Hurricane Bay (13 page)

“I'm glad to hear they're doing so well.”

“Thanks.”

The silence stretched out between them. Not a comfortable silence. She drew her knees in, rested her chin on them and looked at him. “So what happened in St. Augustine?” she asked him.

He felt himself stiffen. “Someone died.”

A frown tensed her brow. “And it was your fault?”

“Yes. No. Look, it's not something I like to talk about.”

“Hey, you came out and sat down next to me.”

“Yeah, I did. So how is your life? No marriages after Nate over there?”

He heard the sound of her teeth grating. “No. No marriages. How about you? Is it true? Have you and Sheila been getting close again?”

He shook his head, aggravated, trying not to lose patience. He stared at Kelsey, and she stiffened where she sat, not turning from him, but definitely tense. “What is it that you still haven't figured out? Sheila was looking for something, and it wasn't me. Yes, we hung out together at the bar. Yes, she came out here. But I wasn't in the best shape to try to solve her psychological problems, and she certainly wasn't any kind of a balm for me.”

“But you were the last person to see her.”

“No, I'm certain that someone else saw her.”

“Who?”

“Dammit, Kelsey, that's what I don't know.”

“You think she's dead,” Kelsey said, watching him.

“Kelsey, I'll find Sheila.”

“Hey, out there!”

They were interrupted by the call from the yard. Looking back, they saw Cindy, Larry, Nate and Jorge standing and waving.

Dane got to his feet and instinctively reached down to give Kelsey a hand. To his surprise, she accepted the lift and didn't wrench away immediately.

“We're going to take off,” Nate called. “I've got to go by the bar.”

“I need a real shower,” Larry said.

“I may have a hot date,” Cindy contributed.

“I
am
someone's hot date,” Jorge said.

Dane walked back along the dock and reached the yard. Cindy took a step toward him before he could reach the group, rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Thanks for letting us invite ourselves over.”

“Thanks for everything you brought.”

“Just call us dial-a-party,” Nate said. “Hey, come by the bar later, if you can. I've got a new band starting tonight. They do everything. Pop-rock, jazz, reggae, calypso…you'll like them.”

“I'll try to make it.”

“I'm off,” Jorge said, lifting a hand with his keys in it. “Thanks, all of you. It's good to get together.”

“Yeah. We'll have to do it again,” Larry said. “We're heading back to the duplex,” he said to Kelsey. “Are you coming?”

“I've got my own car. I'll be along.”

“You sure?” Larry said.

“I'm sure that's my car,” Kelsey said, smiling.

“No, I meant—”

“Kelsey will be right along,” Dane assured him. “I have plans tonight.”

He thought that maybe her cheeks reddened, but she replied smoothly to Larry, “I'm just going to make sure we picked up any messes we made in Dane's place.” She turned and started for his house. The others took off for their cars, waving their last goodbyes.

Dane looked at the dying sunset. Strip clubs didn't get going until later anyway. He followed Kelsey into the house.

She was in the kitchen, rinsing out the last chip bowl.

He leaned in the doorway, watching her. “Are you sure you don't want to go through the rest of my papers?”

She turned and looked at him innocently. His gaze slipped to her breasts. He forced it back to her eyes.

“I have my own computer, you know.”

“What?”

“I don't need to go through your papers. I can download old newspaper articles just the same as you can.”

He clenched his teeth with aggravation. “Kelsey, leave it, please.”

“I just want to know what you're going to do to find Sheila.”

“I will do everything in my power. Kelsey, please, trust me on this. Let me do the investigating.”

“There's a little coffee left. Do you want more, or should I just pour it down the drain?”

“No, I'll drink it.”

He walked over to the coffeepot.

“I'll get it for you,” she said.

He paused. Kelsey was suddenly being far too nice.

“You know…I think I left my lighter outside. Why don't you join me for coffee? I'll meet you in the living room.”

