Every Wickedness (30 page)

The photographs were eight-by-ten-inch massacres, bloody diaries of lives ended too soon, arranged in horrifying sequence from top to bottom: captured, bleeding, dying, dying, dead. Anne Spalding, Natalie Gorman, Patricia Mowatt on the extreme left.

To the left of Patricia Mowatt’s row was a bare expanse of wall, room for more photographs. Again Beth shivered and swallowed, tasting salt. She, too, would be immortalized in this gallery, her final moments a part of this montage of torture and pain.

She had been such a fool. The pristine white of this dungeon, the perfect symmetry of the photo gallery, the chrome frames.

Not Rex McKenna. Brad Petersen. She remembered now and shuddered with dread at how easily she accompanied him, how calmly and smoothly he had spoken about his fiancée, how he’d wanted to settle down and raise a family.

From somewhere behind the wall she was facing, Beth heard footsteps. Fear, on centipede feet, skittered up her back. The door in front of her opened, and he was in the room.

“Well,” the Spiderman said, smiling broadly, “finally awake? You slept right through Saturday morning cartoons.”

J
ordan Bailey was whistling, and he was no whistler. He hummed along with the radio once in awhile, sang off-key in the shower, but whistling had never been one of his skills, and this was no tune anyone could recognize. All he needed was a corsage, and he’d feel like an overgrown kid on prom night. His car had been washed and vacuumed this morning, his shoes were polished, and the slacks to his dark suit had knife creases. His hair didn’t need combing, his tie didn’t need straightening. He was ready.

Beth should have received the roses early this afternoon. The thought of tonight’s fresh start rejuvenated him, to the point that he was in his car and driving to the Marina a half-hour early. He had waited long enough to see her.

Beth’s cat was sitting on the living room windowsill when Jordan pulled into the driveway. He shut off the Mazda’s engine and climbed the front steps two at a time. He was whistling again.

Four rings of the doorbell brought a response from Samson, who was now on the other side of the door, peering curiously at Jordan through the grillwork. Jordan felt the first pangs of unease when, after two more rings, Beth still didn’t answer. He was early, he knew, yet if she was soaking in the tub,
there’d been enough time for her to throw on a robe and come downstairs.

He pounded on the door and rang the bell again, put his ear to the glass, but all was quiet. 6:35. Was Beth still at work? He knew she had been on her own today, her assistant off on some gambling holiday. Perhaps she was still closing up or had a big sale in the works and couldn’t break away. No matter, he thought. Their dinner reservations were for eight o’clock, and even if Beth didn’t have time to change, she’d look fantastic anyway. Meanwhile, he would just wait in the car. She’d be along any minute.

He returned to his car, moved the driver’s seat back, and waited. At quarter to seven, just as he was ashamed to admit his eyes had closed, there was a tapping at his window. It was a gawky teenager wearing Levis, a Henley shirt, and a Giants’ cap on backward. Jordan clicked his key in the ignition and lowered the automatic window.

The boy stooped and looked inside the car. “You waiting for Beth?”

“Yes,” Jordan answered. “Looks like she’s put in a full day today. You must be Bobby Chandler. Beth’s told me a lot about you.”

“Call me Bob. She has?”

Jordan nodded and smiled.

“You Beth’s boyfriend?”

“I’m Beth’s hungry boyfriend. We’re supposed to go out for dinner tonight. I wonder what’s keeping her?”

Bobby shrugged his shoulders. “Wasn’t around last night either. I kind of pop around to check on things. Figured she must have been out late last night celebrating Elvis’s arrest.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Bobby looked pleased to know something about Beth’s life that Jordan hadn’t yet been privy to. “Some jerk’s been writing Beth creepy letters. Turns out to be the guy who rents the office over Beth’s store, Rex. Dressed as Elvis on Halloween and tried to scare Beth. I helped catch him.” Bobby’s thumb jabbed his own chest.

But for Beth, Fridays were “cocoon nights” — bath, book, and bed by nine o’clock. Still, if her ordeal with the letters was over and the loony had been caught, Beth just might want to kick up her heels a little.

“What time were you out here last night, Bob?”

The boy thought for a moment. “I went out at 8:30. There was a party up on Pierce — lots of kids from school. I came back this way a little after one. Beth still wasn’t home.”

