If Looks Could Kill (15 page)

"Does anybody up there know who you really are?"

She merely shook her head. Mac wondered just what lay beneath that brittle control of hers. "What about the people you worked with at DFS? Would they know?"

She shook her head again. "Nobody ever knew I wrote until I moved here. It was... mine."

Oddly enough, he understood. Maybe if he'd had something of his own, he wouldn't have needed the force so badly. Maybe he wouldn't have lost so much when he'd left.

Instinctively he leaned forward, not close enough to touch, because that might have spooked her. Close enough to offer support, to insinuate understanding. He'd been a champ at Good Cop-Bad Cop. He knew just how to play the role to get his best results, and he knew that to get anything out of this iconoclastic, insightful, enigmatic woman, he was going to have to play it to perfection. Because what this letter told him was that without Chris Jackson, their killer had no reason for his actions. Without her, they also wouldn't have any kind of window into his reasoning at all.

"You knew this was where we were heading," he said simply, hands out just a little, posture very still.

She shook her head, her eyes a little wider, with a funny sheen to them. "I want it all to be a mistake."

"It isn't. Lawson's right, and you know it. And I think there are other letters like this one in that pile."

"I didn't even notice it," she protested, her voice just a little ragged. "It just looked like another letter asking for help getting published." She was picking at her shirt now, a childish gesture on a woman who only moments ago was so completely in control. "I get them all the time."

Mac shook his head, his instincts pointing dead-on at the envelope in his hands. "When was that last guy killed?"

"I, uh, don't know."

"Three weeks ago," a voice said.

Both of them turned to find a new player at the door. Short, stocky, untidy in a too-careful kind of way. Brown and hazel, unremarkable, unmemorable. Mac disliked her on sight.

Sergeant Lawson. Mac might not have been able to immediately place the voice, now gravelly with the cold or whatever had her wiping at her nose with a wad of Kleenex and clearing her throat. But there was no mistaking that attitude.

"Robert Weaver died three weeks ago," she said, opening the screen door without invitation and stepping into the living room. Her gaze never left Chris's as the author climbed to her feet.

Mac followed, lifting the envelope for her to see. "In that case, Sergeant, I think we may have a suspect. And I think he knows you're after him."

Chapter 6

The sky was a robin's-egg blue, impossibly high and clean, its only adornment a tattered scarf of clouds at its shoulders. Along the winding hill roads south of Pyrite, the trees were just beginning to boast the first blush of green, and the world smelled like fresh dirt and old leaves. Chris felt as if she could see forever through the sharp spring air as she geared down on her Triumph motorcycle and pulled back on the throttle.

She couldn't accelerate fast enough. There wasn't enough wind slicing at her cheeks, not enough howl to the engine, or enough shudder through the handlebars to fight. She needed the contest right now, leaning into sharp curves and popping through the gears with her foot as the bike skimmed the asphalt, roaring up over blind rises and then hauling in on the brakes when she misjudged a turn. She needed the silence of the mountains and the emptiness of the afternoon, when everybody else was at work and the tourists hadn't yet begun to infiltrate the Ozarks to finger the lace tablecloth tattered from dogwoods and redbuds.

She needed to escape.

Elise Lawson terrified her. Not just her brusque attitude, her competent, professional air that told Chris plenty about just how far she'd take this investigation. Not just her appetite for the three nearly identical letters Mac had already come up with to add to her growing evidence file.

Her unrestrained delight.

She wasn't like Mac, smelling the scent of a good hunt, or like many of the other cops Chris had known, intrigued by a tough puzzle. She was like Harlan standing up to shout down the librarian at the town council meetings. Elise Lawson saw something in this case that even Mac didn't seem to get, something personal that sat sourly on Chris's stomach.

Chris had met cops like that before, usually burnouts who'd stumbled so far into the muck they had to shovel that they couldn't smell it anymore. Hot dogs with attitude who forgot where the line was, and often crossed it without thought, their only interest what could benefit them, their enjoyment salacious.

But Lawson was too young for that. She was brand new to homicide, working the Crimes Against Persons unit from St. Louis County straight out of a stint on patrol in affluent West County. She was also probably looking for a way to compare dick sizes with all the male detectives around her, and Chris knew with a sinking feeling of fatality that this was going to be it.

Chris focused on the silvery tumble of a stream as it paralleled the road. She opened her mouth wide and sucked in great lungsful of clean, crisp air. She did her best to clear her mind of everything but the power of the motorcycle beneath her, the sway and swoop of flying along the back roads on two wheels, the millisecond reflexes needed to skirt the edges on a 350-cc bike.

She still saw the pictures. Black-and-whites, color, the tints as lurid as a tabloid, the positions stiff and unnatural, like Lester left without a hand up his back, the settings as clinical as an operating room. The eyes open. All the eyes open, and somehow looking right at her.

What have you done now?

Instinctively she squeezed her eyes shut. She almost missed a curve and opened a new doorway into somebody's barn. Damn Lawson for finding her. Damn her for goading MacNamara into joining the hunt. Goddamn her soul to all the fires of hell for exhibiting those pictures to Chris like her personal accomplishments.

