Left for Dead (2 page)

“Excuse me,” Jamie said. “You didn’t see anyone else in there, did you? My girlfriend and I are playing hide and seek.”

“Nobody’s in there,” she muttered, with a wary sidelong glance at him. She moved on, then adjusted her backpack. “You can check it out if you want…freak.”

Jamie looked around to see if the coast was clear. He’d never stepped into a women’s bathroom in his life. If anyone saw him, they’d probably think he was a major pervert. He poked his head past the door: just as dirty and smelly as any public men’s room—only no urinal. “Meg? You in here?” he called, his voice echoing. Both stall doors were open. The place was empty.

He tried the men’s room—on the off-chance she’d been gutsy enough to stow away in no-woman’s-land. But the bathroom was empty.

When Jamie stepped back outside, a chilly wind stirred up, and he shuddered. He noticed two big piles of leaves at the edge of the park. Had Megan buried herself in one of them?

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he called, swiping at the mound of leaves. He walked into them—until he was up to his knees in dead leaves. “Shit,” he muttered, kicking at the piling. He glanced around the empty park. “Meg?” he called out. “Megan? Babe? Okay, you win!”

Jamie’s eyes locked on the row of cars parked along the roadway that snaked through the park. When he’d told her to stay in this section, he’d considered this road a boundary line. Nevertheless, Jamie hurried toward the line of cars. Some of them appeared to have been abandoned. Megan wasn’t hiding behind any of the vehicles. Jamie even peeked underneath the cars. No sign of her. Something was wrong. Where the hell was she?

“Okay, Meg, you win!” he announced loudly, lumbering away from the last automobile at the edge of the park area. “I give up, babe! Game’s over, okay? Meg? C’mon, I’m getting tired of this…”

Across the roadway, he’d caught the attention of a couple, who had stopped to stare at him. They must have taken him for a crazy man, yelling at nobody. If Meg was in the vicinity, certainly, she could hear him too.

“Megan? Baby?” Jamie couldn’t help it, but his voice was cracking. “The game’s over. Goddamn it, I’m serious! I’m going home, okay?”

Jamie glanced around. It didn’t make sense. If someone had grabbed her, she would have screamed. He lumbered back toward the park bench. Maybe if he just sat and waited for her, she’d come out of her hiding place.

As he passed under a tree, he heard twigs snapping. Leaves drifted down past him. Jamie looked up.

“I can’t believe you gave up so soon!” Megan teased him. She was sitting on one of the lower branches.

He managed to laugh. “You scared the shit out of me, goddamn it. I thought someone had abducted you.” Shaking his head, Jamie watched her climb down. “I looked up there, for God’s sakes, and I didn’t see you.”

“That’s because I was in that other tree,” Megan said, nodding at a tall oak by the roadway. She jumped to the ground, then gave him a quick peck on the cheek. She was a bit out of breath. “After you looked up this tree, I came down from the other one and hid up here. Pretty smart, huh?”

“You’re a friggin’ genius,” Jamie muttered. “C’mon.”

They crossed the road—into another part of the park, where a path wound around the beautiful Dahlia Gardens. Megan put her arm around him, but Jamie pulled away. “Oh, don’t be a sore loser,” she said, giggling. “Huh, you should have seen yourself ducking into the ladies’ toilet. It was pretty funny.”

“Yeah, hysterical,” he replied, cracking a smile, despite himself. He couldn’t stay mad at her.

Megan kissed him, then ran toward a big pile of leaves between the gardens. Jamie chased after her. Megan jumped into the leaves, then let out a scream.

Jamie laughed—until she screamed again.

“Oh, my God, my God!” she yelled, recoiling and scrambling out of the leafy pile. Megan had tears in her eyes. She ran into his arms. “Something’s in there,” she gasped, trembling. She started to choke on her words. “A dead animal—some
thing—”

Jamie stepped toward the hill of leaves, now scattered and blowing in the chilly wind. He hesitated, then brushed some leaves off the top of the stack.

“Please, Jamie, don’t,” Megan cried, turning away.

He felt a cold and hard object against his fingertips. He dug past the top layer of dried-up leaves and lawn waste. Something smelled like rotten fruit. It was wrapped in a clear plastic bag. Jamie swiped a few more leaves away. He could see a woman’s face and a pair of heavily made-up eyes staring back at him through the plastic. Her mouth was painted dark red, and she had a beauty mark on her cheek.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered.

Jamie told himself that it might just be a mannequin. But he brushed away a few more leaves, and he saw the plastic bag was tied around the woman’s throat.

Her blue-white hand—frozen with rigor mortis—clutched at a something near her neck.

It was a gold heart-shaped locket.

She’d checked into the Westhill Towers Hotel in downtown Seattle under the name Mrs. George Mowery.

