SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (54 page)

When she asked him one of her listed questions:

“Have you ever hurt a woman or a child?” he answered, “Lots of them.”

She raised her gaze from the yellow legal pad lying on the dresser and turned to him. “Who?” she asked. “And why?”

He smiled at her and wriggled in his bonds, flexing his fingers. He was slightly built, not much larger than Shadow. He had a dark growth of beard that grew to a point on his chin, making him appear more sinister than he would have looked without it. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Anywhere.”

“They asked for it,” he said in a morally superior tone.

“Did they? Children asked to be hurt?”

“Even them.”

She returned to the chair and sat close to the bed. Her mind tried to slip away to remember Scott, but she would not let it. “Tell me.”

“If you'd like.” He spoke of his exploits the way a mountain climber might tell cronies of his journeys around the world to scale the highest peaks.

Her face never betrayed her. The club nightlife and the dancing had taught her how to camouflage her thoughts. She sat quietly, listening without commenting until he was done. It took more than two hours and her thoughts did not wander from him even once.

Depravity. He reveled in it. If he told the truth—and she knew he had, who would admit to oral sex with a six-month-old if it was not the truth?—then he was lower than a slug, lower than the demons stoking the fires of hell.

She gave him the highball glass of doctored whiskey.

A man-hating thing? Was that what this was all about? Just that and nothing else? Did she need to be back in the state hospital, Missed out on drugs, for thinking she should clean the city of its brutal men?

Or did this man, and the other two she had killed, need to continue walking the earth and getting away with their crimes against women? Was she going insane or was she simply growing more sane? She thought of Charles Bronson in the Death Wish films and felt a kinship with the vigilante character he had portrayed. At one time she had thought his movie character over-simplified and his motives too elementary. Now she thought just the opposite. Revenge was perfectly suitable and ridding the world of evil perfectly acceptable to her mind.

But this was no movie.

This was blood and vomit and the most deadly poison.

It still bothered her to play the game. It took nerves of steel, a clear mind, true courage. Murder took the most courage of all, even more than coming back to herself had taken when she had been lost in the fog that year in the hospital. If she made a mistake . . . If she killed someone who didn't deserve to die . . .

But that wouldn't happen. She shook her head now, slowly, and reached out to untie Chap Wilson from her bed.

This man could never have left the Shoreville mansion alive or she would have been responsible for loosing a monster back into the world to commit more crimes against children. Babies. Little innocent . . .

Her mind slipped a gear and her hands paused in the untying of a scarf. A memory floated to the foreground of her thoughts. She saw her mother, tall as the ceiling it seemed, which meant Kay must have been less than five years old. Her mother was being struck by her daddy. He knocked her to the floor with one backhand blow to the face. Kay ran to her and sat down beside her on the kitchen linoleum. She could feel the cold come through her knees. She could smell mama's sweat and the background scent of garbage in the pail, dishes unwashed in the sink. She brushed back mama's curtain of black hair and touched her hands covering her face. “Mama? Mama!”

The hands fell away and there was a red welt rising, closing off her mother's left eye. Kay looked up at her father, his raised voice booming like thunder above them.

“She ain't hurt. Get away from her, girl.”

His hand clamped around her forearm and lifted her aside as if she were a sack of potatoes. Then his hand closed over her mother's arm in the same place and lifted her, too, into a standing position.

Kay struggled to wedge herself between them when he raised his hand again to hit her mother. Kay pushed his legs. They were hairy legs sticking out of big white boxer shorts, the firm, muscled legs of a young man. Rock beneath her small hands.

Then the vision faded away and Shadow understood something she had never known about herself. She had not consciously known that scene from her childhood existed. It was a revelation, since her father was gone before she was really old enough to remember him well, and her mother had never mentioned those times when he must have beaten her.

“Oh, mama.”

Why didn't she miss her mother now? Why hadn't she called her since her release from the hospital?

