Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (30 page)

She thrust the paper at me. I took it and said, "You're a genius!"

Amy was staring at Rae as if she found her fascinating. I made
introductions and explained where we were bound, omitting my concern
for Emmons's safety.

"You want me to go along?" Rae asked.

"Is there room for three in your car?" I asked Amy.

"I was kind of hoping we could take yours. Marc's isn't too
reliable; it was acting up on the way down here."

"And neither is mine," Rae said, "so that lets me out." She paused,
then added, "Awful about the fire at Café Comedie, huh? I heard about
it on the radio. Did Jay Larkey… ?"

"Probably." But I had begun to wonder about that. The bartender had
said the explosion was in back near Larkey's office, but he hadn't
actually placed his boss on the scene at the time. And there was also
the matter of the male phone caller who had hung up on Hank after
asking if I was back from Los Angeles and if Amy had contacted me yet.
That combination of facts was one which only Larkey had possessed. "Are
you going to be up for a while?" I asked Rae.

"For hours. I'm too wired to sleep."

"If anyone calls for me, will you tell him I'm still in L.A.? And if
he asks about Amy, say she's still here but asleep."

"Sure." Her eyes were curious.

Quickly I motioned to Amy and we went down the hill. I wanted her to
drive so I could look through the Times, but she said she couldn't
handle a stick shift. I considered checking the features section right
then and there, but my worry about Emmons was strong enough that I
decided not to waste any more time in getting to the river. Whatever
Tracy had seen in the paper might not hold any significance for me;
better to wait and let Emmons tell me his story—if he was in any
condition to.

There was little traffic on the freeway, and we made good time,
passing Richmond by one-thirty. Flame billowed from a remote tower at
the refinery on the shore; the faintly illuminated
storage tanks hulked on the dark hillsides. Amy was
uncharacteristically silent, her head turned away from me as she stared
out the side window.

At the other end of the bridge over the Carquinez Strait, the toll
taker yawned as she accepted my dollar bill. The neon of the
frontage-road businesses in Vallejo was softened by a light mist. Amy
stirred and pointed to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop. "Can we stop? I
need to use the bathroom."

What was it with her and bathrooms? I thought irritably. Probably
nervous, or maybe she wants to do some coke. Nothing would surprise me
anymore.

I pulled off the freeway, drove to the coffee shop, and parked in
front. "Don't take too long."

"Aren't you coming in?"

"I'll wait here." As she got out, I took the copy of the Times from
where I'd set it on the rear carrying seat and switched on the car's
dome light.

The features sections was called "View." I turned to it first. The
piece Tracy had used to demonstrate her new comedy technique—about the
woman who built the twenty-thousand-dollar doghouse—dominated the front
page. To its left was what looked to be a regular entertainment column;
below it was an article on the spring fashions. I turned to the inside:
a personality sketch of a New York-based cartoonist, with ads below the
fold. Similar arrangement on the facing page, with a horoscope and Dear
Abby.

Of course Tracy might not have been looking at the View section when
she saw whatever it was that had given her such a turn. Perhaps it was
a straight news item.

Page four contained a continuation of the entertainment column and a
cartoon strip, but a piece on page five caught my eye. Titled "Unsolved
Crime of the Week," it appeared to be a regular syndicated feature
describing an open police file and asking readers to contact their
newspaper should they have knowledge of the perpetrator. That week's
crime was a
five-year-old arson-murder in Fort Myers, Florida, on the Gulf Coast.

I skimmed the article quickly. The arson had occurred at a
shopping-and-entertainment complex in the affluent resort area, at
three in the morning during the height of the winter tourist season.
There was no question that the fire had been set: traces of a liquid
accelerant—gasoline—were found in a crawl space below the level of the
blaze.

Due to the lateness of the hour, only one person had been killed.
The charred remains were initially thought to be those of the complex's
developer, Warren S. Howard, but a positive identification could not be
made. And in the weeks that followed the fire, a number of little-known
facts about Howard came to light: he was dangerously overextended and
deeply in debt; several of the stores and restaurants in the complex
had failed to renew their leases; he'd tried to raise capital by
selling off a tract of land he owned near the Fort Myers airport, but
the growth rate in that area had not been as projected, and there were
no takers; various liens against his property and lawsuits had been
filed.

