Last to die
Page 27
“Man, it stinks in here.”
Rene simply shot him a look that said, Try living in Africa for three years, bucko.
Jack took a step forward, then jumped at the sound of a cat toy squeaking beneath his shoe. He let out a nervous chuckle, but Rene didn’t even flinch. She suddenly seemed oblivious to the sounds, the smells, the sights-to anything but the past she’d come here to uncover. Jack, too, could feel the mood shifting. No more little jokes, no more playful smiles, no more contrived distractions to keep them from breathing in and absorbing the tragedy that had occurred right here in this house, the horrible crime that had ended a child’s life and changed a young mother forever.
“She was twenty-four when it happened,” said Rene, her voice quaking.
Jack just stood there, as if he could feel his own blood coursing through his veins. Twenty-four. Could he remember what it was like to be twenty-four? Could he even fathom what it felt like to be a twenty-four-year-old woman with a four-year-old child, flat broke, working nights at Hooters, her husband working two jobs just to keep them out of bankruptcy? Was that the life of the princess Sally had dreamed about as a little girl, coming home at midnight six nights a week smelling of cigarettes and spilled beer, too much makeup on her pretty face, her nipples protruding from her too-tight tank top and her nylon shorts riding up her ass like a thong bikini, because looking like a slut would fetch her a few more bucks in tips? He wondered if there was a time in her entire adult life when Sally was ever truly happy. He wondered, too, if Sally could possibly have realized that her shitty little life wasn’t all that bad, that it could have been so much worse, that the real nightmare was only about to begin.
“I don’t think I can go back there by myself,” said Rene.
Instinctively, Jack went to her, took her arm, and together they started down the dark hallway. They walked slowly, their heels clicking on the cracked terrazzo floor, click-clock, click-clock, click-clock, as if to mark the reversal of time, their descent into an unspeakably dark past. Jack didn’t make her go any faster than she wanted, but they were barely moving, and finally she brought them to a stop at the open bathroom door.
Jack was right with her, so he switched on the hall light, which gave them enough illumination to see inside. A cat was perched on the lid of the toilet seat, as if waiting for a drink, then scurried away. The sink was stained with a broad streak of rust, and mildew had darkened the white ceramic tile. A deep crack arced across the medicine chest mirror. Directly opposite them was a cabana door that presumably led to the patio.
“That’s where he got in,” said Rene.
“The jalousie windows?”
She nodded once and said, “He slid his arm through, reached inside, and unlocked the deadbolt.”
Jack stared at the lock, imagined the knob turning, wondered what Sally and little Katherine were doing when the stranger had joined them, wondered what was going through that monster’s mind when he closed the door behind him, stepped inside, and started toward the bedroom. Was he all tingly and excited, sexually aroused, fearful of nothing? Or maybe he did have fear, a sociopath’s only fear, the sick fear that reality couldn’t possibly measure up to his endless hours of twisted fantasies, fear that all the planning and anticipation would be for naught because it simply wouldn’t be enough that the girl was all his, the hot mom too, and that he could do with them as he wished.
Rene stepped inside, past the sink, then stopped and gasped. Jack immediately understood why. The bathtub. It was gone. It had been ripped out and replaced with a stand-alone shower, but its footprint remained like a giant scar, a crude confirmation of what had happened there. Jack had seen many crime scenes and crime scene photos, but he never got used to it. Looking at it made you realize that it really had happened, that it could never be undone, that the awful bitterness would rise up in your throat until you could taste the pain, the screams, the utter horror of the victims. Right there, that very spot, was where he’d knelt on the tile floor, filled the tub with water, and rinsed Sally’s blood from his knife. Right there, that same spot, he’d wrung the blood from Sally’s blouse, dipping and squeezing until the water turned bright red. Then he carried Sally’s daughter-still alive, her feet and hands bound-and placed her in the tub, undoubtedly drawing one last moment of pleasure from the horror in her eyes. And then he slowly rolled her over, facedown in the water, and he watched, watched with delight. Jack knew he watched, because he’d spent four years of his life defending monsters like this on death row, he’d seen the gleam in their eyes as they recounted their conquests, killers who didn’t see the point in killing unless they could watch every fucking last minute of it. That son of a bitch just watched her body writhing, her head bobbing, her bound legs flopping like some vulgar abomination of the Little Mermaid, his own curiosity unsatisfied until he saw with his own two eyes how much of the bloody mixture her tiny lungs could hold.
