Last Breath

by Michael Prescott

  Had to be a trick. He was trying to fool her into coming out.

  Or was he going to get a gun?

  No, couldn’t be. If he had a gun, why wouldn’t he have brought it with him in the first place?

  Well, because he was crazy, of course.

  If he was planning to come back with a gun, then her only chance was to get out now, while the kitchen was clear. But suppose it was a trap, and she climbed out only to be attacked ...

  The fear was back. When things had been clear, when there had been only the simple job of fending him off, she had forgotten how to be afraid. Now that there was a decision to make, she was aware again of her terror and confusion, and aware also that she was only a ten-year-old girl, alone without a sitter for the first time ever, and this was all too much for her.

  The house was silent. Had he gone? Really gone?

  Maybe she could risk emerging. If she saw him waiting for her, she might have time to get back into the crawl space. She—

  Footsteps again.

  Returning.

  Too late. He was back.

  He must have brought a gun, must have.

  No escape now. The knife was useless. She waited in terror until his silhouette appeared above her, his long, scrawny shadow stretched on the dirt floor, and she looked up into his face.

  Her dad. Blinking down at her.

  “C.J.? C.J., what the hell ... ?”

  “Daddy, is he gone, is he gone?”

  “Is who gone? Get out of there, it’s filthy down there!”

  “Is he gone?”

  “There’s nobody here, C.J. Get out now,”

  By the time she climbed up, her mom was there as well, staring at her in bewildered concern. “What in the world?” her mom kept asking, over and over. “What in the world?”

  C.J. told them what had happened. She told them about the man who had come for her, who had gotten into the house without making any noise, who had known her name, who had said he’d been watching her. “We have to call the sheriff,” she said. “Please, let’s call now before he gets too far away!”

  Her parents made no effort to pick up the phone. They merely traded a resigned glance.

  “Come on,” C.J. insisted, “we have to call!”

  “C.J.,” her dad said softly, “there was nobody here tonight.”

  She stood stunned, unable to register the fact that they didn’t believe her.

  “You got all worked up,” her mom said in a gentle, soothing tone. “Maybe it was something you saw on TV. You know how that imagination of yours can get going sometimes.”

  “It wasn’t imagination,” C.J. whispered. “I cut him. Look.”

  She showed them the knife, but the blood on the blade had already dried to a thin dusky line like a gravy stain.

  “C.J... .” her mom said, losing patience.

  “There’s some of his blood on the floor of the crawl space. You can see it!”

  But no blood was visible on the gravel. She must have obliterated all traces when she climbed out.

  Still, she wouldn’t give up. She made her parents accompany her on a tour of the house. The man had broken in. There would be signs of it. A forced window, an open door ...

  There was nothing. Every door was locked, every window sealed.

  “Are you willing to admit that it was your imagination now?” her dad asked sternly.

  “He was real,” C.J. said stubbornly. “He was the boogeyman.” Even as she said it, she knew this was the wrong choice of words. Everyone knew there was no such thing as the boogeyman. Even she had known it until tonight.

  Her parents wouldn’t listen. When she pressed the point, they lost their patience. They sent her to bed, telling her that she would not be left without a sitter again.

  The Sheriff’s Department was never called. After a while C.J. stopped talking about the intruder. Meekly she acknowledged that she must have imagined him. It was the safest thing to say. But it was a lie.

  That man was real. And he might still be out there. Waiting, as he had said. Studying her. Biding his time.

  How he had entered the house remained a mystery for a month or so, until she remembered the doggy door. The Osborns had no dog, but the ranch’s previous owners had kept two schnauzers and had built a small swinging door at the rear of the house. It had not been used in years, but when she tested it, she found that the door still opened easily, and the hinges made only a faint squeal, inaudible at a distance.

  The opening was small, and she herself could barely pass through it. But she recalled the man’s long, skinny arm. He had been bony, almost skeletal, and somehow, by some incredible contortion of his shoulders and hips, he had crawled through the little door. And when he heard her parents returning, he’d crawled out again.

