Last Breath (2 page)

She retreated a couple feet and waited, the knife held before her in both hands like a talisman.

Silence. Stillness.

Broken by his voice, breathless and mocking, still raised in a falsetto whisper. “You’re a fighter, Caitlin.”

He knew her name.

“Who are you?” she called out, fighting to keep her voice steady.

No answer.

“How do you know me?”

No answer.

“What do you want?”

This time, a reply. “I want you, Caitlin.”

His voice was not what she had expected. She’d thought it would be husky, gravelly, a dark, croaking voice, but instead it was soft and almost soothing, seductive as a python’s hiss.

“Want me for what?” she asked.

Laughter.

“Leave me alone!”

“Can’t do that, Caitlin. I’ve waited too long.”

She wanted to ask what he meant, but the words wouldn’t come. He explained anyway.

“I’ve been watching you. Biding my time. And now ... tonight ... my long wait ends. Tonight, Caitlin. Tonight.”

He had to be the boogeyman. Who else could he be?

The knife shook in her hands, but she did not loosen her grip.

In movies, she had seen how a panther or a tiger would coil up, then pounce. She knew he was doing the same thing. Tensing his body for a new attack.

It came. This time it was his arm that was thrust through the aperture, one gloved hand grabbing at her, nearly seizing her by the wrists. She twisted clear of his grasp and stabbed again, missing, and the arm retreated up the hole.

She edged sideways to a new position, then waited for the next assault.

She had seen little in the split second when he snatched at her, but enough to know that his arm was skinny and long. He wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and a black glove. He was not the raggedy man of her imagination. He was thin and sleek and quick.

How old was he? A teenager only a few years older than herself, or an adult? She couldn’t tell. His whispery voice gave nothing away, and she couldn’t see his face.

She hoped she never saw it. If she did, it would mean that she had lost the battle.

“Why me?” she called hoarsely.

“It has to be somebody, Caitlin.”

“Why me?” she repeated.

“Because you’re so very pretty. Do you know how pretty you are? Your hair is so smooth and shiny, chestnut brown streaked with sun. I’d like to run my fingers through your hair.”

She shuddered.

“I’ve studied you,” he went on. “In town ... and here at the ranch. You fascinate me. You’re a very special little girl.”

“Just go away.”

“I wish I could. But then I’d never learn the answer to the question that’s been haunting me. What color are your eyes, Caitlin? Are they brown or blue? I’ve never gotten close enough to see.”

Her eyes were green, but she didn’t tell him. She didn’t want him to know anything about her—even though he already seemed to know too much.

“I’ll bet they’re pretty eyes,” he said, and then the gloved hand was upon her again, closing over her right wrist and jerking it back, and she dropped the knife. He grabbed for it, but she snatched it first with her left hand and slashed at him furiously, and she heard a hiss of pain.

He retreated again. In the glow of the flashlight she saw a thin red line painted on the knife blade. She had nicked him in the hand or the forearm. Hurt him.

She had never intentionally hurt any living thing before tonight, but now she wanted to maim and cripple and mutilate. He had called her a fighter. He was right.

“Bitch,” the voice breathed.

Droplets of blood pattered on the gravel.

“Go away,” C.J. whispered.

But she knew he wouldn’t.

She steadied the knife. When he struck again, she would be ready. She would hold him off all night if she had to. She would never give up. Let him try again and again to invade her hiding place. She would inflict cut after cut until he either gave up or died.

“I’m going to kill you, Caitlin Jean Osborn,” he said in a deadly monotone. “And I’ll do it slowly. I’ll make you pay—”

“Fuck you,” she snapped. It was the first time she had ever said that word aloud.

She waited for the next onslaught. Strangely she wasn’t scared anymore. Later there would be time for fear, but now there was only the beat of her heart and the feel of the knife and her total concentration on survival.

Come on, she thought. Try again. I’m not afraid of you. Try again ...

The flashlight disappeared.

For a startled moment she thought he had switched it off. Then she heard the creak of floorboards in the kitchen, the tread of receding footsteps, and she knew he had left.

