Every Wickedness (26 page)

“D
amn,” Beth said, setting the phone down. “Jim isn’t home, and he’s not at work either.” She closed her address book and returned it to the centre desk drawer. “I hate bothering him. He’s got so much on his plate, but he’d want to know about this note. And this one is so much worse than the others.” She took another look at the drawing and shuddered. “It’s like she’s watching her own autopsy.”

“Could be worse, Beth. At least the artist gave you a nice set of boobs.”

“Go ahead, make light of this, Gin. I’d like to hear your snappy lines if that envelope were addressed to you.” Beth paused to allow the words to sink in.

“You’re right,” Ginny replied, somewhat chastened. “It is creepy. Is Kearns sure the Spiderman’s not the one sending these notes?”

Beth nodded. “Says it’s not the killer’s M.O.”

“M.O.? I love cop talk.”

Beth groaned. “This guy, whoever he is, is just playing on everyone’s fear of the Spiderman, hoping to shake me up. And he’s doing a great job.”

“I’ve got the willies myself. Tell you what,” Ginny said, patting the carpet, “let’s finish this game. Looks like I might finally win one. You can try
Kearns’s number in half an hour. Nothing we can do in the meantime.”

Beth settled onto the carpet. Samson reappeared and draped himself across Beth’s feet. Two turns later, Beth reversed Ginny’s luck and jumped ahead thirty points.

“Did you hear that?” Ginny whispered.

“Not again, Ginny. Cut it out.”

“Musician’s ears are never wrong. There was a creak, then metal against metal. Is your front door locked?”

“Yes, and the alarm’s set. Stop worrying. You’ll drive us both crazy.” She checked her watch. “I’m going to try Jim’s number again.”

“And I’m going to see about that noise. I know what I heard.” Ginny grunted as she stood up. “Damn. My foot’s asleep. Come on, Samson. Let’s investigate.”

Ginny headed toward the front door, with Samson, to Beth’s amazement, in pursuit. Beth had just located Jim Kearns’s home number for the second time when she heard Ginny cry out.

“Oh shit! Beth, quick!”

Beth hurried to where Ginny stood in the entry hall, flattened against a wall, and followed the direction of Ginny’s frightened stare.

Crawling across Beth’s mint green broadloom were at least a dozen huge, brown spiders.

“Do something, Beth!” Ginny wailed. “I hate those things!”

Beth glanced at her stocking feet, then reached for the nearest weapon. She flung the remaining chocolate bars from the stainless steel bowl, then brought the bowl down on the carpet. Each swing was accompanied by a sickening crunch.

When she was done, Beth counted. “Fourteen spiders. My God.”

“Correction,” Ginny said, still rooted to the spot. “Fifteen. Look.”

Samson had one of the creatures in his mouth.

“Ginny — rubber gloves and a plastic bag.”

Ginny raced into the kitchen.

Samson, quite pleased with himself, dropped his treasure at Beth’s feet. It was still alive. One more crash of the bowl killed the spider and sent the cat scurrying upstairs.

“Must have been your mail slot,” Ginny said, returning with gloves, bags, plus paper towels and a bottle of club soda. “The noise I heard. That’s where they got in.”

“Thanks,” Beth said as she cleaned spider guts from the rug. “You’ve been a big help.”

“I’ll show you help. Come on. Grab a jacket. Wanna bet that whoever did this is still out there? Probably laughed his ass off when we started screaming.”

Minutes later, the two were outside, looking in either direction along Scott Street, though neither knew what or who they were looking for. A block away, on the corner of Scott and Beach, half a dozen
teenagers were leaving a house party. They stood in a circle on the sidewalk, and as Beth and Ginny drew closer, they could see a seventh person in the middle.

“Hang back, Gin,” Beth said, grabbing her friend by the arm. “I’ve had enough excitement for one night. Breaking up a swarming isn’t on my agenda.”

“No, Beth, they’re joking. Listen.”

“Thank you, thank you very much,” one of the youths said.

“Please let me be your teddy bear,” sang another.

Everyone laughed.

Beth broke into a run, Ginny following.

“Hey, you!” Ginny hollered. “Elvis Aron Presley!”

Hearing the voice, the man looked over the shoulder of one of the teenagers. When he saw the two women bearing down upon him, he broke through the group and sprinted toward the Bay.

