SPITTING DEVIL
By Brian Freeman
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2012 by Brian Freeman
The moral right of Brian Freeman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 78087 796 9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblanceto actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Spitting Devil
As Alison Malville dreamed, black ants marched over her body.
Like an army of intimate invaders, they sought out the puckered folds on the buttons of her nightshirt and trooped relentlessly across the silk onto her damp skin. From her pillow, they climbed through the thick forest of her red hair, clung to her eyelashes, and explored the orifices on her face. She tasted them on her tongue. She inhaled and exhaled them through her nose. She drowned them in her tears as she cried. Unable to move, she screamed soundlessly as thousands of ants mounted her feet, her thighs, her torso, and her neck, violating the crevices between her limbs.
Wake up, her brain told her.
Wake up!
Alison flew upward in bed. Awake, she could still feel the ants crawling on her body, and she tore at her clothes, popping buttons as she stripped naked. She scrambled out of the tangled sheets and threw herself against the wall, rubbing and slapping her skin as if she could kill them. Finally, exhausted and sobbing, her chest hammering, she sank to the floor and hugged her knees.
Again. It had happened again.
She dreamed of the ants almost every night now. When she closed her eyes, there they were, waiting to slip out through the walls. They had even begun to march from her sleep into her waking life. She couldn’t escape them. Wherever she went in the house, she heard them massing in the ceiling, watching her like spies.
Alison understood what was happening to her. It wasn’t about the ants at all. It was about her husband. He was driving her into madness.
As she sat on the floor, she stared at the glowing clock on her nightstand. The time said six o’clock. There was no light through the curtains, but it would be morning soon, and she was already late. She’d failed. She’d meant to stay awake – to listen, to see what Michael did – but sometime after midnight, her eyes had blinked shut despite three cups of caffeinated tea. She’d slept heavily.
The ants had come back.
Alison got to her feet in a rush. Gooseflesh pebbled her bare skin. She lifted a robe off the hook on the back of the closet door and slipped her arms inside the sleeves and tied it at her waist. She removed the chair wedged against the doorknob, unlocked the bedroom door, and peered down the upstairs hallway, which was dark and quiet.
She smelled something odd in the stale air, blowing through the vents with the furnace heat. It was an essence of perfume. Hers.
She checked on Evan first. Her ten-year-old son slept in a bedroom that was crowded with monster posters thumb tacked to the walls. He was obsessed with old Frankenstein movies. Vampires. Werewolves. Unlike his mother, Evan was fearless, immune to bad dreams. She found him on top of the covers, his skinny limbs sprawled, his mouth open, and his messy mop of brown hair covering his eyes. She navigated the minefield of toys littering the carpet and stroked his cheek with the back of one hand. Evan murmured but didn’t wake up.
Alison heard something behind her. She spun, but there was nothing.
Just ants.
She clutched her forearms as she hurried downstairs. The house was so cold and dry that the metal railing gave her a shock of static when she brushed against it. The ceramic tiles on the floor of the foyer were like blocks of ice, making her dance on her tiptoes. She passed quickly into the dining room, where the carpet was lush, but she grimaced as she cut her foot on something sharp buried in the weave. She bent down and kneaded the pile with her fingers until she located a triangular shard of glass, which she cupped in her hand. When she peered into the dusty shelves of their hutch, she saw that a Russian crystal tumbler – a wedding gift from her parents – was missing.
“Oh, Evan,” she breathed.
She didn’t have time to worry about the broken treasure. She continued to the rear of the house where Michael kept his private office. The door was closed, as it usually was now. The room was off-limits to anyone but him. Her husband claimed that Evan had been playing with his computer, but she suspected that Michael was more afraid of what she would find hidden in his personal files.
Pictures. Photographs.
She put her ear to the door, and she could hear him lightly snoring. He’d been sleeping down here, away from her, for several weeks.
Alison was relieved that he was still in the house. She told herself that her paranoia was just a dream, like the ants. That was how it worked when you suspected something you didn’t dare believe. You used every opportunity, every excuse, to tell yourself that you were wrong.
Michael was not a monster.
Even so, Alison knew that his being here now, in the morning, meant nothing. She’d slept most of the night, and in those hours, anything could have happened. She had to know the truth. She backtracked to the foyer, where the vaulted ceiling loomed over the entryway. Michael kept his keys in a ceramic bowl by the door, and she scooped them into her hand. She threw open the double front doors and ran outside. They lived in the country. She heard morning birds squawking in the spruce trees beyond the field. The fieldstones on their walkway were freezing. She could see her breath.