“We should go,” said Jack.
“No. I want to see the bedroom.”
They retreated from the bathroom and continued down the hall. The door was open about a foot, just enough for a cat to come and go. Rene pushed it all the way open, and flipped the light switch. The fixture on the ceiling had four bulbs, but only one was burning, which left the room dim and full of shadows-cat shadows, dozens of them. Cats on the bed, on the dresser, on the floor, in clothes baskets scattered about the room. Cats everywhere, and Jack felt his eyes starting to water.
“Looks like his eleven cats have had a few kittens,” he said.
“I want to check the closet.”
From what he’d read about the crime, Jack knew that the attacker had been hiding in the closet. Rene stepped around a sleeping ball of orange fur, and Jack followed her across the room. She stopped before the closet door.
“You want me to open it?” asked Jack.
She stared a moment longer, then simply nodded.
He’d offered to open it without a moment’s hesitation, but as he reached for the handle, he felt something pulling inside him. It had been five years since the crime, dozens of different people had lived in this house since then, and he knew in his mind that there was nothing to fear on the other side of that door. But in his gut, where it mattered, he felt a slight reservation.
“Please,” said Rene. “Open it.”
The metal door handle felt cold in his hand, cold as the ice water that must have run through that killer’s veins. He turned it. The latch clicked. He pulled the door open and saw a sudden black flash, which sent his heart into his throat.
A cat raced across his shoe tops.
He and Rene exchanged glances, as if to calm each other’s nerves. Jack opened the door all the way and looked inside.
“You say he got in through the bathroom door, huh?”
“That’s what Sally told me. The police report said there were signs of break-in at the bathroom door.”
“So, he comes in the bathroom, walks down the hall to Katherine’s bedroom, and hides inside the closet.”
“That’s the theory.”
Jack pointed to the access door in the ceiling inside the closet and said, “Where do you suppose that leads to?”
Rene looked up and said, “The attic?”
A wall of built-in shelves inside the closet led upward like a ladder. Jack climbed up to the third shelf, pushed on the plywood, and opened the ceiling door. “It’s an attic, all right. Wonder if he could have come in this way?”
“I suppose it’s possible. I don’t even think Sally knew every theory the police considered or rejected. The prosecutor was extremely tight-lipped about his investigation.”
“Tell me about it. I had a little run-in myself a few weeks ago. So long as they consider the investigation active, they aren’t going to tell you much.”
“You mind taking a look?”
“In the attic?”
“The police have had five years to solve this crime. Why not have a look for ourselves?”
Jack shrugged
and said, “Okay, sure. Why not?”
Jack climbed up the shelves, pushed the ceiling door aside, and poked his head into the attic. The air was stuffy, and he was sweating almost instantly, as the temperature in the attic was at least ten degrees hotter than the main house. Jack let his eyes adjust and found a naked bulb hanging from a wire. He pulled the cord, and the attic brightened.
“Got light,” he said.
“Good,” she replied, her muted voice wafting upward through the ceiling.
Jack climbed the rest of the way and pulled himself up. The attic had no floor, just exposed joists and insulation, so he distributed his weight across three joists-feet, seat, hands. The lighting wasn’t great, but it was good enough to see that the attic ran the length of the house, from one end of the gabled roof to the other. He was at the highest point, dead center, and even there the head clearance was only about three feet. He saw no windows.
“Don’t see how he could have gotten in here from the outside,” he said. “Don’t see any outside access at all.”
