Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (18 page)

32

The Pontiac Firebird that had been parked in the driveway was gone. Otherwise, the house looked as it had two hours earlier when they interviewed Jessie Klayman. Two police cars had Dickson Street closed at 108th, and two more were parked at the dead end. An ambulance waited behind the barricade. The handful of neighbors on the street had been warned to stay inside and away from windows.

Stride called the phone inside the house. No one answered.

‘We think Ross is gone,’ Maggie said. ‘Guppo talked to two teenagers who live across the street. They said he usually drives the Firebird.’

‘Did they see him go?’

‘No, but he may have headed out the back. There’s a dirt road behind the house that leads through the trees to Gary Street.’

‘Get his photo out around the city. The car and license, too.’

‘In process,’ Maggie said.

They wore their vests. Through binoculars, Stride examined the small house and saw no movement at the windows. All the curtains were closed. So was the door to the detached garage. Overhead, the sun was bright in their eyes.

‘We’ve got two officers staking out the back of the lot,’ Maggie said. ‘There’s no activity.’

‘Okay, let’s check it out.’

They used a neighbor’s lawn to approach the house from the east. There were no windows on the east wall other than at the basement level, where there was a door and a look-out window. The detached garage was on their left. As they cleared the neighbor’s house, Stride saw one of his officers in position at the rear of the Klayman lot near the tree line. The cop gave a thumbs up; the rear of the house was secure.

Stride had his gun in his hand. So did Maggie. Guppo and three other cops followed twenty yards behind them.

They reached the Klayman driveway. The house was built against a slope, and a two-level retaining wall and garden led to the front yard. Jessie Klayman kept stone nymphs among the weeds. Stride climbed the first level of the retaining wall at the corner of the brick basement. The windows of the living room were above their heads, and another window at ground level looked into the basement.

No activity.

He pulled himself up to the front lawn. Crossing under the living room windows, he took the wooden steps to the door and pounded sharply with his fist. ‘Jessie! Ross! Police!’

There was no answer. Looking through the storm door, he saw that the front door was wide open. The room where they’d sat with Jessie was empty, but the television was still on. He shouted again and heard nothing but the laughter of a TV sitcom. The living room showed no sign of disturbance.

Stride opened the screen door and went inside. Maggie followed.

‘Jessie!’ he called again. ‘It’s Lieutenant Stride.’

They cleared the kitchen and the living room, which were both deserted. He used the remote control to switch off the television, restoring silence to the house, except for the rattle of the rotating floor fan. It was dim inside with the curtains closed. He pointed at the hallway, where he could see entrances to two bedrooms.

The first door was painted black, but it was open, and an overhead light was on. He nudged around the threshold into the bedroom, and the interior took his breath away. Maggie entered behind him.

‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

There was no bed, just a mattress on the floor. The walls, like the door, were painted black. The glass of the windows had been covered over with black plastic garbage bags duct-taped to the frame. A television sat on an old microwave stand in front of the mattress, and dozens of video games were strewn across the carpet. Gold ammunition littered the floor like popcorn. At least thirty bullet-ridden paper targets were thumbtacked to the wall, along with bizarre posters: a skeleton wearing a Nazi uniform; a naked girl with the head of a jackal and gun barrels for nipples; a skinless zombie in a diaper with blood spurting out of his face; and a Las Vegas casino street littered with torsos and severed limbs.

Across the entire wall, Ross had spray-painted in five-foot red letters: I AM GOD.

‘Jesus, who is this kid?’ Stride murmured.

But they knew who he was. They’d seen him before, in other cities, in schools, in workplaces.

Stride had made mistakes in his life. He’d arrested people who turned out to be innocent. He’d left cases unsolved. He’d failed to protect people he’d sworn to protect. This was different. This time, he’d missed a threat that Maggie had seen too clearly. That his wife had seen. He knew there was no bright line between social misfit and mass murderer, but he hadn’t seen this one coming.

Ross Klayman was out there somewhere. He was going to kill.

‘Where are the guns?’ Maggie asked. ‘Troy said Jessie had guns.’

They investigated the next bedroom, which was Jessie’s room. The gun locker was there, open and empty. No rifles. No handguns. No ammunition. Ross had taken everything when he left the house. If Troy was right, then Ross had an arsenal with him.

Stride saw Guppo in the doorway behind him.

