Killing Spree (3 page)

Gillian autographed the book for the man’s wife, and signed his cast too. Rolling up her coat sleeve, the daughter asked Gillian to autograph her arm. Gillian complied. She talked with them for a few minutes. The man asked if she needed a ride someplace. Gillian lied and said she was fine. As the man and his daughter pulled away in the minivan, Gillian waved. And when she was sure they could no longer see her, she started to cry.

Those few moments with that man and his daughter had made her feel important. Maybe the long bus trip here was worth it after all. So why was she crying?

She’d been doing that a lot lately—when she was sure no one was around to see her.

Gillian found the pepper spray in her purse while fishing out some Kleenex. She dried her eyes at the bus stop.

There was something else in Gillian’s purse—her mail. They’d been late delivering it today, and she’d grabbed it out of her mailbox on her way to catch the bus to Woodinville. Now, on the near-empty 409 back to Seattle, Gillian glanced over her mail—and tried to ignore the unabashed gaze from a creepy, bearded man with a bad toupee, seated in one of the Handicapped Only spots.

Most of the letters were bills, some past due. But she’d also received a postcard from her best friend, Dianne Garrity, vacationing in Palm Springs. She and Dianne had grown up together. As a kid, Dianne had been considered a weirdo because she’d had scoliosis and wore a back-brace through tenth grade. But that didn’t bother Gillian, who was never very athletic or popular anyway. They read each other’s diaries, and Dianne was the first person to tell Gillian that she should be a writer. “I mean it,” Dianne had said back in high school. “You’re going to be a famous author someday.” She was saying the same thing when Gillian was trying to sell her first thriller to scores of uninterested agents and publishers.

Saw “Black Ribbons” in a Walgreens here in Palm Springs
, Dianne mentioned in the postcard.
You were at eye level, right next to Stephen King—well, okay, NOW you’re there. I moved it.

There was also a letter from her agent. It was a Xerox of the first few paragraphs of a
New York Daily News
article. Her agent had attached a Post-it.
Doesn’t this seem familiar?
it said.

The bus went over a few potholes, but Gillian barely noticed. She was studying the headline:
POLICE HUNT FOR ‘ZORRO’ KILLER
. The article told of a stabbing on Halloween night in New York. A man dressed as Zorro had sliced up a woman in the back of a taxi. The clipping was only a portion of the story, and the victim’s last name had been cut off:…
visiting from Portland, 28-year-old Jennifer
—

Biting her lip, Gillian set down the news clipping.

The story was familiar, all right. She had written a scene like that in one of her books.

He noticed the curtain move in the front window. For the last hour, he hadn’t seen any activity in Gillian McBride’s half of the quaint, cedar-shaked duplex, but he knew the kid was home. Gillian and her son, Ethan, occupied the first floor of the duplex. The woman who lived in the small unit above them hadn’t been home for several days.

The duplex had a certain unkempt charm. Fallen leaves covered the sidewalk in front of the place. Gray with dirty white shutters, the converted house had a park bench on the front porch—between the doorways to the units. The basement had a separate entrance on the side. The light outside the cellar door was activated by a motion detector. There was no garage, which couldn’t have mattered much to Gillian McBride because she had no car. The yard was tiny, but the duplex sat on the edge of a ravine. Through some of the bare trees, he could see St. Mark’s Cathedral, a brick and mortar monstrosity, looming on the other side of the ravine.

He felt as if he knew every inch of Gillian’s place. He’d been watching it—off and on—for the last few days.

Mostly he sat in his parked car across the street, listening to his iPod and playing his Game Boy to relieve the tedium. Every once in a while, he walked around the block to stretch his legs and peek into the windows.

He was halfway down the block when he saw the curtain move in the front window. Then he heard her door open. Ducking behind a wide evergreen, he watched the kid step outside. Gillian’s son, Ethan, would turn fourteen in a few days. He was skinny with wavy brown hair he must have recently cut himself, because the bangs were all askew. Despite a trace of adolescent acne, he was a handsome kid.