Beth noticed he had a limp and knew they’d catch him.

“Beth, what’s going on?”

Bobby Chandler was one of the teens, dressed as a clown.

“Bobby,” Beth cried out, racing past, “help us get this guy!”

The boy kicked off gargantuan red plastic shoes and joined in the chase. Even in sock feet, Bobby soon overtook Ginny, then Beth, and was closing in quickly on Elvis.

At Marina Boulevard, the man turned left and
headed toward the Yacht Harbor. Beth watched as Bobby Chandler made a flying leap at his target. The man thudded to the pavement.

“Get off me, you little bastard!”

Beth and Ginny helped Bobby with the struggle and, between the three of them, managed to get the man to turn over. The rest of the teens had now reached the scene, eager to witness the action.

Beth squeezed between two teens. “I’ll be damned.”

“That’s him!” Bobby shrieked. “That’s the guy! Hey Beth, why are we chasing your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend? What are you talking about?”

“This is the older guy I was asking about. He’s been around your house a lot these past few weeks. Didn’t think he was your type, but Tim O’Malley told me to mind my own business.”

Rex McKenna spat blood. He’d bitten his tongue when he hit the ground. “Shut up, you little twerp.” He peeled off fake sideburns.

One of the teenagers used her cell phone to call 911.

Beth stared at Rex, her feelings a mixture of revulsion and relief. “The notes and the spiders were from you? Why?”

Rex McKenna spat again and answered simply, “Fuck off, bitch.”

W
hatever pricey cosmetics Nora Prescott had so skillfully applied seemed to crack along with her veneer of gentility at the mention of her son’s name. She slumped in the delicate chair, then, as if realizing how uncomfortable it was, she moved to the sofa opposite Kearns, her tiny frame cocooned by the down-filled cushions.

“William was always difficult,” Nora said when she had composed herself. “Even his birth was difficult. Three days in labour, can you imagine? I prayed for death, you know, the pain was so terrible, then finally William was born. No mother loved a baby more.”

Love? Until moments ago, there had been so many layers of frost covering the woman, an
ice
pick couldn’t have penetrated. Now she was talking about love. Kearns wondered how Nora would define the word.

It was clear to Kearns that Nora Prescott didn’t have a friend to call her own. With him here, ready to listen, Nora would spill her guts. He could already see her relieved expression, the tracing of lines around her eyes and mouth softening.

He pressed on. “And William’s father?”

Nora smiled slightly. “The age-old story. I was eighteen. William’s father didn’t want anything to do
with me or his son. Prescott is my maiden name. I never saw the need to pretend.”

“You never took the surnames of any of your husbands?”

“No. I didn’t expect my marriages to last. There seemed no point bouncing from name to name.”

Marriage to Kearns was a sacrament, not some kind of hobby that could just be discarded when it got boring.

Nora seemed to read his thoughts. “You don’t understand,” she sighed.

“I’d like to try. Help me out.”

“William, even from an early age, was a very demanding child. Very possessive. I had to hold him in my lap constantly, when I was on the phone, watching television, reading the paper. I had to lock the bathroom door for privacy.”

Was William Prescott more demanding than any other kid, or was he simply reaching out for a cold-hearted mother’s affections? Kearns wondered.

“Three times I brought orphaned kittens home, hoping William would eventually transfer some of his affections to his pets, learn to give rather than take.”

“Didn’t work?”

“None of the kittens stayed with us long. They ran away.”

“Cats are funny creatures,” Kearns said. “Maybe William would have been better off with a dog.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.” Nora sighed. “It was me he wanted. All the time. He even hated it when I
went to work, but I finally managed to secure a secretarial position. William threw tantrums every morning.”

“What did his teachers say?”

“William was a bully from kindergarten on. I was forever calling in sick to work so I could run to the school and deal with some catastrophe he had caused on the playground.”

“Didn’t he make friends with kids his own age?”

“There were boys who used to come over to play, but after a few visits, they never came back. Attracting playmates came easily to William. Keeping them as friends, however, was a different story.

“My absences from work were becoming chronic and finally, my boss questioned me. I told him everything about William, and he was wonderful, even offering to act as a surrogate parent to my son.”