‘Alert everybody, Max. Canal Park. Downtown. The mall. The DECC. He’s going to show up somewhere.’

Guppo turned away, already pulling out his walkie-talkie.

‘Boss,’ Maggie called. Her voice told him the story.

She was in Jessie’s bathroom. Stride joined her there, already aware of what he was going to find. The bathroom was still humid and damp from the shower. The plastic curtain had been shunted aside. Jessie Klayman was sprawled on her back in the tub. She was naked, and her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Wet strands of red hair lay like veins across her face. The blood all over her body, on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, on the porcelain tub, matched her hair.

Ross had shot his mother at least thirty times.

*

Guilty.

Cindy stood in a crowd around the window of an electronics store, watching the live news report on local television. The crawl at the bottom of the screen announced the jury verdict. Janine Snow had been found guilty of second-degree intentional murder in the death of her husband, Jay Ferris.

She’d expected it, but she wasn’t prepared for the finality of the result. It was hard to draw a line in her mind from that bitter January night to this hot summer afternoon. She’d driven Janine home. Her friend. She’d watched her go inside with her husband. Minutes later, Jay was dead, and now, months later, her friend had been convicted of his murder. Cindy had been there when it all began.

The reporters speculated about the sentence. The statute called for punishment in cases of intentional second-degree murder of not more than forty years. The sentencing guidelines suggested twenty-five years for a defendant with no criminal history. Archie Gale was on television, vowing an appeal and proposing a sharp downward adjustment in the jail time. Regardless, everyone expected the judge to sentence Dr. Janine Snow to at least twenty years at the women’s correctional facility in Shakopee, Minnesota.

Twenty years.

From the beginning, Jonny had said she was guilty. So had Maggie. So had everyone in the city, who’d convicted her in the court of public opinion from day one. And now a jury of twelve Minnesotans had agreed.

Cindy listened to the mutterings of the people around here. The sentiments all sounded the same – that it had ended the way it had to end. She wondered if it was
schadenfreude
, that joy in watching the downfall of someone who had climbed high. The television showed a picture of Janine in a white surgical coat, blond hair perfect, body perfect. A miracle worker. A millionaire. A murderer.

Dan Erickson appeared on the screen, lecturing about justice applying to everyone, taking no pleasure in the tragedy.

Jay’s brother Clyde came next, expressing satisfaction with the verdict but reminding everyone that a conviction wouldn’t bring his brother back to life. Which was true. If Janine had done this thing, no matter her motive, no matter the circumstances, then she had to pay the price.

The reporters talked about the jury and their willingness to convict without the discovery of the murder weapon. They interviewed the foreman, a woman named Eleanor, who praised the eleven people who served with her and the careful job they’d done. She expressed sorrow for victim and killer alike, but she said the verdict was the only reasonable conclusion that anyone could draw from the facts as they were presented to them.

Cindy tried to imagine herself on that jury. Would she have voted to convict? And to her surprise, she realized: Yes.

She heard her phone ringing and slid it out of her purse. Jonny was calling. She assumed he’d been in the courtroom when the verdict was read, and now he wanted to mend fences with her. They’d argued about it for months. It wasn’t in her nature to accept that she was wrong and Jonny was right. He was a stubborn man, but he had a stubborn wife, too.

‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ she said as she answered the phone. ‘You win.’

Jonny simply said: ‘Where are you?’

‘What?’

‘Cindy, where are you?’

‘I’m at Miller Hill Mall. I’m watching the news about
—
’

‘Get out of there,’ he interrupted.

‘Why?’

‘Cindy, get out of there right now. I don’t want you in any public place.’

‘What is going on
—
’ she began, but then she stopped.

Her words hung in the air. So did the noise of the mall. The music overhead. The laughter. The television in the store window. She found herself staring at a pretty woman in her thirties who’d been shopping at Aéropostale. She clutched a big bag in her hand. She smiled, joking to a friend, mouth open as if she were singing a karaoke song. That was who she was at that moment, but a moment later, the bag fell from her hand. The light vanished from her eyes. She threw her arms in the air and staggered forward, and dots of red spattered over her body the way rocks made splashes in the lake.

The noise caught up to Cindy’s ears. Staccato explosions of gunfire rocked back and forth between the walls. Dust blew, tile shattered, and smoke clouded the air. Her fingers loosened; her phone fell.

