Superstition (21 page)

Nicky complied. Joe could feel the way-too-familiar tingle of adrenaline start to burn through his veins. Excitement had always been his drug of choice. Once he’d lived for it, for the thrill of the chase, the danger of discovery, the rush of knowing that death lay right around the next wrong turn.

All that was behind him now, but there was nothing he could do to stop his body’s long-conditioned response.

“The sender was Lazarus508,” she continued when he apparently didn’t respond fast enough to suit her. “You know, Lazarus, like from the Bible? He was dead, and came back to life. And 508—May eighth? The day Karen was killed.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I get it. Did you send a reply?”

“N-no.”

“Good. Don’t. Don’t do anything with it until I’ve had time to think about it a little. Save it, but leave it alone. Where are you?”

“In my apartment. In Chicago.” She sounded slightly impatient. “Does it matter?”

“It might.” Joe’s head rested back against the cool slick Naugahyde, and his gaze slid to the window. The mini-blinds were closed, but through the slats, he could see slivers of starry sky. “If that was sent by the guy who did this, and from the sound of it, it may very well have been, you realize that this would be the second time he’s contacted you directly?”

A beat passed.

“So what does that mean?” Her voice held a sliver of uncertainty now.

“Nothing good,” Joe said grimly. “I’m glad you’re in Chicago. How’d he get your e-mail address?”

“I don’t know. From the show’s website, I guess.”

“Your physical address wouldn’t be on there, would it?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. You just now got the e-mail?”

“I just now found it. It was sent on Monday, at three-seventeen a.m. I haven’t checked my e-mail since”—she hesitated briefly—“Sunday.”

“Monday at three-seventeen a.m.,” Joe mused. “That’s only a few hours after the murder. You were still on Pawleys Island at the time it was sent, right?”

“Yes.”

“And we had your cell phone.” He’d confiscated her phone, with its original message, as evidence, just as he had the clothes she’d been wearing at the time of the attack. She hadn’t objected. He’d gotten the impression that she would rather have carried a snake around in her purse than keep that phone with her after she’d heard the message that the perp had left for her on it, and the clothes had been torn and bloody, unusable. “So e-mail was probably the easiest way for him to get in touch with you at that particular time.”

“I guess.”

“The question is, who knew we had your phone?”

There was a pause.

“I don’t know. Lots of people. My family, probably most of the staff on the show, whoever knew in the police department—it wasn’t a secret.”

“No.” In retrospect, it probably would have been better to have made it one. Too late.

“You have a new phone now, right?” With a new number, while they monitored the old one in case the perp should call her again. So far, no luck.

“Yes.”

“Nothing?” Obviously, she would have told him if there had been, but . . .

“No.”

Joe was silent as he turned various possibilities over in his mind.

“You understood what the message was saying, right?” she said after a moment. He could hear the anxiety in her voice. “He’s planning to kill three people who are connected, and the murders will happen close together. It’s like before—Tara Mitchell and her friends.”

“I understood that.” His response was faintly dry.

“He’s already murdered Karen. So that means . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“One down, two to go,” Joe finished for her.

“Yes,” she said. He could hear her breathing. “I think . . . I think I was meant to be the second victim.”

“Looks that way.”

“Is that why he’s contacting me?” The words came out in a rush. “Do you think those messages mean he’s going to come after
me
again?”

That was a hard one to answer. She sounded scared. His natural protective instincts—and he was surprised to discover that he still had any—made him want to assure her that she was home free, out of the woods, safe. Unfortunately, honesty wouldn’t let him. “Three who were connected in daily life” implied that the other two victims would know the first. “Close together”—hell, what did that mean? As a time frame, it was vague. But Nicky had been attacked within minutes of the first killing. . . . By accident, because she had stumbled across the crime scene at just the wrong moment, or by design? There was no way to be sure. But one thing he was sure of: If the message was legitimate—and that was a big
if
—Nicky had reason to be concerned. On the other hand, since she was safely out of the way, there was no reason to confirm what she already knew and in the process possibly scare her senseless.

