If Looks Could Kill (46 page)

Mac didn't even thank her. He simply turned back to the radio and barked out orders.

Shelly. Oh, God, it wasn't fair. It couldn't be like this. No matter what the story had said, no matter how this all had to turn out. Chris couldn't let Shelly suffer for her, too.

"Honey?"

Chris opened her eyes again to find that Sue stood before her with a cup of coffee in her hand.

"Come on, drink up. It's gonna be a long evening, and you don't look very good already."

Chris wanted to cry again. She wanted to beg Sue's forgiveness for even, for a moment, wanting to suspect her. Hoping that it could even be Sue, who had never flagged in her support of Chris in all this, rather than herself. Rather than have that monster still alive inside her.

She should be relieved. There was a chance she hadn't really killed those people. That the madness she'd been sinking into had been someone else's.

It was still her fault.

Even if Elise—or whoever she was—was the murderer, she was doing it for Chris. To Chris. To get Chris's attention and give Chris some kind of message, to maybe pay her back for something she'd done years ago that she had no memory of.

Judgment is never escaped, her mother had always said. Maybe, somehow, it was true. Maybe she'd run to Los Angeles in the hopes that she'd outdistance not only what she'd suffered, what she'd done to her child, but whatever she'd done to this nameless, vague person.

Only she hadn't escaped anything. It had all been waiting for her back in Missouri, years later, lifetimes later. Chris accepted the cup into both hands and did her best to smile. "I guess you don't have anything to say about keeping secrets anymore," she accused gently.

Sue actually blushed. Dipped her head, just the way Victor did when he was confronted. "What was I supposed to say when I found out?" she demanded. "Oh, Chris, you and I have something in common. Remember the good old days?" She lifted those huge, babydoll eyes, and Chris saw the fresh tears of distress. "I didn't know what to say. I never worked on the halls. I was a secretary in medical records, and I hated every second I was there. I couldn't... couldn't get those case histories out of my mind, all those sad, sad stories."

"They were crazy people," Chris protested, self-protection long since found in sarcasm, "not crime victims."

Sue stared at her, outraged. "You were fourteen years old when you were hospitalized," she said in that mother's tone. Defending the defenseless, as always. "That's not exactly hardened criminal country."

Chris sipped at her coffee, the hot liquid scalding the pain that was already waiting in her chest. "But I was paying for my crimes."

"You were being treated. Just like everybody else. And don't forget, I saw all those case histories. Hundreds of them. And what I always felt was that they
were
the victims. Innocents unable to cope somehow with the madness around them."

Chris did smile now with genuine gratitude for her friend. "I wish I could have known you then," she admitted.

Sue smiled back, sincere and earnest. "Me, too."

"Curtis is missing, too," Mac announced as he stepped back out of his office.

Both women turned to him, their smiles discordant in the tense room.

"Inconsiderate of him," Harmonia intoned from where she was perched on the couch.

No one else paid any attention to her.

"She just wanted Shelly," Chris assured Mac. "It's a personal thing now. Curtis is safe somewhere. Try the hospital. Maybe the filling station."

"Why?"

She shrugged, uncomfortable with intuition. "I don't know. It just seems right. What do you want me to do?"

"Stay right here. As soon as I get to the scene I'm sending John back for you."

Chris almost dropped her coffee cup. "Don't be ridiculous. I'm not sitting here while she has Shelly. You know the way the story goes."

Mac nodded, completely in control. "Yeah, I do. You die. I'm not real interested in seeing that happen."

"You'd rather offer up Shelly?"

"I'd rather have everybody walk away intact. Now, I've been on the horn with Eldon and the highway patrol. We have the chopper and the dogs. Where should we look?"

Chris tried to think. She did her best to pull that story back up, the harsh, disjointed flood of guilt and desperation. The charred core of despair from which she'd spun her tale of salvation and resurrection. The path of her own redemption, the metaphoric act of her death at the hands of her conscience.

Except now, it could well be the very real thing.

"I think..." She paced, mug clenched, Mac and Sue forgotten as Chris forced up images and concepts she'd sublimated and displaced so well she'd become a best-selling author. "I'm not sure. It should be Fulton, or my house in Springfield. Back to a place where she... where I'd be most afraid. Where I'd been captured and cornered, and have to come back to face my truths..." She closed her eyes, clenched her courage to her and finished, knowing that neither of them would understand the weight of her words. "Back to the darkness."

"Fulton?" Mac countered. "You think she'd try and get there?"

When Chris opened her eyes, it was to find herself back at the front window, looking out onto her town, onto the simple, neat streets and familiar faces.

Even the town looked as weary as she, flagging beneath the clouds and dingy haze that looked like old hospital halls. The sun was setting, but that only sapped the light. There wouldn't be any reaffirmation tonight.

"Fulton's too far," Chris admitted, still looking. "She'd stay here. Maybe my house. Maybe the hospital. A nice figurative substitute."

"Then that's where we'll look."

"She's not stupid, Mac," Chris said, out to the flat, overcast sky. "She's been building her case for this moment, which means that she isn't going to give in without some kind of resolution."

She could hear Mac checking the clip in his gun. Heard him sliding shells into the shotgun he'd pulled from the gun closet. Wondered whether he was already chafing at that scar, and what it would cost him to walk into that hospital.

She wondered whether his hands had started to shake.

"I'm not stupid, either," he told her. "I'll have plenty of help. Now, you three stay here until John shows up. And keep the doors locked."

"Stay here?" Harmonia objected, jumping right to her feet. "And all those news people waiting for their meal?"

Mac stared at the woman, nonplussed. "I don't think they'll be there anymore," he offered diffidently.