“How about access from another room?”
He was afraid she was going to say that. “I’ll check.”
He crab-walked across the joists, careful not to slip and stick a foot or hand through the ceiling. The farther he traveled from the opening, the hotter it got. He could feel his shirt starting to stick to his back with sweat. His foot dragged across the exposed insulation, and a cloud of musty fibers was suddenly airborne. Jack coughed the thirty-year-old particles out of his lungs. He didn’t see another ceiling access door anywhere.
“I think the closet’s the only way up,” he shouted.
“Why don’t I just check the closet in the other bedroom,” she shouted back.
Jack considered his position, his head banging against the roof, his body spread out across the joists as if he were training for the county fair wheelbarrow race. Now she thinks of it. “Good idea,” he said.
He could hear her footfalls below him as she traversed the hallway that connected the bedrooms. He heard a door open, presumably the master bedroom, then another one, presumably the closet.
“Nothing,” he heard her shout.
The lightbulb flickered, and the attic went dark.
“Oh, shit,” Jack muttered. He stayed in his crab-walk position, hoping the light would flick back on. Some light was shining through the opening to the attic from the closet below, so it wasn’t completely black. He knew the joists were the standard sixteen inches apart, so he could find his way back even with the bad lighting. He waited for his eyes to adjust, and then he noticed something.
Down at the other end of the attic, over the master bedroom, a ray of light was shooting up into the attic. What the hell?
“Rene, where are you?”
“In the master.”
“Do you see a hole in the ceiling?”
He waited for her reply, which was simply, “No.”
The beam of light was still shining up like a laser from the master bedroom. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, but that was because the attic light had been burning. In the dark attic, and with the light glowing in the bedroom below, it was plainly visible. Jack crawled toward the beacon until it was within an arm’s length.
He stared at the light for a moment, noticing that insulation had been cut away next to the joist. The hole itself was smaller than a dime, but there was definitely a hole, and with the insulation trimmed back it appeared as though someone had deliberately put it there. He squatted down and peered through the opening.
“Rene? You sure you don’t see a hole?”
There was a brief pause, as if she were searching. “No,” she said.
“Just the ceiling fan.”
Ceiling fan. Jack pulled away a little more insulation. He found an electrical box and a mounting bracket for a ceiling fan. Beside the fan bracket was another bracket. It was attached to the joist but not to the fan, and it didn’t seem to be serving any purpose at all. He took a closer look, and there was just enough light emanating upward through the hole to let him read the manufacturer’s name printed on the side of the bracket: Velbon.
It probably wouldn’t have meant anything to him, had his ex-wife not been a photographer. Velbon was one of the best-known manufacturers of tripods and mounting brackets for video cameras. At that moment, Jack realized exactly what he’d found.
He took one more look down through the hole-a hole that from the bedroom probably looked like nothing more than a vent in the ceiling fan-and he had a perfect view of the bed.
Five years earlier, it would have been Sally’s bed. He could have watched Sally climbing into bed. Sally sleeping in her bed. Sally doing whatever it was she liked to do in bed.
“Rene?” he said in a voice loud enough to carry into the room below.
“Yes?”
“Your sister was definitely being stalked.”
Fifty
At six o’clock Monday morning, Gerry Colletti was in his kitchen, dressed and ready to leave for work. He checked his reflection in the glass display cabinet and, as always, liked what he saw. A lot of lawyers had fallen into the casual dress mode, but not Gerry. The suit was Armani. The shoes, Ferragamo. His silk tie and socks-you could measure a man’s true net worth by the quality of his socks-both by Hermès. The shirt was custom made in Hong Kong, as were all his shirts, because there wasn’t a designer in the world that made shirts to fit a freak of nature with a nineteen-inch neck and a thirty-inch sleeve length. Gerry hadn’t worked out since he quit the wrestling team in college, unless you called banging your female clients a workout, so it was truly the clothes that made the man-clothes and a good tailor.
