Last Breath

by Michael Prescott

  “The hourglass,” Rawls said.

  “But I guess they had a different significance. Our guy is into spiders.”

  This was such a non sequitur that Rawls could only echo, “Spiders?”

  A grunt from Walsh. “He laid a trap for our SWAT team ... or for anybody else who tried to corner him in his lair. Installed the cover of a fluorescent lighting panel on the ceiling of the hallway inside his apartment. But there’s no light fixture behind it. Instead, there’s spiders.”

  “How many?” Rawls asked softly.

  “A million of the goddamned things, for all I know. The asshole locks himself in his bedroom behind a steel door, then kills the hallway light—he rewired the switch so he could operate it from inside his room—then activates a hydraulic cable that runs through the ceiling. Simple principle—the Plexiglas cover of the lighting panel is spring-loaded, and the cable releases the spring. Cover slides back, spiders fall out.”

  “A million of them.”

  “Give or take.”

  “Venomous spiders?”

  “Oh, sure. Probably not normally aggressive, but when they’ve been dumped out of their cage like that ...”

  “They bite. How bad is it?”

  “We’ve got four SWAT members in the hospital, plus another Sheriff’s deputy who got bitten when he reached the scene. Fumigators are spraying the apartment now. Probably have to evacuate the building ... It’s got central air, and some of the spiders may have gotten into the ducts.”

  “Nightmare,” Rawls breathed. No wonder the detective sounded beaten.

  “Hasn’t been my best day. Or anybody else’s either. Except for the suspect. He got away clean through a secret exit.”

  “Take anything?”

  “His computer, it looks like. A laptop, obviously. He must own one. There’s a, whatchamacallit, docking station in his bedroom.”

  “If he has a mobile connection or he can get access to a phone jack, he can monitor the Web site.”

  “And the video feed. I know. I kept it up and running. He knows we’re on to him, but he doesn’t necessarily know we’re aware of the site.”

  “Does that help us?”

  “Who knows?” Walsh sighed again. “Can’t hurt. Frankly, I’ll take any advantage I can get over this creep. Hold on a sec.”

  Rawls heard Walsh talking to somebody in the background, relaying orders in an exhausted voice. He glanced at Brand. “It’s a mess in LA.”

  “So I gathered. Hey, this guy always strikes on the last night of the month, right?”

  “So?”

  “Just strikes me as funny, that’s all. The coincidence, I mean.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “You getting the tip-off e-mail on the same day when this dude is getting set to knock off victim number three.”

  Rawls stared at him, thinking. “Now that you mention it,” he said finally, “it is kind of funny.”

  Then Walsh was back on the line. “Sorry about the interruption. Things are pretty hairy here. I’ve got to go.”

  “Just one thing, Morrie. You never explained about the tattoos. When I asked, you started talking about spiders. What’s the connection?”

  “Black widows. They have that same hourglass mark.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s what the tats were all about. Goddamned spiders—not time.” Walsh was beating himself up, taking the blame for having made the wrong deduction. Rawls heard the harsh self-accusation in his voice.

  “It could be both,” Rawls said gently. “A symbol for both things.”

  “Could be, but evidently it isn’t. Christ, did I ever fuck this up.”

  “Morrie—”

  Walsh kept talking, unwilling to be consoled. “He never had a four-hour timetable. Even the name we had for him was wrong. He’s not the Hourglass Killer. He has another name for himself. A better name.”

  “What name?”

  “It’s right here in his journal. Yeah, we found that, or at least the Sheriff’s crime-scene people did. He tells us who he really is on the very first line.”

  Rawls waited.

  “ ‘I am the Webmaster,’ ” Walsh recited. “Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?”

  42

  I am the Webmaster.

  Treat repeated the words to himself, driving through a village of names.

