The Vision (24 page)

“This is absurd,” Max said. “Mary, I won’t let you have the pistol.”

“Then I’ll go without it.”

He glared down at her. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

She stood up, faced him. She met his eyes and held them, as if to prove, through the directness of her gaze, the depth of her commitment. She spoke with quiet intensity and with a foreboding tone that chilled Lou to the bone. “I’m up against something so big, so evil that I can only guess at the dimensions like a blind child feeling an elephant’s leg. These past few days have been a living hell for me, Max.”

“I know. And—”

“You can’t know. No one can know.”

“If you—”

“Don’t interrupt,” she said. “I want you to understand. So you’ve just got to listen. Max, I’m afraid to go to sleep, and I’m afraid to wake up in the morning. I’m afraid to open every door I come to, afraid to turn around. I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of what might happen—and of what might not happen. Dammit, I’m even afraid to go to the bathroom alone! I cannot live like this. I refuse to live like this. There’s something about this case that makes it different from all others, something that’s working inside of me like acid, eating me alive. This case touched my life like nothing else I’ve worked on, but I don’t know why. Max, I sense, I feel, I
know
that if I don’t pursue this man with every ounce of energy I have and in every way I know how, then he’ll come after me.”

The trivet on the Ouija board moved, but Lou was the only one to see it. It slid to the spot marked YES, as if in agreement with Mary’s prediction.

“If I don’t take the initiative,” she said, “I’ll lose what little advantage I might now have. I can’t walk away. If I try to run, I won’t get far. I’ll die.”

Max said, “And if you pursue this man, if you insist on going down to that tower tonight, then you’ll probably die sooner.”

“I might,” she said. “But if I do, at least I’ll have taken responsibility for my own life and death. All my life, I’ve been scared of everything, and I’ve let someone else deal with my bogeymen for me. Not anymore. Because this time no one else can help me. The answer is inside of me, and if I don’t find it soon, I’m finished. It’s past time I stopped hiding behind strong men. I’ve got to take chances. When I risk something and fail, I’ve got to suffer the consequences like anybody else.

If I’m always pampered, cuddled, and cushioned from shock, then my successes in life are mean ingless. I’ve decided that no one—not Alan, not you, Max, and especially not that part of me that’s still a dependent six-year-old
-no one
is going to stop me from living a full life.”

They stood in silence for a while.

The grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour.

Lou said, “Forty-five minutes until he takes a shot at the queen of the boat parade.”

Mary said, “Well, Max?”

Finally he nodded. “We better get moving.”

 
 
Blood. Blood like ribbons tangled in her hair. Blood spotting her punctured breasts. Blood on her hands, her arms, her belly, her thighs. Blood on the sofa and chair. Blood on the draperies, on the wall. Bloody little footprints of a cat all across the light tan carpet.

Trying to hold down the taste of vomit, Officer Rudy Holtzman stepped carefully around the mutilated body of Erika Larsson, went into the dark kitchen, and turned on the lights. He used the wall phone to dial headquarters.

When the night girl, Wendy Newhart, answered, Holtzman said, “I’m out here at the Larsson place.” His voice was strained and hoarse
_;
it cracked on a couple of words. He cleared his throat. “The lights were on when I got here. Nobody answered the bell, but the door was ajar. She’s dead.”

“Oh, my
God!
Well, I’m not going to tell her father. That’s out of the question. Someone else will have to tell him.”

“Better get Charlie over here with the other squad car,” Holtzman said. “Call the medical examiner right away. And Patmore, of course. Tell Charlie to move his ass
_;
I don’t like being here alone.”

Wendy Newhart asked, “When was she killed?”

“How should I know? The medical examiner will know.”

“I mean, did it just happen before you got there? Within the past half hour?”

“What’s it matter?” Holtzman asked.

“Rudy, tell me! Did it just happen?”

“The blood’s mostly caked and dry. I can’t pinpoint the time of death, but it must surely have been a good many hours ago.”