  She knew this was so, because snagged on a splinter of wood in the doggie door’s frame were a few black threads. She remembered the black trousers he’d worn.

  Of course it proved nothing. There was no point in even raising the issue with her mom and dad. They would look at her strangely, and there might even be talk of consulting with a psychologist in Blythe, as there had been for a few days after the attack.

  She didn’t want to see a psychologist. She kept her thoughts to herself.

  But from then on, whenever she played outdoors or rode a pony in the desert or climbed a trail to a high ridge, she kept watch for a tall, lean figure in black.

  The boogeyman was out there.

  And someday, she knew, he would return.

  PART ONE

  The Red Hen

  NOON-8:00 P.M. WEDNESDAY

  1

  Morrie Walsh hated autopsies.

  He knew he was supposed to be accustomed to this part of the job after thirty years as a cop, but somehow it never failed to get to him—the unpacking of a human body, the utter violation of a person.

  Of course, as he knew too well, Martha Eversol had already been violated far more profoundly. Nothing the pathologist could do to her really mattered. The true damage had been done by other hands.

  Walsh stood beside the steel autopsy table, one of two tables in a specially ventilated room at the Los Angeles County Morgue, a room restricted to badly decomposed remains. Martha Eversol had been dumped in an abandoned mini-mall on Sepulveda Boulevard a month earlier, and the condition of her body was not good.

  One saving grace was that there had been no rain. January, often the start of LA’s rainy season, had been unusually dry this year, with some days approaching the windy dustiness of the Santa Ana season that normally developed in September. The dryness had helped to preserve the corpse. Instead of rotting, it had been mummified. The skin had a taut, leathery quality, and the other tissues had withered away, making the bones sharp and obvious beneath.

  The body lay utterly limp. Rigor mortis had dissipated many days ago.

  The medical examiner was a lean, ponytailed man named Sarandon who lacked most of the quirks associated with members of his profession. His only noticeable eccentricity was a habit of humming complicated melodies during an autopsy. He seemed partial to Bach.

  Sarandon stood opposite Walsh, reviewing the tools in his kit: scalpel; surgical scissors; the wickedly sharp, long-bladed implement called a bread knife; and forceps, known as “pickups” by coroners everywhere. His assistant bustled about, making arcane preparations, while Sarandon turned on the microphone hanging over the table and dictated his opening remarks, beginning with today’s date, January 31.

  Walsh briefly shut his eyes. It was a date he’d been dreading since Martha Eversol’s disappearance exactly one month ago.

  Sarandon examined the body, finding ligature marks on the wrists and ankles—“antemortem,” he noted, pointing to the swollen redness of the wounds. But of course they would be antemortem. There was no point in tying up the woman after she was dead. Martha Eversol had been bound while alive. She had been kept that way for precisely four hours. Walsh was sure of it.

  Sarandon, humming a
pleasant air that sounded suspiciously like a show tune, found bruises on Martha Eversol’s neck. Antemortem or perimortem. Before death or at the moment of death.

  “Consistent with manual strangulation?” Walsh asked, already knowing the answer.

  Sarandon nodded curtly, not removing his gaze from the body. “Consistent, but we won’t know for sure until we look at the trachea.” He peeled back the corpse’s eyelids and noted pinpoint hemorrhages on the insides of the lids and in the whites of the eyes. “Additional evidence of strangulation. Still not conclusive.”

  Walsh nodded. Manual strangulation closed off the arteries at the sides of the neck but left open the artery at the nape. Blood would continue pumping into the head but would be unable to leave. As blood pressure rose, capillaries burst, producing telltale petechial hemorrhages.

  “How about the tattoo?” Walsh asked.

  Sarandon interrupted his humming. “You haven’t seen it?”

  “The body was still clothed at the dump site. I heard SID found the tat when they undressed her.” He pronounced it “sid,” but he meant the Scientific Investigation Division—the crime-scene specialists.

  “Yeah, they did. Just wait till we get a few pictures, and I’ll show it to you.”

