“Bobby...”
He drove forward, screaming and swinging hard. The bone caught her across the shoulders and neck. It took her by surprise, and she fell backward, tumbling down the stairs. When the boy dared to peek, he saw the wig resting on a step, just above her impossibly twisted body.
He threw the thigh bone at the far wall and slowly made his way downward, half expecting the old woman to rise and clutch at him.
She lay motionless. He jumped over her and into the second-floor hallway, then slammed the door behind him.
He was breathing in short gasps, but most of the panic had ended.
How could he get out?
Her purse, he thought, he’d find keys in her purse.
Then he remembered the first cat and how a trashman had found it. He had made a promise to himself then never to get caught again.
The old lady was dead. What would they do to him for that?
He knew he had to find a way to hide her. He found matches. But, first, on impulse, he went back up the stairs and took the feather headdress from the dried-out corpse. It was a trophy. Little Bobby had died, but the boy had survived. He hid the headdress in some bushes at the back of the yard, then returned to the house and held the flame of a match to the base of the living-room curtains until they were on pre.
Later, when he had to cry to fool the policemen and the firemen, it boas very easy. All he had to do was think of her clutching hands and her perfume and how she called him Bobby.
The lights of Las Vegas, glowing some fifty miles ahead, brought new energy. He had driven all day with only three stops for food and gas. By rights, he should have been exhausted. He wasn’t, of course. If he continued past Vegas, there were only three hours left until he reached Kelsie in the castle he had built for her.
As he drove closer to Vegas, he began to reconsider. Why arrive so tired he couldn’t fully enjoy the first meeting with Kelsie – the first real meeting, the one that counted for the rest of their lives together. Why not stop in Vegas and sleep?
For the next forty miles of driving, he had good intentions. He would rent a cheap room and just sleep. He would forget other sweet, sweet memories and not let Las Vegas distract him. But the excitement in him grew as the distant glow turned into neon reds, blues, greens. It wasn’t just excitement over Kelsie. It was the long familiar predator’s excitement. He surrendered to it before reaching the city limits.
Despite the excitement, he did not rush. Instead, he checked into a motel. He spent a half-hour making sure his mustache was secure, another five minutes selecting a wig. He dressed casually elegant – cashmere jacket, Polo shirt, and fresh jeans.
He did not rush his cruising either. He wandered from casino to casino, alert for a potential victim. Nearly a half-dozen times he moved in closer to a woman, then backed away. For aside from her looks, the woman had to have the certain edginess, which experience had taught him meant the best chance of success. She had to be constantly surveying the room, as if looking for a man, which naturally she was.
After two hours of soda water and lime juice, he saw one. She was moving from slot machine to slot machine, dropping coins and pulling without any real interest in the results. She wore a black dress with spaghetti straps and black stockings. Her blonde hair brushed the skin of her bare shoulders. She’d been drinking, which was obvious by the careful way she moved to keep her balance. Perfect.
The Watcher moved closer.
This one was older than he preferred. The excitement, though, could not be denied.
He waited until her back was turned. He walked up behind her and spoke with enthusiasm. “Kelsie?” he said. “Kelsie McNeill?”
She turned her head, and he backed away, stammering. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You look just like someone I know.”
This was the crucial moment. If she smiled, it meant either sympathy or interest. Either did just fine.
She smiled, the wrinkles on her face emphasized by her heavy makeup.
“I guess it was too much to hope for,” he said. “Ten years and a thousand miles since breaking up. Again, I’m sorry.”
He backed away, then stopped. “Look,” he said, “this is stupid, but I’m in sales, and I’ve got a lot of money and, honestly, money doesn’t help at all when you’re lonely. I was wondering if...”
The woman’s smile grew broader.
“Honey, you got the money, I got the time.” She stepped closer, into a ray of light from the ceiling. Food edged the corners of her mouth. She squeezed her arms together, accenting her cleavage. “And, honey, if it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me Kelsie.”
She took his arm and led him away from the slots and toward the bar.
Day 5
8:57 a.m.
“George, did you pack a candle?” Clay was on his knees, peering at a small wooden door set into a frame that sagged back into the hard dirt walls of an embankment. It had taken them two hours to find the root cellar beneath the sweeping branches of a spruce growing out of the side of the hill, twenty paces from the last rotting timbers of Mad Dog’s cabin.
“Candles are very light.” George grinned to dispel his own tension. “They go in my knapsack, not yours.”
Clay was too distracted to notice George’s attempt at a joke. He was totally focused on the door. Weathered wood, stained with the acid runoff from spruce needles. It hung straight, however. The hinges on the door were bright, the padlock new.
Predators have lairs. Predators always return to their lairs.
For a moment, Clay wondered if the predator was inside waiting.
Then he shook his head – he wasn’t thinking straight. The lock was securely bolted on the outside. It would have been impossible, then, for someone to crawl inside, shut the door, and lock it on the outside. If anyone was in there at all...
“Kelsie!” he shouted, banging on the door. “Taylor!”
