If Looks Could Kill (42 page)

That even brought John to attention.

"What silver piece?" Mac asked, trying to keep his voice level.

"The 1898 silver piece of Cooter's," she retorted. "I saw it when I was tearing my house apart... when I was trying to find out where that baby's cry came from." She squeezed her eyes shut this time, and Mac saw that she was trembling. The effort at control must have been awesome. He caught himself about to reach across to her and stopped. Not here. Not now.

"I must be... it must be happening again," she whispered to herself, her voice condemning and final.

"What happened to the coin?" Mac asked.

"I don't know if it was ever really there. Or maybe I took it and then put it somewhere else. I'd thought it was in the teapots... I couldn't find it again when I looked."

Mac spared a second to look back at John. John got the message without a word and silently stood and headed for the door. He'd go back over Chris's house with a fine-tooth comb.

"Tell me about acute psychotic breaks," Mac said without bothering to turn the tape recorder back on.

Chris forgot her apple for that one. "Why? There's a perfectly boring psychiatrist who can fill you in on that."

"I want to hear your impressions."

She shrugged. "They explained it to me as a basic circuit overload. Too much to handle, not enough coping power, bam! you think you're a dog."

"And the prognosis?"

"You mean is it treatable? Very. Will it come back? I guess so."

"What did
they
say?"

Funny now that she was facing all this she didn't pace. She crumbled inward, like a building with the center supports taken away. "They said that if I acquired the skills to cope, it shouldn't happen again. I guess they were wrong."

Mac stubbed out his cigarette and resisted going for another. He was rubbing his upper lip, thinking fast. "Can people with acute psychotic breaks function in a day-to-day environment?"

"What?"

"You were the most surprised one around to hear about those murders. Do you really think you could commit serial murder and not even know it?"

"I killed my own child and can't remember it!" she cried shrilly. "Why should this be different?"

"Because you can't
remember
anything at all about that time before," he retorted, leaning closer. "You've been functioning just fine here."

"But my nightmares," she insisted. "At night, when I... when I sleep. I... it's like I disappear. Like I know there's something happening and I can't remember what, but it's horrible."

"Like murder?"

"Yes!"

"How many times have you had this nightmare?"

"Since this started?" she countered hotly, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. "Constantly. Every time I fall asleep. So I just don't fall asleep."

"But the town's been safe," Mac insisted. "We haven't had a rampage of murders."

"Cooter and Dinah aren't enough for you?"

"What do
you
think, Chris?" he challenged, right in her face, his voice hard, brooking no escape. "Do you think you did it? Do you think you could commit serial murder?"

"But I..."

He came to his feet. Towered over her. "
Do
you?"

She jumped up. "No! No, damn it, I can't see how I could possibly do it. But don't you get it yet? I can't see how I could have murdered my own child. And I did. I smothered her. The police found her in my closet, in a plastic bag, as if she were trash. They said I... I tried to keep it all a secret. That I killed her to protect myself."

She was sobbing now, her body shuddering with the impact of all that old poison. Finally disintegrating with the burden of all that guilt right before Mac's eyes.

He forgot to be a policeman then. Walking around the table, he pulled her into his arms and just held her. One or two faces appeared briefly at the door and then drifted away again. No one interfered. For a long time, Mac just soothed. Just listened to the tumbled words of grief and rage and guilt that spilled out, just waited through the inchoate terror that had been building right behind that smart-ass attitude all along. Just finally gave into the need to hold her again so that even for a little while, she could be safe. And then, when she began to calm, he challenged her again.

"Give me some options," he said.

"Who else could it be?" Her nose was still buried in his chest, her body beset by dying tremors. "They would have had to have known me in Fulton."

Mac smoothed her hair and looked out to the gathering dusk. "Tell me more about The Watcher."

* * *

Chris didn't need drugs to feel dazed this morning. The cacophony of the courtroom was doing it for her. She sat at the defense table next to Brenda, her hands clasped together to keep them still on the old mahogany table, her attention carefully on the bench, her attitude deceptively calm.

Behind her, she could feel the accumulated attention of the crowd that overflowed the paneled room. Camera crews, reporters, sensation seekers from five counties. Harlan and a contingent with signs about the wages of sin and the forgiveness of the Lord, and the Reverend Bobby Rayford front and center with the Freedom Fighters. Eloise and Luella and the Clarksons arrayed right behind Chris, and at least fifteen people who'd expressed their most sincere concern to her and their latent suspicions to the cameras. The Tower of Babel at its finest.

A major cluster fuck, as Garavaglia had called it yesterday afternoon. Chris couldn't have agreed more. A cluster fuck of catastrophic proportions.

The prosecuting attorney had her medical file from Fulton. Brenda had character references and two psychiatrists. The only thing saving Chris's sanity was the fact that Roger Peterson, the prosecutor, had nixed the idea of finding her mother and asking her to testify. That would have cinched Chris's reputation and case for good when it sent her screaming out into the streets.

Mac sat stiffly behind Peterson, here in official capacity. He'd testified as first witness on the scene, telling Peterson how grisly the scene was, and Brenda how he'd discovered Chris desperately trying to perform CPR. He'd produced the interview tapes in which Chris had admitted that she might have committed murder, and the tapes from the recorder Chris had hooked up in her house, which provided what might have been the sound of a door opening sometime during the night when JayCee had sworn he didn't see anything. The sounds of struggle had been brief, with no more protest than a surprised gurgle. And then the chilling sounds of metal against flesh, faint splashing, and grunts of exertion. And once again, maybe, the door. Or maybe, as Peterson offered, simply the bathroom door.

