Bad Desire

by Devon, Gary;

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  Praise for the Writing of Gary Devon

  Lost

  Edgar Award Finalist

  “Lost is the kind of novel that will play havoc with readers who enjoy a long night’s sleep. In fact, once you start this book, forget about sleeping, eating or whatever until you’re done. [Gary Devon] comes through with a book that deserves serious consideration as a minor American classic.” —Philadelphia Daily News

  “One of the most original riveting pieces of storytelling in years.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “I’ve heard books described as gripping, and I might even have used the term myself. I don’t think I really knew that it meant though, until I picked up Lost…. The writing is remarkable, dark, and exquisite. Lost is a real find.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “Gripping … Mr. Devon has written a novel of appealing originality.” —The New York Times

  Bad Desire

  “Devon follows his praised first novel, Lost, with an account of forbidden love and serial murder that thrills from intriguing start to chilling finish.” —Publishers Weekly

  “From the masterly depiction of his ice-eyed killer to his chilling Hitchcockian ending, Gary Devon blows away every other psychological suspense writer around. Bad Desire is a stunner. Buy it. Or beg, borrow, steal it. But read it.” —Martha Grimes, New York Times–bestselling author

  “Bad Desire is a very good read. A fine psychological thriller.” —Mary Higgins Clark, New York Times–bestselling author

  “Gripping and suspenseful.” —Ira Levin, New York Times–bestselling author

  Bad Desire

  Gary Devon

  PART

  ONE

  1

  His name was John Howard Beecham, but there was not a soul still alive who could have looked at him and sworn who he was, not mother or family or kin. Over the last few years he had had his face altered twice, the first time in Quebec and then more recently in Mexico City, both times thinking that he had enough money to quit this business and live in quiet seclusion. But money had a way of running through his fingers.

  He had been a good-looking man who wanted to look ordinary, and for the most part he had what he wanted—at the age of forty-nine, he looked different than he had before and, also, years younger. He knew only the illusion was important. There were some things, of course, that couldn’t be changed—his crow black eyes, for example, inherited from his grandmother who had been a full-blooded Creek Indian. He thought strangers remembered his eyes. Sometimes he felt it when they looked at him, and he had to keep telling himself that as long as he didn’t get caught, it didn’t matter. But it worried him excessively. An idle mind, his grandmother had scolded him, is the devil’s playground.

  Taking the southern route, he had come to California from Biloxi, Mississippi, where there were now two outstanding warrants for his arrest on charges of first-degree murder. The warrants had been issued several months apart for men of different names and descriptions, but Beecham knew who they were for. In the past ten years, he had murdered sixteen people, men and women alike.

  It was 8:55 on a Monday morning when he arrived in Los Angeles, stepping down from the bus and walking straight through the station to the street. Beecham carried an oversized gym bag, nothing else. He wore a clean blue chambray work shirt rolled at the cuffs, sturdy khaki trousers with a military cut and brown calfskin Wellingtons. He looked like a common worker, someone, he thought, who would remain anonymous in the early crowd.

  On the sidewalk, he experienced a moment’s disorientation, but he wasted no time, setting out toward a red Avis sign a few blocks away. From Los Angeles, Beecham would have an hour’s drive north, up the coastal highway to a town called Meridian. He would arrive there a day early, exactly as he wanted it. Still keeping a deliberate pace, he crossed the intersection, all but hidden in the flow of clerks and shop girls on their way to work.

  A tropical front had moved in; for the third week in May, the weather was surprisingly hot and humid. Not much different, he thought, from New Orleans. But he paid it no mind. For Beecham, things were always pretty much the same.

  The stores were beginning to open for the day; interior lights were coming on behind the large plate-glass windows facing the street. He passed the window of a jewelry store where a man was setting out watches, a dress boutique with its haughty mannequins, a department store where multiples of the same product filled each separate section of window display. A shiver crept up his spine and sank into the roots of his hair. He stopped and looked behind him, always wary, checking to see if he had somehow been followed, but no one was rushing at him from behind; nothing unexpected had happened.