  Sarandon’s assistant shot a roll of 35mm photos of the body. Then the ME and his helper eased Martha Eversol off the body block that supported her torso. The corpse slipped onto its side, exposing the left shoulder, and there on the shoulder blade was the tattoo.

  “Postmortem,” Sarandon said. “Like the other one.” There was no reddening of the skin around the design, as there would have been if the ink had been applied during life.

  More whirs and clicks from the snapshot camera. The exhaust fans incorporated into the table hummed busily, while the more powerful fans installed in the ceiling droned in counterpart. As yet there were no odors for the fans to draw off. But not for long.

  Before the corpse was replaced on the body block, Walsh took a close look at the tat. It was a maroon hourglass, three inches long, rendered by hand.

  He had known it would be somewhere on her body. On Nikki Carter it had been engraved in her right buttock. Evidently the Hourglass Killer didn’t care where he made his mark.

  “I’ve heard SID found a calling card,” Sarandon said, shifting the body into a supine position.

  Walsh stiffened. “Who told you that?”

  “Little birdie.”

  “We don’t want that information getting out. It’s bad enough that the tattoo is public knowledge.”

  “Hey,” Sarandon said, “you can tell me. I don’t leak.”

  This was true, but Walsh cast a doubtful eye on Sarandon’s assistant.

  Sarandon noted the glance. “Raul’s okay. Come on, Morris, you’re among friends here.”

  Walsh thought of the bodies on gurneys and steel tables in every room and corridor in the morgue. Among friends? Among the dead, was more like it.

  “Can you shut off the tape recorder for a minute?” Walsh asked.

  Sarandon motioned to Raul, who killed the microphone.

  “On both vics he left the same item,” Walsh said. “A three-by-five index card. Both times, the same words, printed by hand in block letters: WELCOME TO THE FOUR-H CLUB.”

  Sarandon frowned. “Four-H Club?”

  “Right.”

  “Could mean anything, I guess. The Four-Homicide Club, maybe. Or the Four-Hooker Club.”

  “Neither of the vics was a prostitute.”

  “To a guy like this, all women might be prostitutes.”

  “That’s not what it means.”

  “No? Then you tell me.”

  “It’s the Four-Hour Club,” Walsh said.

  “Four hours?” Sarandon lifted an eyebrow. “Because of the hourglass, you think?”

  “Partly. And then there’s the wristwatch.”

  “What about it?”

  “The dial was frozen at two-seventeen. That’s four hours to the minute after Nikki Carter’s abduction.”

  “If the nightclub witnesses are reliable.”

  “I think they are. Carter went into the rest room at approximately ten-fifteen and never came out.”

  “Well, possibly. But there are a lot of ways for a Timex to get busted.” The ME began snipping Martha Eversol’s fingernails one at a time, placing each into a separate evidence envelope, which Raul neatly labeled. “Let’s say the killer messed up the ligatures, didn’t tie them tight enough. Carter gets free and struggles. He throws her to the floor, breaks her watch.”

  “You didn’t find any defense wounds. Besides, letting her get loose would be a mistake on his part.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t think this guy makes mistakes.”

  Sarandon glanced at him dubiously, then returned to his work. “You’re saying he smashed the watch on purpose, so the dial would freeze at exactly two-seventeen.”

  “Which is when he killed her. Which is why she’s a member of the Four-Hour Club.” Walsh shrugged. “The stomach contents support the same timeline.”

  “Come on, Morrie. Plenty of things can interfere with digestion. We can’t say for sure how long Carter was kept alive.”

  “Your best estimate was six hours after her last meal, which would mean four hours after her abduction.”

  “Key word there is estimate. I didn’t know you were going to take me so literally.”

  “It all hangs together—the hourglass, the wristwatch, the Four-H reference.”

  “And you think this one followed the same pattern?”

  Walsh nodded. “Martha Eversol was snatched from a side street around eight-thirty on New Year’s Eve, on her way to a party. Someone rear-ended her, and she must’ve gotten out to exchange insurance info. I’m guessing she died at thirty minutes past midnight on the first day of the year.”