“How do you know?” Jordan asked. “She was probably asleep. The lights would’ve been out.”

“Nope. I’m pretty familiar with Beth’s routine,” Bobby said emphatically. “Her living room light was on. She keeps it on a timer until she gets home.”

“Maybe she just forgot to turn it off.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Bobby said impatiently. “Besides,” Bobby glanced away, “her car wasn’t in the garage.”

“Tell you what, Bob. I’m going to make a run past the store. Make sure Beth hasn’t had a flat tire or anything.”

“Want me to come?”

Jordan shook his head, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted into reverse. “You wait here,” he called to Bobby as he backed the car out of the driveway. “If Beth gets here before I do, tell her I’ll be right back.”

As Jordan pulled away, he noticed the expression on Bobby Chandler’s face. The boy was visibly delighted to be involved in yet another intrigue, particularly since it concerned Beth.

To Jordan, this particular intrigue held no thrill, and his worry tripled upon his arrival at Personal Touch. The roses he ordered had been delivered and lay untouched across the store’s doorstep, still surrounded by transparent wrap, the blooms beginning to wilt.

What the hell was going on here?

A cursory glance through the shop window was no help. There didn’t seem to be anything out of place. The door was locked. He raced around to the back of the building. Beth’s car was still there, but she wasn’t inside it, nor could he see any sign of her when he peered through the barred windows at the rear of the store. He hurried back to his car, grabbed his cellular phone, and punched in Beth’s home number. The phone rang seven, eight, nine times. Still no answer. Moments later, Jordan was heading
back to the Marina, cursing every stop sign and every pedestrian who forced his foot off the gas pedal. He racked his brain wondering where she could be. Did this have something to do with that McKenna character? There’d been a pervert, too, some old fart Beth had been trying to stroke off her client list.

No. Beth wouldn’t be caught alone with either of those losers. She was smarter than that, and more cautious. Car trouble. That had to be it. She had grabbed a cab and was probably just getting home now. She would apologize for her lateness, and he would find out he’d worried for nothing. Hair appointment, some last-minute detail — why assume anything sinister?

Bobby Chandler was pacing the sidewalk and playing his sentinel role to the hilt when Jordan’s car screeched to a stop in the driveway. The squeal of tires brought Bobby over to the car.

“Anything?”

“No sign of her there,” Jordan said, and checked the digital clock on the dash. 8:00.

“Maybe Beth was running late and went straight to the restaurant.”

There was an instant flash of hope, then Jordan said, “She couldn’t have. She didn’t know where we were going.”

Bobby was on a roll now, sensing Jordan was a captive audience. He let fly a host of what-ifs, from the ridiculous to the incredibly stupid. Beth could be
on a bender in some bar, abducted by aliens and used for medical experiments —

“Listen,
Bobby,”
Jordan cut in.

“Maybe she just stood you up,” the boy added smugly.

Jordan shot him a look, and Bobby’s smile vanished.

He needed time to think, and Bobby’s yammering wasn’t helping.

Jordan signalled the end of the conversation by raising the window, then he reached for his phone once more. He struggled to recall Ginny’s last name, knew there was a baseball connection, then remembered Rizzuto. He listened to Ginny’s suggestive answering machine message four times. At 8:30, he remembered his reservation and called the Hotel Vintage Court. Masa, the hotel’s restaurant, had already given away his table.

He checked his rear-view mirror constantly, as though by looking, he could make Beth’s Audi magically materialize in the driveway. Every set of headlights that came up Scott Street brought him to attention.

At 9:00, he got through to Ginny, who hadn’t heard from Beth and was as worried as Jordan.

By 9:30, with no hospitals reporting any recent admissions matching Beth’s description, Jordan knew she was in trouble.

H
er fingers and toes were freezing. Goosebumps rose on her naked flesh. Her nipples were taut, her abdomen distended. She needed to urinate.

The Spiderman drew closer. Beth jerked her head to the left and squeezed her eyes shut, as though the action would make it all go away, make him go away.

“Time to face reality,” Brad said, his voice eerily calm and controlled. “I’ve chosen you. The least you can do is look at me, get to know me a little better. That’s what you wanted, right? It’s what everyone wants. To find out what makes a guy like me tick.”