Ethan stepped out on the front porch, then looked left and right. He wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and clutched a small, black, plastic bag against his stomach—almost as if he were trying to conceal it. Padding down the porch steps, he crept around the side of the house. The kid seemed to shrink as the light above the basement door automatically went on. He hurried to the garbage cans, opened the lid to one, and dug out a loaded Hefty bag. He dropped the little plastic bag into the receptacle, then loaded the Hefty bag on top of it. After another furtive glance around, he replaced the garbage can lid.

From behind the evergreen, the man watched Ethan hurry back inside the duplex. The curtain in the front window moved again. Obviously, the kid wanted to make sure no one had seen him. If he was concerned about anyone finding what he’d thrown out, Ethan was a bit early. The trash collection at Gillian’s place was every Thursday morning. That gave him two more days to go through that garbage and unearth whatever the kid was hiding.

He saw someone coming up the sidewalk.

It was Gillian, back from her book signing in Woodinville. He’d seen the announcement in the newspapers. He wondered if it was successful.

Clutching the collar of her trench coat, she headed toward her duplex. Even though she was at least half a block away and couldn’t see him, he blew her a kiss.

Gillian stopped in her tracks. She stared at the duplex in the distance. The automatic light to the cellar entrance just went off. It was operated by motion detection. What was moving around the basement door?

She quickly reached inside her purse, and found the pepper spray without any trouble this time. As she continued toward the house, Gillian told herself it could have been anything—maybe a raccoon. That was one of the disadvantages of living so close to a ravine. Ethan was home, but it couldn’t have been him. The only things in the cellar were the washer and dryer, and he didn’t even know how to operate them. He couldn’t have been taking out the garbage—not on his own, not without her asking him at least three times to do it.

Approaching the house, she saw no sign of anyone, no raccoons scurrying about. The trees swayed in the autumn breeze and leaves flew up from the sidewalk. Maybe the wind had set off the automatic light.

Gillian took another cautious look around before she ascended the porch steps. She quickly dug her keys out of her purse. As she opened the door, a waft of stale smoke hit her. “Ethan?” she called. “Ethan, are you home?”

He came around from the kitchen. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Were you burning something in here?” she asked, closing the door behind her.

“Oh, um, I—yeah, I tried to start a fire in the fireplace, but I screwed it up,” he said, shrugging. “Sorry. I didn’t know it stunk so much.”

She waved a hand in front of her face. “Well, from now on, maybe you shouldn’t try to have a fire when I’m not here. Okay?” She put her keys and the pepper spray back in her purse, then moved over to the front window and opened it a bit. “Were you outside just a minute ago?”

Ethan quickly shook his head. “No. Why do you ask?”

“Well, something just activated the light by the basement door.” Gillian slipped out of her trench coat. “It gave me a little scare for a minute.”

“Oh, well, I—I think I saw a raccoon out there earlier. How did your book signing go?”

Gillian hung up her coat. “There was a line of five hundred people around the store, and a riot broke out when they ran out of my books. They had to call the cops in.”

“Did you sell
ten
books at least?” he asked.

On her way into the kitchen, she kissed him on the cheek. “A whopping eleven. Did you get any dinner?”

“I had a DiGiorno.”

“But you had frozen pizza last night.” Gillian peeked into the refrigerator. “There’s a perfectly delicious casserole in here. I told you all you had to do is heat it up. And there’s salad—”

“I just felt like pizza again,” Ethan replied, plopping down at her computer. It was in an alcove just off the kitchen. Gillian’s husband had converted the pantry into a writer’s nook. There was a tiny window with a view of the ravine, a bookshelf full of her books along with tomes about true crimes and serial killers, and framed family photos of Gillian, her husband, and Ethan.

Ethan often used her computer to play video games. She didn’t object. The poor guy had to entertain himself somehow. It was bad enough she left him alone every Thursday night so she could teach her creative writing class at the community college. But now, with the recent release of
Black Ribbons
, she’d been gone more evenings than she’d been home the last three weeks. She felt as if she’d been neglecting her son for book signings, book club dates, and interviews with newspapers and tiny fifty-watt radio stations all over western Washington State.

Gillian figured she probably wasn’t in line for The Worst Mother Alive Award, but she certainly had a dishonorable mention coming to her. Plus they were practically broke. It was a long wait between royalty checks, and the money she made teaching that creative writing class wasn’t much. Gillian wondered how she would pay those bills in her purse.