  When he turned his head again, Beecham saw himself endlessly reflected in a wall of thin, wire-rimmed glasses, the kind his grandmother had worn before she died. It was as if something from his past reached for him. She could have been standing there, gazing at him a hundred times over. SEE BETTER! the sign said. SEE MORE! ALL SIZES & STYLES. YOUR CHOICE … $9.95. It occurred to him that glasses might be the last remaining touch needed to disguise his face. If he could find lenses of clear glass, they might soften the penetrating blackness of his eyes. He decided it was worth a try and entered the store.

  Two days later, in the town of Meridian, the door of Delaney’s Tap & Dine opened and a man came in. He was a medium-size man, rough-looking, dressed in faded work clothes that were clean but a little damp from the sweltering weather outside. He carried a folded newspaper under his arm and he wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses—the air conditioning in the room made the lenses fog. For a moment, he stood inside the door, his black eyes skittering behind the steamed ovals. Then he took the glasses off, wiped them on a handkerchief and reset them on the bridge of his nose.

  It was minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, the slow time of day at Delaney’s. The bartender squinted at him and went back to working the daily crossword puzzle in the L. A. Times. At the sound of the door closing, the few men at the bar glanced over their shoulders, then returned to the last inning of the Dodgers-Phillies game. Everything, even the noise of the television set, seemed muted to Beecham, like the distant buzz of a saw. He looked at his watch. 3:56. Four minutes early.

  The dining area, in the back half of the long room, was deserted, and Beecham walked toward it. At the end of the bar, where a waitress was counting her tips, he ordered a pot of coffee and two cups and paid her with a ten-dollar bill from his folding money. “Keep it,” he said, returning the other bills to his pocket. “I’m meetin’ somebody. See to it that we’re left alone.”

  It was a lot of money for a pot of coffee and the waitress looked at the bill and then carefully looked at him. She had seen him before. He had been at the bar a couple of times yesterday, drinking a beer and leaving and then coming back hours later, but he wasn’t from around here. “You’d better watch that one,” she had muttered to Charlie, the bartender. “He’s up to no good.” There was something strange about his face, and in his eyes there was a haunted, empty look, like the eyes of a dead man. “He gives me the creeps,” she’d told Charlie.

  The waitress put the money into her apron pocket and went to the kitchen in the back. Beecham crossed through the zigzag of tables and took a side booth so he would face the front of the room. As soon as he was seated, he put the newspaper down beside him, near his hip, opened it, and removed the snub-nosed .38 Special it had concealed. Taking a silencer from his pants pocket, he attached it to the barrel with a deft twist of his fingers; then he placed the .38 down along his right thigh, within quick and easy access.

  He shrugged
to loosen his shoulders, trying to relax, and leaned back, watching the front door. The room was like a long tunnel; at the end of the shaded interior was the saloon’s large front window, rippling with sunlight. Outside, along the sidewalk, dry palmetto fronds hung motionless in the heat, and across the street, beyond the rocky seawall, the Pacific looked like stressed metal.

  The waitress brought his order on a cork-lined tray—two white cups on white saucers, the chrome pot of coffee, a creamer and a sugar dispenser. As she placed the cups and saucers on the table, she started to ask if there would be anything else, but he stopped her. He took her wrist in his hand and his grip was hard and cold like iron. “Just leave it,” he said. It was as though something mechanical had closed on her flesh and she flushed and drew away from him, returning to her station behind the bar. Beecham did not make any movement to pour the coffee, but sat staring through his glasses at the front of the room.

  Behind him, in the area of the rest rooms and the public telephone, a second man stood watching them. The waitress noticed him, but went on washing the beer glasses. It was as if he had wandered in here by mistake, she thought; he seemed out of place in this forgotten neighborhood bar. The back of the room was dim, his tanned face shadowed, yet he appeared comfortably sleek and handsome. Tall, in his forties, he wore a light summer raincoat, which was unbuttoned, showing glimpses of a white shirt and tie. The waitress had never seen him before.

