I backed up against the sink, breathing shallowly.
“Don’t show fear,” Terry whispered to me.
“Would that encompass wetting my pants?” I squeaked.
“Take it easy. She’s not going to attack you with her mistress in the other room.”
“No, but she may attack us when her mistress comes back in the room, on her say-so!”
“What are you all whispering about in there?” Dinah called from the bathroom. “You aren’t talking about me, are you?”
I grimaced and put a finger to my lips, but Terry shouted back to her, “Yeah, we were just talking about what a great apartment this is! Do you live alone?”
The toilet flushed, followed by the sound of running water. Then Dinah came sauntering back into the kitchen with a bandaged hand.
“Did you get a beer?”
We shook our heads, but didn’t volunteer that we were too scared to walk past Helga the Killer Wolf to get to the fridge. Helga was now licking her paws, looking perfectly sated and domesticated, and Dinah reached down to pet her.
“That’s my little angel,” she said. “She’s such a good girl.”
Helga jumped to her feet and whipped her tail around.
“No, that’s enough meat for right now,” Dinah admonished her. “Maybe you’ll get more later if you’re good,” she said, winking at me.
And just what was that supposed to mean?
Were Terry and I about to become a treat for a rabid wolf owned by a psychopathic serial killer?
“So . . . pretty weird about Hugh Binion,” Terry said to Dinah.
“Yeah, can you believe it?” Dinah said, as she pulled a long-neck bottle of Corona out of the refrigerator.
“What a horrible way to go,” I said, trying to cover my terror with idle chitchat.
“Godammit!” Dinah shouted.
I jumped a foot in the air. What? What’d I say?
“The beer’s not cold!” she huffed. “The landlord was supposed to fix the fridge. If you’ll reach up and get the glasses down out of that cabinet there, I’ll get some ice. Can’t drink warm beer.”
I reached into the cabinet as instructed and brought down three glasses with shaking hands. Terry grabbed one from me, popped the top off her beer, and poured it into the glass. I started to do the same, but then Dinah reached into the freezer and pulled out a hand tool.
It was an ice pick.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I made a desperate attempt to signal to Terry that it was time to go, but the idiot ignored me.
What was wrong with her? Where the hell was her famous intuition? Did Dinah have to have “Psycho-killer” stamped on her forehead before Terry would get clued in?
Dinah palmed the ice pick and jammed it into the old-fashioned freezer, chipping off hunks of ice as the razor-sharp pick snicked away.
“’Course, I’ve noticed that most people who get killed that way have done something to bring it on themselves, you know what I mean?” she said, looking directly at me.
Snick.
Snick, snick.
“How so?” Terry asked curiously.
“That Binion, I’m pretty sure he was involved in criminal activities.”
“How . . . how would you know that?” I said, a little quaver in my voice.
Dinah shrugged. “I know my beat.”
“Well, nobody deserves to be brutally killed,” I said.
She turned and looked me straight in the eyes, pointing the ice pick for emphasis. “No, but you could say that it’s inevitable sometimes, when people get involved in things they shouldn’t be involved with.” She gave me a quick smile, then returned to chipping ice.
I was sure I would faint. Or puke. Or puke while fainting.
“Could I use the bathroom?” I said weakly.
“Sure,” Dinah said. “Right back there.” She pointed past my nose with the ice pick. I dodged it reflexively.
“Sorry, that was kinda close,” Dinah said.
I tried to give a casual laugh, but sounded like I was coughing up a hairball instead. Heccch.
Terry gave me a bewildered look.
“Be right back!” I sang out.
I scurried down the hallway to the bathroom, attempting to slow my breath and my heartbeat. What had I just done? I’d left my sister alone in the kitchen with an ice-cleaver, meat-pick murderer! But I thought that if I could get away for a few minutes my fear would subside, my senses would return, and I’d be able to think of a way out of this mess before we got stabbed into Swiss cheese.