“Thank the Lord for small miracles,” she said.

“What?”

She had hung up.

Holtzman put down the receiver and turned to see a black cat standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the front room, no more than five feet from him. Its fuzzy white muzzle had been tinted red-brown with blood. Holtzman took one step, kicked out at the cat, missed.

It squealed and ran.

 
 
They arrived at the harbor at five minutes past seven.

Max parked the Mercedes in a corner of the lot that, in season, served both a restaurant called Italian Villa and Kimball’s Arcade. Tonight the restaurant’s side of the lot was nearly full, while the other side was nearly empty.

The three of them got out of the car.

Lou drew up his shoulders against the cold. As the storm air had moved in from the Pacific, the temperature had dropped rapidly from a one o’clock high of seventy degrees to a current low of forty-four. The wind had increased, too; it whipped in from the harbor, lashed King’s Point, made the night seem even cooler than it was.

Lou said, “I still think I should go with Max, and you should stay here, where it’s safe.”

“It’s not safe anywhere for me,” Mary said.

“At least if you stayed here in the car—”

She waved one hand impatiently, interrupted him. “We’ve got two weapons we can use against this man we’re after: one is Max’s handiness with guns, and the other is my psychic talent. The two of us shouldn’t split up.”

The sea wind lifted her long hair, made it flap like a banner behind her.

Max put one hand on Lou’s shoulder. “I don’t want her in the thick of the action any more than you do. But maybe she’s right. She’s probably not in any greater danger there than here. Besides, neither of us is going to change her mind.”

“I feel so useless,” Lou said.

“We need someone here in the car,” Max said. “You’re our early-warning system.”

“We’re wasting time,” Mary said.

Lou nodded glumly. He kissed her cheek and told Max to take good care of her.

They hurried into the wind, across the parking lot toward the huge, deserted barnlike building that housed the array of souvenir stands, trinket stores, amusements, and coffee shops known collectively as Kimball’s Games and Snacks.

He got behind the wheel of the Mercedes and closed the door. Through the windshield he could barely see Max and Mary as they drew farther away and blended into the darkness around the clapboard and cedar-shingled pavilion.

A fierce gust of wind rocked the car. Forks of lightning stabbed through the sky, but still there was no rain.

Lou settled back, resigned to his role as a sentinel. If the killer didn’t anticipate Mary tonight, as he had last night, he would probably approach Kimball’s openly, brazenly. If Lou spotted a man moving toward the building, he would switch on the Mercedes’ ignition and alert Max with two short blasts of the horn. The pavilion and tower stood only sixty yards farther along the boardwalk that connected seven or eight businesses on this section of the harbor. The sound of the horn would travel that far undiminished, but it wasn’t likely the killer would recognize it as a signal. Even if Mary was able to foresee the exact time and direction of the man’s approach, the horn would be a welcome confirmation of her vision.

Of course, the psychopath might have anticipated them again and already be at the pavilion.

Lou shifted uneasily behind the wheel.

He thought of Patty Spooner, strangled to death with a priest’s stole. He thought of Barry Mitchell, hideously mutilated.

He looked left and right, peered into the rear-view mirror. No one. He squinted at the deep shadows along the side of the pavilion. All was still.

 
 
The black cat crouched on the top of a seven-foot-high set of bookshelves, no more than eight or ten inches from the ceiling in the front room of the cottage. Its forepaws hung over the edge of the shelf
_;
it was motionless, staring down at Rudy Holtzman with suspicion and contempt.

Filthy damned thing. He hated cats. Always had. And it gave him the creeps just to think about this one eagerly lapping up the murdered woman’s blood.

It made a deep, throaty sound, as if daring him to approach it.

He didn’t want to wait with the cat and the corpse, not even for the few minutes Charlie would need to get here in the other cruiser. He walked down the short hallway to inspect the part of the house he’d not yet seen.