The
real
Mrs. Mowery was home in Salem, Oregon, where she lived with George and their two kids. Selma Mowery always stayed home whenever George went to Seattle on business.

Yet for the last two years, Westhill Towers’s records showed Mrs. Mowery had joined her husband on eighteen out of twenty-three of his overnight stays there. Selma had no way of knowing. The credit card bills with the hotel payments went to George’s work address. And Selma never phoned the hotel. She always rang his pager or cell phone. She had no idea her husband was seeing someone else.

The “other”
Mrs. Mowery
was also married. And her husband had no idea she was seeing someone else either. They lived outside Seattle. Whenever George planned a trip, he’d e-mail her, and she’d think of some excuse to spend a couple of nights in the city. She had a friend backing up her cover story this time. They were supposed to be on a shopping spree for a couple of days. She stole George’s idea, and got herself a cell phone. No reason for her husband to call the hotel if he could reach her on the cell. No reason for him to suspect anything.

She liked being Mrs. George Mowery whenever George came into town. But she had no intention of taking the name on a full-time basis. She didn’t want to break up his marriage—anymore than she wanted to ruin her own. They loved their spouses, yet needed the diversion. What she had with George was love with boundaries.

At the moment, she wasn’t too happy with her surrogate husband. George had left her alone tonight while he’d gone off to wine and dine a client. She wasn’t supposed to wait up. He’d apologized profusely, and promised they’d be together the entire day tomorrow. But that didn’t make tonight any easier.

She stared at the Seattle skyline, the twinkling lights of a Saturday night. She saw it all—past her own reflection—through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the small gymnasium on the thirty-seventh floor of the Westhill Towers. She was on the treadmill, clocking in at twenty-one minutes, with 244 calories burned so far. Perspiration dripped from her forehead, and her T-shirt was soaked. It clung to her shoulders and back. She’d been pacing herself to the oldies music piped over a speaker system. Right now, the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” kept her moving in place.

She’d come up to the gym so she could blow off some steam. It beat sitting alone in their room all night. For a while, an overweight man and his two skinny adolescent kids—a boy and girl—had been in the gym, too, going from one weight and cardio machine to another. The boy kept staring at her. So she had a little fun with him.

She’d gotten her two front teeth knocked out when she was a kid—thanks to a girlfriend fooling around with a tennis racket during a slumber party. Every few years, she was fitted for new permanents, and had to wear a temporary retainer with fake front teeth. She could take it out with the flick of her tongue. This was one of those temporary interims. So—when that obnoxious teenage boy gawked at her for the umpteenth time, she smiled, then took out her teeth with her tongue. The kid actually shrieked. He was horrified. It was the one good laugh she had tonight.

The dad and two kids had left shortly after that, about ten minutes ago. Now she was alone.

A section from the newspaper was rolled up in the cup-holder on the Treadmaster’s handlebars. The newspaper was four days old, and folded over to page three. But the headline grabbed her attention:

“Oh, God, enough of this,” she muttered, rolling up the newspaper section and stuffing it back into the treadmill’s cup-holder.

She’d heard about this Rembrandt killer. It was all they talked about on the local news lately. Apparently, the police weren’t any closer to catching him. She didn’t want to read about him. She’d have nightmares tonight.

For the next few minutes she let her mind go blank. She watched a ferry glide across Puget Sound’s calm, moonlit water. Suddenly, she felt so forlorn. People were going places, and here she was, running and running, and going nowhere. She should have stayed at home. Saturday night alone in the city was utter misery.

“Oh, screw this,” she muttered, switching off the treadmill. She felt her pulse, and wandered over to the window. Gazing outside, she caught her breath. “Quit feeling so sorry for yourself already,” she sighed. “You’ll be with him later tonight and all day tomorrow.”

The music stopped. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was almost eleven. The gym would be closing soon. She imagined them automatically locking the door and turning off the lights from some switch down at the front desk. Just her luck, she’d be locked in here until six in the morning. George would think she’d ditched him.

Well, then he’d know how it feels to be ditched,
she thought, heading toward the women’s changing room. She’d come to the gym, wearing a sweater over her T-shirt, with her room card in the pocket. She’d left the sweater in a locker in the changing room.

She walked past a row of lockers. Her footsteps echoed on the tiled floor, and there was a steady drip sound from a faucet in the bathroom. Finding a stack of towels, she wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. She felt a chill. She needed to take a shower, but not here. Without the oldies music playing, the place was kind of spooky. Too damn quiet.

All at once, a locker door slammed.

She jumped at the noise. Her heart rate had just started to return to normal after the treadmill, but now it was leaping off the chart. For a moment, she couldn’t move. She just listened. Nothing.

She’d thought she was alone in here. How could anyone have gotten past her without her seeing? Maybe the noise was from the men’s room next door.