Once inside the bathroom, I shut the door and splashed water over my face. I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. My eyes stared back at me, wide and dazed.
On a sudden hunch, I opened the cabinet.
It was packed with drugs. Rows and rows of brown plastic vials marked “Sample.”
Oh my God. Dinah had a heavy prescription drug habit. What else was she hiding? I wondered.
I turned off the water and slipped out into the hallway, creeping further away from the kitchen toward the bedroom. It was dark but I didn’t dare turn on a light. I pushed open the door, which emitted a little creak. I stood stock-still for a moment, holding my breath.
No sound from the kitchen but Terry’s and Dinah’s voices, conversational and relaxed. Terry even laughed a bit.
Way to go, sis. Keep her calm and occupied.
I ducked into the bedroom. In the half-light I could see a large bed with a plaid coverlet. There was a dresser to my right with two cowboy boots on top, serving as bookends for volumes on criminology and forensics. I panned around the room, looking for anything incriminating.
Nothing to see here. I turned to leave and tripped on something, catching myself on the dresser. I looked down and saw a running shoe poking out from under the bed. I reached down to grab the shoe and its mate.
They were enormous.
Easily a man’s size ten.
Just the right size for kicking me in the face in the doctor’s office. Just the right size for leaving prints in our backyard.
I dropped them on the floor and flew down the hallway into the kitchen. Dinah and Terry leaned against the counter drinking their iced beers and chatting animatedly, the hellhound dozing at their feet.
“I gotta—we gotta go!” I yelled. “Sorry, Dinah!”
Terry and Dinah frowned at me.
“I gotta—we gotta—do that thing, you know? That thing that—we were supposed to do?”
Dinah cut a suspicious eye to Terry.
“Huh?” Terry said.
Okay, maybe I wasn’t the smoothest, but if Terry would just get the goddamned message we could run out the door and maybe make it out of there alive with only a little flesh missing from our butts when Dinah sicced her wolf on us.
Terry set her drink on the counter. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” she said, turning to Dinah. “We’ve gotta do something.”
“What?” Dinah asked. “What do you have to do?”
Gulp. Hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“We have to get home and feed the dogs,” Terry said, and I heaped a thousand blessings on her quick-thinking head.
Dinah gave us a slitty-eyed look, pointing to our business card on the refrigerator door. “The caller ID said you were calling from your house.”
“Yeah, but we forgot to feed the dogs. Slipped our minds,” I said, grabbing Terry’s sleeve.
Helga jumped up, barking in my face. I jerked back in terror.
“She doesn’t want you to leave,” Dinah said. “You sure you have to go?” She gave me an ingratiating smile, and I could imagine blood dripping from her own prominent canines.
“Uh yeah, sorry,” I said, pointing to Helga. “Could you hold on to her, please?”
“Oh, she won’t hurt you.”
“Would you just hold on to the goddamned wolf?”
Terry gave Dinah a sheepish grin. “She’s been like this ever since we were kids. Too many nights with Red Riding Hood under the covers
.”
I grabbed Terry’s hand and we scooted across the living room to the front door. “Thanks a lot, Dinah,” Terry said, waving. “Sorry to drink and run. We’ll talk to you later.”
“Yeah, okay.” Dinah followed us through the front room gripping Helga by the choke chain. “Thanks for comin’ by!”
I whipped open the front door and felt the cool evening air hit my face. We were almost home free. At least I could scream my lungs out now and someone would probably come to our rescue.
“Ya’ll watch yourselves!” Dinah said.
“We will!” I slammed the door in her face and we leaped over the porch and were at the bike in two shakes. Terry pulled on her helmet and revved the engine, screeching away from the curb only seconds after I’d hopped on behind her.
I looked back at the apartment as we tore away.
The curtain was drawn back from the bedroom window. Dinah was silhouetted there, watching us leave. Had she noticed that the room was disturbed? Had I left tracks on the carpet?
