The Shoulders of Giants (28 page)

I made my way through the blinding whiteness to the door with the light bulb over it. The switch I found just inside bathed the small room in red light, and the bulb outside the door added some more white light to the studio. The light sources all mixed together as I left the door ajar to look for my evidence.

Photographs were hung up to dry in racks, and I couldn’t resist leafing through them. Shelley was good. Even better than I would have guessed from watching her work. It didn’t take long before I’d found which cupboard she kept the chemicals in, and what I had come for. I picked up the jar of potassium cyanide.

I knew what I was doing wasn’t legal. I knew that it couldn’t be used in court. I knew that if the police used it as the basis for a search warrant, anything they found would probably be inadmissible. But I had a plan. If I found something incriminating I would leave it in plain sight – somewhere it couldn’t be missed, then call the police and tell them, anonymously of course, that I had just seen someone breaking into the studio and that they were still inside. The police, naturally, would rush to the scene and find the intruder gone, but if they saw some evidence in plain sight they could act on it.

The cyanide was good, if it could be matched with the stuff that killed Julie Campbell, but it probably wasn’t enough to launch an investigation, so I kept looking. I turned to leave the small room, and something else caught my eye. On the counter top, next to a sort of chopping board, and a paper guillotine, lay a small craft knife. Shelley must have used it for cropping pictures. Amongst other things, perhaps. I reached out for the knife, but for some reason, I didn’t pick it up. For some reason, I chose to lay down on the floor instead, bleeding and unconscious.

Chapter 46

When I woke up, I was more than a little disoriented. My breathing was labored, I couldn’t see anything very clearly, and my left foot was warm, wet, and painful.

I raised my head, and saw a figure crouched down by my feet. In as swift a movement as I could manage, I raised my right knee up to my chest, and kicked out at the head of the figure. As they fell away, out of my field of vision, I put my hands to my face and felt plastic. I felt down to my neck, and discovered that the polythene bag that had been placed over my head had been taped down at my neck to prevent me from removing it.

I could hardly breathe at all, and I was beginning to panic. I clawed at my mouth, trying to break the polythene. It was too thick. I started checking my pockets. My right hand stopped on a shape in my jacket pocket, and if I could, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I removed the switchblade I’d taken off Dean Dugan a week before, opened it, and cut a hole in the bag over my head.

I sucked in air like a baby taking its first breath, and felt light headed. Before I knew what was happening, Shelley Ryan was on top of me, and lifting the craft knife high over her head in her left hand. I managed to catch her wrist before the knife pierced my chest, and with my other hand, I plunged the switchblade into her thigh. I twisted it so that the wound wouldn’t close, and shoved her off me. My hand went inside my jacket to my gun. It found nothing. It had no better luck looking for my backup on my belt.

Then I saw that Shelley was holding my Sundance. Bad move. She should have picked up the Glock. From the fact that she didn’t I inferred that she didn’t know much about guns. And that she probably wasn’t a very good shot. I made my decision to act. I leapt towards the wall, and smashed my fist into the glass cover of the box containing the fire axe.

As my feet left the floor, I heard a shot, and simultaneously felt a hot pain ripping through my side. I fell to the ground holding the fire axe in both hands, its metal head over my heart. Shelley took aim again, but her stance was terrible and her hands were shaking. I hoped she might miss. She squeezed the trigger, and the gun clicked. It jammed. I was so glad I hadn’t bought a revolver for a backup.

Shelley threw the Sundance across the room, and it skittered on the floor. I made a mental note of where it ended up, while Shelley turned around to look for the Glock. I looked at the distance between us. Too far. Instead, I swung the axe as hard as I could. I severed the bundle of cables coming from the ceiling just above the point where they entered the electrical box.

Everything went black.

There was no light from outside the door, no light from anywhere. Shelley had found the trigger on the Glock, and fired at me, but I was no longer there. I had rolled away.