She thought she might know the answers. She just hadn't thought of them before. Her mother had never been strong or dependable. She wasn't good in a crisis. She had never been a fighter. She let men and life and disaster roll over her and wear her down smooth as a stone in a creek bed. That's why Shadow left home early and married. Her mother by that time was . . . a shadow.

True! She lost substance as Kay grew, moving into the background of life like a ghost seeking corners. She hardly spoke. She didn't have a hobby or care about herself, about her daughter, about anything enough to make a fuss or an effort.

Why would Kay think to call her for help or to even let her know she was free from the hospital?

But wait . . .

Shadow leaned over, feeling a cramp in her chest like a fist wadding her lungs into crumpled balls. She sucked in little sips of air until the cramp passed.

Her mother was dead.

She had died during her daughter's first marriage and before the divorce. Kay had been at the funeral, paid for by her husband, and she'd seen her mother put into the ground.

How could she have forgotten an event as important as the death of her own mother? Was she truly losing her mind? Or just her memory? And why?

She heard the door opening and turned from the dead man on the bed. Charlene stood in the doorway, light from the hall showing through her long gown.

“Shadow, you can't do this. I told you before, you can't do this.”

Shadow glanced at the dead man and back at her friend. “He hurt a baby.” Her voice cracked. “He admitted it. He had sexually abused children, Charlene. What should I have done?”

Charlene sighed and stepped into the room. “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know nothing anymore. I don't know if I ever did know anything.”

She came to the bed and helped Shadow finish untying the limp body from the iron rails. “At least he's not fat,” she said, rolling the bloody sheets over him, and taking the man's torso into her arms to help carry him through the darkened mansion and down to the pier where the boat was moored.

~*~

The phosphorous light from the computer screen bathed Son's face in a pale blue glow. He was not working on a detective novel. He was thinking.

Earlier in the evening, the local television news had reported a man found out in the Gulf between the island of Galveston and the mainland. It did not appear he had drowned and no one had reported a man missing from a boat. Cause of death unknown at this time.

Son knew it was victim number three. He was sure the man had not drowned. He had been murdered.

It was time for Son to make a visit to his old friend who worked in the morgue. He needed more information than he was able to glean from the papers and the TV news. What, for instance, did the victims have in common? Where did they come from? How were they murdered?

He turned off the computer and went to his bedroom. His mother had been asleep for hours.

He lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, thinking.

The next morning after breakfast he told his mother he had to go to the library to do research. He left her with a pitcher of iced water and made sure she did her business in the bathroom before he left.

Once downtown, he parked and walked two blocks to the hospital. The city morgue was housed underground. He took an elevator down, wrinkling his nose at the smell of antiseptic filtering through even into the elevator's carpeted floor and walls.

Stanley worked days as a morgue attendant. He logged them in and, after he acquired his degree, would assist in autopsies. Son found him idle in a little back office eating pastries and drinking coffee. “Hey, there. How the hell are you?” he said as Son poked his head around the door. “Come on in and have a bear claw.”

Son ambled in, hands in his pockets. He sat down on a metal folding chair facing the desk. “I hadn't seen you in a while, and I'm working on a new book. Thought I'd come down for a chat.”

“Sure, anytime. I was wondering how you were getting on. I loved your last book, man. That was a good one. I didn't know the killer until the very last page.”

Son smiled. “That's kind of you to say, Stanley. A writer never can tell if he's really getting it right without his readers.”

“When's the new one due out?” Stanley held out the tray of pastries to Son then set it down again when Son shook his head.

“Not until the middle of next year. I haven't quite finished it yet.”

“God, I wish you wrote faster! I need a good book to read.”

“I just can't crank them out fast enough, huh? I'll try to do better. Listen, what I'm here for is to see if you might help me with an idea for my next proposal.”

Stanley grew animated, his hands moving in the air as he talked. “Whadda ya want to know? We have plenty of stiffs to pick from.”

“I keep hearing on the news about bodies brought in from out of the bay. You get them?”