  His car was a secondhand Buick, which he kept in a parking space six blocks from his apartment specifically for emergencies like this. After his escape from the local gendarmes, he had roved through alleys and side streets until he reached the Buick. The key, as always, was hidden in a magnetic case under the chassis. The car was registered under an alias and could not be readily connected to him. Stowed in the trunk were a set of false IDs, wads of cash, a passport, a disguise kit, and an overnight bag containing a change of clothes and a toothbrush. He believed in being prepared.

  At first he considered driving out of state, beginning a new life somewhere else. Or ditching the car at LAX and taking a flight to the Midwest—someplace safely banal, like Omaha. But there was a chance the police would be looking for him at the airports. Even the roads might be blocked, though he doubted it.

  Besides, he wanted to hang around. There was Caitlin to think of. He still wanted his chance with her.

  In the meantime, he had to go someplace. One possibility was the house in Silver Lake where he had committed his crimes. He could hole up in the basement, perhaps. But the defects in this plan were obvious. The authorities had already identified him and tracked him to his home. They might just as easily have discovered his killing ground. He had to steer clear of Silver Lake.

  Good thinking, but it had left him with nowhere to go. Aimlessly he’d headed north from Hacienda Heights until he entered the sprawling community of West Covina. Then he had known where his instincts were carrying him, and he’d bowed to their wisdom, driving east on Amar Road and turning south into a sizable tract housing development. He had driven here on other nights. For him, it was a relaxing place to be, a place to decompress.

  There was a fashion among housing developers of choosing a theme for street names. Often the streets were named in honor of the wildlife species they had displaced—Spotted Owl Circle, say. Other times a western motif was selected—Stagecoach Lane, Corral Avenue, Saddleback Court. He had seen communities that reached for a regal air with streets like King Henry Drive and Prince Edward Way. But the builders of this particular development had opted for a theme more congenial to Treat’s tastes. Nearly every one of the twisting, winding avenues and byways bore a woman’s name.

  He motored slowly through the complex, past neat little houses, windows aglow with reading lights and television sets, and he scanned each signpost as it moved past the Buick’s windshield.

  Kimberly Drive.

  Then a series of courts—Joan Court, Kate Court, Kerry, Kathleen, June, Jessica, Justine.

  Jacqueline Drive. Helen Lane. April Way. Sarah and Sonya and Stacey and Stephanie. Regina and Rebecca and Ruth and Ruby.

  So many memories. And the promises of new memories to come.

  There had been a Kimberly for him in Utah. She was a waitress in a roadside diner, and he killed her with a garrote at the end of her shift. Her hair was red, and her waitress uniform was red, and her blood was red as it trickled down her neck from the line incised across her throat by the taut piano wire.

  And there had been a Kate, as well. Schoolteacher in Boulder, Colorado. He had been repairing telephone lines back then. He fixed the static on her line, then returned a few weeks later and fixed her. He had always disliked educators, and it had given him special pleasure to teach her this final lesson, a lesson in pain.

  Oddly, he’d had no J’s. No Joan, June, Jessica, Justine, Jacqueline. He could have—should have—had a Caitlin Jean tonight. But he preferred not to think about that. No point dwelling on a rare failure, when he had enjoyed so many successes.

  The S’s had been particularly productive for him. Neve
r a Sarah, but there’d been a Sonya in Austin and a Stacey in Wyoming and two Stephanies. The first had been a nine-year-old girl in the Mojave—this was during his desert wanderings. The second, more recent—a nurse in Salem, Oregon. He didn’t think her body had ever been found. There was a lot of wilderness in that part of country, and carrion flesh didn’t last long.

  He drove farther along the curving avenues. Patty and Petra and Priscilla passed him by without eliciting any nostalgic recollections. But Paula Street brought a smile to his face. Paula had been a memorable one. Barmaid, Houston, 1991. Hot summer night, with that insufferable Texas humidity choking the air. She went home with another man. Treat followed. The man didn’t stay the night. When he left, Treat broke in and smothered Paula under a pillow. The pillowcase was a daffodil print—funny how he remembered that. Later he read that the unlucky bar patron who picked her up had been arrested and charged with the homicide. Treat never followed up on the case to learn if the man was convicted.