Michael’s black sedan was parked outside the garage. There were needles of frost on the windows. She put her palm on the hood, and it was cold, but in the twenty-degree lows overnight, cars cooled down almost as soon as the engine stopped. She opened the driver’s door. The car was never locked; there was no need for locks here, in the middle of nowhere.
She remembered the exact number. She’d slipped outside to memorize the odometer before she went to bed. It was her lifeline.
Alison sat inside, wracked with shivers so severe she could barely hold the key and slide it into the ignition. She turned the key just far enough to jolt the electrical systems. The dashboard blinked to life in red and white lights. She leaned forward over the steering wheel to study the mileage, and her hand slapped over her mouth in horror. She read the number three times to be certain she wasn’t wrong.
The odometer had changed.
Thirty miles. He’d driven thirty miles overnight.
*
Evan sat at the kitchen table, slurping cereal from his spoon and turning the pages in a comic book. Alison heard the shower pipes overhead and knew her husband was awake. She was dressed smartly for work and wore an apron over her pink blouse to avoid spatter from the bacon in the frying pan. Michael liked a hot breakfast, and she still cooked it for him each morning the way she had for years, as if nothing had changed between them.
“Can I have some orange juice?” Evan asked.
Alison glanced at the boy. Her grim face softened. “Sure.”
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She opened the door of the side-by-side refrigerator and grabbed a carton of juice from the top shelf, but when she shook it, she realized the carton was empty. She blew out her breath in frustration. It was a stupid little thing, but she couldn’t handle the little things today.
“Sorry, kiddo, no juice.”
“Oh.”
“Did you finish it and not tell me?”
“No.”
Alison gave her son the mock evil eye. “Because when you finish it and put the carton back, I don’t know to buy more, right? So you don’t get any juice that way.”
“I didn’t do it,” Evan insisted.
“Whatever you say,” Alison replied, but she was sure that Evan was the culprit. She returned to the bacon, which was blackening rapidly from crispy to burned. She pulled the pan off the range, but the charred odor was strong. She was upset because she hadn’t had time to cook breakfast before getting dressed. Now her pants suit and her long red hair would smell of bacon fat, not her subtle French perfume.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me about?” she asked her son.
“Like what?”
“Like what happened to the crystal glass in the dining room? The one that was in the bureau you’re not supposed to touch?”
The boy gulped nervously. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, somebody broke it. I found the pieces at the bottom of the garbage bag.”
“Not me.”
Alison cocked her head in annoyance. “Evan, you remember what I always tell you? Mistakes are okay, but not lies.”
“I’m not lying.” He stared at her with big, sincere eyes and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think a spitting devil did it.”
“What?”
“A spitting devil.” Evan held up his comic book, where Alison saw a caricature of a red-skinned devil leering from the pages with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. “See, they make bad things happen in the night, and the only way you know they were there is because they spit blood onto the floor.”
“Nice try,” Alison said.
Evan pointed. “Look, there’s blood! See!”
She studied her feet and realized that Evan was right. Tiny red drips of blood were dotted and smeared from the dining room across the kitchen floor. “That’s from my foot, young man,” she told him. “I cut myself on glass because someone broke my Russian tumbler and tried to hide it.”
“Not me,” the boy repeated. “It was a spitting devil.”
“We’ll talk about this more after school,” Alison told him. “Don’t think you’re off the hook.”
She didn’t like Evan’s excuses, but she didn’t have the energy to challenge him now. This wasn’t the first time recently that she’d caught him lying. As the relationship between her and Michael had grown strained in the past three months, Evan had felt the tension in the house and begun acting out. He craved their attention, even if it came with blame and discipline.
“Good morning,” her husband said from the doorway. He nearly filled with space with his tall frame.
Alison tensed and didn’t reply.
Michael Malville kissed the top of Evan’s head and tousled his son’s hair. She saw him out of the corner of her eye. He wore a sport coat and black turtleneck over gray slacks and polished dress shoes. It was his CEO uniform, classy but casual. When you owned the company, you chose the dress code. Michael had started his technology business a dozen years earlier, shortly after they were married, and he’d built it into one of the largest software development enterprises in the state. He worked with nerdy engineers who wore t-shirts and jeans, but he never allowed anyone to forget that he was the boss. You knew it by looking at him. Even now, when he’d laid off half his staff thanks to the recession, he never looked anything but perfect.
Alison knew looks were deceiving. Looks hid all the stress, the pent-up anger, the arguments, the secrets. She missed the early days when they struggled with no money in a small apartment in the city. Wealth hadn’t given them peace of mind.
“Morning,” Michael repeated as he stood next to her.
“Yeah,” she murmured.
“You sleep okay?”