The security in this place wasn’t so terrific. Her plastic card room key was supposed to open the door to the workout room, but the door wasn’t locked. Anyone from the street could have walked into the hotel, taken an elevator up to the thirty-seventh floor, and let themselves into the gym. And there was no lock on the women’s changing room door either.

Someone could be hiding in the very next row of lockers, or in one of the shower stalls, or maybe in the sauna.

She shuddered. “Oh, quit creeping yourself out,” she grumbled. She wished she hadn’t read that stupid newspaper article.

She hurried to her locker. Her hand was trembling as she worked the combination. It was one of those new changeable combination locks. She’d set it for her birthday June third: 6–0–3.

She was dialing the three when she heard another noise. It was a sudden, mechanical hum. Maybe the heater in the sauna, or a vent activating automatically. Whatever it was,
it wasn’t a person,
she told herself.

She got the locker open, then pulled out her sweater. “Honey, sorry I’m taking so long!” she nervously called out. “I’ll be right there!”

She felt stupid, talking to no one—just in case she wasn’t alone in this changing room. Who was she trying to kid?

She closed the locker door and started toward the center aisle. Then she stopped dead.

A shadow swept across the tiled floor.

She glanced up at the ceiling. It was polished metal, almost like a mirror. She could see her own reflection. And she saw a man, standing on the other side of her locker, in the next row.

She gasped.

He looked up at the ceiling, too. His face was a bit blurred. But she could tell he was smiling at her.

On the thirty-seventh floor, a hotel security man switched off the lights in the small gymnasium and the two locker rooms. The place was empty. It looked clean. He failed to notice a pair of white panties dangling from the treadmill’s handlebars.

“There’s another one,” he said. “Christ, that damn thing is huge! It’s bigger than a squirrel. That makes eight so far. I told you, ten’s my limit. If I see two more rats, I’m out of here.”

“Oh, don’t be such a pansy,” Phillip Banach told his brother. He was wearing coveralls, construction boots, work gloves, and over his nose and mouth, a mask which he’d dabbed with peppermint extract. It helped camouflage the pungent smell of the junkyard. The place was about half the size of a football field, with trails winding through hills of debris. Phillip turned toward his brother. “Y’hear what I’m telling you,
pansy?”

“Hey, you’re the homo here, bro,” Alan Banach retorted. He’d put on an old pair of galoshes and wrapped duct tape around the cuffs of his jeans, but he still hated stomping through all this foul garbage. “Flies and rats and stench, oh my,” he said, tugging a small oriental rug out from under a loaded garbage bag. Half of the rug had been scorched in a fire or something. He tossed it back amid the rubble. “I can’t believe you and Damien do this every week,” Alan continued. “What kind of gay men are you anyway, sloshing through garbage? You should be dealing with fabrics and colors.”

Actually, Phillip and his partner, Damien, did deal with fabrics and colors. They ran the Banach-Tate Antique Gallery in Bellingham, Washington. Phillip’s brother, Alan, was their accountant, and they did a good business in their posh little store. Most of their stock was acquired in estate sales, but once every week or so, unbeknown to their snooty, rich clients, the two men searched for antique treasures in this dumping grounds off Interstate 5, a few miles south of the city.

Damien was visiting his ailing father in Everett that Sunday. So Phillip had tapped Alan to come along on this afternoon’s scavenging expedition. It was a two-man job. Some of the pieces they uncovered here could be pretty heavy.

“You know, we’re totally wasting our time. We’ll never find anything here,” Alan announced, sifting through the garbage. He glanced up at his brother—in his coveralls, picking through another mound of debris. “All we’ll come up with is more rats. I’m telling you, if I see two more, we’re out of here.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’ve seen the same rat eight times?” Phillip retorted. “Stop your bellyaching. We’re not wasting our time. For your information, Damien and I once found a headboard here that we repaired and refinished, and ended up selling to a woman from Portland for a thousand dollars.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, you’ve told me that stupid headboard story about a hundred times. It happened in—what, like—nineteen ninety-seven? Get yourself some new material, bro.” Alan picked up an empty jar and waved it at his brother. “Hey, I have an old Noxema jar here! Whaddaya think we can get for this? A couple of hundred bucks?”

His brother didn’t respond. He was staring down at something.

“I’m telling you, Phil,” he called. “No one throws away anything any more. They sell their junk on eBay. Phil?”

Alan squinted at his brother, who was still studying some object amid another heap of debris. Phillip Banach fell to his knees and started digging through the trash. Alan figured his brother must have struck gold.

But then he stepped closer.

Philip swept aside a Burger King bag and some other garbage, uncovering what looked like a woman’s nude corpse.

“Holy Jesus,” Alan murmured. “Is that—”

He didn’t get the next words out. He saw the dried blood between her bare breasts. A plastic bag was tied over her head, and someone had made her up with dark red lipstick, false eyelashes, a heavy application rouge, and a beauty mark by her mouth.