by Unknown
He kissed her again and she squeezed his hand reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, honey, everything will be better soon.’
Jack smiled at her, and as he headed for the kitchen he tried hard not to dwell on the fact that July the eighth, the day of his wedding anniversary, was also the day the Black River Killer had claimed his sixth and youngest victim.
4
Georgetown, South Carolina
Much in the manner that old men remember their first love affair, Spider finds himself comforted and aroused by his recollections of his first kill. Eyes still shut, his mind almost slipping into sleep, he rolls back twenty years and remembers the last moments of his momentous meeting with Sarah Kearney.
The summer sun and sweet floral smells of the South Carolina parkland sting his senses once more; he and Sugar stand inches apart, a delicious awkwardness at the end of their first meeting.
‘Looks like rain,’ he’d said, glancing up at the battleship-grey cloud heading their way. ‘You got a ride?’
Sugar had shaken her head. Her pretty black hair swished as she did. ‘No, I came out by bus.’
Of course you did, my darling, of course you did.
‘Where you going? Can I drop you somewhere?’
‘Hey, would you mind givin’ me a ride to Georgetown? It’s not outta ya way or nothin’. In fact, you go right through it and I can show ya a short cut an’ all.’
‘Course not. Nothing would give me more pleasure.’
The walk back to his car had been so exciting. Anticipation had crackled through his veins like a broken electric cable in a thunderstorm. But he hadn’t forgotten himself. Oh no, he’d been the perfect gentleman, right up to the end.
He’d opened the passenger door for her, and closed it carefully once she was safely inside.
‘Why thanks, that’s really nice of you.’
What happened next had been the best bit. He’d pictured it dozens of times, even acted it out in his garage to make sure it would work properly.
‘First rule of the road, better safe than sorry, always buckle up.’ He’d said it with a smile and pointed at her seat belt.
She’d laughed at him.
Fancy that, she’d actually laughed at him. ‘You’re a real gent, aren’t ya,’ she’d said, ‘real kind to ladies, that’s pretty unusual these days.’
Pretty unusual. He smiled again at the recollection, she’d certainly been right there.
Then she’d done as he asked. Good little Sugar had clunked the seat belt into place and started to sit right back to make herself comfortable with her new gentleman friend.
Poor Sugar.
She’d never made it to comfortable.
As she tossed back her hair, Spider had made his move. Two fingers, bent double at the knuckles, driven deep into her throat, either side of the windpipe. An unbreakable choke-hold.
Just remembering it made him tingle. He flexed his hand and relived the excitement of pressing harder and harder, pushing her neck back against the headrest and blocking off her airway.
Sugar had struggled but the seat belt had pinned her back – just as he’d figured it would. She clawed at his arm, but he’d thought of that as well; the sleeves of his wool jacket just snapped off her nasty fingernails.
He’d thought of everything. He always did. Always would.
And that final kiss? Wow! He’d never forget it.
His lips to hers at the very moment he choked the final breath from her body and caught it in his mouth. Like he was swallowing her soul.
He breathes out. Feels her warmth again, feels that part of her, still inside him – maybe even attached to his own soul.
God it had been exciting. The most exciting, wonderful moment of his life.
And then she had been his. Truly his.
Was it really twenty years ago that all that happened? He could hardly believe it.
My, how time flies so fast.
It only seemed like yesterday that he’d looked across at Sugar’s dead body in the passenger seat and realized that they were joined for ever, as surely as if they were man and wife.
Spider opens his eyes in the dullness of the present day and smiles. Sugar had indeed been special. It was so good to have her back in his life.
5
Georgetown, South Carolina
Fifteen-year-old Gerry Blake and his younger cousin Tommy Heinz couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Day or night, they regularly cut through the graveyard. The old tombstones and creepy church had never held any fears for them.
Until now.
Today, they were in a rush to get to their friend Chuck’s and go fishing with his dad in his boat out on the Black River. They both skidded to a halt on the rough shale path halfway through the churchyard; Tommy stumbled to his knees.
‘Muuutherfucker!’ screeched Gerry, drawing out the obscenity as he’d heard rappers do on MTV.
Tommy was already on his feet, panting like a dog, ready to run for the hills. He’d be out of there just as soon as Gerry came to his senses and got his ass into gear. For a second though, both boys instinctively huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and simply stared. What they saw was already branded into their memories for the rest of their lives.
The grave in front of them had been dug up.
A cheap pine coffin was splintered open and the skeleton of a young woman in a soil-stained dress was upright, resting against the headstone. Blackened bony arms and legs dangled from the filthy cloth. But the image that would haunt the teenagers until their own dying days was that of the head. Or rather, the space where the head should have been.
6
Florence, Tuscany
The psychiatrist in Florence had been as good as her word. Jack had rung her cell phone and, despite being surprised by the call, Dottoressa Elisabetta Fenella had agreed to see him later that very day. The power of the FBI really did cross continents. Jack suspected the big bucks that the Bureau had no doubt promised to pay probably also had some sway.