I tried to stay as silent as possible as I assessed my damage. My foot was bleeding from a cut. She must have thought I was already dead, or wouldn’t last long. My hand was cut, but I didn’t think it was broken, and of course, I had a small hole in my right side. I located the hole, and started looking for an exit wound in my back. I found one.

It was a clean hole, and the fact that it was there at all was a good sign. At least the bullet hadn’t lodged in anything important. Trouble was, with two holes, I was losing blood fast. My shirt and jacket were soaked in blood, and I didn’t see how I could put pressure on both wounds at once, so I needed to get to a hospital quick. Assuming I could get out of there at all, of course.

I wondered what time it was, and if I would ever see Abby again.

I found the wall, and started moving along it, staying close to the floor. I figured if I moved around the outside of the room, I’d eventually find a door, and be able to escape.

Neither of us said a thing. I listened for her breathing. I could hear something, but I couldn’t work out what direction it was in. I tried to keep my own breathing as shallow as possible.

I hadn’t been crawling for long when my hand touched something metal. It was my Sundance. Now I was armed too. Admittedly, I only had a .25 caliber pistol against a 9mm, and even with my extra clip I had twelve good rounds versus Shelley’s sixteen, but it was a start. I eased the dud round out of the chamber, and jacked another in to replace it. I did it as quietly as possible but you can’t unjam a handgun without making any noise. I rolled again, and heard another shot but didn’t feel it.

When I found the door, I reached up and grabbed the handle. It rattled slightly, and straight away a bullet slammed into the wall by my shoulder. The door was locked anyway. I decided my lock-picking skills definitely weren’t advanced enough to escape silently in pitch darkness, so I moved on. I decided that if I could get Shelley talking, I‘d have more chance of hitting her. I also realized that she would have more chance of hitting me if I spoke, but I was definitely a better shot.

“Big mistake, Shelley.” My voice sounded as loud as a gunshot in the darkened quiet room.

She said nothing.

“You could have just shot me when you came in,” I said, making myself as small a target as possible and trying to keep moving. “You could have claimed I broke in.”

“You did,” she said. Her voice was loud, clear, and coming from about ten feet to my left.

Chapter 47

I found myself waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Of course, they couldn’t, because no matter how large my pupils became there was no light at all in the room. It was still way too dark to figure out exactly where Shelley was standing.

“So why all this?” I asked her. “Why the ‘Zorro’ routine, when you could have just shot me as a burglar?”

“Maybe I didn’t want anyone else poking around the place. I dump you somewhere, you become just another baffling corpse. The police would stumble over each other again once a new body was discovered.”

“I see you’ve been following the investigation.” As I crawled along, my head hit something wooden and movable. It was the desk Shelley’s assistant had sat at to make notes and phone calls. A bullet shattered the silence, and the leg of the desk.

“Well, I do have a vested interest,” said Shelley, as if she hadn’t just shot at me.

She seemed eager to talk. I was certainly eager to listen, but I had something to do first. Sitting under the desk, as if it offered some protection, I took my cell phone from my trouser pocket. I covered the large LCD screen with one hand and, with the other, dialed Scott’s number as best I could in the dark.

Once the LCD faded I placed the phone on the floor and moved away from it. To cover the sound, however quiet, of Scott’s answer, I thought of something else to say.

“Okay Shelley,” I said, trying not to make it too obvious, “I understand why you killed Grant, but why the others?”

“You’re so clever, you figure it out.” She was trying the same trick as me. Trying to make me talk to help her with her aim. She didn’t seem too shabby as it was, so when I answered, I kept it brief.

“My opinion? The others were a diversion.” Shelley went quiet. Quieter than before. Perhaps she was trying again to locate me.

She finally spoke. “I’m impressed,” she said.

In the dark, I looked smug. No-one saw.

“Nine innocent people?”

“Ten, counting you,” she said, and another bullet sped past my ear and thunked into the wall behind me. “Besides, they weren’t all innocent.”

“Leon Walker?”