A real estate developer on the brink of bankruptcy. A fire.

The police began to suspect that Howard had set fire to the complex
in order to fake his own death and escape his creditors. The body found
in the ashes, they theorized, could have been a derelict or other
person who would not be missed, whom Howard had lured inside and
knocked unconscious or perhaps drugged. The theory was given further
credence when Howard's wife, Melinda, who had been trying
unsuccessfully to collect on his personal and business insurance,
suddenly disappeared from the area. And it was confirmed when the
charred remains were identified as those of an old man who had run away
from a nursing home in nearby Cape Coral the previous December.

I let out my breath in a long sigh, my fingers dampening the
newsprint where I grasped it.

Warren and Melinda Howard sounded like two people I knew. But how
had Tracy recognized them from this account? I had tonight's fire at
Café Comedie to lead me to make the connection. What had told her… ?

And then I noticed that the piece was continued on the following
page. I flipped it over, found a plea for information and a photograph
of the Howards.

Melinda Howard was at least fifty: short, plump, with frizzily
penned blond hair and glasses. Warren Howard looked older: his hair was
white, the flesh under his eyes deeply pouched. He could have stood to
lose fifty or sixty pounds.

People I'd never seen before.

I wanted to scream in frustration. It fit: a real estate developer
and his wife, a near bankruptcy, a fire. It was perfect.

And all wrong.

Inside the coffee shop I could see Amy, chatting with the cashier, a
take-out container in hand. My irritation level rose to the boiling
point. Why was she buying something to drink when I'd told her to
hurry? I leaned on the horn.

Amy looked my way, exchanged a few more pleasantries with the
cashier, then came toward the door. She walked slowly, juggling her
purse with the paper cup and fishing around inside it. Before she got
to the car, she took out a stick of gum, unwrapped it, stuffed it into
her mouth, and dropped the wrapper on the ground.

"Sorry I took so long," she said.

I gritted my teeth. Amy closed the car door, snapping her gum.

"What's that?" she asked, motioning at the paper with her cup and
spilling cola on her hand.

I wanted to crumple the Times and hurl it behind the seat. In the
interests of Rae's unborn children, I restrained myself.

Amy leaned over, snapping her gum again and breathing wintergreen on
me. If she was going to make sounds like a ruminant all the way to the
cottage, I'd probably throttle her.

"Hey, that's funny," she said.

"What's funny?" I elbowed her back onto her own side of the car.

"That old guy." Her finger stabbed at the photo in the paper. "He
looks like he could be Rob Soriano's father."

I knocked her hand away and scrutinized the picture. Now I saw what
Tracy—who had spent a great deal of time observing others—had discerned
instantly. The only thing that surprised me was that Amy had caught it
before I did.

The man's stiff military bearing was the same as Soriano's, as were
the deep lines that bracketed his mouth. The wavy white hair could
easily have been clipped short and dyed a uniform brown. The pouches
under the eyes, upon closer examination, looked to be the product of
heredity rather than age; such things were surgically correctable, and
any irregularities could be masked by glasses. Weight could be lost,
muscles toned. And Melinda, who in no way resembled Kathy? A wife who
had died or been discarded.

Warren Howard was Rob Soriano.

Rob Soriano, not Jay Larkey, had murdered Tracy.

I folded the paper and put it back on the carrying seat. As I
flicked off the dome light and started the car, I said to Amy, "I want
you to watch for cops, so we don't get stopped. We need to get to the
cottage in a hurry."

There were no cars parked in front of the Barbour place or in the
turnaround where the road ended, and only one tucked into the trees by
the driveway of the farthest house. Lights showed over there, but the
Barbour cottage was dark. I pulled the MG next to the vine-covered
fence and shut off the engine.

I said to Amy, "Are you sure Marc said he'd wait for us?"