Had to be a trick. He was trying to fool her into coming out.

Or was he going to get a gun?

No, couldn’t be. If he had a gun, why wouldn’t he have brought it with him in the first place?

Well, because he was crazy, of course.

If he was planning to come back with a gun, then her only chance was to get out now, while the kitchen was clear. But suppose it was a trap, and she climbed out only to be attacked ...

The fear was back. When things had been clear, when there had been only the simple job of fending him off, she had forgotten how to be afraid. Now that there was a decision to make, she was aware again of her terror and confusion, and aware also that she was only a ten-year-old girl, alone without a sitter for the first time ever, and this was all too much for her.

The house was silent. Had he gone? Really gone?

Maybe she could risk emerging. If she saw him waiting for her, she might have time to get back into the crawl space. She—

Footsteps again.

Returning.

Too late. He was back.

He must have brought a gun,
must
have.

No escape now. The knife was useless. She waited in terror until his silhouette appeared above her, his long, scrawny shadow stretched on the dirt floor, and she looked up into his face.

Her dad. Blinking down at her.

“C.J.? C.J., what the hell ... ?”

“Daddy, is he gone,
is he gone
?”

“Is who gone? Get out of there, it’s filthy down there!”

“
Is he gone?”

“There’s nobody here, C.J. Get out now,”

By the time she climbed up, her mom was there as well, staring at her in bewildered concern. “What in the world?” her mom kept asking, over and over. “What in the world?”

C.J. told them what had happened. She told them about the man who had come for her, who had gotten into the house without making any noise, who had known her name, who had said he’d been watching her. “We have to call the sheriff,” she said. “Please, let’s call now before he gets too far away!”

Her parents made no effort to pick up the phone. They merely traded a resigned glance.

“Come on,” C.J. insisted, “we have to call!”

“C.J.,” her dad said softly, “there was nobody here tonight.”

She stood stunned, unable to register the fact that they didn’t believe her.

“You got all worked up,” her mom said in a gentle, soothing tone. “Maybe it was something you saw on TV. You know how that imagination of yours can get going sometimes.”

“It wasn’t imagination,” C.J. whispered. “I cut him. Look.”

She showed them the knife, but the blood on the blade had already dried to a thin dusky line like a gravy stain.

“C.J... .” her mom said, losing patience.

“There’s some of his blood on the floor of the crawl space. You can see it!”

But no blood was visible on the gravel. She must have obliterated all traces when she climbed out.

Still, she wouldn’t give up. She made her parents accompany her on a tour of the house. The man had broken in. There would be signs of it. A forced window, an open door ...

There was nothing. Every door was locked, every window sealed.

“Are you willing to admit that it was your imagination now?” her dad asked sternly.

“He was real,” C.J. said stubbornly. “He was the boogeyman.” Even as she said it, she knew this was the wrong choice of words. Everyone knew there was no such thing as the boogeyman. Even she had known it until tonight.

Her parents wouldn’t listen. When she pressed the point, they lost their patience. They sent her to bed, telling her that she would not be left without a sitter again.

The Sheriff’s Department was never called. After a while C.J. stopped talking about the intruder. Meekly she acknowledged that she must have imagined him. It was the safest thing to say. But it was a lie.

That man was real. And he might still be out there. Waiting, as he had said. Studying her. Biding his time.

How he had entered the house remained a mystery for a month or so, until she remembered the doggy door. The Osborns had no dog, but the ranch’s previous owners had kept two schnauzers and had built a small swinging door at the rear of the house. It had not been used in years, but when she tested it, she found that the door still opened easily, and the hinges made only a faint squeal, inaudible at a distance.

The opening was small, and she herself could barely pass through it. But she recalled the man’s long, skinny arm. He had been bony, almost skeletal, and somehow, by some incredible contortion of his shoulders and hips, he had crawled through the little door. And when he heard her parents returning, he’d crawled out again.

She knew this was so, because snagged on a splinter of wood in the doggie door’s frame were a few black threads. She remembered the black trousers he’d worn.