She laughed. “That idiot? He never did anything. I took Walsh’s answering machine tape because I’d left a message on it. When I played it back I found his phone call, so I tracked him down. He was so easy to seduce it made me sick. He cried when I put the shotgun in his mouth.”

“Who then?”

Suddenly the light bulb came on over the door to the darkroom. It was the brightest thing I’d ever seen, and it burned into my retinas. Before I could recover, I was on the floor, bleeding from a new hole in my left shoulder, and swearing. I started rolling, and I counted three more shots as they ricocheted off the hard cement floor. I got to my knees, and couldn’t see Shelley. Couldn’t see much of anything except the bright, bright light.

I started firing my .25 in its general direction. Within a few shots, the light went out. I rolled again, so I wasn’t where Shelley had last seen me, and heard two more rounds from the Glock. In my head, I tried to count. I made it that she had six shots left, and I had one or two before I would have to reload. I didn’t want to wait until I had run out, so I swapped the full clip in my holster for the one in my gun. It occurred to me how lucky I was that Shelley had left the clips in the holster.

Shelley continued as if nothing had happened. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Grant was not innocent. He deserved everything he got..”

“Oh, that’s right. He left you. Yeah, that’s a good reason to kill someone.” I was living dangerously, but I figured I didn’t have much time left before I had to make my move. She didn’t answer straight away. I thought I heard a footstep to my left.

“He killed my baby,” she said.

I hadn’t expected that.

“It was the night I told him I was pregnant. We had a fight because he’d just beaten a drunk driving charge and I told him he had to be more responsible now. After I’d gone to bed he set my house on fire. Tried to kill me. I lost the baby. When he found out I was still alive he took all my money and disappeared. They would have found me eventually. This way, by the time Grant was dead, the investigation was already well underway. An investigation where the narrow minded police immediately ruled out all women. I waited until the time was right, then all I had to do was distract the police with some other bodies.”

“And you had no trouble killing all those people?”

“Not at all. If I was caught for Grant’s murder I would have been facing the death penalty, so I had a choice to make. My life, or the lives of eight people I’d never met. The men were easy, and the cop’s daughter, I seduced her too. The others I had to take by surprise.”

She was gloating and I wanted to know more, but my time was running out. I stayed on my knees, closed my eyes, and held my gun out at shoulder height. I listened for her breathing. It was not enough.

“Why the Z? On the feet? What does it mean?” I said. I heard another shot, but nothing hit me.

“Nothing. It’s arbitrary. All I needed was something to connect the bodies. If people agonized over what it meant, so much the better. I meant noth...”

Before she could finish, I turned my upper body towards the sound of her voice, and fired five times.

“Ow, you bastard!” Shelley said. “You shot me. You fucking shot me.”

“Hurts, doesn’t it?

“You bastard. You’re fucking dead. You’re...”

I emptied my last three rounds at the voice, and it stopped. No more yelling, no more swearing, no more shooting. No more breathing, from what I could hear.

The room became silent and black again. There was an eerie calm to it. I slumped on the floor and lay there until I passed out. Then I lay there some more.

Chapter 48

I thought I was still in Shelley’s studio when I woke up. The walls and the ceiling of my hospital room were also painted white.

Various parts of my body were bandaged, and when I tried to sit up in bed, the pain in my side stopped me short.

“Hey buddy,” Scott’s voice said from the end of the bed. “How you doing?”

“Great,” I said. “Just great. Have you filled in my menu card yet, only I want extra Jello.”

“That was some stunt you pulled.”

“If the next words out of your mouth are ‘It could have gotten you killed’, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay, I won’t say it. But I do have to read you your rights, I’m afraid. I hate to have to do it, but you did kill someone.”

I lifted my head, and looked at his face. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. So I asked.

“Are you joking?”

“Jake, you shot her six times.”

Not bad, I thought. Six out of eight, when I couldn’t even see the target.

“This is crazy.” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to speak to your attorney.”

“I don’t have an attorney.”

“I took the liberty of calling one for you.”

“Scott, look...” I stopped when he gestured towards the door.