Murder Over Cocktails: The 2nd Nikki Hunter Mystery (Nikki Hunter Mysteries) (7 page)

Maggie put the plates in the dishwasher and turned to face me.

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow to see the estate, when we can take our time?”

“Let’s just take a quick look around,” I said. “If I like it, we can go back tomorrow.”

When we were on the road again, in our separate cars, I called Jack’s pager, hoping he would call me back before we got to Hillsborough. We took the Highway 92 exit off 280 and drove down to Alameda de las Pulgas, where we made a left. At the end of Alameda we took a right on Crystal Springs Road. After a couple of blocks we turned left again. Just as we were pulling up to a private driveway my smartphone rang.

“Great timing,” I answered.

Maggie was entering a combination on a digital panel at the security gates.

“Where are you?” Jack sounded agitated.

“We’re at a house in Hillsborough. Did you get the tapes?” I whispered. Even though Maggie was two car-lengths away with her back to me, I was afraid she’d hear me.

“Yes, but when I came back…”

“I know,” I interrupted. “There wasn’t time to warn you. Did you have them copied?”

“Yes.”

“Great. We’ll be here at least thirty minutes. Does that give you enough time to return the originals?”

“Plenty.”

“I’ll be back at the office by four. Meet me there and bring the copies.”

I disconnected and tossed the phone into my purse. The gates slid open and we continued down the private driveway. My infatuation with the property in Los Altos dimmed as I took in the vision before me. The house was a two-story brick Tudor with a dome-shaped stained-glass window above the front door and keystone arches over the windows. It made me think of a cathedral, except that it was welcoming rather than imposing. Flowerbeds lined the driveway and continued around the house, and a one-story cottage appeared to be attached to the main structure on the right.

Maggie and I made a quick circuit of the house and grounds, just enough to whet my appetite, and I fell in love. When I’d told Maggie I had always wanted to live in Hillsborough I hadn’t been lying. It had been one of my childhood fantasies.

At 3:40 we walked back to the driveway.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I
love
it. I want to know everything about it. Do you have any information about its history? When it was built and by whom? Details about previous owners? Can you get your hands on the original blueprints?”

“I can probably dig up some information if you’re interested. Why don’t you meet me here tomorrow at one.”

“Great,” I said, without thinking. “I’ll see you then.”

Back in my car I followed Maggie out to the street. I waved as I drove away, and she stopped to key in the sequence to close the gates.

I speed dialed Bill on my cell.

“Anderson.”

“You need to get out more,” I said.

“How’d it go?”

“Lunch was scary, but I found a darling little estate in Hillsborough you can pick up for a song.”

“What do you mean, scary?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’m letting my imagination get the better of me.”

“That’s not much of a stretch.”

“Bite me.”

“Are you working late again tonight?” 

“Probably. I’ll talk to you later.”

Chapter 14

I
raced back to the marina, arriving a few minutes after 4:00, and found Jack loitering outside my office, holding a large brown paper shopping bag in his right hand.

“Have you looked at them?” I asked.

“No. I thought I’d wait for you.”

I unlocked the door and when we were inside locked it again behind us, then closed all the blinds. I rolled my TV cart out from the kitchen, plugged everything in, and turned the console so it was facing away from the front doors, which have glass panes and no blinds. While I was doing all this I babbled excitedly about the house in Hillsborough and told Jack that I was meeting Maggie there tomorrow.

He placed a stack of five videocassette boxes on my desk.

“Are these in any kind of order?” I asked, looking them over. I felt my enthusiasm draining away. I was almost afraid to touch them.

“The originals were dated,” he said, “so I had the guys at the dubbing service label them with the dates. I waited while they did the job. There’s no way they can view what they’re copying. It’s strictly VCR-to-VCR. No monitors.”

“Well, pick a date and let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Jack looked at the tapes and selected the third video in the stack. He handed it to me, and I inserted it in the VCR, turned on the TV, and sat down behind my desk. There was a long leader on the tape, and then suddenly we were watching two women having sex. One of the women was Maggie and the other woman was dark-haired, fair-skinned, and petite. She looked like a slightly younger version of Maggie, without the oversized breasts.

