The Red Scream (17 page)

She opened the box and pulled out a larger than usual stack. As she flipped through it, her eye was caught by a flimsy white envelope with pencil printing. She stared down at it. Her heart pumping hard, she lifted her head and glanced around. Three cars and one van were parked on the street. All looked empty.

She turned back to the mailbox and put the stack down inside. This time she wasn’t going to make the same mistake about prints. Looking around again to make sure no one was watching, she lifted
her skirt up above her waist and used it to take the letters out and carry them to the house.

Strange. It hadn’t occurred to her that there would be more anonymous messages, but the instant she saw the envelope she’d known it was the master poet again.

She dropped the stack onto the kitchen table and lifted the envelopes off one by one until she got to it. Yes, the address was penciled in the same crabbed printing as the first one. And again there was an Austin postmark and no return address. She lowered her head to read the postmark which was a little blurry. September 23, yesterday.

She picked up her cotton gloves which were still lying on the table. After putting them on, she took her sharpest knife from the drawer and carefully slit the envelope. Then she held it open and peered inside. Again, there were torn-out pages. Carefully she drew them out—five pages from
Sweating Blood.
This time it was the account of the murder of Greta Huff in San Marcos. She turned quickly to the back page where another Post-it was stuck, with another penciled poem.

Lady writer, your book’s my guide

For sending folks to the other side.

You may think I’m mighty screwy
,

But I am just as good as Louie.

I can kill or I can rhyme
.

I’m inventive all the time.

At first you thought I was a crank
.

Now you know it’s no one’s prank.

Monday we’ll cheer poor Louie’s demise
,

But from his ashes I will rise

To show you death’s no fate to fear;

Yours is whispering in my ear
,

Predetermined, drawing near.

Get one thing absolutely clear:

I am the master poet here.

She set the pages down. With a trembling hand, she poured herself a cup of coffee. Then she rummaged in her purse for the card
Grady Traynor had given her and dialed the number on it. As the phone rang she checked her watch: five fifty-five. When he answered the phone himself on the second ring, she wondered if he’d been up all night, too.

“Grady,” she said, surprised by the rawness in her voice, “Molly here.” She cleared her throat. “I just looked at my mail from yesterday. There’s another master poet communication—same cheap white envelope, same handwriting, five more pages from my book, the part about the Greta Huff murder. And a poem.”

“Another poem? I’m starting to hate these fucking poems. Read it to me.”

“Okay. I think it’ll mean more to you, Grady, when I tell you that it’s postmarked yesterday.”

Without touching it again, she read it to him.

“Well, shi-it,” he said. “God, Molly, do not touch it.”

She felt a flash of annoyance. “I’m not. Anyway, I’m wearing gloves.”

“Read it once more,” he demanded.

“Master poet, my ass,” he said when she finished. “I don’t know much about poetry, but I know what I hate. I’m going to send someone to pick it up right now and take it to the lab. You okay?”

“I’m fine. Will you let Stan Heffernan know about this or should I?”

“Let me take care of it, Molly. Now there’s no question you’ve got to stay out of this. What I want you to do is hunker down and stay uninvolved.”

“Uninvolved? How the hell can I be uninvolved, Grady, when I get letters like this? Christ, he’s saying he’s using my book as a guide to killing people. And that my death is whispering in his ear.” The hand which held her coffee cup was shaking so much the coffee was sloshing over the edge.

“That’s a good reason for you to keep out of it. What time does your mail come?”

“Usually around two.”

“Tell you what—I’m going to send a man in an unmarked car over about one. Let him get the mail when it comes today. You just stay in the house.”

“I won’t be home. I work for a living, you know.” She softened her voice. “Do you know anything about David Serrano, Grady? I
tried to find him last night, but the relatives he’s staying with over on South Fifth don’t know where he is.”

“Yeah, I know. Listen, I got another call, Molly. But it’s real important that you don’t mention this master poet stuff to anyone. No one. Right now I’m sending a uniform over. Expect him in ten minutes.”

