If Looks Could Kill (43 page)

Chris was the one who made contact. Hands on arms, gaze steady. "It's all right, Shel."

"I... would have helped," the girl protested. "I maybe could have..."

But Chris shook her head. "No, you couldn't. You think I'd put you in any kind of danger?"

She didn't hear the stutter of cameras or hear the expectant hush in the crowd.

Shelly straightened like a shot. "You didn't kill
anybody."

It made Chris smile. "Thanks, honey. But even so, somebody did. I'm much happier with you at Harmonia's. For now. OK?"

She nodded, relieved. "I'm just so... sorry."

And for the first time, it was Chris who did the hugging. "That means a lot to me, Shel." She should have done it sooner.

Shelly joined the phalanx and waited while Brenda ushered Chris into the passenger seat. As even more cameras went off, as questions were tossed out like confetti to a departing ship, Mac leaned close.

"You ready to help me find out who's doing this?"

It took Chris a second to answer. She'd just had too much turmoil. Too much revelation, until all she wanted to do was curl into a shell somewhere on an empty beach and listen to the water. She couldn't go home, she couldn't leave town.

She couldn't call Dinah for support. She couldn't call Dinah ever again.

And here, without any warning, was Mac offering help. Those damn tears she'd finally let loose yesterday threatened again, so that she had to dip her head a moment. But as Brenda climbed into the car, Chris looked back up to see that hint of smile in Al MacNamara's eyes.

"As soon as I get my nap," she promised. "We crazy people sleep a lot, you know."

"My house. I'll cook."

She nodded, fighting the awful temptation of hope. "I'll bring the computer."

Straightening up, he slapped the hood, and Brenda got them on their way. Behind her, Chris could just hear one of the reporters saying to someone, "...can you furnish proof she's a lesbian?"

* * *

"Do you have any evidence that doesn't fit?" Garavaglia asked.

Mac rubbed at his lip. "No. But we don't have any smoking guns, either."

Garavaglia tapped about an inch of ash from his cigar into Mac's Windy City ashtray. "I don't need any fuckin' smoking gun. I'm the circumstantial king, didn't you know that?"

Mac grunted in frustration. "Give me a couple of days," he said. "That's all I ask. I'm waitin' for a possible witness who just had to go to St. Louis for a friggin' ballgame yesterday."

"You kiddin'?" Garavaglia demanded, wiry black eyebrows dancing indignantly. "Even if I didn't care what happened to those three cases in the county, I got a cop killer. You think those Boy Scouts in Clayton are gonna give a dog fart that the prime suspect is a nice person with just a few reality problems?"

"I think we're all gonna be hip-deep in shit if she isn't the killer," Mac retorted. "Because that means we still have a real crazoid out there. And if this cat's following the game plan Chris Jackson wrote out fifteen years ago, it's not finished yet."

* * *

She didn't want to be here. She didn't think she was ever going to be able to sleep under her own roof again.

That wonderful high, open roof. That bright, white, clean expanse of air that had cushioned her for so long from the reality outside. Reality hadn't been outside, though. It had been inside. Deep inside, trapped like that spider in Mac's paperweight. Waiting to spring.

The smell of blood had been trapped in the closed-up house. It permeated the rooms, brackish and metallic, cloying, damning. Even if she was able to scrub the floor clean, throw the couches out, air out the rooms, Chris knew she'd never get that smell of blood out of the building. She'd never erase Dinah's death from the air.

"Do you want some help?" Brenda asked.

Chris shook her head. "I just need some clothes and my computer," she said, trying to breathe through her mouth. Trying so very hard to maintain some calm.

If only she could remember. Somehow that would be better. It would at least be an answer. There would be some sense of comprehension to that grisly scene they'd tried to sweep away. There was only the darkness, though, the shame and the terror and the horrible emptiness. The dislocation of oblivion.

Just like before.

"Chris?"

Both Chris and Brenda turned to the voice at the door. Victor. Alone.

"Where's Lester?" Chris asked instinctively.

Victor blushed and dipped his head. "He... he wasn't sure he wanted to come over."

"Why?" Chris asked, the inanity of the conversation threatening her composure even more than walking back into her house. "Does he think I'm guilty?"

Victor shot her a look of pure misery.

Chris laughed. "Oh, my God, he does," she said, the laughter building into something less than sane.

"No, Chris," he objected, stepping even closer to the screen door, his hands up against it as if he were caught in a cage. "I'm sure that's not it. He just... well, you know how he gets. He didn't feel he could... see you right now."

Chris couldn't stop laughing. Absurdly, all she could think of was that that was the first time she'd seen both of Victor's hands at once. "Oh, I know. Well, tell him thank you. He's been just about the most honest person in town."

"I couldn't convince him to go to court, either," Victor said. "Even after suggesting that
Hard Copy
would probably be intrigued by our Liberace-and-the-banana routine."

Chris laughed even harder. "It's a great... bit, too," she gasped ungracefully. She turned to include Brenda in the conversation. "Lester does a wonderful Ted Koppel." Brenda wasn't nearly as amused as Chris.

"We'll be there for you, Chris," Victor promised. "You know that."

Chris managed to gulp to a stop. "I know. It means a lot to me to know you're watching the house while I'm not here."

Brenda couldn't even wait for Victor to open his own door before asking. "Who's Lester?" she demanded. "His brother?"

Chris broke out laughing again. "His dummy."

She was halfway up the stairs to get her clothes before Brenda managed a bemused, "What?"

* * *

Weird Allen returned from his trip to St. Louis at two that afternoon. At two-ten, Mac and John knocked on his front door.

