Vengeance to the Max (25 page)

Because everything that happened had been about Cordelia’s child. Cordelia died because of her baby. A circle that encompassed Cameron, Cordelia, Wendy, and most importantly Bud.

“So do you still believe Cordelia possessed you and that’s how you knew she was dead?”

Max shook her head, almost thoughtfully. “No. I haven’t really
felt
her since I left the woods. It was something different. Residual memories. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Maybe it was more of Wendy’s essence still lingering out there.
Her
essence even more than Cordelia’s.”

“Maybe.” How the hell was she really supposed to know?

“The key is little Wendy. Why was she so important to you?”

Tired of lying, to herself, to Cameron, to Witt, the truth slipped from her lips. “We were kindred spirits.” Shame was their common emotion. They had both been victims of terrible men, but worse, they were victims of their own shame.

That’s why bringing down Bud had been so important, even before she’d learned what he’d done to Cameron. He was her symbol of the wrongs done to Wendy. Wrongs done to herself.

“Facing your past will set you free, Max.”

How trite. Especially since he’d said it more than once. Cameron’s pained voice and eau-de-peppermint faded out the window, as if he’d left her to face it alone.

She crawled from the bed. Witt hadn’t answered her calls. She’d done her best to tell him. She hadn’t gone to Bud, he’d come to her.
He’d
made her promise to Witt null and void. Hell, that was shifting the blame, if there was any. She should never have made that promise to Witt. This was and always had been her fight, not Witt’s. Bud was her responsibility alone. Today she’d wrest from him in person what she’d failed to get in the middle of the night. An admission of guilt, something she could take to Witt, something to nail Bud to the wall for his crimes.

Payment for yours, Max
? The voice inside her head was neither hers nor Cameron’s.

She showered, dressed in one of her black pantsuits, chose a striped red and black tie because the colors shrieked power, then stepped into her three-inch spike-heeled pumps.

“How did he know?” she whispered to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. How did Bud know her crime?

“Maybe you’re two halves of the same coin,” Cameron answered.

She shivered with the thought of it. “Soulmates.” As Bud had claimed. “Soulmates in hell.”

“Think how similar the acts.”

The tremors began at her shoulders, shuddered down her arms, then dissipated through her fingers. The gold of her wedding ring glittered in the vanity lights. She stroked on eye shadow, mascara, blusher, and lipstick.

“Think.” Cameron gave her but a moment before he continued the torture. “You made a human sacrifice to survive.” She chewed the color from her lips. “Bud sacrificed his humanity.”

Her heart cried out, wanted to deny that she could be anything like that man. But truth was truth. Cameron’s words dripped in imagined blood across the bathroom mirror in front of her. As a child, she’d taken to hiding in the closet hoping the devil would never find her. He always did. The devil in her life had now become the truth. She couldn’t hide from it any more than she’d hidden from her uncle. She wouldn’t hide from Bud.

From the toilet lid, Buzzard watched with unblinking eyes.

“Don’t give me that look,” she told the cat. “I know I promised Witt I wouldn’t see that man, but Bud threatened
me
.” She repaired the destroyed lipstick on her mouth. “I have to play this drama out.” She had no idea what her lines were.

At seven-thirty, Max double-locked her studio despite the fact that she’d left the upstairs window open for the cat to come and go as he pleased. Her high heels sunk into the gravel as she traversed the drive. The morning, cold but bright, bore no hint of the usual seasonal rain. Wind whistled through the elm outside her window while Buzzard cried plaintively amongst its branches. The shush of car tires rushed in from the nearby freeway. A mother called her youngsters to heel. Down the block, children laughed, a morning like any other morning. For them, at least.

She saw him as she reached the end of her driveway. Her mystery man from the airport, in other circumstances, someone else’s Greek god. Somehow, in four days, certainly in the past four hours, she’d forgotten all about him, forgotten the urgency she’d felt to find out who he was.

His black hair, overlong, reached past the collar of his khaki shirt. His jaw line stubbled, his lids drooping, his skin pasty and pouches beneath his eyes from lack of sleep, he slumped in the seat of his vintage blue Camero. Despite the lazy facade, he watched her with dark, alert eyes, beautiful like a strong, young wolf in falling snow and equally as dangerous.

She crossed the street, heels tapping. For the moment, she had the height advantage. “Why are you following me?”

He opened his car door, forcing her to take a step back. She stopped with enough room for him to get out. The slam of the door broke the silence of the neighborhood. She hadn’t realized all other sound had fallen away. He towered despite her three extra inches of heel. One corner of his mouth lifted. Many would have thought it was a smile. Max knew it to be a predatory growl.

He’d been after her for almost three weeks, dogging her footsteps, showing up in her rearview mirror without even the guise of unobtrusiveness. Like a wolf, he’d stayed beyond her reach, turning as she turned, disappearing into the shadows when she would have followed him. “What do you want?”

He reached inside his black leather jacket. Max’s heart pounded with a fear-threat reaction, but she yielded not another inch of ground, not even when a car passed from the left, air currents washing through the material of her suit, through her pantyhose, ruffling the back of her hair.

The wolf didn’t have a gun in his hand. He held four fanned photographs. Turning with a flourish, he laid them out one by one on the roof of his car.

“Beginning of September.” His voice dripped warm honey. Frostbite numbed her fingers. “Wendy Gregory.” He turned, brown eyes sharp and trained on her. “You found her killer.”

Max swallowed, said nothing, but prepared to site the fifth amendment, sure this guy was a cop out to get her.

Next photo, a finger tap. “Late September.” She knew well the date. “Tiffany Lloyd.” Murdered after sex in a public restroom. “You”—pause for visceral contact, eyes backlit with gold, age indeterminate beneath a zealot’s eagerness—“found her killer.”