She took the casserole out of the refrigerator, peeled back the aluminum-foil cover, and picked at the cold chicken and noodles. She studied Ethan’s profile. The computer screen lit up his handsome, chiseled face. He was getting over his gawky-adolescent phase, and starting to look like his father. Gillian felt a little pang in her stomach.

She hadn’t seen her husband for two years. Neither had Ethan. They didn’t know if he was alive or dead. They rarely talked about him—except in the past tense. But that didn’t mean they never worried or wondered about him.

Gillian put the casserole back in the refrigerator. “So—is your homework done, honey?”

“Almost,” he replied, eyes riveted to the computer screen.

“Did you practice your violin?” He’d been playing for three years now, and was quite accomplished at it.

“Yeah, Mom,” he said, preoccupied. “You got another book signing tomorrow night?”

Gillian sighed. “Yes, over in Redmond. I’m going to the market in the morning. I’ll buy some microwave dinners so you don’t starve.”

“Pick up another couple of DiGiornos while you’re at it, okay?”

“Sure,” she muttered, cracking open the window above the sink. The kitchen smelled of stale smoke too.

Gillian gazed out the window. For a moment, she thought she saw someone in the side yard ducking behind a tree. Was that why the outside light had gone on and off earlier? She kept staring, and finally told herself it was nothing. She was just on edge tonight for some reason. Hell, in the mini-mall’s parking lot, she’d almost pepper-sprayed that poor man in the cast—the husband of a fan, for God’s sakes.

Her thriller-writer’s imagination was working overtime tonight.

Gillian took one last look out the window, and then started fixing a salad for her dinner.

“Well, thank you, Karen,” Gillian said under her breath.

It was 11:15. Wearing a sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms, Gillian sat at her computer with a cup of Earl Grey. The apartment still smelled a bit smoky—especially in the bathroom. She’d noticed it while in there washing her face twenty minutes ago. Ethan had gone to bed, but a telltale strip of light still shone under his closed door.

She had an oldies station playing softly. Janis Ian was singing something depressing.
Music to Slit Your Wrist By.

Gillian typed out a cordial reply to the e-mail, which had come through her Web site. It was the only fan letter today. She made sure to apologize for the spelling error.

She checked her regular e-mail, and found a note from her agent:

Gillian e-mailed her agent back, and said the outline was going well. This was a total lie. She didn’t even have an idea yet. “And thanks for sending along that news clipping about the ‘Zorro’ Killer,” she added. “That’s very bizarre & a bit unsettling. I hope they catch him.”

After sending the e-mail, Gillian stared at the computer screen for a minute. She couldn’t stop thinking about that stabbing in New York. She’d been at this very spot when she’d created her own “Zorro” killer.

Now someone had made him real.

Shifting in her chair, Gillian logged onto Amazon.com, selected Books, and typed in
The Mark of Death, Gillian McBride
. The sales rank was unspectacular, but there were two new reviews. The most recent reviewer,
Imalegend2
, gave her book two stars, calling it trite and clumsy. But
Imalegend2
added: “The masked-man, ‘Zorro’ murder, however, is a shining, inspired moment, an oasis in this otherwise barren piece of pulp literature.”

“Oh, screw you,
I-Male-Gender-Two
, or whatever your name is,” Gillian muttered. She checked out the other new review.
Wanderemik3
gave the book four stars, and summed it up nicely:

Digging through her purse, Gillian fished out the partial news clipping her agent had sent. She reread the truncated last line with half of the victim’s name cut off: “…visiting from Portland, 28-year-old Jennifer—”

Frowning, Gillian set the clipping aside. She pulled up the
New York Daily News
on the Web, then tapped into their archives for November 1st. She found the complete article, and stopped reading when she came to the identity of that twenty-eight-year-old woman who had been stabbed. “Jennifer Gilderhoff,” she whispered. “My God…”

Gillian knew her.

She reached across the desk to her “pending” box, and dug through the unpaid bills, announcements, and mail that needed her response. She found the postcard, heralding the publication of
Burning Old Bridesmaids’ Dresses & Other Survival Stories
by Jennifer Gilderhoff. On one side of the card was the book cover, with a cartoon of a woman who looked a bit like Jane Jetson. She wore a cocktail dress, and held a lighter wand. The flip side of the card had Gillian’s address and a blurb for the book. Along the margin, Jennifer had scribbled a note:
“To my terrific writing teacher—Thanx for all your encouragement! Hi to my old Seattle pals!”

