Every Wickedness (32 page)

She had to pay attention now. Every nuance of Brad’s actions, every phrase uttered on screen might provide her with the clue she needed to pull the rug out from under him.

The VCR inhaled the cassette. Seconds later, Beth choked back a sob. Too late, she realized the significance of the film’s title.
Around the World in Eighty Days
, now humming in the machine, depicted the final hours of Anne Spalding.

W
hen Kearns removed his grinding fists from his fatigue-scorched eyes, he saw Inspector Anscombe coming toward him, her face jubilant.

“We got another bingo, L.T.,” she said, perching herself on the edge of the desk. “The watch. It’s Lydia Price’s.”

The Cartier, the one trophy Nora Prescott had been reluctant to part with. He damn near had to pry it off her arm.

During the week, Kearns had sent Sharon, with all her people skills, out to the victims’ families, on what he was calling a trophy match, a who-owned-what mission. The Prices were the last family Anscombe contacted, Lydia’s parents having felt the need to get away to their cabin in Tahoe for a few days. Anscombe’s blue eyes, intensified by tinted contact lenses, sparkled with triumph. She appeared to be waiting for her pat on the back.

“Helluva job,” Kearns managed to say, trying to muster some sincerity past the tennis-ball lump in his throat.

“The Prices didn’t recognize the guy in the picture though. But we’re a little closer,” Anscombe said. “At least, we have an idea who he is now, right?”

Kearns nodded. The tennis ball had worked its
way down Kearns’s esophagus and was now lodged in his upper abdomen. En route, it had become encased in lead. He winced, his physical agony now matching his mental exhaustion.

“Sharon, you don’t need much sleep, true?”

Anscombe grinned. “What do you want me to do?”

“Check all the major hotels in town, starting with the most expensive. It’s time to find Nora Prescott and bring her back in for questioning. She’s got to have some clue to where her son is. Use some of those persuasive people skills of yours.”

The grin widened. “My pleasure. “I’ll grind the shit out of her.”

“Good,” Kearns replied. “It’s time her life got fucked up a little.”

Anscombe turned to leave, then paused. Over her shoulder, she said, “Say, L.T., you did get back to that friend of yours who was talking to Weems, didn’t you?

Kearns looked blank.

“You did get that message?”

A
s though she was Siskel to his Ebert, Brad asked her opinion of the film.

The lullaby quiet of his voice crawled over his skin. She wanted to claw at his eyes, make them run like rivers, do to him what he’d done to the others. She wanted to shatter the tomb of silence he created, yank the photos from his gallery of death, drive shards of glass through his perfect skin.

She realized then, that there were two monsters in the room.

Beth paused, made it appear she was gathering her thoughts to form an educated reply. She swallowed bile and forced the tortured image of Anne Spalding from her mind.

When Beth was certain she could respond without her voice betraying her emotions, she said, “I maintain your best work is done with a 35mm, not a video camera. That shot there, for instance” — she pointed to the photograph of her former roommate, really six overlapping Annes, one after the other, blood flowing from six slashed wrists — “there’s no comparison between the artistic merit of that photograph versus the video. How was that done?”

“I used a multi-faceted lens,” Brad explained with a measure of pride. “I worried the effect might
be too gimmicky, but I think it came out rather well. Of course, I wouldn’t ever use the same technique twice. Special lenses and filters are no substitute for imagination.”

“I think that’s why the stills are better than the videos,” Beth told him. “The viewer can wonder ‘why all the blood? Why is this happening?’ The fear is more real when the imagination is allowed to run amok. The videos, on the other hand, reveal too much. There’s no mystery, no room for the viewer’s own intelligence.”

Brad, the
artiste
, seemed to appreciate this insight. “You’re right, of course. However, the market is more lucrative for video. Sometimes we creative types have to forego craft for finance.”

“You don’t seem to be suffering in that department. Your home, your car, all this equipment —”

“I’m an only child,” Brad said. “My mother dotes on me.”

Beth gulped. From the moment she’d awakened in Brad’s basement, she had objectified him as much as he had her. He was the shadowy figure from all childhood nightmares. Now he was speaking about a mother. He was a member of someone’s family. A chill coursed through her.

