Deadly Pursuit

by Michael Prescott

  Passing under the yellow crime-scene ribbon strung across Dance’s doorway, Moore followed Lovejoy inside.

  The living room was three times the size of her entire apartment in Denver, lavish and plush, the giant windows framing a Cinemascope view. It must have been spectacular before the thick pile carpet had been torn free of the tacks, the paintings taken off the walls, the sofa cushions unzipped and emptied of stuffing, the drapes removed, the wall fixtures unscrewed.

  Now it was a scene of orderly wreckage and controlled destruction, unoccupied save for the Justice Department attorney in charge of evidence recovery. He lounged on what remained of Dance’s sofa, listening to Jay Leno over the high-pitched howls of power tools.

  In the bedroom two FBI men, Tobin and Mays, were cutting neat vertical slices in the plasterboard. They shut off their saws and raised their goggles when Lovejoy and Moore entered.

  “What’s up?” Tobin asked. Five o’clock shadow darkened his cheeks and gave him a slightly disreputable appearance that was not improved by an overlay of plaster dust and sweat.

  “I need to look at something,” Moore said, moving toward the nightstand.

  “Nothing in the drawers. Believe me, we checked. Took out all his papers and knickknacks, even X-rayed some of them with the portable fluoroscope.”

  “I’m not interested in the drawers.” She lifted the telephone handset off its cradle, studied it.

  Sheila had said Jack was on the phone. But apparently she hadn’t heard him talking. She had merely seen him with the phone in his hand.

  The handset was thin and lightweight. She saw no sign of tampering. But the cradle ...

  Heavy. Thick. She turned it over. The bottom plate was attached with two small screws.

  Squinting at the screws, she saw abrasions on the minuscule grooves of the heads.

  “This phone has been taken apart,” she said quietly. “More than once, I’d say.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Tobin breathed.

  Mays got a small Phillips screwdriver and carefully removed the screws, then lifted off the plate.

  Inside the cradle, in a narrow cavity between the plate and the guts of the phone, was a single plastic syringe.

  “Physical evidence.” Lovejoy showed Moore a broad smile, his first since the raid. “Thank God.”

  “We would have found it eventually,” Mays said with a note of defensiveness.

  Lovejoy ignored that. “You’d better get the syringe over to the LAPD lab and see if they can find enough fluid in it for serological analysis. Also, see about matching the needle to the puncture wounds in the victims’ necks. And find out if there’s any sort of brand name on this thing, some way of tracing its origin and distribution, determining how he got hold of it.”

  Tobin already knew the procedure. “Right. Right.”

  “And get Justice in here to preserve chain of evidence.” Lovejoy moved toward the bedroom doorway. “And check the other phones—Jack’s office phones, too—in case he tried the same gimmick twice. And—”

  Moore, smiling, gave him a gentle shove from behind.

  “And we need to get going, Peter. We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  11

  Jack Dance woke at dawn and rubbed his aching neck. Sleeping curled up in the runabout had left him sore and stiff.

  He had beached the dinghy in the cove, on the seaweed-strewn mud flat, and camouflaged it with palm fronds. He didn’t want it to be spotted from the air in daylight.

  Throughout the night, biting insects had harassed him without mercy. Only after arriving at the island had he realized that he’d forgotten to purchase bug spray. Sleep had been fitful, his fragmentary dreams disturbing.

  Breakfast was a can of pears. He consumed the entire contents, including the heavy syrup. The thick, sugary liquid made his gut roll.

  Jack sighed. Yesterday’s euphoria, born of plotting strategy and taking action, had faded. He pictured his apartment in Westwood—the well-stocked refrigerator, the comfortable chairs, the thick-pile carpet, the king-size bed. It made a disheartening contrast with his present circumstances.

  Yes, he’d had quite a fall. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had gazed down on Los Angeles from a height, a monarch surveying his dominion. Now he was a sweaty, muddy, ravenous thing, a hunted creature seeking refuge in the wild, master of nothing, not even of ticks and sandflies.

  He would rise again, though. He swore he would.