She closed her eyes to the next picture with its soft
puft
of air against the roof of the car as he tapped. Two small girls minus protective mothers skipped down the sidewalk, laughing, quieting for a moment when they saw the two adults, rushing past in fear, then laughing again once they’d reached what they thought was safe territory. Didn’t they know safety was a figment of imagination?

The wolf’s voice went on. “Early October. Bethany Spring.”

“Her killer found
me
.”

He smiled with two pointed eyeteeth, kept that predatory gaze on her as he patted down the last photo, the one that had appeared in the paper, as the others had. “Lance La Russa.”

“Three weeks ago.” Give or take. She tipped her head, waiting for his answering line.

“Another killer unmasked.” He blinked. “By you.”

Unmasked, yes, but Max had not discovered a perpetrator as harsh as the word
killer
described. And Lance, though murdered, was not the true victim in it all.

“Who
are
you?” How had he connected the four deaths?

“I’m asking the questions.”

“And I’m not giving any answers.” A cop. He had to be. Four different jurisdictions, four sets of investigators, not one had looked to her. Not until this guy. She thought of Witt, itched to reach for the cell phone he’d given her, the one hidden in the voluminous pockets of her purse. But she didn’t need a savior. Keeping her hands at her sides, she refused to fidget.

A bus rumbled by the end of the road, the heavy scent of diesel in the air despite the distance. Minivans packed with moms and kids invaded the quiet, tree-lined street. An old lady, sensible shoes slapping the pavement, plastic poop bag in hand, walked her bouncing poodle. The next door neighbor kid, and future hoodlum, streamed by on his skateboard, a sneer distorting his face.

Max and the man waited the activity out in silence, like gunslingers at high noon. She moved her hand to her hip. Mystery Man—to her mind, he wasn’t anything like a Greek God now—reached once more to his pocket. He kept a rumpled, folded bit of paper to himself but put the photograph in her hands.

A Polaroid. Max gasped, for the first time unable to hide her reaction.

“Recognize him?” There should have been a taunt in the wolf’s voice. Instead a trace of sympathy laced his tone.

Max closed her eyes, fighting the urge to drop the thing like a hot coal. The stiff paper burned her fingertips. She’d seen enough lifeless bodies both in vision and in reality to know this one was dead. Obviously a morgue shot, it focused on the head, shoulders and half a torso, but it was the scar that held her attention, the scar running from cheekbone to mouth, puckering his lips with a grimace that didn’t relax even in death. She’d seen it in her nightmares, memorized it like the feel of tissue beneath her fingers.

Scarface was dead. Retribution had been earned, the god of vengeance appeased for the moment. She kept her eyes closed, waiting for an adrenaline rush that never came.

The creak of leather, the rustle of paper, the honk of a distant horn, and Max opened her lids. Mystery Man spread out his secret paper atop the roof of his metallic blue car.

A sketch artist’s rendition of the dead man as Max had seen him two years ago, the features blended, hazed, indistinct, only the scar stood out in the composite drawing. The scar had stood out in her mind the night Cameron died, the night this now dead man had held her down and forced himself inside her, the night he’d threatened to slice her cheeks open with his death’s head ring, to give her a scar rivaling his own.

At the bottom right of the composite, in a square box, the artist had drawn a likeness of his ring. Max wondered if he’d been wearing the piece of jewelry—if a death’s head could be called that—after all this time or if he’d pawned it for his next score.

“How did he die?” she asked.

“Gunshot to the back of the head.”

“Where’d you find him?”

His eyes widened, at what she couldn’t be sure. “San Francisco. Parking garage near Pier 39.” A tourist attraction.

Odd place for a druggie/rapist/killer. Why had he been there?

Her hand with the photo rose to chest level, high enough to look once more at the spent features. Strange that violent death didn’t appear on that peaceful face. He might have been asleep but for the lack of muscle control, the mouth slack on the unmarred side, cheeks flattened. Lightheaded, she swayed. Mystery Man caught her arm, popping her out of the fog.

“Why are you showing this to me?” How did he know the picture’s importance?

“Do you have any comment to make?” He folded the paper lest it blow away in the slight morning breeze.

“You live by the gun, you die by the gun.” She stared at the face, now smooth and unlined. Scarface had been nothing more than a boy, late teens, early twenties. Somehow, that night, never realizing, she’d seen him as an ageless monster.

“That sounds like vigilantism.” The wolf devoured her with greedy eyes, hung on her every word, hung
her
on every word.

She gave him what he wanted. “It sounds like justice to me.”

The growl dropped a pitch. “Why did it take you so long to find him?”

She didn’t deny his implication. “I never looked.”

“Why did you look now?”

She thought of the hole she dug for herself with each admission. He was a cop. He knew about Cameron, about his three killers. He believed her to be a murderess. Then Max thought of Bud Traynor. Tattoo, Scarface, Bootman, dead or alive, no longer mattered. Only Bud did. She looked beyond the wolf, above his head, to the high windows of the Victorian behind him, to the taller trees. Then she turned back. “My husband told me to find him.”

For the first time, uncertainty showed in the man’s brown eyes.

“A vision,” she went on, letting her eyes dance across his wary features. “I have visions all the time. I find murderers, bring them to justice.” She took a deep breath, gave him a sweet, satisfied smile. “But you know that already. You’ve been following me. You know about Wendy, Tiffany, and Bethany. Lance and Angela.” She held out her arms, crossed at the wrists. “You better arrest me. Tattoo and Bootman are still out there,” she said, her implication being that they wouldn’t last for long.