The ninety-minute rail journey to Florence went quickly, mainly because of the beauty of the countryside that rolled past the dusty window of the airless, rundown and overcrowded carriage. He found himself mesmerized by the vineyards and olive plantations that battled for the best terraces across steep hillsides, drawn to the sunlight but scratching for patches of precious shade. In some places, the sun had scorched the ploughed fields into slabs, making the earth look as if it had been fashioned out of hunks of grey stone. In wetter valleys, golden stone cottages rose from fertile fields like farmhouse bread baking in an oven.
And Tuscany certainly was an oven.
Jack found himself bathed in sweat as the train started to slow down into Florence. He blamed the lack of air-con, but he knew it was something else. Second thoughts.
Second thoughts about facing up to whatever was inside him, whatever memories were powerful and dark enough to scare him even when he was asleep.
The facts, the cold hard facts, came tumbling into his head. The Black River Killings had broken him.
Those weren’t just his words, it was what every crime reporter in America had written after his collapse at JFK.
He’d failed to catch a man who’d murdered at least sixteen young women, and who would murder more. He’d failed.
They’d written that too. Written it so many times that it had stopped hurting. Or so he told everyone.
Maybe it was best if he stayed broken. Broken didn’t mean completely unworkable or totally destroyed, it just meant he wasn’t as good as he once was. Maybe seeing a shrink would only make things worse.
His head filled with static, a sort of tinnitus, a hissing noise, and then it became clearer, not hissing, cutting. The noises were back; slashing noises. Steel on skin. He covered his ears and closed his eyes.
The sounds slowly slipped away. Had he heard them, or imagined them? Maybe the train pulling into the station, the wheels on the track?
He took his hands away and opened his eyes.
; Silence.
The train had stopped and the carriages were empty.
It was decision time.
7
San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany
San Quirico D’Orcia nestles in a stunning valley east of Montalcino, a third of the way along the breathtakingly beautiful route most tourists take to Montepulciano. A kilometre in the opposite direction, on the rising, winding road from San Quirico to Pienza, is the dramatic cypress-lined hillside that Ridley Scott used for the poignant scenes of the wife and child waiting for the return of Maximus in the film Gladiator.
The town’s historic walls are broken and have lost much of their beauty. Behind them though stand buildings made of a glorious golden stone, reminding Nancy of the rough chunks of sweet honeycomb that she craved when she was a kid.
La Casa Strada lies on the very edge of the town walls and was once an olive oil business. That was until the mid-seventies, when a blisteringly hot summer brought the locusts of bankruptcy to many farms in the valleys of Tuscany. The owners, Laura and Sylvio Martinelli, gave up and moved in with family in Cortona. Sixty-year-old Sylvio got a job driving taxis, while sixty-five-year-old Laura turned her hand to baking Torta della Nonna for a local shop. Since then, their former home and work buildings had been modernized and extended beyond recognition; only the magnificent view over the rolling hills of Val D’Orcia remained unaltered and unalterable.
Nancy was winding herself slowly into her working day. She’d dropped Zack at a friend’s house for a play day and was about to go through her planning routines for the week and coming month. She was relieved that the three-year-old had finally settled into his daily routine. A year earlier she used to endure terrible scenes at the International nursery in Pienza with him refusing to be left. Zack would cry and scream, clutching on to her shoulders or dress to prevent her putting him down. Worst of all, when she walked outside, she would see his tear-streaked face pressed against the window, begging her not to leave him. Nowadays though, Zack was ‘a big boy’, a ‘good boy’, and he understood that mommy and daddy needed to work during the day.
Nancy stuck her head through the kitchen door where the chefs were finishing the last of the breakfasts and shouted ‘Good morning, everyone!’, then waited for the replying chorus of ‘Buon giorno’ before letting the door flap shut again.
She noticed that their local handyman, Guido, was in there fixing a troublesome ventilator hood that served Paolo’s gas-fired eight-burner oven. For some time, their temperamental chef had been pressing Nancy for a new range, like the one his second cousin in Rome had. But Paolo would have to wait, cash was tight at the moment and she’d told him that until the summer’s takings were in, he’d have to make do with the ‘bargains’ they might pick up from local catering auctions. Nancy smiled to herself. In truth, Guido had now fixed so many of the appliances that neither she nor Jack could really regard them as bargains any more.
There were other things that needed fixing too. Months back, part of the far end of the garden terrace had dramatically slipped away and created a sharp fall on to the next terrace and an intriguing hole in the hillside. Carlo reckoned there could be an old water well in there, while Paolo conjured up more exotic possibilities by pointing out that the area used to be a fortified Medici stronghold. Whatever it was, it was an eyesore, a nuisance and maybe even a danger. Any day soon, one of Carlo’s friends was coming to do what he promised would be an inexpensive job of landscaping over it.
‘Morning, Maria,’ said Nancy, as their twenty-year-old receptionist finally arrived at her desk.
‘Good morning, Mrs King,’ said Maria Fazing. Her grumpy American owner had banned her from using her native Italian. Nancy insisted that as foreign tourists were their main target customers, she should always begin conversations in English. Maria put up with it because one day she would enter Miss Italia, then Miss World, and would eventually be grateful to have been forced to learn English. Or at least that’s what she told herself.
