If Looks Could Kill (18 page)

The bell tinkled merrily behind Sergeant Lawson. Nobody saw Sue walk in on the frozen tableau.

"What?" Mac was asking.

Chris was still trying to breathe. That protective bubble of Plexiglas had just grown smaller. Or maybe the beast had grown larger, eating up the air between herself and it. Chris could feel its breath on her again, could hear that silky whisper of terror. There was so much to keep track of, so many doors that needed to stay shut in order to protect herself. Door after door, all set in an intricate design to provide protection, to open up space. It was the only way she'd managed.

The only way she'd survived.

Sue never even got out her greeting before she, too, came to an uncertain halt, all of them now within five feet of Chris. Chris was beginning to sweat, desperate to move. She remained perfectly still.

"What do you mean, you're Jacqueline Christ?" Lawson asked carefully.

That brought Sue's head snapping right around. "What?" she demanded even more forcefully than Mac.

Chris dredged up a self-effacing grin as she directed her gaze to the stain an old thunderstorm had left on the indoor-outdoor carpeting by Mac's office.

"It's another pseudonym I use," she admitted in a small voice.

"Pseudonym?" Mac countered. "You mean other books?"

"You're Jacqueline Christ?" Sue asked almost shrilly, her sensible green eyes huge with astonishment, her purse hitting the floor with a flat thud. "Jacqueline Christ!"

Chris did, finally, face her friend. "That phone booth does get crowded sometimes."

"More mysteries?" Mac asked.

Chris shook her head. "Romance."

That brought on another shocked silence.

"Oh, God," he moaned. "Now I have to read romances?"

Sue turned on him like a mother defending her young. "Just so you know, Jacqueline Christ is the best in the business. She's written fifty-three books."

His face crumbled. "Fifty-three?"

Sue afforded him no more than a glare before she swung her attention back on Chris, the news sinking in with force. "You
really
are Jacqueline Christ?"

"I'd really appreciate it if you don't say anything," Chris said. "My mail's intense enough as it is."

That brought another heartfelt groan from Mac. "I imagine you saved all that, too."

She nodded.

He damn near dropped his head in defeat. "Then we'll have to go through it."

"Why hide it?" Lawson asked, finally coming to life.

Everybody turned on her, almost surprised that she was still in the room. She had never even had the chance to put down her purse or briefcase, standing stiff and alert as a bird dog on the scent.

"It's just easier to keep everything separate that way," Chris admitted. "I need... I need to compartmentalize things to be able to manage what I do."

Lawson finally moved, her actions brisk and impersonal. "It's not important. What's important is how the killer found out. Who knows?"

"Of
course
it's important," Sue retorted, then retreated when everybody else turned on her in consternation. "But I bet I could talk to Chris about that later... after I go through the mail." And with that, she spun around, picked up her purse, and stalked into the mayor's office.

"Who knows?" Lawson asked Chris again, pulling out her notes along with a Kleenex to blow her nose. "Damn allergies," she muttered to herself. She had a wedding ring on her left hand, an old fashioned Claddagh ring with hands wrapped around a tiny gold heart. Chris wondered at who some people married.

She decided it was time for some coffee. Actually, she wanted a drink, but she didn't drink, so coffee was going to have to be her best substitute, unless Mac wanted to teach her how to smoke right on the spot.

"My agent," she said, her back to both of them as she hefted the pot and poured. She knew what it was going to taste like. She swore Sue filtered it through Tom's baseball socks. It didn't matter. It was strong enough to creosote railroad ties, and that was what she needed at that moment.

"And his name?"

"Her name," Chris countered, taking a slug straight up. "Dinah Martin."

"That's right," Lawson mused, pulling out a chair and perching on it. "Your agent's a woman. Our killer seems to be a woman, too."

Chris almost spit coffee on her. "Well, it's not Dinah," she said with a bark of laughter. "She'd never see any reason to resort to knives. She does enough damage with her tongue."

Lawson was bent over her notes, checking something. "She has a rap sheet," she announced.

Chris waved her coffee cup in objection. "Not for murder."

"For what?" Mac asked, following Chris's example and heading for the coffeepot. She saw him pat his pocket for his cigarettes, saw his forehead wrinkle in frustration at not finding any.

"It's nothing," Chris insisted, trying to read over Lawson's shoulder.

Lawson snapped her files shut. "Theft."

"Shoplifting." Chris turned to Mac for support. "She has a little problem."

His scowl was deeper, coffeepot poised over his official Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms coffee mug. "A little problem?"

"She's seeking treatment."

"She's a kleptomaniac," the detective announced dryly.

Mac was hardly impressed. "Unless she's been stealing swords and bathtubs, I don't think she's involved. Anybody else know about your other pseudonym?" he asked Chris, his voice gentling noticeably. "Anybody at all?"

She didn't even have to think about it. "Nobody but the people at Rapture Press," she insisted. "Jacqueline has been well-known for a lot longer than C. J. I didn't want the town treating me like some of the people in the industry have been treated, so I kind of... well, protected them from the truth. I'd rather not have to spend my time defending my craft, or my privacy."

"Well, somebody else has figured it out," Lawson stated. "Some woman with access to the Brentwood post office... I don't suppose
you've
been up there recently."

Chris's answer was automatic. "Well, sure. Just a few weeks ago. I'm up there all the time researching..."

Which was just about when it dawned on her exactly what the detective was implying.

It took an effort to keep from hurling her coffee at the woman. "What the hell do you mean?"

Chris didn't even notice that Mac had taken to leaning against the wall by the map, or that his full attention was on her flushed face.