  He had his hands in his raincoat pockets as he approached the booth and he kept them there as he slid into the seat opposite the man in work clothes.

  Neither of them spoke. For several seconds, they studied each other, coldly, without expression. Then the man wearing the glasses raised his hand from beneath the table, took the sugar dispenser and tipped it above the black Formica tabletop between them. The sugar gushed from the spout, the white grains bouncing and spreading in a wide mound. When half the jar was empty, he set it aside and with the flat of his hand, he spread the sugar into a thin, irregular coating on the black surface. With a blunt forefinger, he began to write in the sugar.

  He wrote the first word and smoothed it out, the gawky letters vanishing under the swipe of his hand as soon as the word was completed. Then he wrote again, wiped the words out and drew his hand back, leaving the sugar surface flat and ready. The man in the raincoat watched this without any reaction, his deep-set eyes switching from the marks on the table to the man making them.

  Again the two men looked at each other.

  At last the other man’s hands rose to the edge of the table, an aristocrat’s hands with slender, uncalloused fingers. Beecham saw that the man’s left hand sported a square diamond ring. With his right index finger, the man wrote in the sugar and after a moment, wiped out the two words. The diamond ring gleamed. He wrote and smoothed and wrote. Then he prepared the sugar for a reply.

  And Beecham wrote NAME and again flattened the white crystals.

  The man wearing the raincoat did not hesitate. RACHEL, he wrote and then added the rest of the name, BUCHANAN, and when he had wiped the sugar flat again, he spelled out where she lived.

  Beecham nodded, the first time he had made any such movement, and wrote WHEN and the other man wrote SAT. NIGHT, erased it and wrote, BEFORE 12.

  There were other things that had to be understood and so it went on: first the man in the raincoat writing and wiping across the sugar and then the other man following suit, but always with fewer words, one or two at a time.

  All at once, it was ending.

  The dark-haired man in the raincoat wrote NOT THE GIRL and quickly smudged it out. Then, NO MISTAKES, and the words vanished.

  He brushed his hands together, knocking a few white grains from his fingers. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, laid it in the midst of the sugar, stood and immediately left the dining room through the rear.

  Underneath the clear wrapping on the cigarette pack was a small metal key. Beecham took the red pack in his hand, shook out a cigarette and set it on his lips. He put the pack in his shirt pocket. With his hands hidden, he quickly removed the silencer from the .38 Special, slipped the handgun under his belt inside his shirt and returned the silencer to his trouser pocket. Twisting the newspaper into a cone, he parted the pages until they made a pouch. Then using the side of his hand, he scraped the sugar off the table into the wedge of newspaper, leaving only a few thin white seams on the black Formica. He folded the top of the newspaper over so nothing would spill and clamped it under his arm.

  With that done, he put the cigarette, unlit, in the ashtray and sat looking through the long interior, toward the palmettos outside and the passing cars and the ocean that never changed. Above the sun-streaked window hung a sign for ANCHOR STEAM BEER and a clock that Beecham watched, its second hand sweeping around and around. When five minutes had passed, he got up and went in the direction the first man had gone, toward the rest rooms in back, and never returned.

  Canyon Valley Drive ran through the oldest residential section of Rio Del Palmos, California. The street dated from a time when parcels of land were sold in tracts of five or ten acres instead of the quarter-acre lots currently on the market. In the thirties, the Canyon Valley district had been favored by the owners and captains of fishing fleets, and by the prosperous doctors and merchants in town; now, although the houses were still imposing, the area was decidedly middle-class, abandoned by the wealthy for the northern hillside estates on the other side of the city. Surrounded by grassy foothills, it was a pleasant neighborhood of widely spaced houses. The streets were like paved country lanes, curving, rising and falling with the contours of the rolling terrain.