“Sure.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, and she stiffened at his touch. Her rejection made him freeze. That was how it was between them now. Distant. Like strangers. She couldn’t bring herself to pretend anymore.
Thirty miles.
Michael picked up the empty carton from the counter. “No juice?”
“Someone finished it and put it back.”
He held up his hands defensively. “Not me.”
“It was a spitting devil,” Evan called from the table.
“Evan, be quiet,” Alison snapped. “Finish up and brush your teeth, so your father can drop you at school.”
The boy groaned and pushed himself away from the table. He handed his dirty plate to his mother and shuffled out of the room. Alison put a steaming plate of eggs and bacon in front of her husband without saying a word. She turned to the sink and made as much noise as she could with the water and pans to cover the silence between them. It didn’t work. When she turned off the water and dried her hands, she realized that Michael was sitting at the table, his breakfast untouched, staring at her.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“For God’s sake, Alison.”
“I said, it’s nothing.”
He hesitated, and his face looked pained. “I think you should see a doctor,” he told her softly.
“What?”
“A psychiatrist.”
“Are you serious? Are you really serious?”
“You need help.”
“You have no idea what I need,” she snapped.
“I’m worried about you. If you won’t talk to me, maybe you should talk to someone else.”
“I have to go,” Alison said, gathering up her purse and shutting down the conversation. “Evan broke one of our crystal tumblers. Talk to him about it. He lied to me before.”
“Okay.”
“He’s doing that a lot.”
“Can you blame him?” he asked.
“Are you putting this on me? This is my fault?”
“I’m putting this on us, but you’re the one who kicked me out of the bedroom. You’re the one locking me out of your life. You think I need this? You think I don’t have shit of my own going on, with my whole business going down the toilet? Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure I’m under?”
She heard the roar in his voice and saw it in his eyes. Rage whistled out of him like steam from a kettle. That was the real Michael. The Michael she’d come to fear, after years of loving him unconditionally. She didn’t know how she could have been so wrong for so long.
Whenever he was in the kitchen with her now, her eyes were drawn to the butcher block beside the stove, where she kept their Wüsthof knives. The slot for the big one, the carving knife, was empty. It had been empty for weeks, ever since the first report on the news. She hadn’t said a word. Not to anyone. Not yet. It was as if they were dancing silently, with him daring her to admit what she knew.
“I know all about your pressure, Michael,” she said.
*
Dead Red.
That was the nickname his uniformed cops had given the killer when the second red-haired body was found. It was a sick shorthand, and Jonathan Stride didn’t like it. He hated elevating killers by giving them names. It made them into myths and fed their egos. He’d ordered his cops to stop, but he was too late to contain the damage. The nickname had already crept into the newspapers, and everyone in the city of Duluth knew the man’s identity now. Dead Red.
He’d struck again overnight. A third victim in two bitter months. Once again, the color of blood matched the young woman’s hair.
“I keep thinking that it could have been me,” the woman seated in Stride’s truck murmured out of the back of her throat. Her nervous brea
th fogged the windshield. “Sherry and I knew about those other girls. Who doesn’t, you know? So I did a dye job. I went from auburn to jet black. I figured it was a little cheap Clairol protection, but Sherry told me it was silly. She said she’d die before she dyed. We laughed about it. You know, better dead than red, right?”
Stride had seen witnesses in shock many times. You arrive at your best friend’s apartment to drive her to work, like any other day, and instead you wind up haunted for life by what you find. The smell of body and blood never entirely goes away. Murder writes on the brain in indelible ink.
He saw the woman trembling. He reached into the back seat for his leather jacket and positioned it gently over her shoulders.
“When did you last see Sherry?” Stride asked her.
“Around midnight. We were at a party at somebody’ house in Lakeside, but we were both pretty drunk, so we figured we’d leave before we threw up. I dropped her off here.”
Stride squinted through the windshield and wiped it with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Sherry Morton’s apartment was in the basement of a century-old Victorian home on the steeply terraced streets near the university. She’d been a nursing student. Twenty-four years old. Pretty. Petite. The house with its chipped paint and loose gutters, protected by towering skeletons of oak trees, was now enveloped in crime scene tape and surrounded by police cars shedding clouds of exhaust in the frigid air. It was mid-morning under a slate gray December sky.
“Did Sherry hook up with anyone at the party?” he asked.
Sherry’s friend, Julie, shook her head. “No, I would have known if she did.”
“Did you see anyone leave at the same time as the two of you? Could someone have followed you?”
“I don’t think so. It was late, and the streets were deserted. I think I would have noticed another car behind me.”
“How about here at Sherry’s place? Did you see anyone hanging around outside?”
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