He listened for muffled moans, which would tell him they’d been gagged. Instead, he heard a faint buzzing sound. He couldn’t be sure if he was imagining it or not.
George knelt down and handed Clay a candle and a couple of wood matches. “Lock looks strong,” George said.
“Did you load any sledgehammers into my knapsack? Felt like it.”
George took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. “Use a screwdriver on the hinges.”
Five minutes later, candle and matches tucked in his back pocket, Clay was working on the final screw. The buzzing had not gone away – in fact, it seemed louder to him now. Once before he’d heard such buzzing. He prayed now that he was wrong.
“George, maybe you should stand guard by the tree.” George did not need to see inside the root cellar, not if Clay’s terrible premonition had justification.
George backed out.
Clay hesitated. It was agony. Wild elation and hope filled him. The lock and new hinges were proof enough their guess was probably accurate. Could Kelsie and Taylor be waiting for him on the other side bound and gagged?
Predators have lairs. Predators always return to their lairs.
Dread terror consumed him. The buzzing, Would he be opening the door to the cruelest crime scene any killer could invent?
Clay pried the door away from the frame. The padlock splintered as he yanked it away completely. A sharp copper smell hit his face. Few people would know that smell. Few people had stood over a disemboweled body. Few people had seen frenzied flies blanket day-old blood. “Oh, God,” he prayed.
The nightmare was coming true. He scrambled backward on the verge of vomiting. The stench, unbearable in a normal situation, was that much worse because he didn’t know if the body was Kelsie’s.
“What is it?” George asked.
“Give me a minute,” Clay lied. “I’ll be fine.”
The peacefulness of the sky, the gentle breeze, the gurgle of the nearby stream, and the green of the mountainside mocked him and his utter dread. Clay wanted to run. He wanted to deny the root cellar and the body inside had eve
r existed.
But he had to know. As he crawled back under the tree, he could hardly support his weight on his trembling arms, in his fear at what he might see. At the open door, he lit the candle and pushed it inside ahead of him.
What he saw first were cowboy boots, pointing upward, and the dim outlines of legs covered by a blanket.
The sight shot him with electric relief.
Rooster Evans.
Clay had seen what he needed to see. It was not Kelsie or Taylor.
No other bodies lay in the confines of the root cellar. Let the sheriff deal with this one. He began to back out.
Something in the corner caught his eye. In the candlelight he saw it was a diaper.
Taylor! Had Taylor been here?
Clay ran the candle around the edges of the root cellar, looking for anything to give him an indication of what had happened to Taylor.
He caught the darker shadows of a crude shelf cut into the dirt wall, about chest high. Clay moved closer to the shelf. In the flickering, smoking candle light he saw curled edges of paper.
He reached for the paper with his other hand. A quick glance showed it was a photograph. He decided to look at it outside, in the light of day.
He took a quick look around the cave but found nothing else.
As he left the root cellar, he realized tears were falling down his face, tears of relief. Not until seeing the cowboy boots turned upward had he known the extent of his agonized uncertainty.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he kept whispering. “Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.”
Once outside, he crawled out from under the spruce tree, stood, and faced George again.
“Rooster Evans,” Clay said to the unspoken question. “Ripped up bad. I hope it happened after he died.”
What Clay didn’t say was that Rooster had been ripped up so badly it was like a message left behind for Clay – taunting done by the killer.
Clay held up the piece of paper. “I found this, too.”
They studied it together in the sunlight. George glanced at Clay, a look of horror on his face. “Like Kelsie,” George said in a whisper, “but not her.”
The black-and-white close-up of the woman’s shoulders, neck, and face did resemble Kelsie. A little younger, a little coarser, but the same shoulder-length blonde hair, the same type of cheekbones.
Clay understood George’s expression. This woman’s eyes were wide with fear – with good reason, A gloved hand at the edge of the photograph held a fillet knife, and the tip of the blade was an inch under her skin with a two-inch red track showing where he had begun to cut.
“A trophy,” Clay said. He was forcing himself to step out of his emotions and assess the photograph with his years of experience. He knew he was seeing something important, but he couldn’t quite figure it out.
The quality of the photograph was good, very good, as if taken by a professional and developed by a professional. A photograph like this would require a setup ahead of time. It would require a...
“Tripod,” he told George. “Tripod.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Coin marks, remember? Set apart in the corners of a triangle. Back then, he’d taken photographs using a tripod. How else could he and the victim be in the same shot?”
George nodded slowly. In nearly three-quarters of a century of living, nothing had prepared him for the evil implicit in such a photograph.
Clay, however, had moved well beyond the emotional impact of the image of the dying woman. “We’ve got to get moving,” he said. “Back toward town.”
“Town? But –”
“Black and white. Easy to develop and print. Do you think he ever dropped his film off at a one-hour developer?”
“Oh. You mean –”
“I mean as soon as we get back into cell-phone range, we’re calling every photography shop in a radius of a hundred miles. Let’s pray that someone on the list in my back pocket has been buying supplies.”
