Jack took a long moment to speak. When he did, his voice was a hoarse rasp, sandpaper on old wood.
“Stevie ...?”
Steve’s face showed no expression, no life. He might have been a mannequin, save for the jewel of sweat tracking slowly down his temple like a raindrop on a windowpane.
“Sorry, Jack,” he said softly, in the flat, pitiless voice of an executioner. “I’ve been one step ahead of you the whole time.”
19
Jack heard the words, understood their meaning, but could not make them real.
“Put down the knife,” Steve continued in the same unflinching hangman’s tone.
Jack had forgotten he was holding it. Fingers splayed, he let it drop to the floorboards. It made a soft, distant thump.
“Now sit.”
He retreated a step and seated himself on the sailing thwart. He waited.
“You goddamn asshole,” Steve said quietly.
There was pain in his voice now, pain that gave the lie to the emotionless expression he still wore.
Jack tried striking a light note. “Hey, Steve-o. I thought we were friends.”
“Is that why you were about to stab me?”
“Stab you? Hell, is that what you thought?” A sharp, forced laugh. “I saw some gulfweed tangled in the anchor line. Figured I’d cut it free.” He pointed. “Look for yourself.”
“Shut up, Jack.”
“I’m serious—”
“Shut up.”
Jack fell silent.
The boat bobbed slowly on the turquoise water. Pelican Key was a green smear in the distance. Jack smelled salt and moisture, felt the noon heat on his skin.
Sun and air. How much longer would he know these things? There was little daylight in a cell, and prison air stank of sweat and disinfectant. He could see what shape the rest of his life would take, a dismal, ugly prospect, hardly better than death.
Still, he might have a chance. Steve must have sensed the danger Jack posed, must have brought along the gun for that reason. But he couldn’t know the full story: the seven murders, the nationwide manhunt.
It might be possible to talk Steve into forgetting this incident in exchange for Jack’s immediate departure. Later the Gardners would hear the news and realize they’d let a multiple murderer escape—but by then he would be long gone.
His spirits rallied slightly. He had limitless confidence in his ability to manipulate and deceive. He’d built his life on it. And with it, he could save his life now. All he had to do—
“They’re after you,” Steve said, the words cutting like a razor into his thoughts. “Aren’t they?”
“Who?”
“The police.”
“After me? For what?”
“For killing all those women.”
All the breath went out of him, and with it, all hope. No possibility of a getaway now, no chance to stay on the run. Steve already knew ... everything.
It took Jack a long moment to speak. When he did, the false levity was gone from his voice. “You told me you hadn’t turned on the radio or TV in two weeks. Hadn’t seen a newspaper in days.”
“I haven’t.”
That made no sense. Jack shook his head. His eyes asked an unvoiced question.
“There was plenty about it in the news before Kirstie and I came to Pelican Key. You’ve been making headlines for months.”
“Not me. It was all Mister Twister. Never Jack Dance.”
“But I knew it was you. At least”—Steve dropped his gaze—“I was pretty sure I did.”
“That’s impossible. You couldn’t.”
“They showed pictures of the victims, Jack. Some of them looked almost exactly like Meredith.”
Meredith. Finally he understood.
His voice was a whisper. “I see.”
“You’ve been killing her over and over again. Christ, you’re so sick.”
“I prefer to think of myself as unconventional,” Jack said dryly. Distantly he was pleased with himself for finding some faint humor even in this most extreme crisis of his life. “So you deduced everything from a few photos? You should have been a detective.”
“There was a little more to it than that. All the murders took place out West; I knew you’d moved to L.A. years ago. The girls were picked up in bars; that sounded like you. You always were a ladies’ man.”
“And you always were jealous.”
“Not anymore.”
Bitterness flavored the words. Steve’s face was no longer empty of expression; his pinched lips and narrowed eyes conveyed an unmistakable impression of disgust.
“Besides,” he went on acidly, “there were limitations to your sexual prowess, weren’t there? You never dated blonds. I remember your once saying you had a problem with blond women. That was how you put it: a problem. I’ve thought about that a lot in the past six months. Looks like you’ve still got the same problem, Jack. Looks like killing Meredith didn’t get it out of your system.”
Killing Meredith. Steve was right, of course. But how had he known?
“I thought you believed Meredith’s death was a diving accident,” Jack said slowly. “I thought that was what everyone believed.”
“It’s what I wanted to believe. Up until a couple of minutes ago, I was still capable of persuading myself that it might have happened that way. If you hadn’t tipped your hand, I never could have been sure.”
Steve reached down and retrieved the knife. He studied it, the blade turning slowly, a pirouetting dancer.
“I recognize this. You used to bring it with you on our boat trips.”
Jack swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, his voice unexpectedly thick.
“And now you were going to plant it in my back. Nice.” He put the knife on the seat beside him and lifted the gun a little. The blued barrel gleamed like the cresting fin of an albacore. “How about Kirstie? What did you have in mind for her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
A beat of silence. The sun, hanging at its zenith, set the sky aflame. Jack wondered, in an oddly impersonal way, if he was about to die here, in this boat that rocked so gently, gently, a cradle on the water.