He walked out of the kitchen and through the house. Outside, he leaned against the support wall and looked in through the dining-room window. He watched as Kelsey came out of the kitchen, set the cups down on the coffee table and looked around the room. She was headed back toward the dining room when something caught her eye. He frowned, seeing Kelsey get down on the floor on her hands and knees.

He walked back in. She jumped up as he did so, her cheeks bright red. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

She stared at him in silence for a moment. “Just friends,” she said. “There was nothing hot and heavy going on? There was nothing serious?”

“What are you talking about now?” he asked, aggravated.

She dangled something in front of him. An earring. Sheila's earring.

He crossed his arms over his chest, staring at her. “So?”

“This is Sheila's earring.”

“You know that?”

“Of course I know that.”

“How?”

“I gave her these earrings. The stones are emeralds. They were my gift to her when she was the maid of honor at my wedding.”

“So Sheila lost her earring. What does that mean? She's been in this house many times.”

“Right. But her earring was here, on your living-room floor. If you look at the way the loop closes, these aren't the kind of earrings that just fall out.”

“Kelsey, what the hell are you saying?”

“You two were…you were having an affair again.”

He walked over to where she stood, staring into her eyes as he plucked the earring from her fingers. “All right. One more time, Sheila was here. I never said to anyone that she wasn't. Were we having an affair? No. We honestly were not having an affair. Nothing so grand. Did we have sex one night? Yes. One night. We both knew that even what we'd had as kids was long over. Did I do something horrible and evil to Sheila? No. Pay attention here.
No.
There it is, the truth. And I really don't give a damn whether you believe me or not. Take it or leave it.”

Kelsey's teal eyes lit hard on his for a long moment. Then she brushed past him. He didn't move and didn't turn.

He heard the sound of the door closing as she left his house.

K
elsey was surprised to arrive at the duplex and find that neither Larry nor Cindy had gotten back before her. They had probably gone with Nate to the Sea Shanty. Or else the hot date Cindy had mentioned was with Jorge. She had no desire to follow them and have a more social night, and was relieved at first to be back alone. She wanted to shower, huddle into bed and sleep. It was unlikely that she would sleep easily, but at least she could shower, get into bed and mull over her thoughts of the night.

Strange, though, the minute she turned off her car's engine, she felt her solitude. The night wasn't still; there was a soft breeze blowing. But the trees and shrubbery seemed to hang heavily around the driveway and create a host of shadows. The short distance from the driveway to the house became very long. Darkness almost seemed to whirl in pockets of ebony, constantly changing the shapes that were nothing but illusion but appeared to be sinister creatures lurking in the night.

They had forgotten to turn on a porch light. It was only the street lamps, standing high and at a distance, that gave any glow to the night and turned the lengths of branches into bony fingers, stretching out over the yard.

Kelsey realized she was just sitting in her car, staring at the house.

She told herself she was ridiculous, opened the car door and started for the duplex. None of the shadows jumped after her, though breezes rustled the branches, seeming to create a whisper on the night air. To her annoyance, she fumbled with the key while getting it into the lock. Once she had gotten the door open, she burst in, then turned and closed the door as if there were a tiger on her tail. She locked it quickly, then stood in the entry feeling like a fool. Shadows. She didn't tend to be afraid of them, or of darkness, or of the night.

Yet as she walked through the living room to the kitchen and dining area, tossing her purse on a chair, she felt uneasiness creep over her.

The strange sense that she wasn't alone.

She found herself retracing her footsteps to the front door, as anxious to get out again as she had been to get in. But before she reached the door, she managed to tell herself she was being absurd. The duplex had been locked. There was nothing out of order that she could see. There was no reason to think she was anything but alone.

Still, with the uncanny sense of something being off persisting, she decided that her first course of action had to be an inspection of the apartment. Living room. Definitely no one there, unless it was an ant-size person. She opened the door to the second bedroom where Larry was sleeping, going to the bath and looking behind the shower curtain, then checking out the closet.

