If Looks Could Kill (44 page)

He looked over at her, and she sat straight up. She'd never seen Mac so surprised. "So was Sue Clarkson."

Chapter 19

"What are you talking about?"

Mac motioned to the screen he'd been studying. "Her work history. She was a secretary there in seventy-four."

Chris came right to her feet. "So what?"

Mac simply watched her where he sat. "So, isn't that kind of a coincidence?"

Chris was already on the move. Her chest simply didn't have the room for more surprises. She couldn't breathe as it was. And Sue couldn't have murdered anyone. Sue was normal. Sue was sanity. Sue had children and a husband, for God's sake.

"Come on," she challenged. "You can't think Sue's the one. Hell, I
will
admit I killed all those people before I believe Sue had anything to do with it. I'll admit I committed the goddamn Lindbergh kidnapping if you want." She stopped right in front of him, agitated and angry. "Not her."

Mac never flinched from her. "At least we can talk to her. Find out if she has any ideas."

Tears again. Hot, frustrated tears. He was trying to take everything from her now. She'd lost Dinah. Lost her silence, her isolation, her security. He wanted to rob her of her reality as well.

"Do you want to come along?" Mac asked.

Chris straightened. "You bet your ass I do."

He was shutting off the computer as she walked over to pick up her purse. Overstuffed, as usual. Overbalanced. When she reached to pick it off the table, the whole thing upended and rained down everything from checkbooks to aspirin to miniature screwdrivers. And one other thing.

She saw it bounce. Heard the little clink, caught the metallic glint as the light flashed from it. Saw the dull glow of scarred metal.

"I'm not picking all that up," Mac said without looking up from where he was working.

Chris couldn't answer. She couldn't take her eyes from the circle of silver that was spinning like a top on the hardwood floor. Mesmerizing. Terrifying. Damning.

"Jesus," she whispered, hands to mouth. "Oh, Jesus."

Mac immediately turned around to see.

"Oh, Jesus is right," he agreed as he bent to pick up Cooter Taylor's 1898 silver dollar from the floor.

* * *

"You were supposed to search her house!" Mac was yelling.

John faced off with him, nose to chest. "I did!"

Mac waved the evidence bag with the coin at him. "Then explain this to me. Tell me how the fuck it ended up in a purse that's been locked in a house behind police tape for three days."

"I don't know, all right? What else do you want me to say? But I went through that purse. I went through every drawer and cabinet. I damn near ripped apart the bears."

"You two are giving me a headache," Chris complained quietly from where she was stretched out on the couch, inside Ray's office, trying her damnedest to come up with her own answers. "There's nothing to argue about. I must simply be craftier than either of you thought."

That actually brought them to a halt, still in face-off position, right outside the door to the mayor's office. City hall was closed for the day, the door locked against people with press passes and the evening shift still out serving the search warrant on Allen. There was another major scandal brewing, about how local parents allowed their young daughters to visit Allen alone in his home. How their pictures were now ending up in his very private albums.

Allen hadn't been stalking Chris. He'd been stalking children. Chris would have been much happier with it the other way around.

Her head hurt. Her chest was on fire. Her stomach was trying to bring up the lasagna she'd managed to force down at Mac's. Just when things had started looking minimally better. Bail and help to prove she wasn't really crazy. The silver of that coin had burned her hand like fire.

Maybe it
was
someone else, Chris thought, watching the play of shadow on the mayor's newly painted ceiling. Maybe she wasn't the monster.

Maybe if she hadn't lived through nineteen seventy-four and nineteen seventy-five, she'd be more inclined to believe it.

"Am I going to have to come out there and break it up?" she demanded toward the open doorway, closing her eyes instead of jumping to her feet.

"Not unless you want to scare off Victor in the process," Mac suggested. "He's at the corner right now. If he knows you're here, he'll close up tighter than a virgin on a blind date."

"Does he have Lester with him?"

"Yeah."

"What about Sue?"

"I'm going to talk to her next."

"After Victor fingers her, huh?"

Chris massaged her eyes, desperate for silence, for distance. For peace.

No, not peace. Answers. Finally and truly and irrevocably. Pictures, sounds, smells, whole and telling. Good news or bad. Innocence or guilt, Chris wanted her memory back. She wanted to be able to call up her life and not have it skip around like a badly spliced video. She wanted to know whether she'd just learned to close those doors too well, whether she really had murdered and then forgotten, just as she had so long ago. Or whether, maybe, this time it was someone else's nightmare. Someone who wanted to share their delusions with her.

She was so tired. So goddamn weary of all that guilt bearing down on her.

Out in the front room, the doorbell tinkled. Chris cringed farther into the soft Naugahyde of Ray's couch.

"Chief? You wanted to see us?"

"I'm glad you brought... came along, Lester," Mac answered quietly.

Chris kept her eyes closed. She measured her breathing, focusing on water, on sunlight, on the springtime that was exploding outside Ray's window rather than the revelations she knew were due out in that front room.

"Sit down, Victor. I'm really stumped about something, and I think you can help me."

There was a small pause.

"John's just leaving," Mac offered. The bell tinkled again, and Victor finally moved.