Nancy checked the computer, then the answer-phone, and updated the list of room bookings. She also added four more people to that evening’s dinner reservations and then checked their own website for e-mail enquiries. There were some requests for menus, a couple of letters in Italian that Nancy printed off for Maria to reply to, and someone wanting a quote for a fifth-wedding-anniversary dinner.
Maria was on the phone to some potential guests so Nancy had to wait to hand over the e-mail print-offs. She glanced down at a copy of La Nazione. The front-page headline screamed ‘Omicidio!’ and carried a photo of a pretty dark-haired young woman called Cristina Barbuggiani. Nancy had also seen the girl’s picture on TV bulletins and had heard staff talking about how her body had been chopped up and thrown in the sea. She turned away, letting out a long sigh, sad to realize that even here, in the most beautiful place she had ever lived, there was no escape from murder.
8
Florence, Tuscany
Jack stepped from the silence of the empty train into the noise and swelter of midday Florence, a broiling city of bustling bodies and blaring traffic. His mind was still clogged with the dregs of his nightmare when he reached the office of Dottoressa Elisabetta Fenella. The building stood just off Piazza San Lorenzo in the city’s most famous market district and was overlooked by the majestic stone presence of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, a frontless fourth-century church, rebuilt by the Medicis.
Jack slipped from the scorching sunlight of the street into the cool shade of the building’s entrance-way. He took a cramped, old-fashioned, iron-gated lift to the third floor and was ushered by a demure receptionist into a marble-floored, high-ceilinged consultation room. Overhead, two fans that probably predated Florence itself spun gracefully but pointlessly, batting currents of hot air from one side of the room to the other but doing nothing to cool the place. An antique oak desk squatted in a far corner, overlooked by a crucifix on the far wall and weighed down by papers and silver-framed photographs of a large extended family. Jack picked one up and studied a glamorous dark-haired woman in her late thirties, shoulder to elegant shoulder with a much older man.
The door behind him opened and the woman in the picture frame looked startled to find him at her desk.
‘Signore King?’ she asked, her voice betraying her disapproval of his nosiness.
‘Yes,’ answered Jack, embarrassed at being caught snooping. ‘Forgive me, old police habits die hard.’
‘Please.’ She gestured towards two creamy cotton settees arranged either side of a square glass-topped coffee table.
‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, I appreciate it.’ Jack offered his hand and as she shook it he noticed a gold and diamond wedding ring that would cost an FBI field officer three months’ salary.
‘You’re welcome. I’m afraid it was either today, or I wouldn’t have been able to fit you in for several months.’ Elisabetta Fenella put a brown file down on the coffee table and Jack noticed his name. He was on file.
No doubt the FBI had shipped it to her, FedExed her all the gory details about his burnout, his failure to cope with the pressure of his workload, and she’d had it waiting there, gathering years of dust but ever ready for the moment he inevitably cracked up and came calling.
The thought slapped the wind out of him.
Dottoressa Fenella cut to the chase. ‘Your office called me, what – something like two years ago? So, why did you choose now to ask to see me?’
It was a good question. And he wanted to give a good answer, wanted to come right out and say that he needed her intervention, needed her skills to hold back the evil that drowned him every night. But he couldn’t. The words simply wouldn’t come.
‘Let me help you, Jack.’ She saw his eyes fall on the file again. ‘Read it if you like.’ She pushed it towards him. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing in there that you don’t already know.’
Jack stared at the file but didn’t touch it. It was a test of strength and trust. She would hold nothing back, pro
viding he was strong enough to do the same.
But was he?
A white flash went off in his head, as white as the tiles of the morgue, as white as the drained skin of more than a dozen dead women.
‘Okay,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s get on with this. I’ve wasted enough of your time already.’
9
Days Inn Grand Strand, South Carolina
Once Spider had taken what he wanted from the cemetery, he’d headed straight back to his rented room at the Days Inn Grand Strand, only minutes from Myrtle Beach International.
The act of grave-robbing had not given him a sleepless night. Far from it. It had exhilarated and exhausted him as much as any imaginable sexual marathon, and afterwards he’d slipped effortlessly into a full night’s sleep.
Spider stirs now in his hotel bed and looks around the room to get his bearings. He wonders how the crummy joint managed to get one star, let alone two. Outside he can hear kids shouting and laughing as they jump in the pool and he longs for them to be quiet. He needs food, drink and much more rest, but such comforts will have to wait. Escape is now the only priority.
Although he is more than thirty miles from the desecrated grave, for him it’s still too close for comfort. Despite the incredible desire to stay around, to mix with the locals and listen to them talk about what has happened, he knows he must leave. By now the cops are certain to be crawling all over the cemetery, and that in turn means that the story might be on every radio and television station. He’s been scrupulously careful, and he will be even more careful before leaving the room, but despite all his precautions he’s aware that there’s always a chance that someone will see him, even if he hasn’t seen them.