Brad laughed. “You’re wondering about my mother, how she can love someone like me, what she really sees when she looks at me.”

“No, I —”

“She’s always known about me,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Oh, she tried to close her eyes to who I
was, tried to make me invisible, but I think she realizes now she can never escape. Just like you.”

Beth forced the last sentence to some dark recess in her mind.
Keep the focus away from you
, her internal voice warned. “She knows about —”

“The women? She does now. Mother’s been so generous, this grateful son feels compelled to shower her with tokens of affection.” The scorn in his voice was unmistakable.

The souvenirs. The articles Kearns told her were taken from the victims. Given to Brad’s mother.

Beth saw the anger in Brad’s eyes and knew this was forbidden territory. She couldn’t risk tipping his emotional scale in that direction. Not yet.

Better to stroke his ego, she thought, and cast her glance toward another one of Brad’s framed photos. “How did you manage that shot?”

He followed her gaze toward an artsy picture of one of his victims. The camera must have been positioned somewhere behind the table. The woman’s head dangled over the edge, her breasts thrust desperately upward, her heart still beating beneath. Her naked skin was covered with images of multi-hued bottles of nail polish. The esthetician. Monica Turner.

“I took a slide of a nail polish display in a department store, then projected the slide onto her skin, keeping the background black so the images wouldn’t appear anywhere else.”

As best as she could, Beth glanced around the
room. “I don’t see a slide projector. Or any of your lenses. Do you keep them back there?” She directed her gaze toward the door on the opposite wall.

Brad nodded. “In the darkroom.”

Where there might be a way out. Or a weapon. She had to get in there, but she couldn’t appear too eager. “All that equipment must cost a fortune. I really don’t know much about photography —”

“And I’m sure you don’t give a damn.” Though his voice carried the kindergarten singsong lilt, it had taken on an edge. “This chat has been fun, a pleasant change from the usual snivelling and pleading, but you don’t think this glibness will change anything, do you?”

What was left of her heart plunged into the abyss, and with it her last flimsy vestige of hope. Had she really believed she could pull this off, when at least a dozen others had failed?

At length she said, “No, Brad. I know I’m going to die here. You control when that will happen. But I refuse to worsen my situation by expending my remaining energy on bursts of hysteria.” She remembered Carole Van Horne, the obscene ravings of a woman gone mad with fear.

He shot her a curious look. “This is either an Oscar-winning performance, or you’re an
ice
woman.”

“Neither,” she answered. “But the Serenity Prayer works for me. ‘Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change —’”

“Philosophy bores me,” he cut in. “Especially the trite kind that’s printed on posters and bookmarks.” He looked at his watch and yawned.

Beth held her tongue. Whatever avenue she chose still moved her closer to the end. She had been here a little over one day, and already Brad was tiring of her, his boredom escalating too quickly. Her effort to be different from his other victims had been for nothing. Much as Brad claimed to disdain hysteria, he had probably been amused by it, perhaps empowered by it. Nothing Beth did now would make any difference. Perhaps she
should
accept what she couldn’t change. She was going to die. And soon. Her nose was bleeding.

Brad produced a stark white handkerchief from his pants’ pocket and dabbed at her nose. Then his thumb and forefinger pinched her nostrils together and she couldn’t breathe. She jerked her head upward, opened her mouth and gasped, swallowing gulps of precious air. Blood escaped down her throat, and she coughed. Brad pulled his hand away. The bleeding slowed, a trickle oozing down her upper lip. He wiped the area clean. “There, there. It’s all right. All better.”

Then suddenly, as though nothing life-threatening had occurred, he asked, “How about another film? I could show you my latest release. That aerobics instructor was down here the night of my party. The night you and I met. You can faintly hear the music in the background.”

Patricia Mowatt. Held captive in this tomb while upstairs scores of partygoers ate, drank, and danced. She would have heard their laughter, felt the rhythm of their celebration. Ginny, Jordan, Beth, and nearly a hundred others. And not one had saved her.

“I’d rather see your darkroom,” she replied.

He leaned closer. “Why this obsession with what’s behind the door?”