  Yes, Paula. A good one.

  Serial killers were said to take souvenirs, mementos of their kills. No doubt most did, but Treat had never been much of a collector. He saw no point in weighing himself down with a lot of bric-a-brac when he was so often on the move. And why give the police any help in apprehending him, or in making a conviction stick? A room full of incriminating evidence was just the break they needed.

  So he had not followed the example of other killers like himself. He took nothing from his victims except their breath, their lives, and their names. This was the secret hoard stashed in the treasure chest of his soul. He remembered their names, always.

  Amanda Street. Bernadette Court. Cynthia Court.

  He’d had his share of A’s, B’s, and C’s, but not those particular ones. He headed toward the other end of the community, past more sleepy homes, more droning TV sets, more affectionate couples and cranky kids, more of the normality that surrounded him but never touched him, was never fully real.

  Into the G’s now. Gabriella, Gina, Gloria, Gail. He’d had a Gina in West Palm Beach. Left her dead in her condo with the air conditioning turned up high to keep the body cold. He hadn’t wanted the smell of decomposition to alert the neighbors until he was far away.

  Faith, Frieda, Flora, Felicia. He recalled a Faith in the Mojave, eleven years old. A Felicia, too, though she had been one of his less satisfying kills—a patrol car nearly spotted him as he was dragging her into an arroyo, and he had to quickly cut her throat and flee in case the cops doubled back to investigate. A waste. Treat sighed sadly. He hated waste.

  Erica, Erin, Evangelina, Evelyn, Elena ...

  So many names. And he’d had no small number of them. Erica in Las Cruces, killed in an alley during a street festival, left on the pavement with cotton candy sticking to her face. Erin, another child of the Mojave. Evelyn—she’d been a driving instructor in San Francisco, whom he’d met during a stroll in Golden Gate Park. She had rebuffed his advances, but she hadn’t noticed him follow her home. San Francisco was a fun town. All those people living atop an earthquake fault line that could rupture at any moment. Crowded life and mass death so closely intertwined. He would like to return there someday.

  More streets, more names. He paid less attention. Occasionally a sign would catch his eye—Christie Lane; he’d known a Christie in New Orleans, pretty girl, slightly plump, squealed like a stuck pig when he put the ice pick in her skull—but mostly he just drove and let his thoughts wander.

  After a traumatic experience, such as his run-in with officers of the law in their stormtrooper regalia, it was best to relax and reorient oneself. Nervous exhaustion would lead to panic, and panic produced stupidity, and stupidity was the single vice he could not abide.

  Had he been stupid, he would not have lasted this long.

  He’d been at the game for twenty years now. His first kill had been claimed at the tender age of twenty-one. He had preyed on children in the early years. In retrospect, he could see that his choice of victim had been dictated by his youthful insecurities. He had not felt competent to go after adults.

  There had been children in Montana and Nebraska and the Mojave Desert. One of those children—a rare failure—had been Caitlin Osborn, age ten. He had seen her in the shopping district of her small hard-scrabble town and had been instantly captivated. Such a pretty little thing. He’d known he must have her. He had followed her home and watched her parents’ house on and off for days, until the opportunity offered itself.

  She would have been a memorable kill. He had planned to strangle her with his gloved hands. Strangulation had been one method he employed during his early wanderings, but not the only one.

  Even in those formative years, he had begun to perfect his craft, testing new techniques, seeking variety. His inspiration was the famed Zodiac killer of California, who had never been caught. The Zodiac was unusual among predators of his kind because of his willingness to alter his modus operandi. Other killers repeated the same shopworn MO, invariably relying on the knife or the garrote or the gun, but the Zodiac was more clever, more creative than that. He tried different methods of execution, while varying the locale of his crimes.

  More important, the Zodiac resisted the temptation to advertise. There was a fetishistic impulse among serial killers to identify themselves with a “signature”—a term of art used by psychological profilers and other overpaid savants to designate a nonessential, highly personal feature of the crime. To kill with a knife was an MO. To mutilate the corpse in a distinctive fashion was a signature.

