If Looks Could Kill (9 page)

"Something that does not even bear considering. I have a hangover the size of the deficit, and you're probably out celebrating sunrise or something vile."

Chris shook her head in wonder. "Was there a reason for your message, or were you just in the mood to whine?"

"On or off the record?"

Chris grinned. "No, I'm not recording." One of Dinah's more quaint paranoias was the fear of being preserved for posterity without her permission, and Chris definitely had the tools with which to do it. Tucked into C. J. Turner's cabinets behind the makeup case and lock picks and firearms catalogues were the phone recorders, taps, tracers, location finders, directional mikes and computer protectors. Chris had collected each one for research during visits to New York where exclusive shops catered to even more paranoid big business. Chris knew how to use them all. She never did, unless she was working on a book. "Now, what's up?"

Dinah's voice loosened up infinitesimally. Only Chris would have noticed. "Oh, you mean about that rather... no, that absolutely bitchy little police detective who's been threatening everything short of capital punishment if I didn't give away your address? I want you to know I held off as long as I could."

"The drums have already reached me. I'm calling her next."

"No, dear, call Trey next. He has a migraine and it's not even noon. Tell him you're not knifing people in St. Louis so he can manage lunch."

"And what if I am?"

"Then lie, of course. He's in the middle of editing your next book. You lose him, and you'll be back to Wanda the Comma Commando from Hell."

It was a relief to get in another smile before facing the next call. "That's what I like about you, Dinah. You never lose sight of what's really important."

For just a second, the static from New York was empty. Chris fantasized that the outside world had vanished, that all that was left was Pyrite with its small jealousies and unshaken loyalties. That the only world was the one that ambled along outside her window, and that the worst thing after her was Harlan with his good Book and bad breath.

"Did you hear which book this person is supposed to be copying?" her agent asked, and for the first time her voice sounded less than in command.

Chris considered her doodles, a hundred sharp edges that wept black ink. "That's what confuses me, Di. If it were a death by sword, it'd be a pretty easy call. But
Hell Hath No Fury...
I've seen that pattern too many times to call it an isolated cause of death. What makes them tie it to me?"

When Dinah answered, her voice was missing its trademark razor-sharp edge. Not ten people in publishing would have recognized the sound as one of concern. "Maybe you should call and find out."

Chris took a very long breath. "Yeah. Maybe."

"And then call me right back."

That made Chris smile. "I'm a big girl, Dinah. You don't have to run right down and hold my hand."

She won a self-righteous snort for that. "Good dear God in heaven. What a horrible thought. Dinner with the Clampetts."

"You never know," Chris taunted. "You might just like it here. I do."

"And I might just sell my condo and join the Medical Missionary Sisters. Now, call that... person, and find out what's going on."

"Nothing's going on. Somebody in St. Louis doesn't have enough to do, that's all."

Ten minutes later, she wasn't quite as sanguine about it.

" You 're
C. J. Turner?" asked the voice on the other end of the phone.

Chris wasn't exactly sure how to respond to the delight. It wasn't quite the reaction she'd anticipated. "Yes. Detective Lawson?"

"I want you to know how much I've enjoyed your work. All your work. I've followed you from the very beginning."

Chris knew that voice. It tickled at the back of her mind a moment, stirring emotions like rustling leaves. She wondered if she'd worked with Lawson before. It was certainly possible. She'd have to ask her. One of the few things Chris had little control over anymore was her memory. Notoriously bad, often sketchy. Irretrievably broken so that she spent familiar minutes in just this kind of exercise.

"Thank you," she acknowledged, brow pursed. "Um, what can I do for you, Detective?"

"I'd love to talk to you about your theories sometime, Ms., uh, Turner."

"Jackson. My real name's Jackson."

"Oh, is it really?"

Chris was going to ask then where they might have met, what the detective wanted, when she heard a new voice on the other end of the line. Imperious, furious. Intruding.

"Sorry..." The first voice apologized, and then, evidently bowing to the flood of obscenity and command, handed over the line.

"...well, I'm here now," the new voice snapped in conclusion. Chris couldn't say she was encouraged by this new, more strident tone. Another woman. Unfortunately, the real Detective Lawson. "Sorry," the policewoman said to Chris, not sounding as much sorry as irritated. "That was one of the dispatchers. She has no goddamn business answering phones up here. Goddamn groupies are all alike..." And then, abruptly, she sighed. "She's been drivin' me nuts ever since she heard your name. Probably wants an autograph or something."

"I don't mind," Chris tried to protest.

It didn't do her much good. Evidently Lawson wasn't any more interested in her opinions than she was in those of the anonymous dispatcher who'd had the bad taste to answer Lawson's phone for her. Chris didn't like the detective already.

She decided to be just as polite. "Why do you think your murder has anything to do with my book, Detective?"

"Simple," Detective Lawson said in that abrupt, sharp tone of hers, evidently not at all thrown off. "The signature. Remember how Emma stabbed her husband in the shins just to make sure he couldn't get up and run after her, even when he already looked like Alpo?"

Give Chris a cop anytime for not mincing words. "Yeah," she agreed halfheartedly. "But you can't mean to tell me that nobody else has ever done that before."

"Of course not. Maybe coincidence works for writers. It just doesn't cut it for me, though."

The detective wasn't winning any friends on this phone line. Chris could hear the distinctive tonal qualities of a person intent on the cooperation-through-intimidation school of charm, police edition. Everybody plays by my rules, cause I got the gun. Well, Detective Lawson had it bad.

"What makes you think it's not maybe a wife who read my book and kept that kind of pattern in the back of her mind?" Chris tried diffidently, not even happy with that explanation. It would still be a kind of culpability she didn't want. She wasn't writing "how-to" manuals here.