The pretty woman near her slumped to the ground. So did another woman. Then an older man.

As they dropped, as the people scattered around her, she saw him coming.

Everyone screamed. Everyone ran.

33

Howard sat with Carol in his car across the street from the courthouse. A crowd lingered on the steps. Some of the jurors had stayed behind to answer media questions, but he didn’t want to be interviewed. If he started talking, he’d say the wrong thing. An hour had passed, and already he regretted what he’d done.

He’d said it the first time in the jury room: ‘Guilty.’

And then again in the courtroom: ‘Guilty.’

Janine had watched him as the judge polled the jurors. Her eyes burned him. It was as if she
knew
. He expected her to reach out a hand, to touch him with her cool fingers, to whisper: ‘Don’t betray me.’

But he had. He squeezed his eyes shut, said the word, and cast her away like all the others. He was weak. When he looked again, she hadn’t looked away. He thought he saw the tiniest of sad smiles on her face. Forgiveness.

‘You did the right thing, Howard.’

It was Carol talking.

He stared at his wife in the driver’s seat of his LeBaron. She’d picked him up in white sweatpants and a Dells T-shirt. She looked at him like a hero, and he realized she was proud of him. He’d just sent a woman to prison, and she thought it was the greatest thing he’d ever done.

‘I know it was hard,’ Carol went on. ‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t sure you could do it. You’re a softy at heart, Howard. I mean, that’s a good thing most of the time, but it takes guts to convict somebody of murder, even when you know darn well she’s guilty.’

‘Let’s just go home,’ he murmured.

She nodded at the reporters near the courthouse flagpole. ‘Don’t you want to go answer some questions? I know this was a big thing for you. You’ve earned a little fame for being part of it. I can wait here.’

‘No, I don’t want to talk to anybody.’

Carol started the engine. Then she turned it off and took his hand. ‘Hey, listen, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a bitch lately. You were in a tough spot, and I wasn’t being supportive.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t care about that.’

‘Well, let me make it up to you. We’ve got the Dells coming up in a couple weeks. That’ll be fun. We can get Annie a pizza and rent her a movie one night, and you and me can fool around, huh? It’s been way too long.’

He summoned a smile. ‘Sure.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad this is over,’ Carol said. ‘No more Dr. Perfect. We can go back to living our lives. Just you, me, and Annie. It’s about time, right? I’m ready for things to be exactly the way they were.’

Howard didn’t answer, because that was his worst fear. He didn’t want to go back to his old life. He didn’t want to be normal again. He hated the idea of things being exactly the way they were.

‘Wow,’ Carol said.

‘What?’

She lowered the window. ‘Don’t you hear it? Listen to all those sirens. Something big’s going on.’

*

From her hiding place inside a leather goods store, Cindy could see bodies in the corridor of the mall, dead where they’d fallen. The tiled floor and columns bore wild streaks of blood. Smears. Handprints. She smelled the discharge that comes with death, mixing like spoiled roses with the sugary aroma of the food court and the leather jackets dangling in front of her. Just as incongruously, the overhead music continued to play happy pop songs. Britney Spears. ‘Oops! . . . I Did It Again’. The crowd noise that typically drowned out the music had emptied into a muffled chorus of people crying and praying.

Shopping bags spilled their contents onto the floor where they’d been dropped. Swimsuits. Strappy heels. Bottles of lotion. Stuffed animals. She saw cell phones, too, abandoned in the melee. One by one, they began to ring, forlornly, before going to voice mail. Word had spread instantaneously around the city.

Those who could reach exterior exits had escaped, but there were dozens more, like her, trapped in stores. At least ten people huddled near her, hiding behind clothes racks, their arms wrapped tightly around their knees, their faces buried in the crook of their legs. It was as if, by not looking up, they could make themselves invisible. As if the shark eyes of the gunman would pass over them. Or maybe they just couldn’t bear to see the end when it came.

She didn’t think five minutes had passed, but their imprisonment felt like hours.

He hunted them methodically from store to store. She couldn’t see him, but he wasn’t far. He fired and moved, fired and moved, fired and moved, like a soldier occupying a beachhead. Seconds of silence stretched out between assaults, giving her faint hope, but then a new hailstorm rained down not fifty feet away – gunfire, store windows shattering, victims screaming, individual bullets that could only be kill shots directed at those who had nowhere to run. And then his boots making new footfalls. Tap knock tap knock.

