Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (76 page)

Then disaster presented itself in a cheap rayon dress.

Standing outside the front entrance to the hotel, she looked a thousand years old. Even from ten feet away he could smell the alcohol.

In low-budget horror movies, there was a surefire way to tell that the monster lurked nearby. There was always a musical cue. The threatening cellos before the bright brass of the attack.

For Seth Goldman, no music was needed. The end—his end—was a silent indictment in a woman’s puffy red eyes.

He couldn’t let it happen.
Couldn’t.
He had worked too hard, too long. Everything was riding on
The Palace
and he would not let anything get in the way.

How far would he go to stanch the flow? He would soon find out.

Before anyone saw them, he took her by the arm and led her to a waiting cab.

37

“I
THINK
I can manage,” the old woman said.

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” Byrne replied.

They were in the parking lot of the Aldi on Market Street. Aldi was the no-frills supermarket chain that sold limited brands at discount prices. The woman was in her late seventies or early eighties, spindly and gaunt. She had fine features and translucent powdered skin. Despite the heat, and the fact that no rain was in the forecast for at least three days, she wore a double-breasted wool coat and bright blue galoshes. She was trying to load half a dozen grocery bags into her car, a twenty-year-old Chevy.

“But look at you,” she said. She gestured toward his cane. “
I
should be helping
you.
”

Byrne laughed. “I’m fine, ma’am,” he said. “Just twisted my ankle.”

“Of course, you’re still a young man,” she said. “At my age, if I twisted an ankle, they might put me down.”

“You look pretty spry to me,” Byrne said.

The woman smiled beneath the veil of a schoolgirl blush. “Oh, now.”

Byrne grabbed the bags and started loading them into the backseat of the Chevy. Inside, he noticed a few rolls of paper towels, a few boxes of Kleenex. There were also a pair of mittens, an afghan, a knit cap, and a soiled quilted ski vest. Seeing as this woman probably didn’t frequent the slopes of Camelback Mountain, Byrne figured she carted around this wardrobe on the off chance that the temperature might dip down to a frigid seventy-five degrees.

Before Byrne could load the last bag into the car his cell phone chirped. He took it out, snapped it open. It was a text message from Colleen. In it, she told him that she was not leaving for camp until Tuesday, and wondered if they could have dinner Monday night. Byrne messaged her back that he would love to have dinner. On her end, the phone would vibrate and she could read the message. She replied immediately:

KEWL! LUL CBOAO :)

“What is
that
?” the woman asked, pointing to his phone.

“It’s a cell phone.”

The woman looked at him for a moment, as if he had just told her it was a spaceship built for very, very small aliens. “That’s a
telephone
?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Byrne said. He held it up for her to see. “It has a camera built in, a calendar, an address book.”

“My, my,” she said, shaking her head side to side. “I believe the world has passed me by, young man.”

“It’s all moving too fast, isn’t it?”

“Praise His name.”

“Amen,” Byrne said.

She began to slowly make her way toward the driver’s door. Once inside she reached into her purse, produced a pair of quarters. “For your troubles,” she said. She tried to hand them to Byrne. Byrne raised both hands in protest, more than a little moved by the gesture.

“That’s okay,” Byrne said. “You take that and buy yourself a cup of coffee.” Without protest, the woman slipped the two coins back into her purse.

“Time was when you could get a cup of coffee for a nickel,” she said.

Byrne reached over to close the door for her. With a movement he would have thought was too quick for a woman of her age she took his hand in hers. Her papery skin felt cool and dry to the touch. Instantly, the images ripped through his mind—

—a damp, dark room … the sounds of a TV in the background …
Welcome Back, Kotter … 
the flicker of votive candles … a woman’s anguished sobs … the sound of bone on flesh … screams in the blackness
 … Don’t make me go up to the attic …

—as he tore back his hand. He wanted to move slowly, not wanting to alarm or insult the woman, but the images were terrifyingly clear, heartbreakingly real.

“Thank you, young man,” the woman said.

Byrne took a step back, trying to compose himself.