It didn't seem to bother Lawson to face Chris with her suspicions. "When was the last time?" she asked.

Chris's jaw dropped. "You think
I've
been killing these people?"

Lawson challenged her with unsmiling confidence. "I think it's too early to rule you out. When were you up there last?"

Chris found herself looking to Mac for support. He considered her evenly, his expression passive. It didn't help.

"Three weeks ago," Chris said.

"And where did you stay?"

"I usually stay at the Ritz in Clayton. It's a little treat I give myself."

Lawson took another swipe at her nose and cleared her gravelly throat. "What about this time?"

"The Ritz. I told you."

"And the time before that? When were you there?"

"I don't know," Chris said. "I'd have to look. Since I set the mystery series in St. Louis County, I go up every time I start a new book. Research into a different municipality."

"Which one did you do this time?"

"Marlborough and Clayton."

Over ninety municipalities within the boundaries of St. Louis County, not to mention the unincorporated area, with enough geographic space and demographic range to keep Livvy Beckworth and Detective Stephens busy for years to come. At least, Chris hoped so.

"The three murders were in the same order as the books, right?" Mac asked, sipping at his coffee.

Lawson sneezed and nodded. "First three."

"And what about the next two?" he asked. "Anything on those yet?"

Lawson fiddled with her pen for a minute. "Not that I've heard."

Chris walked back to the coffeemaker, her cup already empty, her belly churning. "Well, one's the death by oleander poisoning in Ladue, and the other's suicide by shotgun in Fergusson."

"And the one you're working on now?"

Chris looked up, unsettled all over again, somehow sure she was asking for trouble by inviting these two people into her imagination. "Um, this one... I'm not sure yet. Knife again, I think."

Lawson's head came up. "You think?" she asked. "You don't know?"

A shrug, as if that were the most expansive Chris could allow herself to be. The room was too small for more, her chest too tight. "The book dictates it, and I'm only getting started." The day she wrote a book about the good detective here, she thought acidly, she'd have to pick a particularly nasty way for her to go. Death by fondue, maybe.

"Did you see anyone when you were in St. Louis?" Lawson asked.

Chris took another good slug of coffee, masking her fear with its fire. "Why?"

It took Lawson a minute to answer. She just sat where she was, her ballpoint pen clutched in white-knuckled hands, her head bent. Chris saw the swirls of her hair, still flattened a little from sleep, and thought of hospital patients.

"What day exactly were you there?" the detective asked finally.

"The twenty-fifth through the twenty-ninth."

Lawson nodded to herself. "Mr. Weaver was murdered in Affton, less than eight miles from where you were staying, on the twenty-seventh."

Chris wasn't sure how that was supposed to make her feel. She thought of the well-appointed hotel room, of the cold, spare afternoons walking the tidy, prosperous little bedroom community of Marlborough, supported by its speed traps and comfortable, middle-class taxes. A quiet, predictable kind of white-collar enclave where murder just didn't happen. Which, of course, in this book, it hadn't.

She thought of Affton, three books and a tax base away. Blue collar, its major thoroughfares lined with small businesses and cemeteries, its politics conservative, its denizens older, and its decor row upon row of tidy, uninspiring brick homes with neatly tended yards.

She'd driven those streets so long ago, walked through the subdivisions where sweetgum trees had rained down their spiky fruit on well-loved little yards and garage sales had snarled traffic every Wednesday. She'd spent hours and days in the stores, the bars, the bowling alleys watching the people, looking for likely couples to star in her book.

The "Watsons" had been classic Affton residents, white, middle-aged, blue collar, their entertainment the ballgames in the summer, the television in the winter, and the local bar all times in between, the frustrations mounting along with the bills and the realization that the American dream wasn't everything they'd been promised.

Chris had really related to Mrs. Watson, caught by her husband's violent disappointment, trapped by her upbringing, a prisoner of that hot, crowded little house behind the bowling alley. She'd been angry for her, desperate with her, knowing that terrible vise of futility. The night Mrs. Watson had actually figuratively given the Mister his with that horrific butcher knife, spattering blood around her American Colonial bedroom with its J. C. Penney paintings and the knickknacks collected from years of vacations to Hot Springs and Silver Dollar City, Chris had been more than glad to be the proverbial hand to free the little woman who'd existed only in her mind. She'd really enjoyed doing the surly bastard in.

And she'd been back, no more than a few miles away, when the real Mr. Weaver had struggled and screamed and begged as his life had seeped away into the brown and gold bedspread. Chris knew she should ask what time it had happened. She should ask what time they'd all happened. It was important.

She didn't.

She sipped at her coffee as if the detective's news didn't unnerve her. She fought the clutch of nausea at the thought that someone out there was affected enough by her murders to emulate them. To emulate, in his mind, her.

Chris ended up back at the window, where she could see all the way down the street and wondered if the murderer had been as careful in his research as she had.

"I visited one of the women I used to work with," she finally said. "Drove around and walked around to get the feel of the streets. Did some business and some research on the occupations and personality types I wanted to portray. Ate out a few times and got a lot of carry-out from a nearby Chinese restaurant. That's the way I usually do it when I'm up there."

"And at night?" Lawson asked. "Did you see anybody at night?"

Chris knew Lawson wanted her to react. She wasn't about to give her the satisfaction, even though she'd just had her own questions answered. If the book were really being copied, Mr. Weaver would have died somewhere near one in the morning. All the victims would have. "I write at night," she said. "And that's almost impossible to do if I have company."

Lawson challenged her in silence, her non-specific accusation even more offensive. She didn't really suspect Chris. She just wanted Chris to think so to see Chris squirm.