I lit a cigarette. Nicotine is a first-rate drug if you’re interested in bottling-up your emotions. Jack glanced over at me and withdrew the Turkish Ovals from his shirt pocket.

The air in the office was dense with smoke by the time we got to the portion of the video we were waiting for. After both women appeared to have climaxed, Maggie reached over the edge of the bed beyond the range of the camera and came back with a knife clutched in her hand. It had a curved blade about four inches long and what looked like a trigger guard. I’d never seen anything like it. She rolled back to her lover, took hold of the woman’s hair, holding her in place, and swiftly cut her throat.

I sucked in some air and Jack nodded without turning away from the screen. “It gets worse,” he said.

The woman convulsed as life abandoned her body. When she was still, Maggie put on a pair of surgical gloves and crouched over her face. Using the same weapon, she methodically removed several parts of her lover, the knife now oddly converted into a bloody pair of scissors. Then she leaned over the side of the bed again and came back with a large zip-lock-bag into which she deposited the various pieces of the dead woman.

I grabbed the remote control and hit the pause button, ran into the bathroom, and heaved shrimp salad into the toilet. When I’d emptied my stomach, I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face before returning to the front office.

“Are you okay?” Jack asked.

“Oh
hell
no.”

I guess I hadn’t believed it was real until I’d seen it for myself. Maggie Sectio was a monster. One minute she was caressing her companion and the next she was dissecting her. I had not been conditioned by years of watching movies and television. The real thing, even on tape, was horrifying beyond comprehension.

I lit another cigarette and clicked the pause button again.

As the tape resumed, Maggie produced a dust-buster and thoroughly vacuumed the sheets and the victim’s body. After vacuuming she left the room and we heard water running. When she returned, her hair was wet and the blood spatter that had covered her hands and torso was gone. She was carrying a tub of Clorox wipes. After putting on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, she went through the ritual of wiping every surface she had touched, both in the room and on the body. She was very thorough. When she was finished she got dressed and approached the camera, and the screen went blank.

I pressed the stop button on the remote and rewound the tape.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I said. “Were the tapes you already watched this bad?”

“The first one only showed the murder, none of the preliminaries. The second was similar to this one.”

“And on both of those she did the same thing … after?”

“Yes.”

“
Jesus
,” I whispered.

I unlocked my Pendaflex drawer and extracted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “You want a drink?”

“Please.”

Jack rubbed his eyes as though he wanted to disengage himself from the memory of what we had just seen.

I shuffled numbly into the kitchenette and came back with two clean coffee mugs, poured us each a shot, and handed one to Jack. I don’t drink a lot of hard liquor, but I keep a bottle in the office for times when I find reality too hard to handle. This was definitely one of those times.

Jack and I watched the other four videos together. I needed to see them all. I kept hoping there would be some indication that the whole thing was a hoax, but there wasn’t.

By 7:30 my eyes were burning from the smoke in the office and I was a little tipsy. I rewound the last tape and placed it in its box. I silently unplugged the power strip and rolled the TV cart back into the kitchenette.

I made a fresh pot of coffee, leaving Jack alone with his thoughts.

While the coffee was brewing I put the five video boxes back in the paper bag and set the bag underneath my desk. Leaving the blinds closed, I slid open a couple of the windows, to let some of the smoke out.

“You want coffee?” I asked.

“No thanks. I should go.”

“Okay if I keep the tapes?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I never want to see them again. Do what you think is best.” His voice was flat.

Jack looked defeated and completely unlike his usual self as he walked out of the office. I relocked the door behind him, poured a cup of coffee, and sat down at my desk. No way was I doing any bar or restaurant surveys tonight.

The open windows made me feel vulnerable and the smoke was clearing, so I got up and closed them again. Then I sat drinking coffee and trying to think. I was probably in shock, but somewhere between the first and the fifth videotapes I had made a silent pledge to the murdered women. I drank the whole pot of coffee, and a plan began to form.