In the bedroom he found an open window, where the wind played havoc with a pair of flimsy curtains and an oilcloth blind that was drawn down only halfway. The recent storms had soaked and badly stained the carpet.

Holtzman was suddenly excited. He studied the room, recreating in his mind those first few seconds when the sanctity of the house had been violated. He knew that more than rain had come in through that window. He was certain that he’d found the killer’s entrance. And as his glance traveled over the floor, he could hardly believe what he saw. It was one of those lucky breaks you seldom get in police work. Apparently the pistol had fallen unnoticed from a coat pocket as the killer climbed through the window.

Holtzman knelt on the damp carpet to get a closer look at the weapon. He was careful not to spoil any fingerprints that might be on it. If this killer was the same man who had slaughtered those nurses and the people in that beauty salon—and the style sure seemed the same to Holtzman—then the Anaheim and Santa Ana police already had more than enough good prints. So far prints had been of no use in cracking the case because the killer evidently had never had his taken by any police organization in the country. Nevertheless, because he prided himself on being more professional than anyone with whom he worked, Holtzman didn’t grasp the pistol and smear the evidence. He took a ball-point pen from his shirt pocket, slipped it through the trigger guard, lifted the gun off the floor, and held it in front of his eyes.

It was an unusual piece—a .45 Auto Colt. But nothing off the shelf. Something special. A collector’s item. The metal was engraved with delicate leaves and vines. There were also a number of animals —rabbits, deer, pheasants, foxes—etched in positions of flight beginning at the forward sight on the barrel, all of them incredibly detailed, beautifully rendered, all racing toward the butt.

He saw what appeared to be printing on the steel, where it met the wooden handgrip. The bedroom light was poor. The letters were tiny, between a quarter and a half inch high, inscribed with a spidery flourish of the engraver’s tool. Holtzman couldn’t read them.

He stood up and, carrying the Colt on the pen, went to the nearest lamp.

A collector’s piece like this one often passed through the hands of many owners who purchased and resold it at gun shows without bothering to register it with authorities. Nevertheless, with the engraver’s name (and providing the gun had not been stolen from a collection), they should be able to find the man who had commissioned it from Thorben. From him they had a chance of tracing it to the man who’d dropped it while coming through the window.

Still manipulating the weapon with his ball-point pen, Holtzman looked at the opposite side. Again, where the steel met the wooden handgrip, there was writing. Not the same words. He squinted. He read it. Then read it again. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

A siren rose in the distance and grew rapidly nearer.

Holtzman went down the hall to the side of the house that faced the dead-end macadam road. He stood in the open doorway he’d first found ajar.

Another police car, emergency beacons blazing, roared up the long hill from town. Patmore’s station wagon wasn’t far behind it.

Beneath the hall light Holtzman held up the Colt and read the second legend again.

THE DARKNESS AROUND the pavilion was lumpy, velvety, and deep. It offered dozens of hiding places.

Mary carried the flashlight, hooding it with one hand. Every time she made a sudden move in response to imagined noises, shadows danced.

She stayed close to Max as they circled the building, looking for a place where the killer might have gotten inside. Last night the police had entered with a key provided by the owners. That was a convenience denied both them and their quarry. The killer would have to break something to get in and reach the tower
_;
he would have to leave a trail.

She was impatient. Twice she urged Max to hurry.

Already the parade of lighted boats had begun its first circuit of the harbor, entering from the staging area at sea, still far down the channel but approaching fast. By seven-thirty the queen of the parade might well have begun her first pass of the tower.

On the west side of the pavilion, which faced the harbor and was flanked with a railed boardwalk, they found a shattered pane of glass in one of the mullioned windows that looked in on the lightless, deserted coffee shop.

“Did the killer do this?” Max asked.

She directed the flashlight at the ground, and in the soft glow of its backwash, she studied the damaged window. With the fingertips of her left hand she traced the wooden ribs that framed the missing pane. The night was already chilly, but the air got suddenly colder as she concentrated on the psychic impressions that the window held for her.