She was feeling silly again when she thought she heard a sound…like a thumping, coming from the back. Standing in a closet that held nothing but a few of Larry's shirts, she felt a chill sweep through her. Great. She was inspecting the house like a sane person, but if there did happen to be an intruder, she had nothing with which to defend herself other than a tailored shirt and a hanger.

Great.

She looked around the bedroom. Nothing. She stepped back into the living room and decided her best bet for protection was one of the heavy pewter candlesticks on the coffee table. She grabbed one and walked toward the back.

Great. The porch light wasn't on but the lights inside were. If there was someone lurking in the shadows in the back, they would be hidden in darkness. She might as well be on wide-screen television.

Kelsey hit the switch on the wall, pitching the main room into darkness. She inched into the dining area and quickly hit the lights there, as well.

Now the world seemed a pool of darkness.

She stood still, listening. Night sounds came to her, almost imperceptibly. The breeze against the house, the rustle of branches. The longer she stared out through the plate glass, the more her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Seconds stretched into minutes. Minutes seemed an eternity. She realized she wasn't breathing and exhaled a long stream of air, then inhaled. She neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. After a while she once again felt like a fool. She left her silent vigil at the back window and walked into her bedroom.

Sheila's bedroom.

The drapes were open in there, as well. She could see out to the back. A long palm frond dipped low over the pool, as if it were a bony hand with pointing fingers, indicating some horror within the water. She chastised herself for her ridiculous imagination and total cowardice. She still had a death grip on the candlestick.

The moonlight showed little more than shapes in the room. She was almost frozen with the fear that one of them would move. Again she stood still and waited. She almost screamed aloud when she heard another thumping sound from the back, not by the pool, but by the fence to her right.

Nine-one-one, nine-one-one, nine-one-one, just call the police! her mind raged. But call the police and tell them what? That she had heard a thumping noise from her backyard?

So much for being alone, for being grateful for solitude. Where the hell was Larry?

Cindy?

Anyone?

 

Dane had been looking up information on murdered strippers. He had gone to bed with Sheila. He had caught her snooping through his work. Maybe she was getting too close to the truth. Maybe he had followed her home, and now he was out there, thinking she should share Sheila's fate.

She formed the thoughts in her mind, but she didn't believe them. Dane couldn't have followed her so quickly. He certainly couldn't have been here before her.

Besides, she didn't want to believe evil of Dane. How insane.

She kept staring out into the darkness, watching, fighting the sense of panic. The shadow-shapes in the room seemed to loom larger. The bed, she knew. The chair. The wing shape was merely the jacket she had tossed over the back of it.

Nothing was changed, she was certain.

And yet…

She had the oddest sensation that someone other than herself had been in here.

Sheila…

She almost said the name aloud. Was she fine, perhaps in hiding for some reason, slipping in and out of her own home without telling a soul, simply because she was afraid?

But with no valid reason, no logic, no sense, she was just as certain that Sheila hadn't returned as she was that someone had been in the room.

Staring out the back, straining to see, to hear, she almost missed the sound that came from the front of the house.

But she didn't.

Subtle, soft, barely perceptible. But a sound. A clicking. A soft clicking. Like a door opening. With stealth and menace.

The front door. She had locked it.

Hadn't she?

Had she imagined the sound? Worked herself into such a silly panic that she was imagining noises everywhere?

But no…once again, some form of sixth sense or instinct was kicking in.

She was not alone in the house.

The thumping had come from the back. The clicking had come from the front. If she had really heard either.

She realized that she was standing like a deer in the road, blinded by the lights of an oncoming car, standing still and simply awaiting the deadly impact.

In a single instant, she decided that she would rather take her chances outside than be trapped inside the house with a…

Killer.

In a whir of motion, she reached for the latch on the sliding door leading out to the porch, pool and yard. The door didn't give. She pulled at it, then realized there was another latch closer to the floor. She bent down to unlock it.

And then she knew.

There really was someone in the house.

She could hear the swift quiet footsteps against the carpet. She could feel the displacement of the air, as someone was rushing toward her, out of the shadows, out of the darkness.