"Just take a look at this," she'd insisted, flipping open the first file folder right there on Chris's kitchen table. "Tell me if this isn't a damn good approximation of the crime scene in
Hell Hath No Fury."

Not an approximation. Not even as dissimilar as a copy. Chris had only been able to stare, open-mouthed, struck silent by the sight of that mutilated, bloated body where it lay half in the bed, one arm sliding down to the floor, the other thrown across the blackly glistening stomach.

His eyes, flat and opaque, had been wide open. Surprised, as if he couldn't imagine finding himself in such a condition. As if the last person he'd expected to see on the other end of that knife was the one wielding it.

Just as he'd been in
Hell Hath No Fury.

Not almost. Not close.

Exactly.

Every person reading a book comes away with a slightly different picture. Even with detailed description, a reader brings his own prejudices and preferences to a book. Maybe someone else reading
Hell Hath no Fury
would have positioned the victim a little to the right, or moved his hand up another notch toward his heart, where it could have stemmed just a little of the blood that had coursed from him. Where it might have deflected the knife maybe once in its furious descent. They might have given his hair a little more red or his once-handsome eyes a darker shade of blue.

But Chris, who had written the book, who had sat for hours over the exact description of the victim, of the gruesome ballet choreographed in that nondescript bedroom, of the blood splash patterns and lividity markings, had a very vivid image of what that death scene would have looked like.

And she'd looked right down on a picture—on ten pictures, each shot from a different angle—of it.

And another set of pictures from
Too Late the Hero
and
That Scottish Play.
Perfect in every detail. Accurate enough that for just a flash of a moment Chris wondered if she'd really conceived her works or lived them. Had she really only seen these crimes in her imagination?

Just a couple of miles beyond where Rita Louise Filmore catered to every trucker and biker in the county in her double-wide, Eleven Mile Road topped the north side of Wilbur Mountain and afforded a nice view of the valley beneath. Pockmarked No Hunting signs decorated the trees, and beer cans littered the grass from necking marathons when the high school kids pretended that the lights spread out below them were really the view from Mullholland Drive. Chris pulled to a stop and let the bike idle beneath her. Her heart was hammering against her chest, her palms sweaty, her temples throbbing from the vise of small spaces.

She had deliberately bought her house because it was so high, so wide, so very open. And yet, as Lawson had moved closer, her eyes trapping Chris's with her own sense of triumph, her ambition as sharp as splintered glass and her curiosity savage, even Chris's own house had become too small. Chris had ended up throwing both her and MacNamara out and running like hell before she'd stopped breathing completely.

She couldn't handle this. She couldn't live with the burden of what this person with the meticulous letters and perfect, gruesome vision was doing to her, and she had no way to protect herself from it.

All Chris had wanted with her writing was to finally be able to get beyond the guilt. To finally find some peace from the whisperings and reflexes of the past. Always being chased from town to town by the specter of her own failings.

Even here, though, she wasn't safe.

She looked down at the scatter of buildings below her. The Rock of Ages Baptist Church with its steeple in the shape of her doodlings, sharp and surgical, as if God could be divined by compass and protractor. The service station with its misplaced arch, and the county courthouse in its island of trees. Cracked sidewalks and weed-filled lots, modest houses brightened with siding that surrounded the square like diminishing planets in orbit around a dying sun, and farther out in its own untidy cluster of rusted trailers and disassembled autos, the land of Oz, its dismal poverty camouflaged even now by the fog of tree limbs.

It wasn't much. Not a tidy town by any means, or pretty in a conventional way. More like an unkempt favorite aunt, comfortable and easygoing. Crippled with unemployment, spiced with pockets of vicious ignorance and gentled with the small-town concern that had already brought four neighbors and the Methodist minister to her door with offerings of food in her time of distress, Pyrite didn't merit so much as a mention in Missouri's travel brochures.

But it had become as much of a home as she'd ever had. And now, because of something she'd done, she was going to lose it. She was going to lose everything. And there was nothing she could do about it but help it happen, because she couldn't run away from those pictures.

She couldn't allow this person to keep killing in her name.

Chris had been alone most of her life. She had never felt more alone than she did at that moment, when she so needed to tell someone just how much this thing frightened her. There was no one, though, who would understand. No one who had any experience of what madness felt like when whispered in a person's ear. So, as always, she would face it by herself.

Righting the bike, she kicked it into gear and eased on back down the road toward town.

* * *

"I've had it. I'm leaving home."

Chris looked up from where she was closing her garage door, and her mood slid straight from desperate to despairing. She didn't need this right now. Not when she couldn't really concentrate on it.

She straightened and pocketed her key in her fuschia leather jacket. "What's wrong, Shel?"

Shelly's smile was fragile, at once brassy and immeasurably vulnerable. Chris wanted to pull the girl into her arms, and knew the girl would never let her. So she started walking toward the kitchen door, figuring Shelly would follow. She did.

"Wrong?" Shelly laughed as she hefted her purse onto one shoulder with shaking hands. "Nothing's wrong. My father treats me like a piece of dirt, my mother won't do anything about it, and my boyfriend has just told me he's tired of me."

"And?"

They both stopped as Chris worked the key in the back lock.

"And what? Isn't that enough?"

Chris just smiled. "No. I want a really good reason."