  Because the Zodiac varied his MO and left no signature, for a long time his homicides, occurring in different jurisdictions, perpetrated by different means, had not even been connected. There was still some debate as to whether certain crimes were his work or someone else’s.

  At first Treat, emulating his hero, had left no signatures. Later he devised a variation on this approach. He concocted a specific persona, complete with MO, victim profile, and signature, for a brief stint of killing. Then he relocated, adopted a new MO and a fresh signature. He was the man of a thousand faces, protean in his ability to reinvent himself, prolific in his output.

  He did not fool himself that he had mastered every nuance of his work. What was it old Chaucer had said, in a rather different context? “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” Yes, that stated it exactly. He could never be the complete master of such a complex art. Still, he had progressed. And he’d had his fun.

  Having read the literature on serial murder, he knew that it was the fashion among investigators to classify a killer as organized or disorganized, social or asocial, according to the condition of the victim’s body and the crime scene. He played games with the small minds that would pigeonhole him so neatly.

  He fit the profile of a disorganized asocial killer on some of his outings, then switched to the organized social type, then mixed and matched, all the time moving from state to state, until the authorities in their blessed confusion must have thought they were dealing with three, six, a dozen separate maniacs.

  As his confidence grew, he expanded his menu of victims. He put the lie to any accusation of gender bias by selecting the occasional boy, though the females always pleased him best. He overcame his insecurities by graduating to teenagers, then young adults, and finally to anyone who struck his fancy.

  He had been the Bay Area Doctor, dispensing lethal injections to red-haired housewives; the Seattle Bedroom Invader, who killed couples—the husband executed with a silenced pistol shot, the wife asphyxiated with a plastic bag; the Twin Cities Arsonist, who burned his victims in their mobile homes; and others.

  Now he was—or had been—the Hourglass Killer of Los Angeles. He’d preyed on single women in their twenties and thirties, leaving his signature tattoo, his coy calling card. He kept his victims alive for four hours. Why four? Well—why not? The time period had no significance to him. Neither did the hourglass tattoo, except as a private joke relating to his passion for black
widows. Such details were merely part of his latest act, virtuoso flourishes in the new role he had written for himself, a magician’s sleight of hand. While the police were writing their profiles and studying the pattern of his crimes, he would simply vanish, then reappear in a new guise, with new ground rules, in a new locale. And nobody would make the connection. Nobody would link the Hourglass Killer in LA with, say, the Mesa Campus Stalker or the Boise Bride Snatcher or whatever new identity he crafted for himself.

  By this means, he stayed always one step ahead of the authorities. Tonight, admittedly, had been a close call, and in retrospect he should have left town immediately upon noting the police presence in Caitlin’s house. Still, his precautions, a product of experience and long habit, had served him well. He was free, sufficiently far from his home territory to make his arrest unlikely, and he could start over somewhere else, under a new name, in a new occupation.

  In his dash for escape, he had left behind his van, most of his clothes and all of his furnishings, not to mention his arachnid menagerie. All he had was the old Buick—and his laptop computer, which he’d grabbed as he fled, and which now rested on the passenger seat. He was glad not to have lost it. Of course, the hardware could be replaced easily enough—in addition to the cash in the trunk, he had money banked in untraceable accounts, readily available, and he was quite an accomplished burglar as well. But there was a great deal of private information on the computer, including his bookmarked Web pages, one of which was the video display of Caitlin Osborn’s bedroom.

  As far as he could tell, the police remained unaware of the Web site. They had exhibited no knowledge of the secret surveillance and had neither disconnected the camera nor pulled the plug on the site. Conceivably he could continue to use it.

  To watch Caitlin, if and when she returned home.

  To watch ... and perhaps to strike.

  He shook his head. Smarter to forget her. Smarter to move on, reinvent himself once more, start the games anew.