  First light was breaking, a soft luster brightening the sky. Time to reacquaint himself with the island. Seventeen years had passed since his last visit here, with Steve Gardner, in the summer after their high-school graduation.

  Leaving the cove, he immediately found the boardwalk that ran through the mangrove swamp. Sure, he remembered this. He and Steve had traversed the walkway many times. It was a haphazard, crooked thing, twisting and bending like a malformed spine. At its far end, as he recalled, was a forest trail.

  He started off down the boardwalk, moving slowly, wary of weak spots in the old wood. But the structure seemed sturdy enough. Remarkably well preserved, in fact. In better condition than his memory would have led him to expect.

  The swamp folded over him like a nightmare, surrounding him with rank smells and contorted shadows and sinuous shapes that glided through the murk. Clumps of mangroves, their skirts of aerial roots exposed at low tide, formed a labyrinth of twisted trunks and branches. In the narrow channels meandering among the trees, the water had the dark gloss of an oil slick, its surface puckered and dimpled with random bubbles.

  This was a prehistoric world, fetid and lush, crowded with mysterious life. Jack almost expected to see Tyrannosaurus come sloshing into view with a bellows blast of breath and a jet-plane roar.

  He kept walking. As he did, he ran his hand along the boardwalk’s wooden railing, studied the planks passing by under his feet. He began to feel the first stir of misgivings.

  He’d counted on having Pelican Key all to himself. But the boardwalk’s condition was too good, too perfect. It had not been left to rot. It had been repaired—even partly rebuilt, he believed. There were sections where the wood looked new and the nail heads gleamed.

  Jack frowned. Was the key occupied? Had old Donald Larson finally restored the old plantation house and taken up residence there, as he’d promised?

  “Shit,” he muttered. If he wasn’t alone, he would have to leave in a hurry, before he was discovered.

  No point in jumping to conclusions. Maybe the island was inhabited only in the winter months. In that case he could stay until at least the end of September. By then Teddy Lunt should have come through with the documents.

  To find out, one way or the other, he would have to take a look at the house and determine if it was presently in use.

  He could hardly walk up to the door and knock. But from a vantage point on the beach, he could scope out the place with little risk of being seen. He quickened his steps.

  In less than ten minutes, the boardwalk delivered him to the hardwood forest at the center of the island. He hurried along the trail toward the red radiance of the sunrise, intermittently visible through breaks in the foliage.

  His shoes crunched on the dry, crumbly soil, frightening small lizards out of his way. Walls of dense shrubbery and trees enclosed the path, forming a tunnel of green. Somewhere a parrot squawked.

  The tropical hammock was a showcase of the superabundance of life, nature’s insane fecundity. Things grew everywhere here, even on other things. A palette of varicolored lichens smeared the bark of mastics, gumbo-limbos, and banyans, paint splotches dabbed on by some frenetic, freewheeling artist. Orchids, wild pine, and resurrection fern ornamented other trees, bright as Christmas bows. A tall mahogany tottered, its trunk wrapped in the twisted roots of a strangler fig, slowly smothering in that octopus embrace.

  Jack walked on, blinking at the steadily growing brightness of the day. A rabbit flitted through the underbrush and vanished beneath the yellow blossoms
of a Jerusalem thorn. Something splashed in an unseen pond. The recesses of the forest seemed impossibly remote, lost in shadows and mist, partitioned by screens of foliage and ropy webs of medicine vine.

  The end of the trail was just ahead. He could smell the fresh salt breeze.

  The brush thinned. Dark loam gave way to white coral sand. Past a scrim of ferns and waving sawgrass in red bloom, he saw the crimson thread of the horizon. The sky blushed. The sea flamed.

  On the fringe of the forest, he halted abruptly. He shaded his eyes, blinked, then leaned against the rough bole of a date palm and stared out into the blinding light.

  “Oh,” he said simply.

  For just one moment Jack Dance forgot who he was and what he did for fun. He forgot the syringe and his victims’ convulsions and his sweaty exercise afterward with their undressed bodies.