He worked his way toward them. They didn’t have much time. Each assault was a little closer, a little louder.

Cindy saw a fifty-something woman pressed against the wall of the leather store, like a prisoner lined up for a firing squad. The woman’s sanity had flecked away, scattering into confetti. Her jaw was slack. Cindy tried to catch the woman’s eye and give her a smile of encouragement, but there was nothing but faraway panic in the woman’s face. She was a rabbit facing the open jaws of a fox.

And then she began to talk to herself. The noise was jarring.

‘Nicky, come in from the rain,’ the woman murmured. ‘Are you cold, Nicky? Come in from the rain.’

What she said made no sense. Her words came out as a whisper, but then she spoke more, and each time, her volume got louder. ‘Hide in the barn, Nicky . . . don’t be afraid of the spiders . . . hide in the barn.’

Her voice sounded like a child, far younger than she was.

‘I smell apples. Isn’t that funny? Apples!’

Cindy gestured urgently with her hands to make the woman stop. Others in the store hissed for silence. The woman didn’t hear them; she simply stood at the wall, shaking uncontrollably, retreating into some long-ago memory.

‘Climb up here with me, Nicky. Be careful! Don’t fall!’

Another voice murmured from a hiding place: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

And then another whisper, in rage and fear: ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.’

But the woman was nearly shouting now. Turning them into targets.

‘Crows. I hear crows, Nicky. LISTEN TO ALL THE CROWS.’

Cindy felt around her pockets, but she knew she’d dropped her phone. Even so, she had to do something; she couldn’t wait. She spotted a lost phone just outside the doorway of the store, maybe three feet into the mall corridor. She leaned beyond the rack of coats where she was hiding, far enough to see through the store window. The gunman, wherever he was, wasn’t in view. She broke cover, crawling for the doorway, and stopped in its shelter.

‘NICKY, COME IN FROM THE RAIN.’

The phone was just out of Cindy’s reach. She listened for the warning alarm of the killer’s boots but heard nothing to give away his location. Maybe he’d fled. Maybe he’d gone down another corridor of the mall, hunting for new victims.

Or maybe he was waiting for her outside the store.

Cindy took a breath and dove. She scooped up the phone and rolled back into the protection of the doorway. It took no more than two seconds. Her body tensed, waiting for gunfire, waiting for the window to shatter into popcorn above her. Nothing happened, but the silence almost felt more ominous than the noise of bullets. Her chest hammered as if she’d just done her morning run.

She punched the numbers for Jonny’s cell phone. It rang, but he didn’t answer, and she realized he wouldn’t recognize the caller ID on the phone. When the call went to voice mail, she left a hushed one-sentence message – ‘It’s me, answer the next call’ – and then she tried again, hoping he’d pick up.

Finally, on the fourth try, he did. His words tumbled in a rush.

‘This is Jonathan Stride, who is this?’

‘It’s me,’ Cindy whispered, keeping the phone close to her mouth and her eyes on the store window. The mall filled her senses. She could hear water gurgling somewhere – a fountain. Britney was done singing; now it was Bono and U2. ‘With Or Without You’. She felt cold tile under her knees, and her arms were sticky with someone else’s blood she’d dragged into the store. She smelled leather and death.

‘
Cindy!
Where are you? What’s going on?’

‘I’m hiding at Wilson’s. You need to get in here right now. He’s killing everybody he comes across.’

‘Can you see him? Do you know where he is?’

‘No, but he’s close. He was firing inside one of the stores near us just a couple minutes ago. People are dying, Jonny.’

‘HIDE IN THE BARN, NICKY.’

‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

‘There’s a woman freaking out in here. You need to hurry.’

‘Get in the back of the store and hide. We’re moving on all of the entrances right now. We’ll be there in less than sixty seconds.’

‘NICKY, LISTEN TO THE CROWS.’

Cindy waited desperately for the clatter of doors and guns as the police stormed the mall, but instead, like the rattle of bones in a cemetery, she heard the solitary march of boots again. His boots, clapping the floor in a sing-song rhythm. Tap knock tap knock. He was heading for the leather store.

He was almost here.