9:l4 a.m.
The boy had learned to understand the glazed look on his mother’s face. He had also learned to hate it.
“Mrs. O’Connor called this afternoon,” she said. She sat in an old robe at the kitchen table. The ashtray beside her overflowed with half-smoked cigarettes. The sherry bottle beside the ashtray was almost empty. “She says if you don’t stop following her daughter Teresa, they’re going to call the police.”
His mother poured the remainder of the sherry in a glass. She wasn’t even trying to hide it from him anymore.
“I’m worried about you,” she said. She was practiced enough that, even this late in the day, her slurring was hardly noticeable. “Is this something all fifth-grade boys do?”
“What do you care?” the boy said. He leaned against the kitchen counter, sneering. So he liked to follow Teresa. Was there a law against that? Besides, she deserved it, kissing all the other boys in the class except for him.
“What do I care? I’m your mother.”
“You’re a drunk.” It was the first time he’d said it, as if he was testing her.
She rose unsteadily from the table and stumbled toward him. He smelled the sherry, thick and sweet, on her breath.
She drew her hand back, and he waited, almost relieved by her reaction. Maybe she did care. Punishment was love, too, wasn’t it?
Then she turned away. “Get out of my sight,” she said. “I don’t need this kind of hassle.”
He didn’t know he was going to do it until he was actually doing it. He pushed her, catching her in midstride, and she fell hard.
She screamed.
“Mommy!” he said. He kneeled and tried to put his arms around her shoulders. She pushed him away.
“Mommy!”
She managed to get to her knees. Blood welled from a cut on her bottom lip.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” he said.
“You’re a freak,” she said. “Don’t think l don’t knotty about the things you do. The telescope in your room. Your little experiments in the basement. Those moldy feathers on that stupid headdress? Your magazines? I don’t want to look at you.”
“Mommy!”
She managed to stand and without a word left the kitchen. Seconds later, she returned and snatched her half-glass of sherry from the table.
“Make your own dinner,” she said.
He knew she was going to her bedroom. She slept most of the day, except when she was drinking.
The boy waited until he knew she was asleep. He tiptoed into her room and took a twenty-dollar bill from her purse. That would get him dinner.
He stayed away until well after dark, and when he returned, he saw a big, old, rusted car in the driveway. Another boyfriend. Why did she always choose another man instead of him ?
Usually it didn’t make him feel sad or lonely. He had learned not to feel. But this time – unforgiven and with the picture of his mother helpless on the floor and the blood on her lip because he had pushed her – the thought of another boyfriend made him miserable.
He sat on the curb for a half-hour, trying to work up the courage to move into his small bedroom past the lights and noise that would be coming from behind her closed door in the trailer.
He wanted to teach his mother a lesson; he wanted her to pay attention to him. And he remembered how easy it had been to solve his problem the night the old lady died in the attic.
The boy left the shadows of the street and quietly walked into the kitchen. Matches. He needed matches.
The Watcher eased himself into his own house. There was a security pad, hidden behind a fake light switch. He flipped the lid and disarmed the system.
“Welcome home, my love,” he whispered.
He stepped through the kitchen. Gleaming copper pots hung above an open stove range. The kitchen was six hundred square feet, as well-equipped as the best restaurants. He’d hardly had a chance to use it. All of this was about to change, of course. This was where he would cook wonderful meals for his love.
&nb
sp; The Watcher was almost giddy as he moved through the house. In all of his years of preparation, in all of his time in the house, during all of his carpentry labors in complete and necessary solitude, it had never once felt like home to him. Now, of course, it did. His love awaited him. Upstairs.
He was in no rush, however. Although he had showered and slept in the hotel in Vegas – before and after satisfying his hunger with the grimy, drunken blonde – he still felt the exhaustion of the hectic pace of his last few days.
He would sleep again. He wanted everything to be perfect when he joined Kelsie. Rest first, he told himself. It was easier to abide by his decision because of one other thing that made him dizzy with anticipation – the surveillance cameras in Kelsie’s apartment. He had installed the wide-angle lenses beneath the plastic caps that covered the light fixtures. Kelsie could not know of their presence, which, of course, made it all that much more delicious.
The Watcher had no need to walk through the rest of the house to check for intruders. Not only had he taken the precaution of a security system, he had also installed discreet surveillance cameras on the exterior to allow him to watch the grounds. Yes, he would admit to himself, he was a control freak. But was there anything wrong with that? From his bedroom he could monitor not only Kelsie’s apartment but also much of the neighborhood. He could do the same from another bank of monitors just outside Kelsie’s room. Unlikely as the possibility was, the Watcher had prepared for the day visitors might try to enter his fortress. He wanted the chance to be as well warned as possible. And should that day ever happen, he’d prepared for escape too. With money, everything was possible.
Satisfied and exultant, he hurried to his bedroom. It was huge – the entire house was over forty-five hundred square feet – and he had installed a large-screen television at the base of the bed. Hidden beneath the bed were the video machines, cables, and wiring that led to the video cameras.
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