"Where would he—oh, you mean because there're no lights. The
shutters keep them from showing. We were pretty sure the cops wouldn't
come by, but we left them closed just in case."

I got out of the car, motioning for her to do the same. The night
was crisp, a strong wind blowing off the river. A full moon hung
overhead; in its rays the vast plain belonging to the salt company
looked glacial. I stood still for a moment, listening to the muted
rippling of the water and rustling of vegetation. In the distance a dog
howled mournfully.

Amy came up beside me; I could smell her wintergreen gum. She said,
"I'm scared."

"Of what? There's no reason." But I knew why: there was a wrongness
about the place, because of the evil thing that had happened here. I
myself felt a chill along my backbone.

She took out a key and unlocked the padlock on the hasp, removed it,
and pushed open the side of the gate whose hinges had not given way. It
swung all the way back and rested against a pyracantha bush. Amy shoved
it closed again and started through the thicket.

The bright moonlight helped us find our way. On the other side of
the bushes I made out thin lines of light where there were gaps around
the shutters on the windows overlooking the cottage's front porch. Its
sagging roof was outlined against the sky, chimney slightly atilt. On
the porch the dilapidated wicker furniture hunched in the shadows; the
glider moved fitfully in the wind, bumping the wall behind it.

The sense of wrongness was stronger here. Reflexively I patted my
shoulder bag, wishing I had my gun. In the past I'd owned two, kept one
at home and the other in the glovebox of the car, which I'd had fitted
with a special lock. But a few months ago, someone had broken into the
MG and gotten the compartment open. Later I'd decided against replacing
the gun. Now I wondered if that had been a wise decision.

Amy seemed to have banished whatever fears she'd felt, however. She
hurried up the sagging steps, fitted another key into the door lock,
and pushed it open. I put out a hand to restrain her, to urge caution,
but she stepped inside.

Directly ahead I saw a dark brick fireplace, with a huge stuffed
fish that certainly had never swum in these waters mounted on a plaque
above it. A fishing rod—the old-fashioned varnished-wood kind with big
metal guides for the line—leaned against the mantel, an open tackle box
on the floor next to it. The ceilings were low and beamed; the floors
were hardwood, covered by brown rag rugs; around the hearth stood a
grouping of the sort of knotty pine and chintz-cushioned chairs often
found in summer houses. A pair of floor lamps equipped with low-wattage
bulbs and yellowed
shades illuminated the semicircle.

Marc Emmons sat to the right of the fireplace. Amy said, "We're
here!" and trotted over to him, leaving me to shut the door. When I
came all the way into the room, she was standing beside his chair in a
stiff, defensive posture, eyes fixed on the man who sat in the shadows
across from him.

It was Rob Soriano, aka Warren S. Howard. He perched tensely on the
edge of the low chair. In his right hand was a .32 revolver.

Belatedly I realized that the car I'd seen pulled under the trees
farther down the road was parked at an inconvenient distance from the
lighted house, but not really all that far from this cottage.

Soriano nodded at me, steel-rimmed glasses glinting. Behind them his
eyes were jumpy. When he said, "Ms. McCone, I thought you'd never get
here," his voice was higher pitched than usual.

I placed my hands on the back of the chair in front of me. "Have you
been waiting long?"

"Less than an hour. Marc here has been trying to convince me you
wouldn't show up at all, but since I'd found out that Amy was waiting
for you at All Souls, I knew it would be only a matter of time."

So that had been Soriano on the phone. I'd figured the right motive
for the call but the wrong caller.

I glanced at Emmons. His face was pasty and sheened with sweat, in
spite of the chill in the room. He licked dry lips and said thickly,
"He found out from Jay where we were and that you were going to bring
her here. Why the hell'd you have to call him, Ame?"

Amy didn't reply. She was still staring at Soriano.

Oddly enough, I wasn't afraid, even though I now knew Soriano had
somehow rigged the explosion at the club and probably intended to kill
all of us, too. Dead calm settled over me. I dropped my shoulder bag
onto the chair and thought, I'll
take this slowly. Very slowly.