“Yeah, we got ‘em. New one just today, fact is. They're kind of chewed up. Fish, man, they seem to love man meat.” He stared at a raspberry jelly donut and grunted.

“What do you think killed them?”

“ME says the first one was stabbed. These last two, though, they've been poisoned.”

Son looked startled then quickly covered his surprise. “Now that's a tasty method.” He knew Stanley would never release this information to the press guys. He trusted Son to use it in a novel and that didn't matter. Fiction never mattered. And since Stanley's boss never found out, who could it hurt?

“What kind of poison, you know yet?”

“Rat poison probably. Victims have a high concentration of Warfarin in their organs. You know how bad that shit tastes? I don't know how someone got these guys to swallow it, but there's traces of it in the membranes of their mouths and plenty of it in the stomach lining. They drank it, all right. Real weird.”

“Can't be suicides, I guess?” Son said.

“No way, man. There's lots better ways to check out than drinking rat-fucking-poison. Might as well be drinking shit. And two men poisoned isn't a coincidence, it's premeditated. Nah, somebody killed them, that's for sure.”

“Any leads as to who might be doing it?”

“Nope. Any fingerprints forensic might have wanted to lift from their skin got rubbed off in the salt water. Or eaten by the fish. They float in butt-naked. Now there's a detail you could use, huh?” He laughed. “Won't be any stained clothes to check on these dudes. Whoever's doing it is taking ‘em out in a boat, we guess, and dropping ‘em over the side. Might be killing them on land. It's gonna be tough for the cops to crack this one.”

“You expect there will be more?”

Stanley contemplated his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I'm no expert, but since we have three, two of them poisoned, I'd say we'll get more.”

“Serial killer then,” Son said.

“Looks to be.”

“These guys, the victims, they have anything in common?”

Stanley held out his hands in a helpless gesture. “Now this is completely confidential, you know? Ah, well, I guess I don't have to tell you that. But if the press boys got it, hoo doggie!”

Son scooted forward on the metal chair. “What is it? C'mon, this is great stuff for a book, Stan, absolutely great.”

Stan's voice dropped to a whisper. “Well, see, I overheard a homicide dick say this newbie, this new floater, he's the second one that had been hanging out in the titty clubs. Down there in Montrose, you know, those places, naked girls and all?”

“Wow.”

“Maybe it's a woman doing it. Feature that for a minute if you want your balls to go into hiding. Some bull-dyke hates men or something. Or some chick got a grudge against the whole male gender, you know what I mean? Gives me the fucking creeps. I always knew women would make good killers. Now I'm sure of it.”

“The cop say it was a woman doing it?”

Stan shook his head. “He didn't say it, I just worked it out.” He laughed, slapping his hand down on the desk top. “I'm starting to do plots like a writer, ain't I? Kee-rist.”

Son stood. “Well, it sounds promising.”

“Think you can use it?”

“It might work out. I haven't used poison in a book yet. And the literature does say poison is the favored method of murder for women. I think you may be onto something. Maybe you ought to tell that cop what you suspect when he comes back.”

“You think I should?” He stared off into the middle distance. “Yeah, I should do that, shouldn't I? Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye on this one for you. You be back if we get another one and I might know more to help you out.”

Son put out his hand to shake. Stanley stood and took it. “I appreciate the hell out of this, Stan.”

“Hey, my pleasure. I feel like a real consultant, you know?”

“I'll have to put you in one of my dedications soon.”

“You'd do that? God, that'd be terrific. My mom would love it.”

Son left the building thinking about the nakedness of the victims found in the waters off the coast. Somebody was stripping them before dumping them in the bay. Why? It sure as hell cut down on the clues. Just making identification was a bitch. And he wondered if Stan was right, that it could be a female killer. That would be a real switch for him to copy a female. A challenge. A perfect game.

How many female serial killers had there been in history? Precious few. The last had been that woman down in Florida—let men pick her up hitchhiking, then offed them in repayment. Geraldo had interviewed her from prison. Spooky woman. Cold hard eyes.