‘We don’t have sixty seconds, Jonny,’ she said calmly.

‘Hide! We’re coming!’

She shut off the phone. There was no panic now for her and no terror. If he loomed over her, if he fired, she would be dead in seconds; she knew that. It didn’t matter. Calmness ruled. Calmness became her. Sixty seconds became fifty. She glanced at the store, draped in jackets and purses, and saw the frozen shapes of the others sheltered there. At the back, behind the sales counter, she could buy time for herself. A few seconds, but that was all she needed.

Jonny was coming.

Fifty seconds became forty.

She willed herself to move and save herself, but then everything changed for her. On the opposite side of the mall, she saw the doorway of a Victoria’s Secret store. Models of crazy perfection wore almost nothing in the window posters, but the spatter on the glass made them look as if they were covered in blood. In the doorway of the store, standing up, terrified, was a teenage girl.

It was the girl who had innocently sat in the food court, making out with her boyfriend. The sweet half-Asian girl reading about Harry Potter. The girl with her sister’s name. The girl with an entire amazing life ahead of her.

Laura.

That girl – Laura – stood paralyzed no more than twenty feet away. She stared at Cindy, and Cindy stared back at her. Laura wore a skirt that left her long legs bare, and her knees practically knocked against each other. She wore heels that weren’t meant for running, but she was going to run. Her pretty oval eyes darted back and forth, looking for escape. She was a deer by the highway with a truck coming, startled, ready to bolt.

The exit door wasn’t far away. Laura thought she could make it, but Cindy knew she couldn’t.

Tap knock tap knock.

Cindy spread her fingers wide on both hands and pushed the air, as if she could shove Laura back into the store, as if she could make the girl turn around and hide. She shook her head frantically, needing her to understand. She mouthed the word over and over:
No! No! No! No!

Forty seconds became thirty-five. Time slowed down until she could almost see the world drift to a stop.

Don’t run! Don’t run!

Laura ran.

The teenager took six steps in her gangly heels before the bullet took her down. She wailed, her head flung back. Red bloomed on perfect peach skin, and her leg caved under her. She toppled, her shoulder struck the floor, and she squirmed on her back, clutching her thigh.

Tap knock tap knock.

There he was. He marched into view, a soldier all in camouflage, a warrior armed with an assault rifle and ammunition slung over his chest. He had a handgun outstretched at the end of his right arm. He came for Laura, the wounded animal, to deliver the killing shot. Laura wriggled away and cried and begged. He was ten feet from her.

Thirty seconds.

Every other thought in Cindy’s brain went away. Every thought of herself and Jonny vanished. Cindy knew only one thing: Teenagers weren’t supposed to die. Her sister wasn’t supposed to die.

The girl on the floor of the mall was
not
going to die.

Cindy charged. She took off like a sprinter and crossed the space between her and the gunman in one breath. He heard her coming, he felt her coming, and as he turned, bringing the gun with him, she launched herself into the air. She was small, but so was he, and they collided heavily, both crumpling to the tile. She was on top of him, but he hit her hard with the side of the gun, and the impact made her limp.

Twenty seconds.

Somewhere in her mind were the shouting and the thunder of the police. Somewhere close by was Jonny. But not close enough.

He pushed her off him as if she were nothing but a toy. He rolled onto her chest, crushing her, holding her down. She smelled the sourness of his breath and saw his tattoos glowing with sweat. She grabbed his forearm, but he was stronger, and so she bucked her head forward and sank her teeth into his wrist, tearing away skin. He howled. The gun fell. In rage, in pain, he clapped her forehead with the heel of his hand, and her skull shot back against the stone floor.

Circles of burning light burst like ripples in her head, and each ripple dizzied her. There was no more time, no more countdown of seconds, just a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop. She was vaguely aware of him above her, aware of a velcro pocket ripped open, of another gun in his hand. His knees were on either side of her chest. She struck him, but her hand was like a mosquito, easily brushed away.

Footsteps pounded. Chaos. Noise. Voices.

The gun was in her face.

Bullets rang from the police, but no bullets touched him, as if he were shielded. She saw his lips bend into something like a smile. The end was near, but so much could happen at the finish. The barrel touched her cheek, like a kiss. His finger caressed the trigger. More bullets came, more guttural shouts, but the tumult was meaningless. There were only two people in the mall. Him and her.