“Kind of an unselfish thing for a boss to do. This man wasn’t single, by any chance?”

Nora pursed her lips. “Yes, Gregory was single and fond of me. Our times together were the sanest of my life. We took William everywhere, and he seemed happy.” She paused. “As long as Gregory maintained a respectable physical distance from me.”

“You couldn’t demonstrate affection as a couple?”

“Not with William around. No hand holding, no hugging or kissing. William always found a way to come between us.”

“So William had trouble seeing Mommy as a romantic, sensual woman,” Kearns said. “You and this Gregory trod gently until the boy could cope.”

“It all sounds quite reasonable, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize until much later how I was being manipulated by my own son.”

“What went wrong?”

Nora heaved a sigh. “You have no idea how painful this is. I’d buried these memories …”

Kearns bit his lip. He didn’t give a shit about this woman’s alleged pain. This woman had only memories to bury. What about the Mowatts, the Gormans, the families who had to bury precious loved ones? Swallowing his anger, he said, “Please, Mrs. Prescott.”

“The three of us had spent the day at Candlestick Park, then we had supper in Chinatown. William had eaten like a horse all day. Not surprisingly, he was exhausted and complaining of a stomach ache, so at home he went straight to bed.

“It was a gorgeous summer night, and Gregory and I were alone so seldom —”

Kearns held up his hand. “You don’t have to paint me a picture. One thing led to another —”

“Afterward, we drifted off to sleep. I awoke hours later. There was a crackling noise. The bed-skirt around us was ablaze. Gregory and I were frantic, screaming and swatting at the flames with pillows, running to the bathroom for water. We put out the fire ourselves.”

“You’re not saying —”

“Gregory left, and I went into William’s room. He was feigning sleep, as if anyone could sleep with
all the racket we’d been making. I saw my son’s eyelids flutter, then he opened his eyes and gave me that sleepy, helpless look that children have first thing in the morning. I can still remember him saying ‘Mommy, I don’t feel so good. Will you sleep in my bed?’”

“You think William set the fire?”

“Sergeant Kearns, when that little boy rolled over in bed to cuddle, I knew. It was his hands. They smelled like butane.”

H
e had been pumped for days, running on nervous energy and caffeine. Even without the pots of coffee, he would have stayed wide-awake, wired on his fantasies of Beth, imagining what he would do and say when they were together. He played the details repeatedly in his mind until he got the scenario perfect. She would be different from the others. She was no dummy. She wouldn’t resort to the feminine tactics the others had tried. Beth Wells would use her brains, try to outwit him, which would make their time together so interesting. He would feel her power, rob her of it slowly, watch it drain from her as it flowed toward him.

He had all his gear ready. And of course, the superwarfarin. He was careful when he purchased it, driving to Pasadena, Sacramento, Mendocino, altering his appearance, using the same line about his pesky rat problem. Superwarfarin, a long-acting anticoagulant, was invented for use on rats that resisted the ordinary strength of warfarin. It was one hundred times more powerful. Combined with his other goodies, the drug turned human blood the consistency of red wine. One slice along the radial artery and blood shot out like Old Faithful, pulsating with the rhythm of the heartbeat. The other
cuts, the round arc forming the P and the X across the stem, were strictly decorative.

Each of the women had exsanguinated quickly. The model had taken the longest. He’d found oral contraceptives in her purse and knew birth control pills antagonized the action of blood thinners. But they’d all lain there, pleading, getting weaker, some watching the blood spurt from their wrists, others looking away.

He’d done his research. Probably knew as much about serial killers as that ass Kearns. The aura phase, the trolling phase, the wooing phase. Ted Bundy had been adept at that, with his plaster cast and helpless victim routine. But Bundy wasn’t worthy of the publicity he’d received. The bludgeoning — a sign of a man out of control. Where was the art in that?

He thought about Beth Wells again and decided not to make the Chi Rho symbol this time. Though the Christograms had served him well, they were getting old. Nothing like a change in method to keep the juices flowing and the cops guessing.

One thing that damn school had instilled in him was a love of reading. Books, like his fantasies, could transport him at a moment’s notice. He didn’t particularly care what he read; there was something to be learned on every page. He recalled reading somewhere about methods of torture, fascinated by the death from one thousand cuts.