“Gabby, order more Hawaiian Gold,” he said into his Dictaphone. He kept a running list on audiotape of all the personal things his secretary needed to do for him, but he suddenly realized that with Gabby a general order for “Hawaiian Gold” might fetch him anything from a box of pineapples to a bag of premium pot. “That’s Hawaiian Gold coffee,” he said, then slipped the Dictaphone into his inside pocket.
He poured himself a cup for the road, tucked the Wall Street Journal under his arm, and headed for the door that connected the kitchen to the garage.
It had been a quiet weekend, and Gerry had wanted it that way.He was still smarting from the way Swyteck had embarrassed him at the court hearing on Friday afternoon. It wasn’t like him to make a stupid mistake like that with the photographs and the date on his wristwatch. That kind of slipup told him one thing: He wasn’t being patient enough. Brains and patience were all it took to win this contest, two things Tatum Knight and Miguel Rios didn’t have. That would be their downfall. They alone stood between him and forty-six million dollars. Well, them and Alan Sirap.
Whoever the hell that is.
Gerry entered the garage and hit the button on the wall that switched on the light and opened the garage door. His emerald-black BMW was ready for a ride, washed and polished, glistening beneath the hanging fluorescent tube. He paused to admire it as the garage door noisily lumbered upward. He’d always been a car guy. His father had been a car guy-a greasy coveralls, dirt-under-the-fingernails, minimum-wage auto mechanic who’d never in his life owned a new car. His father never had anything new. They never had anything new. His mother had left them when he was ten, came back for Gerry, filed for divorce, cleaned out the old man, waited for the divorce to become final-and then married her divorce lawyer. A smart divorce lawyer. She married that son of a bitch, and then sent Gerry back to live with the old man, flat broke, not a pot to piss in.
What goes around, comes around.
With the press of a button on his remote, the car alarm chirped and the doors unlocked. Gerry got inside, slid behind the wheel, and closed the door. He got himself situated-coffee cup in the holder, newspaper open on the seat beside him for easy reading in stopped traffic, loose change for the tolls in the dispenser. He checked himself one last time in the rearview mirror, then turned the key.
Nothing.
The battery was his first thought, but then he thought again. The electronic keyless entry had responded to his remote, and the dome light had come on when he’d opened the door. The clock was working, too. Something was screwy with the starter.
Or somebody had screwed with it.
Another man might have been frightened, but Gerry only smiled. He prided himself on being fearless. In his line of work, many an ex-husband had threatened him, and a few had even come after him. You couldn’t do this work without balls as big as globes, and his were made of brass.
Somebody messing with his car-how beautiful was that? It was exactly the kind of additional evidence of intimidation he needed to box Tatum Knight into disqualification under the Slayer Statute. That idiot just couldn’t control himself, and Gerry was suddenly cock-sure that Tatum Knight had yanked the wires from his alternator in retaliation for his clever courtroom maneuvering. Swyteck may have scored a few points for style at Friday’s hearing, but Gerry had the long-term winning strategy. And if Knight kept doing stupid things like this, he’d reap the rewards sooner than expected.
He pulled the hood release, got out of the car, and walked around the front to check things out. If this was what he thought it was, he’d definitely file a police report. But he didn’t want to be crying wolf, either. He wanted to see those wires ripped from the starter, maybe even take a few more pictures.
The hood had risen up about four inches before it caught on the safety latch. He reached underneath to find the trip switch that would completely release it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the hood, and wasn’t exactly sure where the release was. Both hands were under the hood, fiddling for the switch, when a black blur fell from above him, swooping down like Spider-Man from atop the opened garage door that lay directly overhead suspended from the ceiling. It was a huge blur that took the shape of a man who pounced on the hood of the car, his sheer weight slamming it shut on Gerry’s fingers. He felt the back-spray of blood against his belly, heard the sickening crush of bones that just a split second earlier had been his precious hands.