Every Wickedness (31 page)

“Your Caribbean condo?”

“A product of my imagination.”

“Even you have to admit your story about volunteer work with seniors was a bit over the top.”

Brad looked disappointed. “That, actually, is true.” He paused, waiting for Beth to assimilate this bizarre information, to wonder how this gentleman killer, this butcher, could spend time performing acts of kindness for old people while randomly destroying youth, then he said, “I get some of my best drugs from seniors’ medicine cabinets. Can’t always be buying rat poison from the garden centres. Someone might remember my face. Retirement apartments are a warfarin paradise. All the old folks are on blood thinners, and you know how forgetful seniors can be, always misplacing things.”

Duping the aged to procure drugs so he could watch women bleed to death.

“Lots of women at the party were attracted to you,” Beth said, not knowing where this would take her, aware only that she had to keep talking. “Why, Brad? Why this way?”

“Such a common question. Very disappointing to hear it from you. I was sure you’d come up with something original.”

He couldn’t tire of her. Not yet. Beth struggled for the right thing to say.

He spared her the effort. “Could be my dysfunctional family,” he shrugged, in answer to her question. “Abusive mother, alcoholic father, the usual. Or maybe it was the time I fell from the jungle gym and hit my head.”

Beth lay there, not knowing how to react. Was it sympathy he wanted? Understanding? She took the therapist’s approach, blinked, and waited for him to continue.

“How about impotence? A classic motive. Can’t get off without hurting someone. There are guys like that. Or maybe some lousy LSD experience in high school left me unhinged. There’s quite a list to choose from. Pick one. It could be any of them, or maybe a combination of two or more. More than likely though —”

He stopped, held his breath, then stated simply, “— they’re all bullshit.” He smiled, not a cruel leering smile, but a matter-of-fact good old buddy smile, which made it all worse. “Really had you going there, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Beth answered, “you really did.”

He was still winning, still master of his game, but there was something else. Since awakening in the basement, Beth noticed a change in Brad, not just in his eyes, but in his speech. She recalled how he spoke to her last evening, both in his car and once they’d arrived at the house; she remembered, too, how Brad had worked the room at his party. He called everyone by name, used names often. A smooth public relations move.

Down here, he hadn’t used her name once. Ginny, too, had been referred to as “your friend,” and Natalie Gorman was “the model.” In this cellar, Brad’s victims stopped being people. Could she change that, get Brad to see her as a human being, or was he already too immersed in his ritual for it to do any good?

“Why the nudity, Brad?” she asked. “This isn’t about sex, so why take off my clothes? Are you trying to compare me physically to Natalie Gorman? Or Anne Spalding? Is that it? Does Beth Wells measure up?”

Brad heaved a sigh and slowly rose to his feet. He looked bored again, and for a moment, Beth thought he would ignore her question and walk away. With a sudden movement, he was over her, his mouth close to her breast. “Tell me, how do you feel when you’re naked? Do you feel liberated, comfortable?”

She felt the heat from his breath, and tightened every muscle until she ached. “You know I don’t.”

He brought his face up close to hers. “Exactly. Besides, you’re a much better photographic subject without your clothes. And worth a lot more money to a discriminating clientele.”

He turned away then, and walked toward the door ahead. Just before he went through, he turned to face her again. His cold whisper sliced the air. “And now, I’ve got something for you.”

He opened the door and disappeared.

J
im Kearns drained his fourth mug of coffee and was debating pouring a fifth when he looked up and realized he wasn’t the only guy in town without a date for Saturday night.

The Kid, Ted Weems, threaded his way through the labyrinth of desks and approached Kearns’s office shaking his head. “You’re too popular for your own good, L.T.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Kearns had read about himself in this morning’s paper, his bad reviews rivalling a B-movie actor’s. “What’s wrong now?”

“Look at all these messages.” Weems patted his blazer then pulled several bits of paper from the inside pocket. “I hope I’m never this famous.”

“You mean infamous,” Kearns said, glancing at the messages. The captain had called; so had the mayor. “Jesus. I’ve only been gone an hour.”