She didn’t want to let him hang up. “Wait a minute, Grady. It’s our murderer, isn’t it? He mailed this before anyone else knew that Georgia McFarland was dead. When he writes, ‘Now you know it’s no one’s prank,’ he’s talking about that murder, isn’t he?”

“It’s possible, Molly. Sit tight.”

“Wait,” she said. “Maybe you should call Greta Huff’s family—there’s a niece. And a brother in a nursing home, I think.”

“Don’t fret, Molly. We’ll take care of it.” The phone clicked and he was gone.

Molly sat staring into her coffee, then lifted the cup with both hands to keep it steady and took a long sip. She thought about reading the pages from her book, but decided she couldn’t face it. Instead she went into her office, got a notebook and pencil from her desk, and brought them back to the kitchen. Very carefully she copied the poem into her notebook, trying to duplicate the handwriting as closely as she could. As she was finishing, the doorbell rang, startling her even though she had been expecting it. Lord, this was making her jumpy.

A very young policeman stood at the door with his hat in one hand and an evidence kit in the other. When she led him into the kitchen, he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and carefully pushed each page into a separate plastic bag and the envelope into another.

After he left, Molly stripped off the clothes she’d worn for twenty-four hours straight, took a thirty-second shower, and dressed in her most comfortable old khaki skirt and white T-shirt.

The last thing in the world she felt like doing now was working on the Abilene Angel piece, but it was due in two hours. She forced herself to sit down at her desk and read it from the computer monitor. When she came to the end, she felt like weeping; she hated every word of it, especially the ending. But she didn’t know why.

It was the kind of high-interest, off-beat, Texas-flavored crime the magazine favored.

It was meticulously researched. Yes.

It was written with careful craft and even had a few nice phrases. Yes.

It had some colorful characters speaking from the page. Yes.

But the fact remained—she loathed it.

She spent the next hour rewriting the ending. Then, without even rereading it, she hit the save key and swiveled around in her chair to switch on the printer. It was finished, not because it felt right or satisfied her, but because she had a deadline in an hour and because she always met her deadlines.

She sent it over the modem to the office and gave the command to print it out so she’d have a hard copy for her files; she still didn’t trust computers completely.

While it was printing out, she looked at her Day-Timer. Last week she had scheduled an appointment with Stuart McFarland for today at noon. She wondered if he’d keep the date after what happened to his stepmother yesterday, but she wasn’t about to call and give him the excuse to break it. He had a tight schedule at the hospital and it had been difficult for them to arrange a time to meet. This interview would give her a jump start on the Louie Bronk article—the beginning of the end of Louie Bronk.

M
olly arrived at the
Lone Star Monthly
offices at eight-thirty to find the usual uproar that accompanied putting the magazine to bed. She talked for a few minutes with Hazel Williams, the fact-checker for the article, and for a few minutes with Jerry Kovac, the attorney who vetted the piece for libel. She fended off a host of inquiries from other staffers, who had all read the morning paper and, under the guise of commiseration, wanted to hear the gruesome details about finding Georgia McFarland’s body.

The summons from Richard came, as she knew it would, before she’d been there ten minutes. When she entered his big office with the wraparound windows looking out over Town Lake and the Congress Avenue Bridge, he was leaning way back in his desk chair staring up at the ceiling. Slowly he tilted the chair upright, keeping his hands clasped behind his head. “Molly,” he said, “what a thoroughly rotten day you had yesterday—first fighting with a good friend who really has your best interests at heart, then finding a
corpse and getting caught up in all that messy police red tape. It must have been so vexsome.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “But when a person’s morbid and death-obsessed, there’s no telling what she’ll do to boost book sales.”

Just a twitching of a smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Okay. So I lost my temper. You did, too. But let’s forget that. What happened yesterday changes the entire complexion of the McFarland case, of course. It’ll be months now before any of it comes clear enough to write about. And since you are actually involved, being first on the scene and all, surely the gendarmes won’t let you write anything about it now.” His smile broadened.