Harmonia simply walked out.

Her act seemed to set off something in Mac. "Shit," he snapped, dropping his weaponry on the table and unclipping his mike. "The press. It's gonna look like a war game out there... John?"

John's voice came back right away. "Yeah, Chief."

"Tell Grover to get his men searching the woods north of Oz. I want every dog up there but one. And put the chopper up over Eleven Mile Road. Up by where Lawson's car went off the road."

There was a pause, a mutter of confused protest in the background. "What about me?"

"Meet me at the hospital. You and two of the state men and that dog. We'll head out from there."

"10-4."

Mac was rubbing the scar now, his movements taut and telling. "I've got to get the press away from that hospital," he said almost to himself as he reclipped his mike. "They think the search is concentrated around Oz, they may give us a little more chance to get the grounds searched before she finds out we've pegged her."

"What about me?" Chris asked, giving it one last try. "What's she going to do when you show up instead of me?"

Mac was picking his equipment back up again. "By the time we find her, John will have you out there already."

Chris turned on him one last time. "I can't be a bystander in this, Mac. You have to understand that."

Mac stopped just short of the front door. Faced her with solemn, quiet eyes that betrayed things Sue never noticed. Chris saw the apprehension there, the first betrayal of what he was going to face. Not just a madwoman, but the darkness in himself. She recognized, too, though, the new uncertainty. The fragile shoot of something growing in the midst of that desolation. It unnerved her. It also gave her the courage to step up.

"I have to know why," she said simply. "Please."

Mac didn't move. He stood before her, hands filled with radio and pump shotgun. In the distance, a siren moaned, and a car jumped the stoplight at the corner. Voices muttered outside the door. Sue waited in perfect silence.

"I promise," he said simply. "I just want to know where she is first."

Ten different tensions rose and released in her chest. Fifteen different emotions. Resolution. Answers. Sunlight after all this damn darkness. A walk through hell to get there. Chris did her best to maintain her composure in the face of his generosity.

"In that case," she offered, turning on her heel. "Don't put anybody at risk. Especially Shelly. Go into my house and get my parabolic mikes. Direction finders, body mikes. Whatever you need to find her. I'll wait right here for John."

Chris pulled her keys from the bottom of her purse and walked them over to tuck them into his shirt pocket.

"And be careful," she commanded, then did her best to grin. "I had to say it before Sue did."

With his hands full and his mind already on the search ahead of him, Mac paused long enough to bend over and give her a kiss. It wasn't much as kisses went. A simple declarative statement. For the first time in two weeks, Chris felt hope.

* * *

Mac locked the city hall door behind him with a curious feeling of expectation. Anticipation. He hadn't enjoyed this kind of action since that night in Chicago. For a second before he turned for the back parking lot, Mac looked out into the waning afternoon. It was a miserable day, stale and heavy. The fresh green of spring was sapped by humidity and the sky had been soiled by pollution. He was starting to sweat just stepping out of the office. Even so, he could still smell the earth. The sweet scent of fresh-cut clover and the first perfume of flowers.

And he was looking forward to searching out that hospital. Even if his hands were shaking. Maybe things were beginning to look up after all.

"Oh, Chief, hello."

Halfway back into the police parking lot, Mac turned to find the Reverend Sweetwater at his elbow. "I'm a little busy right now, Reverend." He didn't stop moving. Sweetwater didn't seem to notice.

"I wanted to speak to you about young Allen," the minister insisted. "His mother came to me about these terrible rumors that have been circulating..."

The last thing Mac needed right now was a confrontation with Sweetwater. He just kept on walking, back toward the empty lot where the car sat in shadows. Overhead the highway patrol helicopter swept up toward Oz. Mac nodded instinctively, his mind already on the search. Now if only the news crews would take the bait. If only Chris understood when he used that fancy makeup kit of hers to dress somebody up in her place for the showdown.

"Chief, I don't think you appreciate what this is doing to do Allen and his family," Sweetwater insisted. "Do you know what a vicious allegation like that will do to that poor boy?"

That finally brought Mac to a halt a good fifteen feet from his car. "I'm pulling pictures of young girls out of that house, Reverend."

Sweetwater waved him off. "Then there's a perfectly good explanation somewhere. He's a faithful church member," he protested without even hearing Mac. "Everyone knows Allen. Why, his mother is an Elder. You can't just take the word of some anxious mothers and precocious girls over that of a contributing member of the community..."

Mac damn near missed the sound of the second helicopter when he heard Sweetwater's protest. "Word of what anxious mothers?"

"I'm sure they're just imagining things. That's what I told them when they came to me."

"When did they come to you?"

Sweetwater took a step back at the tone of Mac's voice. "Well, over... I mean... it was obviously a mistake. After all, Allen's been saved. I personally put up his bail money as a sign his Christian family believes him."

Mac counted to five to keep from hitting the minister. He wondered how long that little band of believers had been enabling Allen to practice his trade in peace. Finally there was nothing for him to do but get on with business.

"Better move out of the way," he snapped. "I'm going to be leaving now."

"But Chief..."

Mac shouldered past him without another word.

Sweetwater seemed to realize he'd overstayed his welcome because, with one final nod, he headed on back toward the street. Mac watched him go before opening the trunk of his unit. It would be nice if he could see some indication that the reverend felt the least bit responsible for protecting Allen. No such luck. He walked like a man without worry, safe in his convictions.

Guilt and redemption. Chris seemed to be the only one who really gave a damn about any of it.

"One-Alpha-Five to Chief MacNamara."

Mac undipped his mike. "Yeah, John."