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not an expert on nutcase killers.”

There was the briefest of pauses.

“Great,” she said.

Something about her tone made him smile.

“From everything I’ve been able to learn, though, these kinds of perps tend to operate within a comfort zone. They choose victims within at the most a few hours’ drive from their home. If we assume that this is the same guy who killed those three girls fifteen years ago—and that’s assuming a lot at this point—then I feel pretty safe in saying that he’s from the local area. In other words, I don’t think you have to worry about him showing up in Chicago anytime soon.”

“Unless you’re wrong.”

There was that tone again. It wasn’t quite sarcasm, but it was close.

“I gotta admit, that’s always a possibility.” He couldn’t help it. He was smiling again. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suggest you keep your doors locked.”

“Oh, thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that one.”

He laughed out loud. “I really do think you’re safe. Chicago’s a long way away, and as far as I’ve ever heard, jet-setting serial killers are pretty rare.”

A beat passed.

“So you think this is a serial killer?”

“At this point, it’s kind of looking that way.”

“So why is he contacting
me
?” The undertone of fear was back in her voice, and it effectively banished his smile.

Again, he wanted to reassure her. Again, he couldn’t.

“I don’t know. Some of these guys like to brag. Maybe that’s what he’s doing. Maybe he chose you because of the TV thing: You know, he’s seen you on TV and he feels a connection. Or maybe he feels a connection to you because he targeted you and you got away.”

As he spoke, Joe caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye, and automatically glanced toward the opposite side of the bedroom. A shadow, slightly denser than the rest, seemed to take on a vaguely human form as it slid through the bedroom doorway before vanishing into the living room. Joe grimaced, then deliberately looked up at the ceiling just so he wasn’t watching shadows anymore. Ignoring things he didn’t want to see was getting to be an art with him.

“Or maybe he thinks I can identify him.”

“There’s that.”

She made an impatient sound. “Do you have any idea
at all
about who might be doing this?”

“Statistically, serial killers are overwhelmingly white males in their thirties and forties. Other than that, the field is wide open.”

“What are you doing, reading up on it?” She sounded vaguely scandalized.

“Google’s a wonderful thing.”

“You’re
Googling
serial killers?” Okay, there was no vague about it now. She was definitely scandalized.

“It’s a place to start.”

“You’re joking—aren’t you?” There was the tiniest note of uncertainty in the last two words that told him that she was not entirely sure. Since he
wasn’t
joking, at least not entirely, he chose to leave the matter ambiguous.

“Maybe. Think you could send me a copy of that e-mail?”

“Yes.” She sounded relieved, as if she’d taken his
maybe
as reassurance. “What’s your e-mail address?”

Joe told her. Then, because he got the sense that she was getting ready to end the conversation and he wanted, however stupidly, to keep her talking just a little bit longer, he asked, “How’s the head?”

“Better. I’ve got a black eye.”

“I’m not surprised.” Picturing it, he frowned. “What about the knife wound?”

“It’s healing. It itches, though.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You back at work yet?”

“Yes.”

There didn’t seem to be a lot more to say. And he wasn’t doing himself any favors by trying to prolong the conversation. She might be what the before part of him wanted, but she wasn’t what the after part knew he needed. Anyway, she was in Chicago, and he was stuck down here in paradise.

End of story.

“Well, I’ll be watching for you on TV.”

“Thanks.”

Just when the pause stretched out to the point when Joe knew it was time to say good-bye and hang up, she spoke again.

“Really, how’s the investigation going?”

Really,
he’d told her the truth the first time. “Okay.”

“Has the FBI gotten involved? Or anybody like that?”

The saying about
hope springs eternal
popped into his mind. Thanks to shows like
Law and Order
and
CSI,
everybody always thought that once a major crime, such as a murder, was committed, armies of specially trained investigators swarmed the case like ants at a picnic.
Wrong.