The woman started her car. After a few moments she waved a thin, blue-veined hand, and angled across the lot.

Two things stayed with Kevin Byrne as the old woman drove away. The image of the young woman who still lived in her clear, ancient eyes.

And the sound of that terrified voice in his head.

Don’t make me go up to the attic …

H
E STOOD ACROSS
the street from the building. It looked different in daylight, a squalid relic of his city, a scar on a moldering urban block. Every so often a passerby would stop, try to look through the grimy glass-block squares that checkerboarded the front.

Byrne took an item out of his coat pocket. It was the napkin that Victoria had given him when she had brought him breakfast in bed, the white linen square with the imprint of her lips in deep red lipstick. He turned it over and over in his hands as he drew the layout of the street in his mind. To the right of the building across the street was a small parking lot. Next to that, a used-furniture mart. In front of the furniture store was an array of bright plastic bar stools in the shape of tulips. To the left of the building was an alleyway. He watched a man exit the front of the building, around the corner to the left, down the alley, then down a set of iron stairs to an access door beneath the structure. A few minutes later, the man emerged carrying a pair of cardboard boxes.

It was a storage cellar.

That’s where he would do it, Byrne thought. In the cellar. He would meet the man later that night in the cellar.

No one would hear them down there.

38

T
HE WOMAN IN
the white dress asked:
What are you doing here? Why are you here?

The knife in her hand appeared extremely sharp and, as she began to absently dig at the outside of her right thigh, it sliced through the material of her dress, splotching it with a Rorschach of blood. Thick steam filled the white bathroom, slicking the tiled walls, misting the mirror. Scarlet streaked and dripped from the razor-keened blade.

Do you know how it is when you meet somebody for the first time?
the woman in white asked. Her tone was casual, almost conversational, as if she were having a cup of coffee or a cocktail with an old friend.

The other woman, the bruised and damaged woman in the terry-cloth robe, just stared, the terror building behind her eyes. The bathtub began to overflow, rippling over the side. Blood dappled the floor, pooling in a glossy, ever-widening circle. Downstairs, water began to seep through the ceiling. The big dog lapped at it on the hardwood floor.

Upstairs, the woman with the knife screamed:
You’re a stupid, selfish bitch!

Then she attacked.

Glenn Close hacked at Anne Archer in a life-and-death struggle as the tub began to overflow, flooding the bathroom floor. Downstairs, Michael Douglas’s character—Dan Gallagher—took the kettle off the boil. Instantly he heard the screams. He bolted upstairs, ran into the bathroom, and slammed Glenn Close into the mirror, smashing it. They fought tooth and nail. She slashed him across the chest with the knife. They plunged into the tub. Soon Dan got the best of her, choking the life out of her. She finally stopped thrashing. She was dead.

Or was she?

And that’s where the edit was.

Individually, simultaneously, the investigators watching the video tensed their muscles in anticipation of what they might see next.

The video jerked and rolled. The new image was a different bathroom, much dimmer, the light source coming from the left side of the frame. Ahead was a beige wall, a white slatted window treatment. There was no sound.

Suddenly a young woman rises to midframe. She is wearing a white, scoop-neck T-shirt dress, long-sleeved. It is not an exact duplicate of that worn by Glenn Close’s character—Alex Forrest—in the film, but it is similar.

As the tape rolls, the woman steadies herself, centered in the frame. She is soaking wet. She is furious. She appears outraged, ready to pounce.

She stops.

Her expression suddenly turns from rage to fear, her eyes widening in horror. Someone, probably whoever was holding the camera, raises a small-caliber gun into the right side of the frame and pulls the trigger. The bullet slams into the woman’s chest. The woman reels but doesn’t instantly fall. She looks down at the widening intaglio of red.

She then slides down the wall, her blood painting the tile in bright crimson swaths. She slips slowly into the tub. The camera moves toward the young woman’s face beneath the reddening bathwater.

The video shudders, rolls, then returns to the original film, to the scene where Michael Douglas shakes hands with a detective in front of his formerly idyllic home. In the movie, the nightmare is over.