“You going to shoot me, Stevie? That the idea?”
“I ought to. I really ought to. My wife fits the pattern, doesn’t she? Blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. She’s another Meredith. That’s how you see her, right?”
“I really hadn’t thought about it—”
“Drop the pose. She explained how you acted on the beach. I had to tell her it was only her imagination. I still wasn’t certain about this—any of this. Now I am.”
The gun trembled. Jack could almost feel Steve’s trigger finger slowly drawing down.
“You would have killed her,” Steve breathed, “if I hadn’t come along. Wouldn’t you?”
A truthful answer might prove fatal, but instinctively Jack knew there was more certain danger in a lie.
“Yes,” he said, and tensed himself for the crack of the pistol’s report.
Nothing.
The gun didn’t fire, the world didn’t go away.
Steve merely nodded and went on nodding, as if in confirmation not only of Jack’s words but of every evil he had ever known.
“You would have left her floating in the shallows,” he said, voice hushed. “Facedown like Meredith. You bastard.” He glanced at the knife. “Was this what you were going to use?”
“Yes.”
“Cut her throat?”
“Yes.”
“You motherfucker. You piece of shit.”
Jack sat motionless, untouched by the insults. Bullets could wound, kill. Words left no mark.
“Is that how you murdered your other victims? With the knife?”
“No. A needle. An injection.”
“Meredith, too?”
“That was different. Cruder. I was only a kid then.”
“Yeah, sure, you were just the boy next door.” Steve frowned, the di
sgust on his face deepening, becoming open revulsion. “Literally, in fact. You did live next door to the Turners.”
“Yeah.”
“But you didn’t kill Meredith at home. You went to the bathing pavilion. Why?”
“I wanted it to look like an accident. I knew she always stayed late after locking up. She would practice her breaststroke, execute some dives. She took that lifeguard job seriously, I guess. Anyway, I hid in the bathroom till the other bathers were gone, then crept up from behind while she was swimming laps. Slammed her head against the side of the pool. Held her under till she drowned. Easy.”
“You sound real remorseful.”
“I don’t pretend to be. That bitch deserved it.”
“Why?”
“There’s a reason.”
“You always hated her. Never made any secret of it. But you wouldn’t say why.”
“It’s not important.”
“It was important enough to kill her for.” Jack said nothing. “Did she turn you down? Is that it? Was she immune to the patented Dance charm?”
“No—shit—nothing like that, Stevie.” Jack sighed. “Just drop it, okay? It doesn’t matter now.”
“Maybe it doesn’t. But it sure did matter back then. That must have been why the cops got interested in you—because everybody knew how much you’d hated her, how you’d always referred to her as a bitch, a cunt, every ugly word you could think of.”
“All of them entirely appropriate.”
“You think you’re so goddamn smart. So fucking superior. But if you are, how come you never anticipated that you’d become the most obvious suspect? How come you didn’t prepare an alibi in advance?”
Irrationally, Jack bristled, his criminal competence challenged. “I assumed the coroner would say she’d struck her head on the bottom of the pool after a dive. Which is what he did say—eventually.” His shoulders moved in a shrug. “I didn’t mess up so bad. In the end, things worked out exactly the way I’d planned.”
“Oh, sure. Everything worked out great, just great—thanks to your quick thinking. Did you come up with that story of yours on the spur of the moment?”
“More or less. I worked it out on my way over to your place. It sounded plausible. You knew Lisa and I had a little thing going.”
“That part was true, I suppose.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, mildly surprised to taste the bittersweet flavor of nostalgia in the words. “It was true.”
Lisa Giovanni had been a married woman of thirty-three, recently separated from her husband. She’d liked sharing her bed with an eighteen-year-old lover, tanned, muscular, virile; and Jack in turn had enjoyed her small, firm breasts and slender legs and silky dark hair, her finely chiseled Italian features, the perfume that wound around her like a flower’s fragrance.
Their trysts had been secret, of course. A scandal if the relationship should come out. Only Steve had known.
So it had been easy enough to formulate the lie and sell it.
“The cops are going to want to know where I was the night Meredith drowned,” Jack had said, pacing Steve’s bedroom on that humid August evening, while Steve listened, first puzzled, then concerned, then afraid. “They’re desperate for somebody to pin it on. Here’s the thing: I’ve got an alibi, but I can’t use it. ’Cause I was with Lisa. She gave me the world tour, as usual. But if I mention her name, it’ll be all over town in two days.”
“What can I do about it?”
“Tell the cops we were together that night. Doing something—I don’t know—maybe we took a drive. A long drive, say, down to Asbury and back. We’ve done that before.”
“Lying to the police—”
“It’s not a real lie. I’ve got an alibi. Just can’t use it, that’s all. Come on, Stevie, you don’t want this thing between Lisa and me to come out, do you? My folks’ll fucking kill me.”
It had taken some time and some talk, but Steve had agreed to go along. No other suspects had emerged, and finally the coroner had been persuaded to close the case. End of story, or so Jack had supposed.
“You already admitted you believed me at the time,” Jack said now. The wind kicked up; the boat rode gentle swells. “What changed your mind?”