“Murders generally fall under the jurisdiction of the local police force. That would be me and my guys. The FBI’s involved only as far as we’ve sent some evidence off to their crime lab.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“We found a couple of hairs on the victim that weren’t hers. There was some stuff under her fingernails. I’m hoping it’s human tissue—that she clawed him—so that we can get some DNA, but it might just be dirt. Footprints, things like that.”

“Were
there footprints?”

Joe grimaced. Actually, by the time they’d gotten to the point of trying to preserve evidence, there’d been
dozens
of damned footprints. In the rush to get cops and paramedics and ambulance workers on the scene, to say nothing of the continually growing number of onlookers who had converged on the spot as soon as word had started spreading about what was going on, everybody and their mother seemed to have trampled that particular patch of earth. But there had been one footprint partly under the pines—and from the looks of it, he would have guessed that it had been made by a man’s tennis shoe or walking shoe. The others he’d had photographed; that one had been photographed and had a plaster cast made of it. The plaster cast had been sent off to the FBI crime lab along with everything else.

“A few.”

“Can you tell”—there was a catch in her voice—“was she sexually assaulted?”

“No.” The autopsy findings had been very clear about that.

“Neither had Tara Mitchell.”

“I’m aware.” Joe had, in fact, already spent hours going over that autopsy report and comparing it to Karen Wise’s. There were a number of similarities—multiple stab wounds, shorn hair, the general location of the crime—but also some dissimilarities. For example, Tara Mitchell’s face had been practically destroyed. Karen Wise’s face hadn’t been touched—but then, in the case of Karen Wise, the killer had been interrupted. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to the facial-mutilation part yet.

“Did you ever find out who screamed?” she asked. “During the broadcast, I mean?”

Joe couldn’t keep the mock surprise out of his voice. “Don’t tell me you don’t think it was a ghost?”

“That’s just it,” Nicky said, refusing to rise to his bait and sounding unhappy. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few days. You don’t think it could have been Karen?”

He had been wondering that himself, almost from the moment he had realized he had a dead woman lying under the Old Taylor Place’s pines. From what he’d been able to determine so far, the timeline made it possible. As far as anyone was admitting, Karen had last been seen in a good light with a positive identification in the kitchen, just before she had headed out the back door to take a call on her cell phone. That had been some six and a half minutes before the screams had ripped through the night. The call, which had come from Sid Levin, who confirmed that Karen had been alive and well at the end of their conversation, had ended in a normal fashion approximately one minute and fifty-eight seconds before the screams. He’d checked the timing against tapes of the TV show; again, nothing to rule Karen out as the screamer. He’d even conducted a few impromptu tests of his own—having Dave stand in various places in the yard and shriek at the top of his lungs while he listened and recorded the sounds from different locations in the house—but none of the screams he’d been able to capture had matched the ones that had provided such a shattering finale to
Twenty-four Hours Investigates.
But then, of course, he had to take into consideration the fact that Dave wasn’t a woman shrieking in mortal fear for her life, either.

“I don’t know,” he said. “So far that’s kind of up in the air. You’d tell me if those screams were part of the show and you knew it, right?”

He heard her draw in a breath.

There was no mistaking the bristle in her tone. “I’ve already told you—”

“I know, I know,” Joe interrupted before she could finish. “I just had to ask again, that’s all. Because I’m really not coming up with a source for those screams.”

“So maybe you should look harder.” Bristle had turned to bite.

“I mean to,” he said amiably.

A beat passed.

“My mother is a genuine psychic medium, you know.” Nicky still sounded a little hot under the collar. “She truly is able to tap into energies and emotions that the rest of us can’t.”

“You’re saying she can talk to the dead.” If he sounded skeptical, it was an accident. The tone he was going for was strictly neutral.

“Yes.”

“Then would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”