Gillian hadn’t seen Jennifer Gilderhoff in two years. But she remembered her. Jennifer was pretty with blue eyes and light brown hair. She had a certain dippy, kittenish quality that a lot of men found attractive and many women found irritating. But she was a pretty good writer. Jennifer had been one of Gillian’s students the first year she’d taught the night class at Seattle City Experimental College.

Gillian read the rest of the
Daily News
coverage, and kept shaking her head over and over again. She couldn’t believe this had happened to someone she knew. She checked the
Daily News
archives for a follow-up story, and found only one brief article—dated three days ago—mentioning Jennifer Gilderhoff was still comatose in Roosevelt Hospital in New York. The man who had stabbed her was still at large.

Getting up from her chair, Gillian moved into the living room and started pacing. If her agent hadn’t sent her the news clipping, she might never have known about this. But now Gillian felt involved, maybe even
responsible
in some way for what had happened. She knew the victim. She’d invented the killer, and drawn the blueprint for the murder.

If she called the police in New York, would they think she was crazy? She couldn’t offer them much—except that she knew Jennifer, and there was a possibility that “Zorro” might have read one of her books. Did she know “Zorro” too?

This was one of those times when she really missed her husband. If Barry were here, she could talk with him and figure out what to do.

Her fictional heroine, Detective Maggie Dare, would know the best course of action. Fortunately, Maggie hadn’t sprouted solely from Gillian’s imagination. The
tough old broad
sleuth had been patterned after her friend, Ruth Langford, a sixty-eight-year-old widow and retired detective. Gillian used Ruth as a technical consultant on all her thrillers. Ruth was also one of her writing students, and she’d been in that same class with Jennifer Gilderhoff.

Ruth, no doubt, was asleep right now. Gillian returned to her desk and fired off an e-mail to her. She sent an attachment of the
Daily News
article. “This is the same Jennifer Gilderhoff from our night class two years ago,” she wrote to her friend. “Do you have any contacts with the NYPD? I want to know more about this case.”

Gillian clicked on the Send icon, and she suddenly felt better. She’d discuss the case with Ruth in the morning. She wasn’t so alone in this.

Getting to her feet, she crept toward the back hallway and checked Ethan’s bedroom door. The slice of light at his threshold had gone out. He was sleeping.

It still smelled a bit like smoke in the apartment. “Phew,” Gillian muttered, waving a hand in front of her face as she wandered back toward the living room. Small wonder the smoke detector hadn’t gone off. But she couldn’t be mad at Ethan for his attempt at building a fire in the hearth. He was probably just trying to make the half-of-a-duplex—minus a father, mother, and home cooking—seem more like a home.

Gillian glanced at the fireplace to see the mess he’d made.

It was clean—with two fresh, pristine logs supported by the andirons, not a trace of soot or smoke beneath the mantel. “I tried to start a fire in the fireplace,” he’d told her. “But I screwed it up.” Gillian frowned. It didn’t make sense.

She heard a tonal
ping
from her computer: an e-mail coming in. She thought perhaps it was Ruth getting back to her already. Maybe her friend wasn’t sleeping right now after all.

Gillian sat down at the desk again and retrieved the e-mail. It wasn’t from Ruth. She didn’t recognize the sender’s address. And there was no subject. Gillian opened the e-mail.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, staring at the unsigned message:

Gillian, I found your husband.

He thought Gillian McBride looked cute in her sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms, her red hair haphazardly clipped back with a barrette. She could have passed for a teenager, and he liked teenage girls—very much, maybe too much.

From the edge of the ravine, he watched her most of the night, pacing around the kitchen and living room. The garbage cans were just outside the kitchen window, so he still hadn’t gotten a chance to hunt for whatever the kid had thrown away earlier.

He took a break, and drove to a late-night Taco Bell on Broadway. He bought two burritos to go. He didn’t dawdle. Last night, he’d seen her peel down to her black panties and a tank top before slipping into bed. He didn’t want to miss the show tonight.