The search of Chris's house and place of business had failed to turn up the missing trophies taken from the victims. The autopsy had put the time of death at approximately 4 a.m. Description of injuries seemed to go on forever, and attract the whirring of TV cameras.

All the time, the judge presided with dignity and solemnity. It was only at recommendation time that he betrayed himself. There was no question in anyone's mind that he was going to bind Chris over for trial. It was just a matter of bail.

Chris held her breath. Sue reached up to lay a hand on her shoulder. The crowd shuffled impatiently.

"In light of the seriousness of the crime," he said, doodling with his pen, "I am inclined to refuse bail."

Now Brenda added her hand.

Chris didn't move. She couldn't. All she could think of was the terror that awaited her in those black, cold little cells. If she stepped into one of them, she'd never see the opening of her trial.

"However," the judge went on, and let his gaze briefly flicker toward L. J. where he sat beside the reverend in the front row of the Freedom Fighters. "The court is sympathetic to the defendant's good standing in the community, and her... delicate situation." Meaning that L. J. had pulled his weight. L. J. hated Harlan more than he liked the judge. And Chris had put L. J. in one of her books as the good-old boy-cop on the trail of truth, which he'd never stopped being fond of. L. J. had probably reminded the judge just what Chris could do with the story of the Axminster family if she'd had a mind to.

"Therefore," the judge said with a smile that told everyone how crafty he was, "with the approval of her psychiatrist, after complete evaluation, and with the recommendation that she spend nights under observation at Puckett County, since those seem to be the hours at risk, I will set her bail at two million dollars."

A cry of outrage swept the room. One side of the room considered the amount far too large, the other far too small.

The judge had obviously figured he'd met all markers by setting bail at all, and then making it an obscene figure. He slammed down his gavel and climbed to his feet, well satisfied with himself.

Brenda turned to Chris with a big grin. "We got him," she crowed.

Chris started breathing again in faulty gasps and starts. "Oh, God." She sighed in relief. One step at a time. One day at a time. She'd held the darkness off by inches.

Sue was all set to storm the desk. "You mean it's OK?" she demanded.

Chris gave her her first real grin since two mornings ago. "It's OK." She didn't see the judge come to a sick stop not four feet away.

"You have that kind of cash handy?" Sue demanded a little more loudly.

Brenda was the one to stop that. "Maybe you'd like Geraldo to hear that," she suggested dryly.

Sue immediately shut up. She didn't stop shaking her head.

The crush of people was heading their way like high tide, so Brenda grabbed Chris's arm and led her over to where John and Mac were waiting to escort her out.

Chris took one look at the avaricious eyes on that crowd and fought the urge to run. Brenda held on tight. Sue and Tom stood right next to her, L. J. and Reverend Rayford behind her. She could do it. She could get through this.

"Gosh," she observed a little giddily as John and Mac took up position in the lead. "I've never been a phalanx before."

Mac shot her a suspicious look and then turned his attention to keeping microphones out of his face and Harlan out of his way altogether.

"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord!" the minister cried like a martyr at the stake.

"Then maybe He'll be speaking to you about that degree of yours," Chris couldn't help saying, sending his skin color straight to the danger zone.

She smiled prettily, just as half a dozen cameras went off. Which kept them from seeing the way her hands shook as she shoved them into the pockets of her suit jacket.

Chris thought she'd effectively dodged everyone when they headed back around to the judge's chambers to wait out bail. It was Harlan who found them, though, his face red, his posture stiff. He was alone. Chris wasn't at all sure she could handle him in the shape she was in.

"You think I'm doing this for my own benefit?" he demanded without preamble.

Chris dragged Mac and John and Sue to a halt as she faced the preacher. "I think," she countered, "that you wouldn't know the Lord's work if it bit you in the asd."

She expected a tirade. At least a reading or two. Instead, Harlan merely shook his head. "Don't blame the Lord for what your parents did," he said simply, his voice quiet. Almost sad. "He doesn't just offer punishment, but glorious salvation. They forgot that."

And then, without another word, he walked on, and Chris was left to stare openmouthed.

Mac settled a hand on her shoulder. "Chris?"

She was stunned to realize that she was fighting tears. "I hate it when he's right."

And then, they, too, went on their way.

* * *

If Chris had thought she could sneak back out once her bail was met, she was sorely mistaken. Not one person had left in the intervening two hours. Outside in the hallway, a reporter from St. Louis was doing the intro to his piece. "The spotlight has hit this sleepy little Ozark town of Pyrite as world-famous author C. J. Turner is finally revealed—as a prime suspect in a series of grisly murders..."

Chris was jostled, glared at, questioned, patted, accused, and sung to. No matter how many times Brenda repeated the phrase "No comment," people still demanded a comment. Aggressively. Obnoxiously. Persistently. Chris began to sweat. She kept smiling, even though she felt as if her face were on fire. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, even though her knees were dangerously weak.

She wouldn't let them see the panic. She wouldn't.

But it was getting close.

Instead, she kept her eyes on Mac's back as he cleared a path. She thought of enigmas and scars. Of gentleness in the form of challenge.

They'd just made it down the side steps to where Brenda's car was waiting when Shelly stepped out of the crowd. Ashen-faced, tear-stained, heartbreakingly uncertain.

No, Chris thought, knowing that this was what was going to make the difference. She could handle Harlan. She could handle the judge and the crowds. She couldn't handle Shelly's distress.

Chris shoved three people aside to get to her.

"I'm sorry," Shelly said, hands clasped, finally looking like the child she was. "I didn't know, Chris. I didn't know what you were going through, and I..."