Buchanan shut off the tape. As with the showing of the first tape, the occupants of the small room were stunned into silence. Every high they had felt in the past twenty-four hours or so—catching the break on the
Psycho
tape, finding the plumbing supply house, finding the motel room where Stephanie Chandler had been killed, finding the Saturn submerged along the banks of the Delaware—went out the window.

“This is one very bad actor,” Cahill finally said.

The word floated for a moment before settling into the image bank.

The Actor.

There was never any sort of official ritual when criminals got a nickname. It just happened. Whenever a person committed a series of crimes, instead of calling him the doer, or their unsub—short for
unknown subject
—it was sometimes easier to give him a nickname. This time it stuck.

They were looking for the Actor.

And it looked like he was far from taking his final bow.

W
HENEVER THERE WERE
two homicide victims, apparently killed by the same person—and there was no doubt that what they had witnessed on the
Fatal Attraction
tape was indeed a homicide, and little doubt it was the same killer as the
Psycho
tape—the first thing detectives look for is a connection between the victims. As obvious as it sounds, it was still true, yet not necessarily an easy link to establish.

Were they acquaintances, relatives, co-workers, lovers, former lovers? Did they attend the same church, health club, encounter group? Did they shop at the same stores, bank at the same bank? Did they share a dentist, doctor, lawyer?

Until they could identify the second victim, finding the connection would be unlikely. The first thing they would do is print an image of the second victim from the tape and recanvass everywhere they’d been for Stephanie Chandler. If they could establish that Stephanie Chandler knew the second victim, it might be a short leap to identifying the second woman, and finding the link. The prevailing theory was that there was a ferocious level of passion to these two homicides, which indicated some sort of intimacy between victims and killer, a level of familiarity that could not be achieved through casual acquaintance, or fuel such viciousness.

Someone had killed two young women and saw fit—through the prism of whatever dementia colored his daily life—to record the murders on tape. Not to taunt the police, necessarily. But rather to first horrify an unsuspecting public. It was certainly an MO that no one in the Homicide Unit could ever recall encountering before.

Something connected these people. Find the connection, find the common ground, find the parallels between these two lives, and they would find their killer.

Mateo Fuentes provided them with a fairly clear photographic image of the young woman on the
Fatal Attraction
tape. Eric Chavez was off to check on missing persons. If this victim was killed more than seventy-two hours earlier, there was a chance her disappearance had been called in. The other investigators assembled in Ike Buchanan’s office.

“How did we get this?” Jessica asked.

“Courier,” Buchanan said.

“Courier?” Jessica asked. “Is our doer changing his MO on us?”

“Not sure. But there was a partial rental sticker on it.”

“Do we know where it was from?”

“Not yet,” Buchanan said. “Most of the label was scraped off. But some of the bar code remained intact. The digital imaging lab is looking at it.”

“Which courier service brought it?”

“Small company on Market called Blazing Wheels. Bike messengers.”

“Do we know who sent it?”

Buchanan shook his head. “According to the kid who delivered it, he met with a guy at the Starbucks on Fourth and South. The guy paid cash.”

“Don’t you have to fill out a form?”

“All false. Name, address, phone. Dead ends.”

“Can the messenger describe the guy?”

“He’s with a sketch artist now.”

Buchanan held up the tape.

“This is a wanted man, people,” he said. Everyone knew what he meant. Until this psychopath was shut down, you ate standing up, and you didn’t even think about sleeping. “Find this son of a bitch.”

39

T
HE LITTLE GIRL
in the living room was barely tall enough to see over the coffee table. On television, the cartoon figures bounced and gamboled and zoomed, their manic movement a loud and colorful display. The little girl giggled.

Faith Chandler tried to focus. She was so tired.

In that space between memories, the bullet train of years, the little girl became twelve, about to enter junior high school. She stood tall and straight, the last moment before the boredom and utter misery of adolescence took over her mind; the furious hormones, her body. Still her little girl. Ribbons and smiles.