We sped down to Olympic Boulevard, then Terry pulled into a darkened parking lot and cut the engine. She took off her helmet and sighed, leaning on the handles.
“This had better be good,” she said.
I jumped from the bike and yanked off my helmet in one move. “Good? How good is this? While you were chatting so pleasantly in the kitchen, I actually did some detecting . . .”
She gave me a sideways look, waiting.
“I went into the bathroom and guess what she had in there?”
“A dead body dangling from the shower massage?”
“The medicine cabinet was full of drugs in brown pill bottles, marked ‘sample.’ ”
“So what?”
“So what?” I yelled. “This whole thing has been about prescription drug dealing! And what’s a cop doing with a cabinet full of promotional drugs?”
“I don’t know, but ‘sample’ sounds like something you get in a hospital, not something that falls off the back of a truck.”
“All right, then. What about the meat cleaver and the ice pick?”
“She’s from Oklahoma! Country people use those kinds of implements. They go out and slaughter animals for their Sunday dinner. They’re not squeamish like us.”
Squeamish like us?
“Oh, pardon me for being squeamish when we’re in the kitchen of someone who killed her whole family and half the widows of Beverly Hills,” I said.
Terry crossed her arms over her chest. “I told you to get laid, didn’t I? This is what comes from not getting laid. A completely out-of-whack perspective.”
“I was trying to get laid!” I said, almost choking on the words. “I was just about to get laid when you went into front-door demolition mode!”
“Well, excuse me. I was trying to protect the dogs.”
I sighed in frustration. “You are completely missing the point!”
“Please,” she said. “Tell me the point.”
“Dinah’s our butcher. A twisted mass murderer of biblical proportions.”
“And what is her motive? Or don’t you need motivation in the Bible?”
“I’ll tell you her motive,” I said, nodding madly. “She’s anxious to get ahead, to make it to the Homicide squad—”
“And?”
“She knows her beat, like she said. She takes the bogus burglary report from Suzie Magnuson and smells a rat. She knows there’s fraud going on, she makes the connection between Binion and Lenore and Suzie and Hattrick—all of them—and she thinks, ‘Great. Here’s a bunch of dirtbags I can use for my own purpose.’ ”
“Which is?”
“Homicides, lots of ’em. In a town not known for its murder rate. She does the killing, then gets a chance to shine in front of her superiors, always the first one on the scene and full of bright ideas. Anyone looking into the deaths would see a bunch of double-dealing lowlifes bumping each other off one by one!”
“Okay, so how does she manage to do all this killing while she’s on duty?”
“I don’t know, she’s fiendishly clever!”
Terry laughed again, shaking her head.
“Oh, and I forgot the best part!” I said. “I found running shoes under her bed. They’re big, about a man’s size ten!”
“That’s the best part?” Terry hooted. “She’s got big feet! She must be a killer!”
“I looked at her feet, Terry. They’re not that big.”
“So you think she puts on men’s running shoes so she can’t be tracked by her footprints?”
“It’s a damn good idea, you have to admit.”
She made a skeptical face. “I don’t know—”
“It all adds up.”
“I’m not sure it adds up. We’d have to sit down and chart it. Who died when, who’s connected to who—that kind of thing. We’d have to know when Dinah was on duty and when she wasn’t . . .”
What was this, role reversal? Suddenly the ever impetuous Terry wanted to sit down and diagram things while I was making the call to action.
“We don’t have time for that!” I said.
“Why not?”
“The noose is tightening around Dinah’s neck. She knows it. That’s why she shot into our house. She tried to warn us that night in Hattrick’s office, but we didn’t get the message. You heard her—‘When you get involved with things you shouldn’t, you bring it on yourself.’ What was that, if not a statement of intent?”
Terry shook her head. “I can’t buy into any of this.”
“Well, I can!”
“Hey, we agreed a long time ago that I was the better judge of character.”
“No, you decided that.”