  In that moment he was not a killer. He was only a man gazing transfixed at the woman on the beach.

  She wore sandals and shorts and a yellow tank top. Her hair was golden, her skin sun-bronzed. Her slender body was limned in fire against the red dazzle of the sun.

  She ambled lazily along the irregular line of seaweed that marked high tide, her head thrown back, arms loose at her sides. Plovers scattered before her, comical in their helter-skelter distress.

  An enchanting picture. So perfect it might have been posed. The woman belonged on a postcard or a calendar. Anyone looking at her would smile, just as Jack was smiling now, not in lust but in simple aesthetic appreciation.

  She knelt to examine something on the beach. A shell. It gleamed in her hand. She put it back, reached for another, and then her gaze lifted and, across a span of thirty feet, she met his eyes.

  Slowly she stood. She watched him.

  Jack saw the sudden tightness in her mouth, the unnatural stiffness of her body. He saw fear. And seeing it, he remembered himself.

  His interlude of rapt contemplation ended instantly, as if a switch had been thrown. No more time for that. There was a job to do.

  He stepped out of the brush into the loose pebbly sand and started toward her, still smiling, but his smile held a different meaning now.

  From this distance he could not distinguish the color of her eyes. He hoped they were blue.

  Even if they were not, he would enjoy watching her face when he took out his pocketknife and buried the spear blade in her throat.

  12

  Rigid, breath stopped, Kirstie stared at the man as he emerged from the shadows of the trees.

  He was tall—taller than Steve—and about the same age. He wore a denim shirt, blue jeans, black shoes. His careless posture and casual way of walking implied an ample fund of confidence, frequently tapped, instantly replenished.

  The man moved toward her, crossing the bleached moonscape of coral sand, his long, sinuous shadow sliding at his heels.

  She was abruptly conscious of how alone she was. This walk on the beach was her morning ritual; sometimes Steve joined her, but most often not. Today he’d mumbled something about catching up with her as she slipped out of bed. Most likely he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep.

  She looked toward the house. Beyond the trees, at the southern tip of the island, the red-tiled roof glowed like a carpet of embers. The dock stood on the reflected image of itself, a many-legged insect balanced on the surface tension of a pond.

  Would Steve hear her if she screamed for help? She didn’t think so. The distance was too great, and the breeze, blowing out of the south, would throw her shouts back in her face.

  As calmly as possible she faced the man, her head lifted, shoulders squared.

  “This is private property,” she said as he came nearer.

  He smiled, a clean white smile full of friendliness but empty of affection. “I’m aware of that.”

  He closed to within six feet of her and stopped. For a beat of time they watched each other without speaking.

  Overhead soared a brown pelican, a young bird showing a white belly and brown wings. It wheeled toward the sea in search of food, dipped and rose, then dipped again, dark against the blaze of sun.

  Hunter and prey, Kirstie thought. The words touched her with their chill.

  “If you know it,” she said slowly, “what are you doing here?”

  “Visiting.”

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “I’m not bothering anyone.”

  “You’re bothering me.”

  “I would think you’d be lonely. You are alone, aren’t you?”

  The question pulled her stomach into a tight, acid knot.

  She forced herself to keep her eyes focused on his face. A handsome face, in its way. Sharp-featured, faintly cruel. Stubble dusted his cheeks. The breeze flicked listlessly at his unkempt brown hair.

  He stared back without blinking, a cool, flinty gaze that raised prickles of gooseflesh on her arms. His hazel eyes sparkled, but not with merriment.

  “No,” she answered. “I’m not alone. My husband is with me. And ... some friends.”

  “How many friends?”

  “You have to go.”

  “There are no friends, are there?”

  “I want you to leave. Right now.”

  “No husband, either, I’ll bet. You really are all alone.”

  “If you don’t go—”

  He took a step nearer. She wanted to retreat, but if she gave ground, the man would only be emboldened.

  “You have pretty eyes,” he said suddenly. “Blue eyes. Deep blue. They match the water.”

  Her pulse beat in the veins of her wrists. There was a greasy coldness in her belly. Her mouth was very dry.

