche of drums and guitar bury her. Heavy metal wasn't music, it was pulverization, and that was just what she needed right now.

The second time, the sound was more insistent. Chris looked over at the grandfather clock.

Who could be stopping by at this hour? Pyrite wasn't exactly the place for all-night socials, and besides, everybody knew better than to bother her when the shades were down. It was the corollary to the rule that if the town kept her secrets, she'd keep theirs.

"Chris, please," the high-pitched young voice hissed.

Chris took another instinctive look at the clock, and her mood fell even farther. Damn, this could only mean one thing, and she wasn't sure she was up to dealing with it tonight. Well, at least it would take her mind off phone calls.

She opened the door to find a wan, dishwater-blond teen girl in jeans and an oversized leather jacket standing out on the sidewalk. At first sight, the girl just looked skittish, the way any fifteen year old might, caught out after curfew. Instinct directed Chris's attention to the new bruise along the girl's jaw.

"Come on in, honey," she said, and ushered her inside. She didn't mention the discoloration. That would have pushed the girl right back out into the night.

"I know your shades are down..."

"You caught me in the middle of a break. Come on in and have a Coke."

As she guided Shelly over to one of the overstuffed couches that bracketed the freestanding Franklin stove, Chris took a second to regroup. Like a mental exercise, a deliberate realignment. Shove her problem back into the shadows where it belonged right now, shuffle Shelly's forward. Mental doors opened and shut, Metallica off, Debussy on, and Chris settled down to business.

"Did you go to the game tonight?" she asked as she walked on through to rummage in her depleted refrigerator for another soda and grab a half-opened bag of chips from the counter.

"It was a bust," Shelly answered in that tight little voice that betrayed so much.

Chris wondered who had hit her this time. Tossing the bag of chips onto the brass-and-glass coffee table, she handed off the soda and took her own seat in the black leather-and-chrome rocker by the couch. It wouldn't do any good to bring it up. All Chris could do was offer asylum and hope for the best. Again. She knew the game plan much too well by now to either expect more or settle for less.

She waited. It was what was needed with Shelly. Patience and circumspection. Silence. Chris's house was the DMZ in Shelly's life. The compromise between what Chris should have been able to do for the girl and what she'd managed.

There was just no lesson like the one about what could happen to a person who tried to pin a charge of child abuse on the judge who controlled most of the county. And if there was one thing Chris prided herself on, it was the fact that she only had to learn her lessons once. So she balanced her soda can on her knee and waited for the rest.

"Bobby Lee was supposed to be high scorer, ya know," Shelly finally offered, watery blue eyes focused on her hands where they clutched her own soda can in her lap. Her nails were bitten so badly that her fingers bled. "He was printed up in the
Dispatch
and everything."

The grandfather clock ticked its way toward the conclusion Chris had already reached. Bobby Lee was Shelly's current boyfriend, an impatient, immature headbanger who was looking to take his place on the next turn on the never-ending cycle of violence in Shelly's life.

"I... I guess he just had a bad night."

He'd had a bad night all over Shelly. Chris fought the urge to shake the girl until she rattled, the same urge she checked every time the girl made the same mistakes, got herself into the same trouble and then whined her way to a rationalization that would keep her right where she was.

Chris knew all about it. She knew just how the cycle worked, how it fed on itself, and finally fed on the women born and raised in it. It didn't ease her frustration in the face of it. It did keep her from venting it. Instead she focused her own attention on the balcony fifteen feet over Shelly's head where a chorus line of oversized stuffed bears sat with their legs sticking out into the air between mahogany spindles.

"You don't want the judge seeing you tonight," was the most she could say, thinking of those bears. Of the comfort of stuffed animals that never demanded, never hurt, never disappointed. Wishing she could at least offer Shelly that, and knowing it would never be enough.

Shelly let loose with a harsh bark of laughter that seemed almost obscene on such a frail, hesitant girl. "The judge could care less. Except that he can't stand the idea of me havin' a say about anything I do."

Her jaw was clenched now. Her fingers dug at the aluminum until there were a series of dents along the side of the half-full can. Shelly, the once-shy, caregiving younger daughter, the child her mother had always dressed for church and sent along with suppers for sick neighbors. Shelly, raised to be a victim to yet another man who'd beat her. Shelly was going to blow like a pressure cooker one of these days. Chris knew. She just hoped she could be handy to diffuse some of that deadly anger once it let loose.