Chapter 15

I
decided to show a couple of the tapes to Bill. I knew there was nothing he could do because of how they had been obtained, and I remembered him saying we shouldn’t even discuss the tapes, but I needed him to be fully aware of what, and who, I was up against. Then I would have to get Maggie to reveal herself. There was only one way I could think of to do that, and thinking about it brought on another wave of nausea. I swallowed hard, trying not to let the fear get the best of me.

I rinsed out the cups and the coffeepot, picked up the sack of tapes and my purse, turned off the lights, and looked around outside to make sure I was alone before unlocking the door.

As I was walking down the companionway I saw that Elizabeth’s lights were on. I knocked on the deck of her trawler and waited, my heart pounding in my throat. There was a chance she’d have the good sense to refuse to assist me in my quest to stop Maggie. The door slid open and Elizabeth appeared, dressed in gray leggings and an oversized tee shirt.

“Hi, sweetie! Come on in,” she said. “What’s in the bag? Is that Lily’s Jil Sander?”

“Videotapes,” I said, “and yes, it is.” I climbed the dock steps and went inside, closing the door behind me.

“What’s wrong?”

Elizabeth doesn’t miss a thing.

“I need a favor,” I said. “A big one.”

“Okay. You want wine?”

“No thanks.”

“Sit down.”

I sat and K.C. climbed onto my lap. I stroked his long orange fur and found the warmth of his body and his muffled purr comforting. Elizabeth poured herself a glass of white wine and curled her feet underneath her on the settee, looking at me expectantly.

“You know that case I told you about?” I began.

“Yes.” There was apprehension in her voice. She wrinkled her nose and said, “You reek of cigarette smoke.”

“I know. Sorry. These are tapes of the killings.” I set the bag on the settee between us.

Elizabeth leaned over, peering into the bag. “Do I get to see?”

“If you really want to. But not right now. I just watched all of them and I couldn’t stand to go though that again just yet.”

“So what’s the favor?” she asked.

“I’m going to look at a house in Hillsborough tomorrow with the woman on the tapes. She’s a real estate agent.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“It is. I want you to come with me.”

“Okay. I’ve got tons of vacation time coming.”

“That’s not all,” I continued. “You and I need to pretend we’re lovers.”

Elizabeth smiled hesitantly. She thought I was kidding. “What?” she said.

“She’s a lesbian. She has sex with women and then she kills and dismembers them. Bill can’t tell the Sheriff’s Department about what’s on the tapes because they were obtained illegally. I’ll have to catch her in the act, so I need to convince her that I’m also a lesbian, or at least bisexual. That’s where you come in. I’ll introduce you as my friend, and while we’re looking at the house we can give her a few subtle hints that we’re, um … intimate.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Holding hands, maybe a kiss.”

Elizabeth sipped her wine. “I don’t know, Nikki. What if you like it? This could permanently change the nature of our relationship. What should I wear?”

Relief washed over me. “I don’t even know what
I’m
going to wear. I’m afraid to impose any further on Lily. Maybe we should just go casual.”

“What time?”

“We’re meeting her in Hillsborough at one.”

“So we have time to go shopping.”

Elizabeth loves to shop.

“Call me when you get up,” I said.

I left the videotapes with Elizabeth, instructing her to lock the door behind me so no one could inadvertently interrupt her while she was watching them, and stumbled the rest of the way to my boat.

My answering machine was blinking when I got home. I pressed the play button and Bill’s deep voice resonated through the speaker.

“It’s seven-fifteen and I’m off duty. I thought if you weren’t working tonight, you might want to get together.”

I looked at the time. It was only 8:33. It felt much later. I picked up the phone and dialed his home number.

“Anderson,” he answered.

“It’s me. I just got your message. You still want to get together?”

He did, and God knows I needed the company. I showered and slipped into jeans and a tee shirt, then walked back to Elizabeth’s trawler and knocked on her door.

After several seconds, she said, “Who is it?”

“It’s Nikki.”