  “I want you off this island.” Her words came slowly, paste squeezed from a tube. “Now. Immediately. Or my husband and I will radio the police.”

  He moved forward again, and this time she did step back, unwilling to let him invade her personal space. A cool splash of tidal water lapped her ankles.

  “The police?” He frowned. “That’s not very nice. I have a feeling you and I aren’t hitting it off too well.”

  “How perceptive.”

  “I’m a surprisingly sensitive fellow.”

  “If you’re so goddamn sensitive, you ought to know when you aren’t wanted.”

  “I have gotten that message, actually.”

  “Then you’re going?”

  “In a minute. First there’s just one little thing I have to do ...”

  His hand moved toward his pants pocket, and suddenly Kirstie felt sure she had to run or scream or do something, dammit, because this man was not normal, this man was not safe.

  An explosion of barking split the air.

  She jerked her head sideways and saw Anastasia blunder out of the brush onto the beach, loping this way.

  Tension hissed out of her body, leaving her muscles slack. She could breathe again.

  “My husband is here,” she said, struggling to hide her relief. “Maybe you’ll listen to him, if not to me.”

  The man made no reply, simply gazed past the dog at Steve, following Anastasia across the sand.

  He had tossed on a pair of long pants, a cotton shirt, and the battered Nike running shoes he refused to throw away. His glasses glinted, the lenses screening his eyes.

  Kirstie wished he looked bigger, more imposing. The man before her was muscular and fit. He could take Steve in a fight. But not with Anastasia to help. Thank God they’d bought a big dog.

  Steve hurried toward them, urgency conveyed in his long, ungainly strides. As he drew closer, Kirstie was surprised to read more puzzlement than concern in his expression.

  He stopped two yards away. For a long moment no one spoke. Anastasia was silent, watchful. The breeze died off, even the air around them holding its breath.

  Then slowly Steve smiled. “Jack? Jack Dance?”

  The other man extended his hand. “Steve Gardner. Jesus Christ, it is you.”

  Kirstie watched, speechless, as they locked grasps in a violent handsha
ke.

  This was Jack Dance? Steve’s high-school friend? His companion on the Florida trips that always ended on Pelican Key?

  But that was two decades ago. What the hell was he doing here now?

  Steve voiced the same question, his smile still fixed on his mouth—a giddy, sunstruck smile, curiously unreal.

  “Just visiting,” Jack answered. “Got bitten by the nostalgia bug, I guess. Developed a sudden hankering to see the place again. Relive some old memories. Know how that is?”

  Steve nodded. “Oh, yeah. I know how that is.”

  “So you live here? You bought the island?”

  “Not exactly. We’re like you—just visiting. The Larson heirs are renting out the plantation house to vacationers.”

  “Must have fixed up the house pretty nice, huh?”

  “You’ll have to see it. I’ll give you a guided tour.”

  “Got the whole island to yourselves?”

  “Absolutely. Total privacy.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “It is great.” Steve shrugged. “Look, you’ve got to spend the day with us. Lunch and dinner. We’ll explore the island, just like in the old days.”

  Kirstie bit down hard and said nothing.

  “Terrific, Steve.” Jack patted Anastasia’s head, and the dog tentatively licked his fingers. “I’d love to.”

  “You’ve met Kirstie, obviously.”

  “Of course.” Jack spoke in a courtly tone quite different from his earlier mocking insolence. “She’s something special. I’m jealous.”

  “You should be. But don’t get any ideas. She’s mine.”

  “Then I’ll just have to content myself with this elegant creature’s affections.” Jack stroked the dog’s silken fur.

  “Her name’s Anastasia,” Steve said. “We call her Ana.”

  “Beautiful animal. Reminds me of my dad’s Doberman.”

  “How is the skipper?”

  “Passed away four years ago. Heart failure.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

  “It was quick, at least. He didn’t suffer.”

  Jack scavenged a stick of driftwood and tossed it high in the air. It twirled like a boomerang and landed in a puff of coral sand. Anastasia ran to retrieve it, tail swishing joyously.