On Kearns’s desk were three cardboard containers of Chinese food. After a week of meals consisting mainly of chocolate bars, coffee and lukewarm Cup-A-Soup, Kearns had decided to treat himself. He would reacquaint himself with vegetables and actually sit down to eat for a change. Despite his good intentions and Henry Ng’s promise that his
Peking duck was “focking amazing,” the food had barely been sampled.

“Kid,” Kearns said, “I can understand me being here eating food from a box, but you? You should be out on the town with some hot young thing. I thought you had tonight off. What gives?”

Weems ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “My hot young thing dumped me, L.T. Last night. Go figure, huh? Nice guy like me?”

“Hey, Kid, that’s rough.”

“Yeah, I thought we had something special, but I guess it was only me who thought so. Anyway, being busy helps, so I may as well stick around here. This case is getting under my skin. Bet you feel that way sometimes too, huh L.T.?”

“Quite a few times, Kid,” Kearns answered, a hint of sadness creeping into his voice. “That’s why I don’t have a date tonight either.”

Jordan didn’t know what else he could do. He struggled to think of some other way to get to Kearns and convince him that Beth was missing. He hadn’t been able to make contact by telephone, and it was clear the cop he’d spoken to was both overworked and preoccupied.

The young inspector had tried not to be condescending. “Lieutenant Kearns is out of his office at the moment.”

“But Beth’s his friend. He’d want to know.”

“I’ll give him the information as soon as he gets
back. Still, your girlfriend hasn’t been gone that long …”

Jordan could see the look in the man’s eyes, a mixture of pity and frustration. “You don’t know her,” he tried to explain, but already he could see the cop losing patience. Jordan scribbled his name and phone number on a slip of paper. “Give this to Lieutenant Kearns and tell him what I said. Please.”

He watched the cop shove the paper into his pants’ pocket.

As Jordan steered his car toward home, he felt Beth’s safety slip further from his control.

“Hey, I hope everything works out and your girl shows up soon,” the young inspector had said. “You seem like a decent guy.”

Decent was the last thing Jordan felt like. He wanted to smash windows, run through Beth’s store, her house, fling open drawers, search closets, turn over furniture, look for any clue that might tell him where she was. He wanted to scream her name.

When he arrived home and locked his door, he did exactly that.

B
leeding to death.

Beth wondered how long it would take. Her physician had never told her, and why would he? Beth was always careful, took her medication faithfully, refrained from contact sports, ate the proper food. Neither she nor her doctor would assume the worst. But the worst had happened, and so Beth thought about dying.

The cut would sting, maybe burn a little, then what? Would she just fall asleep, peacefully, like some 1940s movie heroine, or would she struggle for breath, choke on her own bloody vomit …

The need to urinate had disappeared. Her back ached, and there was pain in her joints that had nothing to do with her physical confinement. When she glanced down, she saw that her flesh was tinged yellow. Her symptoms were worsening.

So what? She was going to die anyway. If she could control nothing else, at least she could be master of her own fate. She would do it to herself before he could do it to her.

The massage table was lightweight, perhaps on wheels like the one in her masseur’s office. She could probably topple the table by rocking from side to side until it flipped over. The fall might kill her.

She jerked her neck upward and jackknifed her body, her ribcage straining against the heavy tape beneath her breasts. She rocked laterally, slapping left shoulder, then right, against the vinyl of the massage table. It didn’t budge.

He had bolted it to the floor.

Weary and aching, she collapsed. She would not be able to kill herself by falling.

She placed her tongue between her molars and began to press. Would it hurt, she wondered, when her teeth clamped down hard on her own flesh? Only for a moment, she rationalized, and by then, she would be past caring. She hoped that when the time came, she would have enough strength left to spit a mouthful of her own blood in Brad’s face.

All at once, she hated herself. She had spent her entire life running, fleeing her hometown to escape memories of a con man, jumping from date to meaningless date. Now, faced with the malevolence of Brad Petersen, she was opting for escape again, planning her own death. She hadn’t bothered to consider the alternative of living.