"Because this cookie can't read. Nothing but street signs and beer labels, anyway. She swears she came home from a visit to the tavern with her girlfriends to find her husband sliced and diced by an unknown intruder. That alibi went over about as big here as Ted Kennedy saying he just couldn't find his pants."

"What about forensics? Do they bear her out?"

"Inconclusive. Which leaves the wife cooling her heels in the county jail without enough for bail, and me on overtime."

Like it was all Chris's fault. Chris shook her head, the idea still too alien, the logic forced. The detective was looking for a cheering section, and Chris wasn't in the mood to help.

She tried again to escape. "I still don't see why you're so sure she didn't really do it."

"Because I've read your work. I recognize similarities. M.O., evidence, area of town, even the victim's name. We've almost got a perfect match here."

Chris didn't realize she'd set down her coffee. "The name? The guy's name was Ralph Watson?"

"Not Watson, Weaver. But he was from Affton, just like the guy in your book. Murdered in the middle of the night with a kitchen knife the size of a machete that was dropped back in the corner of the bathroom. And that shin thing, just like I told you. It even happened on a Tuesday night."

For just a moment Chris closed her eyes, sucked in a long breath past the constriction in her chest. The itch had grown into dread. Impossible. This just couldn't be happening.

Chris leaned back in her chair, opened her eyes and deliberately looked out to the forest of blossoms that filled the opening into the showroom. She took a slow, deep breath, smelling roses and chrysanthemums and daisies, reading the messages on Mylar birthday balloons that floated toward the ceiling.
You're 40 and I'm Not. Over the Hill. Old Fart.

Normal stuff. Solid, familiar sensations, cats padding back and forth, the sun gleaming in the genuine plastic cemetery bouquets along the far wall, Millie Wyler tapping a hello on the window on her way by. Small, simple everyday things that made sense.

Flower shops made sense. Murder didn't. Even murder that's expected, that explodes from the most violent and primal of human emotions. Chris knew. She was a student of murder, murder by reason of insanity, born of jealousy, revenge, fear. Murder committed as the desperate act of a driven, tormented person.

Not cold-blooded murder. Not the murder of a victim chosen with the deliberate care of a man picking roses for his lover. Not murder without reason.

Chris instinctively retrieved her pen, only to find the sharp-edged, weeping expanse she'd left on her scratch pad. She set the pen back down without using it. She had nothing left to do but stare.

"Why?" was all she could ask. "Why would somebody want to do something like that?"

"Hey," the policewoman protested brusquely. "We got people who like to chop women into totem poles and stand 'em out in the front yard to ward off aliens. Don't ask me about motives. Do you have any ideas about who we might be looking for here?"

Chris laughed. "Why should I?"

"Well, that psychic thing. You know. Livvy Beckworth."

From the terrible to the absurd. "The heroine in my series is psychic, Detective Lawson, not me. I'm just a writer."

She got another stretch of dead air, although this one sounded different than the pause to New York. This one, traveling only as far as Clayton, Missouri, where the St. Louis County police detectives were officed, crackled with activity. Not just physical, like the voices and phones and beepers Chris could hear in the background. She could have sworn she heard mental wheels turning.

"I'm sorry I can't be of any more help to you," she tried, her gaze once again on the doodling, on the jagged peaks of her imagination. "I've never gotten letters from anybody protesting that they wanted to commit murder. Nobody I know enjoys it as a hobby, and I only do it in my imagination." Deep in the night, when her defenses were friable as old skin, when reality lived in dreams.

Could there possibly be someone out there who kept the same hours? Who sought a twisted kind of communion with her? Chris shook her head, took a breath, tried her best to clear the image. To shake off the suspicion. It was ridiculous. She was just a writer.

"Well, you'd better come up with some kind of idea, Ms. Jackson," the detective assured her, "because you have a real problem on your hands."

"Me? What did I do?"

"Who knows if it's something you did? Maybe it's just something you knew. But somebody out there sure likes the sound of your words enough to turn them into three-act plays."

"One murder..."

"One?" Lawson retorted sharply. "You think I'd be on the phone if we just had one?"

This time Chris knew her heart had stopped. "What?"

"Nine months ago we had a woman drowned in the bathtub. Blond, real pretty, ran with a real fast crowd out in West County. The P.A.'s going on the assumption that the poor asshole she was married to finally found out she was running around on him. The asshole swears he's innocent."

Chris couldn't even manage an answer.

"Yeah," the detective retorted as if she'd heard something anyway. "I thought it might sound familiar.
Too Late the Hero,
wasn't it? Unfaithful, scheming wife, desperate husband. Her name was Deborah, right?"

Chris could hardly hear her own voice. "Right."

"Eight months before that, a young gay actor was shishkebobbed with a long, sharp instrument in the rehearsal hall of the Loretto Hilton Theatre in Webster. Medical examiner's talking something like stiletto, but I'd bet you money that one of those skinny swords'd fit real nice into the hole in his chest."

"Epee," Chris whispered. She closed her eyes, quelled a sudden lurch of nausea.

"That's the one," the detective agreed. "Now, I admit that I wouldn't have suspected a thing if I hadn't just been reading
Hell Hath No Fury
the day we got the call on the Weaver case—in fact, your favorite fan gave it to me. Anyway, it intrigued me a little. So I started checking back on some cases. I'm finding a real interesting pattern here."

Chris wanted to wash her hands. She wanted to wash everything. Something was crawling all over her.

Lawson didn't seem to notice the silence. "Now, I'm not sure if you just... you know, like, anticipated this stuff happenin', like the professor does in your books. Maybe you know more than you think. Maybe somebody's out there screwin' with our heads. One way or another, I'll guaran-goddamn-tee you it isn't gonna stop until we figure out what's goin' on. Now, you gonna help me or not?"