He sat up straight, rested his right ankle on his left knee, and jiggled his foot up and down. “Listen. Don’t start in right away on the Griswold thing, Molly. Take a day or two off in Houston first, stay at the Galleria, go shopping, sleep late—God knows it looks like you could use a little sleep, and”—he looked at the familiar khaki skirt—“why don’t you buy some new clothes?”

She sat down. “Richard, this has been the best job I’ve ever had.”

“I know,” he said, his voice steely. “So don’t muck it up.”

“I’m trying not to, but asking me to stop covering the Bronk story now is like asking a fisherman to stop just as he’s about to pull a seventeen-pound bass into the boat. I need to see this through.”

“No problem, sweetheart. Go ahead and cover the execution. I saved you three pages.”

“You know that’s not nearly enough. Especially now, with this new murder. My God, Richard, the man has had two wives murdered in eleven years and he says he’ll talk to me about it. The children are going to the execution and they’ve agreed to talk to me. I’ll need at least twelve pages.”

“Molly, let’s not go through this again. You’ve got a blind spot here. Trust me. It’s best to drop this for now. A monthly can’t compete with the newspapers on live cases—you know that. We wait and cover them in depth later if they’re sufficiently interesting.”

She paused and took in a deep breath. “Listen, Richard. I have a proposition for you: let me do an outline and a few opening paragraphs for the story I have in mind. I can have it ready tomorrow. You read it with an open mind and then decide. Okay? Just give me two days and an open mind.”

His face darkened. The smile was gone. “Molly, I know you can write the hell out of this. But it would be a waste of time. We’ve got just so much space in the next issue and it’s all spoken for. I can’t give more than two or three pages to Louie Bronk. Just his execution. Period. Finis. You can do capital punishment next year.”

Molly couldn’t afford to lose this job. But she couldn’t knuckle under here either. “You said for me to take two days off in Houston. Just do this—let me take them off to write this outline.” This was a gamble. “Then if you read it and still don’t want me to do it, I’ll let it go and never mention it again.”

His long face brightened. “Promise?”

She nodded.

“I want to hear you say it.”

Molly remembered how easy it was when she was a child; just cross your fingers behind your back when you promise something you might not be able to deliver on. Adult morality was trickier. “I promise,” she said.

M
olly looked around the noisy, steamy cafeteria in the basement of Brackenridge hospital. When she’d phoned him last week, Stuart McFarland had agreed to talk to her about Louie Bronk if she could come meet him at the hospital. Since he usually managed a break around noon, they decided to combine the interview with lunch.

At quarter past twelve she leaned back against the wall and began to doubt he was coming; she should have called to confirm. At twenty past, a group of men in white coats came walking down the corridor talking and laughing. As they approached, she saw that one of them was Stuart McFarland. He was right in the middle of the group, but he was the only one not laughing.

When he saw Molly, he walked over to her and took her hand. His grip was firm and the fingers felt dry and cool and competent. “I’m late because we had an emergency. Of course.” His eyes were bloodshot and he needed a shave.

“You look like you need to sit down,” Molly said.

“Yeah. Let’s get some chow first. It’s not great, but it’s right here and it’s cheap.”

Molly followed him through the line, amazed by the amount of food he crowded onto his orange tray: chicken-fried steak, mashed
potatoes, carrots and peas, three rolls, a bowl of beans with sour cream, a dish of fruit and a piece of cherry pie. She got a salad and an apple and followed him to a table against the far wall.

“Is that all you’re having?” he asked as he unloaded his dishes from the tray.

“Afraid so,” she said, sitting down. “The real tragedy of middle age is a slowed metabolism.”

He smiled and began to eat immediately.

“I don’t know if I got a chance to tell you yesterday, but I’m sorry about your stepmother.”

“Me too,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Georgia was a really nice woman and she was making my father happy. She didn’t deserve to end up like that.” He sliced a big piece off his steak. “God knows my father could use a little happiness. He’s had so much misery.”