  “Probably didn’t get a chance to keep her resolutions,” Sarandon said blandly.

  Walsh was tired of the conversation. “So are you going to look at her windpipe or not?”

  “I aim to please.”

  The tape recorder was turned on again, and Sarandon resumed humming and set to work.

  Walsh didn’t care that the ME was skeptical. MEs were supposed to be skeptical. They were trained to look at an elderly woman who died of heart failure and think cyanide. They took nothing for granted.

  Walsh was willing to operate a little more on instinct, and his instincts told him that time mattered to this man he and his task force were hunting, this man who carved an hourglass tattoo into the dead flesh of each victim before dumping her body in some remote location where it would lie hidden for days or weeks. First, Nikki Carter, found inside a jumbo garbage bag in an auto graveyard in East LA. Now the second victim, Martha Eversol, deposited in the shell of a failed mini-mall, where she had lain undisturbed throughout January.

  Well, she would be undisturbed no longer. Walsh thought about that as Sarandon made the Y incision with his bread knife, opening up Martha Eversol from the shoulders to the stomach, then down in a direct line to the pubic bone.

  Decomposition was advanced, and the smell was bad. Walsh tried to suppress his gag reflex as the gassy stench wafted up into the overhead fans.

  Sarandon scalpeled the skin and muscle off Martha’s chest wall, then bisected her ribs with a bone cutter. The chest plate came loose and was laid aside. He hummed something by Rachmaninoff—the Second Piano Concerto, Walsh thought. He knew these things. His mother had forced him to take piano lessons as a kid.

  Body fluids began running in the gutters of the sloped table. Raul turned on a couple of spigots built into the table to wash the mess away. Sarandon switched to the theme from Cabaret. It sounded much too cheerful to be hummed as a dirge over Martha’s mortal remains.

  What came next in the procedure was known in the coroners’ trade as the Rokitansky method. Another ME had once described it to Walsh as field-dressing a carcass. He had made it sound as if the deceased was just another
trophy to be strapped to somebody’s hood.

  The Rokitansky method entailed dissecting the corpse from the neck downward. Walsh would have to witness the entire process in case anything unexpected came up, but it was the neck that interested him.

  He already knew the Hourglass Killer had strangled Martha Eversol. He just needed physical confirmation.

  Sarandon carefully separated the larynx and esophagus from the pharynx, then stopped humming and took a close look.

  “Fractures of the cricoid cartilage,” he reported.

  “Strangled,” Walsh said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.

  Sarandon nodded. “Manual strangulation, consistent with the first victim.”

  Raul spoke up for the first time. “Was there ever any doubt?”

  Walsh sighed. “Nope. No doubt at all.”

  Sarandon began humming again. He worked the bread knife south of the collarbone, beginning the process of unpacking Martha’s vital organs, and Walsh stood silent, wishing he were somewhere else, far away from the autopsy and Sarandon’s musical accompaniment. On Zuma Beach, maybe, with his surf-fishing gear. That would be nice.

  Sarandon hummed, and in his mind Walsh cast his line into the tide and let the surf carry it far from shore.

  2

  The spider hung in her web, inches from her prey.

  Gavin Treat leaned closer, watching. This was the good part. She would feed.

  Yesterday evening he had released a cricket into the five-gallon terrarium that occupied a corner of his bedroom. Last night the cricket, hopping frantically, became entangled in the funnel-shaped web. Though it struggled, its efforts had only lashed it more tightly to the gluey strands.

  Now it lay still. It had given up. It faced its own end with the equanimity born of unrewarded suffering.

  The spider began to prowl.

  Treat watched the eight legs navigate the mesh of quivering threads. The spider moved lightly, in a calm, unhurried gait.

  She was a western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, and Treat loved her as much as he could love anything. He had raised her from a spiderling after finding her and others of her brood scurrying amid a drift of timber in the mountains near Malibu. He remembered the thrill of the discovery and the care with which he had gathered up a dozen of the small darting shapes, loading them into a plastic sandwich bag and sealing the flaps.