Allen lived in the house his grandparents had first bought, a small, single-story frame home that sported clematis and rose of Sharon bushes. The outside of the house was neat and tidy and well-kept, since Allen's mother loved to garden.

The inside was different.

"I thought you'd come to tell me about my application," Allen whined when Mac asked him about Mary Willoughby's allegations.

Allen was sitting on an old tweed couch in a torn T-shirt and saggy jeans. The house smelled musty and closed off, as unkempt as its occupant. Mac noticed a magazine corner peeking from beneath the cushion on which Allen sat and the torn out ad with the picture of a young girl in a swimsuit Allen shoved in a drawer as Mac opened the screen door.

"Shopping, huh?" Mac asked with an offhand gesture.

Allen couldn't seem to keep his hands still. "Uh, yes. My cousin's birthday. Chief, I told you I wasn't in Mrs. Willoughby's yard. I mean, if I want to have fun, I don't need to do it alone, ya know?"

He flashed Mac one of those between-us-guys smiles, which on him looked as thin as the paint on his walls.

"Yeah," Mac agreed. "That's what I figured. But ya know, we have to check these things out. And, since it was in proximity to the murder scene, I was kind of hoping for a corroborating witness. You know, help me and I'd help you."

"I'd help if I could," Allen protested, and for the first time sounded absolutely sincere. "Jeez, I wasn't even on patrol that night. I was... I guess I was tired."

Mac nodded and joined John by the front door. "Well, thanks anyway. Appreciate the help."

Allen stepped forward. "About my application..."

Mac raised a hand. "Let me get through this three-ring circus first, Allen. OK?"

"Yeah. Sure, Chief."

John waited to speak until he and Mac had almost reached his cruiser. "Now, maybe he has a magic formula I don't know about, but I don't see that man having the kind of equipment that's noticed in the dark."

Mac nodded. "Definitely minor leagues. On the other hand, when we get back, I want you to get a search warrant for that house. And an arrest warrant."

John shot him a look. "You saw it too, huh?"

* * *

"You're not going to find anything," Chris sighed, head in hands.

Mac just kept on tapping at computer keys. "Have you had any more visitations from your phantom?"

She didn't want to answer. She didn't really want to move. "This house is a pit. Can't you get the judge to paint it?"

"You didn't answer me."

"No. No, I haven't had the feeling of being followed. Except by the entire staff of the
Enquirer."

"And if the story—what did you call it?"

"Stalking the Beast"

"If
Stalking the Beast
is coming true, it's not over yet, is it?"

Another sigh. Depressurization of the tension in her chest. Defense against the palpable passing of each minute, each second until the sun went down. Until her own beasts were let loose again. "No," she answered. "It's not."

It should have been another beautiful day. Spring was exploding throughout the Ozarks. Chris should have at least had that to hold on to. But the weather had closed in, the sky heavy with an unbroken layer of clouds that trapped humidity like a pot lid. The day was warm and thick and as uninspiring as Mac's ceiling. Oppressive. Chris felt the weight of it right on her shoulders.

"You said the story was therapeutic," Mac offered.

Chris nodded, her movements jerky and quick.

"And the protagonist's conscience stalks her because of some evil she's done that she hasn't paid for."

A smile, grim and small. "Guilt and redemption again. The heroine redeems herself in the end by offering herself up to save someone else."

"So, you have guilt, redemption, and sacrifice," Mac countered absently, attention on the screen. "Are you sure you aren't Catholic?"

He almost got another smile out of her. Almost.

She was curled up in his couch, trying her damnedest to focus on the mundane, the active. The positive. Anything but the realization that Dinah was really dead. That she'd never sit across a table from her agent again and be reduced to tears by Dinah's outrageous outlook on life. The funeral was in three days. Chris wasn't going to be allowed to go. The grief would simply pile up in silence where she'd kept everything else all these years.

"Do you really think that Ray is going to allow all this extra manpower searching out every deserted building in the county just because you have a 'feeling' that my phantom really exists?"

"He already did. You're much more profitable to him absolved than convicted."

Chris did grin this time, her humor thin. "It's nice to have friends."

At least, for the time being, she felt safe. She felt as if she weren't a threat. The press didn't dare cross the chief, and the town didn't mind that she was sitting in a room with a man with a gun. Besides, it made for great conversation.

Chris rubbed at her eyes and fought the urge to run buck naked into the street, just to give everybody something else to talk about.

"Do you really think Allen is a pedophile?" she asked.

"I'll put money on it."

"When do we find out?"

"John's serving the search warrant about now. I sure do wish I could find someone with a big dick, though."

That did manage to catch Chris's attention. "Something you want to tell me, Chief?"

He allowed a small grin as he punched up a new screen. "Police business. Have you heard about anybody in town with a reputation for being better endowed than average?"

"Sure. Victor. Why?"

That brought him around from the screen. "Victor?" he demanded, incredulous. "How the hell do you know?"

She grinned. "Suzy Gliddel. His fiancée. She complained to me once that it was a dead waste that Victor had such a promising appliance when he wouldn't plug it in. It's one of the reasons they broke up. Victor just didn't seem destined to participatory sports. Why?"

Mac was smiling. "You said he showed up today without Lester?"

"Yeah. Boy, did he look funny. Again I ask. Why?"

"I think I know why he did."

She got no more out of him than that. After having been acquainted with Mac even this long, Chris didn't figure she would. She turned back to considering the mottled gray of the ceiling and Mac turned back to the computer.

"Holy shit," he breathed no more than three minutes later.

Chris looked over. "What?"

"What years were you at Fulton?" he asked.

"Nineteen seventy-four and -five."