Of course it proved nothing. There was no point in even raising the issue with her mom and dad. They would look at her strangely, and there might even be talk of consulting with a psychologist in Blythe, as there had been for a few days after the attack.

She didn’t want to see a psychologist. She kept her thoughts to herself.

But from then on, whenever she played outdoors or rode a pony in the desert or climbed a trail to a high ridge, she kept watch for a tall, lean figure in black.

The boogeyman was out there.

And someday, she knew, he would return.

NOON-8:00 P.M. WEDNESDAY

Morrie Walsh hated autopsies.

He knew he was supposed to be accustomed to this part of the job after thirty years as a cop, but somehow it never failed to get to him—the unpacking of a human body, the utter violation of a person.

Of course, as he knew too well, Martha Eversol had already been violated far more profoundly. Nothing the pathologist could do to her really mattered. The true damage had been done by other hands.

Walsh stood beside the steel autopsy table, one of two tables in a specially ventilated room at the Los Angeles County Morgue, a room restricted to badly decomposed remains. Martha Eversol had been dumped in an abandoned mini-mall on Sepulveda Boulevard a month earlier, and the condition of her body was not good.

One saving grace was that there had been no rain. January, often the start of LA’s rainy season, had been unusually dry this year, with some days approaching the windy dustiness of the Santa Ana season that normally developed in September. The dryness had helped to preserve the corpse. Instead of rotting, it had been mummified. The skin had a taut, leathery quality, and the other tissues had withered away, making the bones sharp and obvious beneath.

The body lay utterly limp. Rigor mortis had dissipated many days ago.

The medical examiner was a lean, ponytailed man named Sarandon who lacked most of the quirks associated with members of his profession. His only noticeable eccentricity was a habit of humming complicated melodies during an autopsy. He seemed partial to Bach.

Sarandon stood opposite Walsh, reviewing the tools in his kit: scalpel; surgical scissors; the wickedly sharp, long-bladed implement called a bread knife; and forceps, known as “pickups” by coroners everywhere. His assistant bustled about, making arcane preparations, while Sarandon turned on the microphone hanging over the table and dictated his opening remarks, beginning with today’s date, January 31.

Walsh briefly shut his eyes. It was a date he’d been dreading since Martha Eversol’s disappearance exactly one month ago.

Sarandon examined the body, finding ligature marks on the wrists and ankles—“antemortem,” he noted, pointing to the swollen redness of the wounds. But of course they would be antemortem. There was no point in tying up the woman after she was dead. Martha Eversol had been bound while alive. She had been kept that way for precisely four hours. Walsh was sure of it.

Sarandon, humming a pleasant air that sounded suspiciously like a show tune, found bruises on Martha Eversol’s neck. Antemortem or perimortem. Before death or at the moment of death.

“Consistent with manual strangulation?” Walsh asked, already knowing the answer.

Sarandon nodded curtly, not removing his gaze from the body. “Consistent, but we won’t know for sure until we look at the trachea.” He peeled back the corpse’s eyelids and noted pinpoint hemorrhages on the insides of the lids and in the whites of the eyes. “Additional evidence of strangulation. Still not conclusive.”

Walsh nodded. Manual strangulation closed off the arteries at the sides of the neck but left open the artery at the nape. Blood would continue pumping into the head but would be unable to leave. As blood pressure rose, capillaries burst, producing telltale petechial hemorrhages.

“How about the tattoo?” Walsh asked.

Sarandon interrupted his humming. “You haven’t seen it?”

“The body was still clothed at the dump site. I heard SID found the tat when they undressed her.” He pronounced it “sid,” but he meant the Scientific Investigation Division—the crime-scene specialists.

“Yeah, they did. Just wait till we get a few pictures, and I’ll show it to you.”

Sarandon’s assistant shot a roll of 35mm photos of the body. Then the ME and his helper eased Martha Eversol off the body block that supported her torso. The corpse slipped onto its side, exposing the left shoulder, and there on the shoulder blade was the tattoo.