She gripped her candlestick tightly in her left hand and pulled at the sliding glass door once again with her left. She pulled hard, with an adrenaline-charged strength that sent the glass sliding with a vengeance across the runner.

But before Kelsey could catch her balance and go flying out, the phantom that had been only sound became real as a figure burst through the bedroom door and came barreling toward her.

With no choice, she turned rather than flee, ready to attack in self-defense.

In a split second, she lifted the candlestick.

And screamed.

 

There were no prints on the Polaroid.

Dane knew it. He hadn't brought the photo into any lab; he just knew that he was dealing with someone who had carefully plotted every aspect of his crime.

He had once heard an FBI profiler give a lecture on the perfect crime. He'd claimed there was no such thing.

But sometimes, by accident, a killer could commit a perfect crime. When a woman was murdered, the husband, ex-husband, boyfriend or lover, immediately fell under suspicion. Except in the case of serial crime. Most of the time, serial killers committed their crimes against strangers. And when there was no one with whom to compare physical and trace evidence, the evidence, no matter how carefully collected, was of little use. Husbands, lovers and boyfriends were easy to track down; strangers were not so easy to find.

There were always clues.

But what had gone on here had been, at the least, orchestrated with extreme detail and careful planning. Accidents could create a perfect crime. This killer had planned on accidents of nature. There were so many tiny fragments with which forensic experts could now work. Prints and blood were huge by comparison; in a lab, a case could be made with a tuft of carpet, a broken strand of hair, a remnant of ash.

Could.

Nature could preserve. Insects could give time lines and tell a million tales.

But nature could also take away. And the whipping fury of a storm could wipe away any trace evidence.

So much for his own powers of observation, his training, his years in the military.

The killer had known when he was away. Had known when he would return. The killer had performed his savage act when Dane had been gone. He had delivered the photo when Dane had been gone.

But not before any evidence had been destroyed. He had planned his act to coincide with the storm. A violent storm, with whipping winds, a massive surge. Normally it would have made sense to go through the motions. To follow procedure. But Dane knew that he had been targeted, watched and used. He was intended to take the rap, to go to prison and possibly to meet his fate through lethal injection. The crime had almost been a challenge.

None of it made sense when brought beneath the scrutiny of everything he had ever learned. The Necktie Strangler was considered, by all the law enforcement agencies that were involved, to be a serial
signature
killer. Often a serial killer's MO might change. He might target strippers who practiced prostitution on the side, then change to picking up women who were merely promiscuous. But the man's
signature
had been in his acts against the bodies of his victims, the fact that he had left them stripped, with the weapon of their strangulation still around their necks. He didn't leave the bodies in the open; he hid them in the water, knowing that time and the elements would take their toll on the corpses. Though this implied organization and planning, it didn't fit with a body being left on his property—and a Polaroid picture of the body being taken, then shoved beneath his door.

There were, of course, killers who wanted to be caught. Killers who knew they couldn't stop but still had enough conscience left to want to be.

Tonight, as he stared at the picture, stomach still churning at the sight, nerves raw, emotions burned and cold, he felt again the sorrow. And the tumult. If he brought this piece of evidence in, he would go to jail. He had owned the old Polaroid camera that had taken the shot.

He had owned the tie that was knotted around her neck.

Any evidence pointing to the real killer had been washed away in the fury of the elements.

Sheila had been with him. There might still be DNA evidence on the body that could prove it.

And yet…

Hiding the picture was withholding evidence. He loathed what he was doing. If his actions brought about another woman's death…

He closed his eyes. If he was arrested, another woman might still be murdered. Because they would be holding the wrong man.

Kelsey was already convinced he was involved. She would be passionately determined on justice for Sheila.

He rose, ready to leave the house, a man with things to do, people to see, and a desperation to do them all before time closed in on him.

He returned the photo to the place beneath the floorboard in his bedroom and headed out. But before he was out the door, his phone rang. He let the machine pick up. He was surprised to hear Jesse Crane's voice.

“Dane, call me. They've found another body in a canal.”