  With no more noise than the soft throb of its exhaust, the dusty black Mustang rolled through a dip in the street, coasted up the opposing knoll and slipped from sight. It was five after six on Thursday morning, the darkness just now turning deep blue with the sunrise. Mailboxes stood at the ends of driveways like lonely sentinels. One, a rusty, tin mailbox, carried the number 522 and the name: R. BUCHANAN. The Mustang’s brake lights flickered for a second as the small black car rolled by, tires grinding softly at the pavement. Another mailbox appeared and sank away, then another. At last the brake lights came on solidly—the Mustang turned into a neighbor’s shrub-lined drive, slipped back and started its return, moving forward on the power of its idle.

  When the white house belonging to the rusted mailbox again came into view, the Mustang stopped. The engine was shut off; the driver’s window slid down. John Howard Beecham sat staring past the iron fence, across the ample front yard at the two-story stucco house in need of paint. Next to the mailbox, a driveway ran alongside the fenced yard through a porte cochere to the white garage in back. Even deeper in the backyard, the green painted roof of a small barn or shed could be glimpsed through the leafy trees.

  Beecham studied the house in detail, placing the location of the doors and windows firmly in his memory. The age and Mediterranean style of the house told him little; by the arrangement of balconies and curtains and blinds, he tried to imagine it inside—a long parlor or living room running from front to back on the right side of the downstairs, on this side a large dining room and an equally large kitchen in back. Upstairs, some bedrooms and a bath. But it was only a guess. There could be other rooms somewhere downstairs. He estimated the distance to the closest neighbor to be about forty yards, the separate properties divided by a grove of what appeared to be wild lilacs. The high bushes created a natural shield. Perfect, he thought.

  As he made his various calculations, a light came on in the rear of the house; a shaft of light spilled over the driveway. That’s the kitchen, Beecham concluded. Seconds later, he noticed that lights were coming on in the other houses along the street. He started the car and drove down the winding road to wait.

  At 7:30 that morning, a school bus lumbered past the old mailbox and stopped at the next driveway to board three children. At the same time, a red and brown station wagon emerged from the white garage, move
d under the porte cochere and down the drive to the street, where it proceeded on in the direction of Rio Del Palmos. It was driven by a girl, still in her teens. An elderly woman occupied the seat beside her. Through the car windows it was possible to see that they were talking in a lively exchange, but their faces, marred by reflections and tree shadows, were visible only in flashes. As they passed the San Lucia Mission—a small historical chapel and cemetery where restoration work was being done—Beecham pulled out behind them.

  In leaving the neighborhood, Canyon Valley Drive meandered through an uninhabited wooded area and became a frontage road, dropping toward the lush basin of Rio Del Palmos and eventually joining the interstate. The traffic through town was already moving at a brisk pace as the station wagon crossed the Rialto River Bridge and left the six-lane highway. The girl maneuvered through two traffic lights, made a right-hand turn and pulled into the high school parking lot. At the busy intersection, the Mustang drew to the curb.

  Gathering her books, the girl left the station wagon, mingling with the scattered flow of students headed toward the turreted building. Okay, Beecham thought, that’s the girl. Even at a distance, she was strikingly beautiful; tumbling about her shoulders, her blond hair glistened like a lovely gold cap.

  On a flagpole in front of the school, two flags snapped out on the wind—an American flag and below it, another flag with a panther leaping through a giant red P. Fluttering across the flag’s top and bottom ran the legend: HOME OF THE RIO DEL PALMOS FIGHTING PANTHERS. Beecham’s eyes took it in and then returned to the station wagon. The elderly woman, who had stayed behind, arranged herself behind the steering wheel and drove out of the parking lot. And that’s the woman, he thought, waiting for her to pass before pulling out after her.

  She stopped at Masterson’s Flower Shop and came out carrying a sprig of white flowers in a chilled cellophane box. She went into a dress shop, which according to its window specialized in weddings and formal affairs. Beecham noted that she was gone for less than ten minutes. With a plastic garment bag over her arm, she came out still talking to the dressmaker, who accompanied her as far as the sidewalk, gossiping and saying good-bye. The woman drove to the post office and went inside; minutes later, she was back driving the station wagon. Everywhere she received polite attention, and when she had gone, the smiles on peoples’ faces were tolerant, even kindly. She was obviously well known, holding a certain standing among these people and commanding their respect.