She opened the door a crack. “You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said. “ I was just watching the first tape. What’s up?”

“I need to borrow a couple of those to show Bill.”

“Okay.” She pushed the door the rest of the way open. “Which ones do you want?”

All five tapes were out on the galley counter. The box with the earliest date was empty. I chose the two most recent videos.

Walking back to my boat I realized I hadn’t eaten since lunch, which I had tossed in the office toilet. I inventoried the contents of my small galley fridge: salad ingredients, cottage cheese, a three-ounce can of tuna, applesauce, and a jar of organic almond butter. I mixed the tuna, some applesauce, and a teaspoon of the almond butter together on a paper plate and wolfed it down. A perfect Zone meal. I could make Bill a salad if he was hungry. After flossing and brushing my teeth I tidied up the boat a little, hung up Lily’s dress, and reclined on the settee to wait for Bill. He had his own gate key, so I wouldn’t need to let him in.

At 9:25 I heard a knock and jerked awake. I staggered aft and opened the hatch, barely giving Bill a chance to get down the steps before I threw my arms around him.

“Hey,” he muttered into my hair. “I’m glad to see you too. Rough day?”

“Yes. Have you had dinner?” I asked.

“I had a burger and fries at my desk.”

“That stuff will kill you, you know.”

We walked into the main salon and sat down, still intertwined. I wondered if I should seduce him before I showed him the tapes.

“What are these?” he asked, picking up one of the boxes.

Too late.

“Copies of two of the videotapes of the alleged homicides,” I said. “You want something to drink? How ‘bout a beer?”

I stepped into the galley and opened two bottles of Guinness.

“Are you going to play these for me, or do I have to get rough with you?”

“Both,” I said, and sat down on his lap.

The beer was warm when we came out of the stateroom half an hour later.

“So what about these tapes,” Bill said.

I plugged one of the cassettes into my VCR/DVD player and said, “I hope you’ve digested that burger. This is pretty gruesome.”

“You’ve watched them already?”

“All five of them,” I said.

“I won’t even ask how you got them. Where are the other three?”

“Elizabeth has them. She’s helping me with the case and I want her to know what she’s getting herself into.”

I pushed the play button.

When the first tape was finished, Bill drained his Guinness bottle and asked if I had anything stronger. I fished the Irish whiskey out from under the sink and poured him a shot.

After the second tape he turned off the TV and just sat there staring at the blank screen.

“You can’t get involved in this, Nikki,” he said.

“I already am. We have to catch her in the act.”

“And just how are
we
going to do that?” he asked pointedly.

“I’m glad you asked that question. One of us is going to have sex with her.”

“What?”
he shouted. “Are you out of your fucking
mind?
This woman is a cold-blooded killer.”

“I don’t see any other way to stop her.”

“You haven’t thought this through. You’re straight. How do you expect to have sex with a woman, especially
this
woman, and not freak out when she touches you?”

“I did some acting in high school. I was pretty good, in fact,” I said defensively. “Besides, everybody’s bisexual to some extent.”

“Okay, suppose you make it through the sex and she pulls that knife on you. What’s your brilliant plan at that point?”

“My plan is to reach into my purse and take out the Ruger,” I snapped.

“And what if she’s faster than you are?”

“I’m going to do this, Bill. We know she tapes these killings, so there’ll be a camera somewhere in the room. When you arrest her for attempting to butcher me, you can get a warrant to search her house and find the original videotapes. It’s the only way to stop her before she kills again. She’s a multinational listings agent. She sells homes all over the world. There’s no way to follow her wherever she goes just
in case
she takes another lover. If you’re concerned about my safety, I’ll let you know when and where it’s going to happen, and you can plant a listening device in my purse or something.”

“I can’t let you risk your life trying to stop this maniac.”

“I don’t want to fight,” I said quietly. “Life is too short.”

“Maybe shorter than you think,” he said. “Please, Nikki. I’ve gotten used to you.”

Clearly not a romantic man, but the sentiment was there just the same.

“I’ll be careful. I promise.”