“A rumor I heard around town a few weeks later. Story was that Mrs. Giovanni had been trying to get back with her husband. They’d spent a weekend together in Cape May—the same weekend Meredith died.”
“Oh, Christ. You mean the little guinea bitch was two-timing me?”
“Apparently. Of course, it was only gossip. Might not have been true. Or maybe whoever started the rumor got the details wrong. Even so, I started to think I’d better go to the police. But if I did, it would look really bad for you—and I still didn’t believe you could have killed Meredith.”
“So you went off to college,” Jack said slowly, as faint hope stirred in him, revived by the beginning of an idea, “and forgot about it.”
“Tried to.”
“Never said a word—for all these years.”
“All these years.”
Jack smiled then. Smiled like a jackal on a flyblown mound.
“We are friends,” he said with rising confidence. “We really are. Better friends than I knew.”
“No.”
“You kept my secret.”
“Wrong. I kept ... my secret.”
Jack understood. And suddenly he knew he could master this situation. He could turn things to his advantage. He could take control.
“Yes, Stevie,” he said softly. “That’s right. It was your secret, as much as mine. You lied to the police in a homicide investigation. You were an accomplice after the fact.”
“In a sense.”
“Not in a sense. That’s the way it was.”
“You could say so.”
“Anybody would say so.”
“I didn’t know your story about Lisa Giovanni was a lie—”
“But you knew the alibi you gave the cops was a lie.”
“You asked me to do it.”
“And you agreed.”
Steve closed his eyes, conceding the point. “Yes.”
“And later,” Jack went on, pressing harder, “after you heard the gossip, you began to suspect the truth. Began to realize what you’d done.”
“Maybe so. On ... on some level.”
“On a pretty conscious level, I’d say. At first, anyway. But you didn’t want to think about it. So you buried it. Buried it deep.”
“Not deep enough.”
“No. Of course not. Never deep enough.” Jack leaned forward, stronger now, taking charge. “Guilt’s like toxic waste. No matter how deep a hole you hide it in, it always leaks out somehow and pollutes everything around it. Isn’t that right, Stevie? Isn’t it?”
Steve said nothing this time, nothing at all—and that was good.
20
Kirstie ran along the boardwalk, the tattoo of her sandals on the planks thumping in rapid counterpoint to the beat of her pulse.
Her fear had been steadily swelling, battening on itself, as she traversed the island. A sense of desperate urgency possessed her, yet a corner of her mind stood back from her escalating panic, appraising it with cool skepticism, reminding herself that her terror had no logical basis, no solid foundation at all.
The swamp matched her mood. Past the railing of the boardwalk lay clumps of mangroves divided by narrow channels of brackish water. Things flitted among the trees’ twisted roots and branches; ribbons of glossy darkness slid soundlessly through the ooze. But no detail was visible, nothing specific, only a teasing impression of movement, as indistinct as the forebodings that shadowed her awareness.
She was certain of only one thing. She wished Jack Dance had not come here. She wished he had stayed a hundred miles—a thousand—from Pelican Key.
The boardwalk completed its zigzag course and deposited her on the marly loam near the cove. She emerged onto the mud flats, out of breath and flushed from running.
Sh
e scanned the area, looking for Jack’s dinghy. It wasn’t there. She saw nothing but mud and seaweed and a few reddish egrets harassing the minnows in tidal pools.
Had Jack lied about beaching the boat here? Had he come ashore someplace else?
Then her drifting gaze fell on a mound of palm fronds a few yards away. Something grayish and rough-textured, like whale skin, was concealed beneath.
The runabout. Thank God.
She approached the boat. At first she assumed the fronds had been blown over it by some freakish breath of wind, but as she got closer, she saw how carefully the leaves had been arranged.
Camouflage. Jack had hidden the dinghy. But why?
Kneeling, she brushed the fronds away. Inside the boat she found a suit jacket and pants, expensive items, badly soiled and wrinkled.
She remembered wondering if Jack had slept on the island last night. Now she was certain of it.
In the bow were three bulging grocery bags stuffed with canned goods and other nonperishable supplies. Near them, a manual can opener and an emptied can of peaches.
“He came here last night,” Kirstie whispered. “Brought enough food for a week. Slept till dawn. Woke up, had breakfast, then went for a walk—and found me.”
And he had left the boat hidden. Had not wanted it to be seen.
A flurry of splashes and beating wings. In one of the tidal pools, an egret chased down a minnow and snatched it up greedily.
Hunter and prey.
The thought shocked her into action.
She sledded the dinghy through the mud and launched it in the shallows. Climbing aboard, she paddled with her hands till she was out far enough to lower the outboard motor.
She jerked the starter cord. The motor sputtered and died.
A second try. Still nothing.
Oh, hell, was it out of gas? She should have brought a can with her.
She searched Jack’s supplies and found no extra fuel. Dammit. Goddammit to hell.
Panic surged again, threatening to overwhelm her. She forced it down, made herself test the motor once more.
Don’t yank the cord this time, just give it a good firm pull. Easy. Easy ...
The motor coughed, rattled, nearly faltered ... then caught.
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