He returned to his same spot, this time carrying his midnight snack. As he wolfed down his food, he stared at her, hunched over the computer in her little writing nook.

Licking red sauce off his fingers, he watched her get up and turn off the lights. Then she reappeared through the thin, gauzelike drapes of her bedroom. The big, aluminum-clad picture window had tall, thin panes on each side, the kind that push out with the handles. There was a shade too, but Gillian didn’t use it much. With the ravine in her backyard, she probably figured no one could see her. But he could. He took another bite out of his Taco Bell delicacy and stared. She pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and the T-shirt underneath started to ride up. But she tugged it down before he got a peek at anything. As she shucked off her sweatpants, he saw she was wearing white panties tonight. He kept hoping she’d peel them off. He even imagined breaking in there and removing them for her. He figured she might just like that.

After all, it had been two years since her husband, Barry Tanner, vanished. As far as the man knew, Gillian hadn’t gotten herself a boyfriend in all that time. It was just the kid, her books, and the night class. That was it. He imagined Gillian McBride wouldn’t mind a night visitor, someone ready to take care of her needs.

He watched her crawl into bed and switch off the nightstand lamp.

Her room was dark, and he couldn’t see anything.

But he stayed anyway.

Gillian couldn’t sleep worth a damn. She kept thinking about Jennifer Gilderhoff, now lying in a coma with multiple stab wounds in a New York hospital. Was it just an eerie coincidence she’d created a “Zorro” killer in her book
The Mark of Death
? Gillian kept telling herself that she would figure it out with Ruth in the morning. Ruth would have some answers.

But who could explain that cryptic e-mail about Barry? Gillian had tried to respond to the unnerving message, but her reply had bounced back at her: “MAILER-DAEMON…Returned Mail: User Unknown.”

Curled up in bed, Gillian hugged Barry’s old pillow to her chest. She remembered a night about two years ago, when she’d been lying in this very spot, hugging
him
, and he’d suddenly started shaking. He’d let out a low rasp, almost like a death rattle. For a moment, Gillian had thought her husband was having a heart attack. Then she realized Barry was crying. She kept asking him what was wrong, but he just went on sobbing. Finally, he threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, and started pacing around the darkened bedroom.

Gillian sat up in bed. “Honey, for God’s sakes, what is it?”

She stared at his lean silhouette against the gauzelike drapes. Clad in his boxer shorts, he marched back and forth at the foot of their bed. “It’s nothing—I can’t—” He stopped, and ran a hand through his wavy brown hair. “It’s just—I’m such a fuckup. You would have been better off if you’d never met me.”

They’d met in college at the University of Illinois, where Gillian studied journalism. Barry majored in business administration. Everyone adored Barry Tanner, and he’d picked
her
. He swept Gillian’s mother off her feet too. “Oh, honey, you hold onto that one,” she’d whispered to Gillian after first meeting her future son-in-law. “So handsome, so charming…” Perhaps if Gillian’s father had been alive to meet Barry, things might have been different. Perhaps her dad wouldn’t have been so captivated by Barry’s charm.

Mr. and Mrs. Barry Tanner moved into a cozy apartment in Evanston. Barry nabbed an advertising job with Leo Burnett Company, and Gillian wrote features for a small suburban press. Some of her pieces even won awards—and circulated in other newspapers around the country. Some of the credit had to go to Barry. He’d proofread and even edited several of those pieces. Gillian was grateful for his input—and for the extra money those articles brought in.

For some reason, they were always in a financial pinch. But Gillian didn’t complain. A lot of people were much worse off than they were. She longed for a bigger place after Ethan was born, but they couldn’t afford it. So for the first four years of his life, Ethan slept in a crib, and his bedroom was a converted walk-in closet. Gillian painted a window with a lovely seaside view on his wall to make up for the fact that her son was sleeping in this claustrophobic little space. When he was five, they got him a bigger bed—on stilts, with a ladder. Beneath the bed, Barry had arranged a small dresser, lamp, and an old bean-bag chair. Ethan loved it, because it looked like something in a submarine. But Gillian felt frustrated. After all these years, they were still in their “starter” one-bedroom apartment. Their son deserved his own room with a window, for God’s sake. Where was all their money going?