“I thought you trusted my instincts!”
“I do when you’re not blinded by politics.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t want to believe Dinah’s the bad guy because she’s gay!”
She guffawed. “Come on, it’s such a horrible cliché: the twisted homosexual killer!”
“Ter, we’re not talking about the movies, we’re talking about real life. And in real life there are people who kill for all kinds of reasons.”
“Look, if what you say is true, if she’s trying to win points with her superiors, she’d have to close some cases, right? Deliver a perpetrator. How’s she gonna do that if she’s the killer herself?”
“Maybe she’s going to give them Sergei.”
“How?”
“Maybe she’s got him stashed somewhere. She makes sure all the evidence points to him, and when she’s eliminated the rest of the players, she’ll choose her moment to kill him, then lead them to his body.”
“Oh, man,” she said. “Do you realize how far-fetched this is?”
“Yeah, well truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes.”
“I’m not at all sure you’d know the difference right now.”
We sat there in silence for a minute, listening to the traffic roll by on Olympic Boulevard.
“Just promise me you won’t rule her out as a suspect,” I said.
“Okay, she’s not ruled out. Can we go now?”
“Yeah, let’s go home. I’m exhausted.”
“I imagine paranoid schizophrenia can be taxing,” Terry said, yanking on her helmet.
Our plan was to pack our clothes, round up the dogs and their paraphernalia, and take a taxi over to Reba’s. We didn’t want her and Eli to stay up worrying all night, and personally, I didn’t want to risk another potshot at my wagging behind.
When we arrived back at the house, the sound of excited yapping reached us on the porch.
“Nice to have someone to come home to after a hard day of tracking serial killers, isn’t it?” I said, pushing open the door.
But no dogs came to welcome us when we walked into the darkened house.
“Where are our babies?” Terry said, flipping on the lights and locking the door behind us.
The dogs barked again, from the kitchen. I stared at
the closed kitchen door in confusion. How had the pups gotten themselves locked up in there?
“Hey, who closed the—?” I started to say, then heard the faint rustling of nylon. My gut clenched as I realized we weren’t alone. I grabbed for Terry’s arm at the same instant someone stepped out of the shadows.
It took a second for me to register who it was:
Barbie. And she was pointing a twelve-inch butcher knife at us.
“I left your babies up in the kitchen,” she said, advancing on us with her slinky walk. She flashed a deranged, Ultrabrite smile, her eyes glittering like icy marbles. “Play your cards right, and I’ll let them live.”
She wore black sweatpants and a bulky pea jacket, her feet encased in large, black running shoes, her blond hair stuffed under a knit watch cap.
“Welcome home,” she said, striding up to me, as I moved back against the wall.
Her hand snaked out and I felt a sharp stinging pain as the knife grazed my ribs. I gasped and looked down in horror. The point of the blade had pierced my skin, but she hadn’t thrust it home.
“Don’t do it!” Terry screamed.
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” Barbie shrilled mockingly.
I realized then that the woman was nuts—stark raving mad. I whimpered as she pushed harder up against me, the cool metal of the knife against my stomach, contrasting with the warm sticky blood soaking my shirt.
“Barbie, take it easy, now,” Terry said, hands up in surrender. “Whatever it is you want us to do, we’ll do.”
“I know you will.” Barbie chuckled. “Hey, how did you like the funeral flowers I left on the porch? I thought they were a nice touch.”
Terry looked over, trying to reassure me with her eyes.
“Yes, very clever,” she said to Barbie. I knew she was trying to keep her talking in an attempt to defuse the situation. I was gasping for breath, fighting the surge of panic welling up inside me. “Just like the needles in Hattrick’s eyes. You’re a real artist.”
“Thanks,” Barbie said, an attractive blush spreading across her cheek implants.
“And the big shoes—also inspired,” Terry said, taking a tiny step forward. “You knew it would make us suspect a man.”
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 28