“No obsession. Just curiosity. For one, my neck is getting stiff. For another, I’m as vain as they come. If you’re going to take my picture, I think I should have some say about how I’d like to be portrayed.”

She had no idea where that had come from. She only knew that remaining confined to this table spelled hopelessness.

He appeared surprised by her statement. A victim’s participation in her own death — a team effort — maybe this was the new experience Brad craved. A fresh twist to what seemed to be a tiresome ritual.

“I’ll think about it,” he said nonchalantly, then rose to his feet and strode across the room. The wooden door closed with a thunk.

T
he kid’s complexion looked like it had been doused with bleach. Ted Weems struggled for composure, but despite his discomfort, Kearns wasn’t done with him.

“Goddammit, Kid. What the hell happened?”

“The message was in my pants’ pocket, L.T. I guess I forgot about it.”

“Jesus. Women’s bodies all over the place, my friend is missing, and you forgot. Explain how a conversation like that could slip your mind.”

“I don’t know, L.T. I screwed up. I wasn’t thinking straight. But your friend hasn’t been gone that long.”

Kearns bit his lip. He hadn’t bothered to close his office door and some of the cops in the next room were doing their best not to appear to be listening. For everyone’s benefit, Kearns raised his voice another notch. “Look, Kid. This is a major fuck-up. When you walk into this building, you leave your personal problems outside the door.”

“Yes, L.T. Sorry, L.T.”

“You’ll be sorrier if my friend doesn’t turn up. Bet your last dollar on it. Now get out of here so I can find out what the hell is going on.”

Weems spun around and made a clumsy exit, smashing his hip against the door jamb.

“Goddammit,” Kearns muttered after Weems had gone.

Kearns’s midnight call to Jordan Bailey nearly gave the poor bastard a coronary.

“Beth!”

“No, Bailey, it’s Lieutenant Kearns.”

“Have you found her? Where is she?”

The panic in Bailey’s voice made his own heart quicken. “Take it easy. What the hell happened?”

“I went to pick her up at seven. She never showed. And I sent flowers. To her store. They’re still in the doorway, wrapped up. Beth never opened for business this morning, Lieutenant.”

Kearns didn’t like the sound of that. Saturday was Beth’s busiest day. “Let’s rule out a few things before we go jumping the gun. Family emergency?”

“No. Ginny called Beth’s parents. Everything’s fine at their end.”

“We’re not dealing with anything like a lover’s spat, are we?”

“So she leaves her car at the store? Come on, Lieutenant. You know Beth. She’d call someone.”

If she could. The pilot was right. Something wasn’t adding up.

“Get some sleep, Bailey. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Just find her, Lieutenant. Please.”

The second Bailey had hung up, Kearns vaulted into action. Two members of his team were dispatched to check out Beth’s house in the Marina; another pair combed the coffee shops along Chestnut Street.

Kearns drove to Beth’s store, worry gnawing at his insides. It could be nothing, he tried to tell himself. A sick friend, he imagined. There could be a dozen logical explanations, yet Kearns couldn’t ignore the shooting pains in his stomach, nor could he get the voice of Jordan Bailey out of his mind. Days ago, Kearns had been prepared to hate him and was ready to arrest the guy if he so much as crossed his eyes. But tonight, hearing the emotion in his voice that was barely concealed by a slight cough, Kearns was drawn into an allegiance with the pilot.

At Personal Touch, Kearns shone his flashlight through the storefront window, though nothing within the showroom appeared suspicious. The white roses were where Bailey said they were, just inside the doorway, untouched.

The sight of Beth’s Audi, the only vehicle in the rear lot, sent a wave of sadness through him for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. The beam of his flashlight revealed what Bailey had already told him — the car was empty, and though he flattened his palm against the hood, he knew what he would discover. The engine was cold.

Kearns went to his car, grabbed a tire iron, and punched the Audi’s trunk lock, just in case. He let out a relieved sigh when the trunk hinged open, revealing nothing more than a gym bag and a folded beach chair.

Two windows flanked the store’s service entrance, both shielded by wrought iron cages.
Kearns jammed his flashlight between the bars of each window, but there was no sign of Beth at the back of the store either. The door’s lock hadn’t been tampered with.