Slowly Beth turned her head toward the voice, opened her eyes, and examined the face of the man looming over her. He was clean-shaven and smelled faintly of cologne. His complexion was unmarred by scars or moles. A hint of a smile revealed even, perfect teeth. Dark brows and eyelashes framed his blue eyes, making them brighter, bigger, more hypnotic.

He seemed oblivious to her nakedness; his gaze did not travel the length of her body the way Rex McKenna’s often had. She almost wished it would — lechery, however abominable, was at least understandable. But Brad appeared to look beyond her, to a netherworld created for him, a place where his evil
took shape and festered. She could not surrender to hysteria, would not allow him to smell the fear he craved.

“I have no interest in you whatsoever,” she said, surprised at the sound of her own voice. It was alarmingly normal, as though the agonizing horror that squirmed along her flesh belonged to someone else. Another Beth Wells. “How long have I been asleep?”

“It’s 10:00 Saturday night.”

“I’ve been out for over twenty-four hours?” She should be with Jordan now, all dressed up, perhaps finishing dessert. A huge lump lodged in her throat. She couldn’t think about that now. Jordan didn’t know where she was. He couldn’t save her.

“You’ve obviously never used sedatives,” Brad said, then dragged the chair closer to the table and sat down. “They kept you under longer than I had planned.”

“The appetizers.”

Beth remembered the pharmacopoeia under Brad’s bathroom sink, over-the-counter drugs she had assumed Brad purchased to alleviate stress. The chloral hydrate in the sedatives, the acetaminophen, the Pepto-Bismol, all would aggravate her regular dose of warfarin. What had he given her? Again she looked down at her skin, her knees freckled with rash, her ankles bloated. Her blood was running like tap water and would soon gush to her brain or stomach, the destination of her impending hemorrhage
nothing more than a crapshoot. The awful taste in her mouth. She was already dying.

She lay perfectly still, knowing her blood coursed through her body according to Brad’s schedule. She had to gain the upper hand. Somehow. Even if she was powerless to move, unable to escape, she would do whatever she could to give herself some kind of upper hand. She had been a victim before. She didn’t like the way it felt at age seventeen, and she was damned if she was going to allow it now. She intended to spoil this photo shoot, shatter some illusions, if only to achieve some final sense of victory.

“Are you going to carve me, like the others?”

“Carve
. Such a savage, primitive verb. No, I’m not going to carve you. You’re not like the others. I knew that immediately. You didn’t even scream when you woke up. The others did.”

Beth knew she couldn’t scream. Didn’t dare. Her larynx or trachea could hemorrhage. She would be screaming herself to death.

She kept her voice low, barely above a whisper. “What good would it do?”

“Precisely. Good girl.”

This wasn’t a fair fight. Beth watched him rise to his feet and start preparing the camera.

Right now, the only weapon she had, and a flimsy one it was, was time. Victims had used it in fact and fiction and Beth knew Brad would recognize any stall tactic for exactly what it was. She didn’t care. She had to try.

She watched Brad climb to the top of the ladder, a camera slung over his shoulder.

“There isn’t any fiancée, is there?”

He shook his head.

“But that picture beside your bed, in the silver frame —”

“My first,” he responded calmly. “Her name may have been Ingrid. I don’t remember. She posed happily for that photo. Right before she passed out.”

“But you were with Ginny. Why not her?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Ginny Rizzuto. My friend. At your party.”

“I danced with your friend. Big deal.”

“You slept with her. She told me you were terrific in bed.” Beth couldn’t believe this conversation, a dialogue that sounded like a couple arguing on a morning talk show.

He erupted in laughter, a full-bellied guffaw that echoed in the cavernous room. “I can assure you,” he managed between gasps, “I didn’t sleep with your friend. On a first date? What kind of guy do you think I am?” he said with mock indignance.

“Ginny said —”

“Your friend lied.” The camera’s flash winked obscenely. “How nasty of her.”

Of course she did. Ginny, who wanted so badly to be loved, who was always out to prove something, had lied about Brad. To save face. To show Beth that a man who looked like Brad could actually want her. And because Ginny said she’d been with him, Beth
thought it would be fine to come all the way to Muir Beach with him. Alone.

Damn you, Ginny.