She remained a prisoner, held to a table by yards of tape. Grappling with her bonds guaranteed a hemorrhage. If she was to survive, she couldn’t risk the tiniest bruise. There was only one solution. Brad had to free her.

He came back into the room carrying a stack of videos. “Since you’re going to be here awhile, I
thought you would appreciate some entertainment. No fair me having all the fun.” He set the cassettes on the table beside her left hip. “I’ve got quite an assortment. What kind of movies do you like?”

Beth had prepared herself to appear fearless in the face of any cruelty he would inflict, but she could not have foreseen this. She didn’t know how to respond.

“Please,” he said, his voice adopting a maddening lilt, “you’re the guest. Are you a dance fan? I’ve got
Top Hat
.”

This couldn’t be happening. No one knew how the Spiderman’s victims spent their final days, but watching an Astaire classic? It had to be a ruse, something designed to keep her off-balance. But why? Until he cut her loose, she wasn’t going anywhere.

Brad removed a video cassette from the pile and set the rest on the floor. Beth watched as Brad wheeled the television set closer, then turned his chair to face the screen.

“There. All set? Good. Now just lie there and enjoy the show.”

The cassette disappeared into the slot.

F
red Astaire did not dance in the Spiderman’s version of
Top Hat
. Beth watched the events unfold on screen with revulsion as another dancer, Carole Van Horne, pleaded for her life. The woman had undergone a metamorphosis in the video, whimpering quietly at first, then hurling obscenity after obscenity at her captor. Near the end, she was reduced to garbled begging and proclamations of dreams not yet realized. She recited the names of people who loved her. Carole’s final line was a gut-wrenching scream as she watched a fountain of blood spurt from her wrist.

Brad played his role without flinching, his face on screen the same as it was now — detached, bored, as though he had entered some kind of fugue state. The films no longer satisfied his hunger, Beth knew. He needed the real thing, and more often.

Beth lay paralyzed, encircled by tentacles of fear. Carole’s scream made her own heart race. In spite of the relentless clamour in her head, she harnessed her emotions and forced slow, even breaths from her lungs.

On screen, Carole Van Horne died, and Beth did not turn away.

Brad cast a curious glance in her direction but said nothing. He pressed his thumb on the remote,
and the film rewound. The entire video had lasted only fifteen minutes. How long had dying seemed to Carole?

Beth waited for the whirring of the machine to stop, then in a voice completely foreign, she said, “It must be frustrating for you, Brad, able only to be in one place at a time.”

He arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you need to be near the women at the time of their deaths, which necessitates mounting the video camera on a tripod. I’m no film expert, but it seems that in order to capture the true essence of what’s happening, some variety would be in order. Close-ups, different angles, I don’t know. As it stands, the film is — well, flat. You fare much better as a still photographer.”

“That is my specialty, of course,” he replied nonplussed. “Still, maybe another film might be more to your liking.”

Calmly, she said, “Let me look at the titles again.”

She caught a flicker of surprise in his eyes.

Brad retrieved the videos from the floor and held the stack over her. One of his knuckles grazed her breast. She quelled a shudder and raised her head off the table. There were a dozen videos, all neatly labelled. The Spiderman was being held accountable for six murders in San Francisco. This collection was proof the police were just scratching the surface. Who knew how many murders he was actually responsible for?

Beth examined the titles.
An American in Paris. Funeral in Berlin. Jewel of the Nile
. Robert Altman’s
Prêt à Porter
. Kathy Smith’s
Low-Impact Aerobics
.

“Third from the bottom,” Beth said.

She steeled herself for more real-life horror, knowing she was using others’ tragedies to buy herself precious time. Still, the films removed the Spiderman’s focus from her. More importantly, her reaction to the events on screen, or apparent lack of one, had thrown Brad a curve ball. The films were meant to shock, to frighten, and she’d given him none of it. Some instinct told her this shift in equilibrium was important.

Where had her instincts been the night of the party, when Brad had spoken to her, when he had stood too close, his smile too friendly? He had been a predator that night, searching for his next victim. The discomfort she’d felt at his proximity was the first ripple of fear, but she hadn’t recognized it.