"Is it about Chris?" the young man asked anxiously as he scraped and rustled into position right out by Sue's desk. "Is she all right?"

"She's fine."

She's not. She's ready to cash it in.

"She said that you wouldn't see her today, Lester. Can you tell me why?"

"Where is she?" Victor asked.

Deep, easy breathing. Calming. Quieting. Escaping anyplace but here. Anytime but now.

"She's asleep," Mac said evenly. "Lester?"

"Is that what you said, you little jerk?" Lester demanded. "That I didn't want to see her?"

"Well, I..."

"And I suppose she thinks
I'm
the traitor now. Fine, I can take it. I can live with the mistrust. I'm sure there are some other ventriloquists out there who'd just love to work with hot property like me."

"Lester, please..."

"He didn't want her to know. Can't blame him really. How would it look, with him bein' the first life-loyal member of her fan club, and he spends his Friday nights outside her window yankin' ole Willie the one-eyed wonder in her honor."

"Lester!"

Sinking, settling, swirling, distancing herself from the turmoil that was building out there. The revelations that would change everything even more. That would undo the world strand by insidious strand.

Away from the guilt of the pathetic disdain in a dummy's voice.

I'm sorry, sorry, sorry...

* * *

Mac wished he were surprised. He wished he could have spared the gentle young man the discomfort of revelation. Victor was ready to crumble into tiny bits of distress. Lester was the storyteller now, the accuser and confessor of crimes committed mostly in Victor's mind.

"And nobody's ever seen you do it?" Mac asked quietly, wishing he could turn an eye in to where Chris was curled up on the couch on the other side of the paneled wall. Victor couldn't even lift his head, his face scarlet and small.

"It's pretty easy," Lester admitted, those bright blue dummy eyes somehow feral. "Sneak out his back door and take advantage of that deep shadow in the big oak behind the houses. He prefers the back window to the front, since he'd rather his devotion be anonymous. No one has ever seen him back there."

* * *

How did I get here? It's so dark. So dingy and smelly and hot. What's going on?

Oh, God, I know. I know where I am. I know where they're taking me. What's going to happen.

I'm so afraid... don't make them take me, Mama.

Don't make them do it again. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I'll repent. I'll do penance on my knees in the dark for the rest of my life. Just don't let them take me back there and strap me down. Don't let them hurt me again... Please, Mama, please...

* * *

"And the night Chris's agent was murdered. You tried to go to the window, like always."

"He
tried. He never takes me. I guess he figures dummies don't have the same
needs
a dweeb in a bow tie does. But I know all about it, because he can't wait to tell me when he gets home. What do you want to know?"

"You were outside Mary Willoughby's, weren't you?"

"He was. Remember? I don't get invited to
those
parties. I have no party favors to play with."

"Why not Chris's house? Why didn't you keep to your schedule?"

"Because the dragon lady was there."

"But did you... did he see anything?"

* * *

She hears them. Gurgles, cries, awful despairing sobs that echo around the high walls and embed themselves into the shadows. People shuffling along the hallways. Faceless, nameless, hunched over and blank, their drool drying on their clothes.

One person. Here, waiting. Right by the edge of her bed.

"Who are you?"

Waiting. But she can't remember. Not her own name, not where she is, not even the reason the side of her cheek is all wet. She drifts in some vague bath of distress, and her head hurts. Her jaw hurts.

"Come here. Closer."

The panic curls in, a wave lifting far out at sea, deceptively small in the vast expanse of water. A swell without definition, without focus. Approaching. Rising.

"If the right eye offends..."

I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry...

* * *

"Victor, tell me what you saw at Chris's house that night."

"He would have come to tell you sooner. He really would have. It's just, he couldn't tell Chris. Not about what he'd been doing. Not about why he'd been standing out there under the trees. I mean, what would someone like her say about that? How would she feel about Victor after knowing?...Does she have to know?"

"One of you has to tell me what you saw out there first. Then I can let you know whether or not Chris has to find out."

"Well, I really didn't see anything. I mean, I waited until JayCee left to... well, you know, relieve himself. He does that a lot, doesn't he?"

"JayCee left?"

"Oh, yes. Well, not
left,
really. Just stepped around behind the Detweillers' shrubbery to the side where nobody would see him. Several times. Must be all that coffee he drinks. Then I slid out... back by the corner of Chris's house, it's easy to hide. It's so dark there, and the bushes offer some cover."

"Nobody was there?"

"Not that I saw. But it's easy to hide. I do it... I, uh, well, anyway, I was turned toward the Willoughby's house when I thought I heard a door close. I thought Chris had seen me and come out. But she didn't. I guess I just heard that person closing the blinds."

"She'd closed the blinds? Who?"

"The agent, I imagine. I couldn't see well. But it wasn't Chris."

It's the dream. The hospital halls, half in shadow as the night shift takes over. Decorated in drab institutional colors and partitioned by the geometries of grillwork on the windows. Awash in the sighs and moans and mutters of medicated sleep. Steeped in half-felt rage, half-remembered terrors, half-realized dreams. A hell even Dante couldn't have envisioned.