“You can tell me, dear. No one will blame you—the man was an expert con artist.”
But Karen couldn’t tell her. Not how Judd taking her in his arms last night had sent an uncontrollable thrill from her head to her toes. How utterly safe and right she’d felt with her arms around Judd’s neck as he carried her to the bedroom. How fulfilled she’d been as they lay beside one another after making love, Judd kissing her eyelids with the tenderest brush of his lips. The sadness and aloneness she’d faced as a single woman had seemed forever past. In its place had been peace and joy, the depth of which she’d never known.
As the tears threatened to turn to sobs, Mrs. Cohen reached over and patted Karen’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, dear, I shouldn’t have asked you, not now. What a ninny I am. In a few days’ time, you’ll be calmer, and able to talk about it. Come on, we’re almost at the store, let’s think about something else.”
The suggestion sounded absurd, but Karen knew Mrs. Cohen was right If she couldn’t pull herself together, she’d go home without the gun she needed. As she shifted in her seat to focus on the driver, the rich moroccan leather of the seat made a creaking sound. “This is a beautiful car,” Karen said, reaching for another tissue to dry her eyes. “I don’t, ah—” she gulped a hiccup “—think I’ve ever seen a four-by-four with leather seats before.”
Ruth chuckled, and Karen sensed what an effort the facade of levity was for her. For all her pushy ways, the flamboyant woman really was a good friend.
“I tease Truman that this sport utility vehicle has more of a plush interior than my Mercedes sedan. We both adore the smell of leather. Though the last time he had the car detailed, they used some ghastly cleaner in here. Can’t you smell it?”
In her preoccupation, Karen hadn’t noticed. Though she was all stuffy from crying, she obediently sniffed the air, then wrinkled her nose. “Yes, I see what you mean. It smells like disinfectant.”
“Here we are,” Mrs. Cohen announced.
McCauley’s Sporting Goods had been a tenant of the old storefront on Main Street ever since Karen could remember, and this time of year, the shop clearly catered to fishermen. Long lines of fiberglass poles flanked the main aisle. Most of the cases seemed to be filled with fishing lures and reels. Mrs. Cohen led the way to the back counter, where a phalanx of hunting rifles was displayed on the wall. A few handguns rested in the locked case adjacent.
A man in his early forties appeared through a door to the back room. He wore a blue plaid shirt rolled up at the elbows, and he ran his hand over his balding scalp when he spotted Mrs. Cohen.
“Morning, Ruth.”
“Good morning, Jimmy. Karen, this is my friend and tenant, Jimmy McCauley. Jimmy, Karen Thomas.”
The owner nodded, gave a slight, professional smile. Karen returned her gaze to the guns in the case. They reminded her forcibly of her uncle’s hobby, and she had to fight to keep the tears from starting again. She wondered if Jimmy had sold anything to Uncle Ed; he’d doubtless purchased ammunition here, if nothing else. How incredibly tragic it was that the objects that Ed had collected and spent so many happy hours practicing with had been the instrument of taking his life.
“Miss Thomas requires a gun,” Mrs. Cohen said matter-of-factly.
The pieces displayed all looked enormous to Karen, as though they would be heavy to lift and require great hand strength to fire. “Don’t you have anything…?”
“Less grotesque,” Mrs. Cohen finished for her.
“I’m sorry, ladies, but we don’t stock many handguns. Our trade is mostly in hunting rifles.”
“Miss Thomas,” she emphasized, “needs something smaller. A woman’s gun.”
The only change in McCauley’s expression was a slight forehead wrinkle of exasperation. “Ruth, I don’t carry women’s guns.”
“Oh, my word, Jimmy McCauley, where have you been all morning?”
“In the back…doing inventory. It’s been a slow morning.”
“And you didn’t have a radio on while you worked?”
“Yeah, I did. My shortwave. I like to listen to some of the foreign channels.”
Mrs. Cohen rolled her eyes. “Karen, will you excuse us for a moment.” She curtly motioned for the proprietor to follow her down the counter, then leaned across to whisper. Karen prayed her gossipy landlady wasn’t going to embarrass her with a longwinded recitation of her uncle’s death and Karen’s connection with the suspected killer. She stared at the deer heads mounted over the gun counter and tightly balled a tissue in her fist. Thankfully Mrs. Cohen cut it short, and they returned in barely two minutes.
“I’m very sorry, Miss Thomas, about your uncle,” Jimmy said. “He was a fine man, and a good customer.” He cleared his throat, but from his expression he seemed to be feeling genuinely sympathetic rather than uncomfortable or awkward, and it made Karen feel just a bit better.
“I wish I had something to show you, Miss Thomas, but we just don’t get any call for lighter pieces in these parts. I’d be more than happy, though, to order something for you.”
“How long would that take?” Ruth asked.
“A few days. I’ll put a rush on it.”
“A few days!” Karen almost said, I could be dead by then. Panic roiled inside her. Mrs. Cohen began to protest in an outraged voice.
“Wait a minute, just wait, please, ladies. Let me think.” His upraised hand moved to his chin. “You know, I think I might just have something that would do…yes, I’m sure it never sold. There’s a little automatic I ordered a couple years ago for a customer who changed his mind. It will take me just a minute to find it in the back.”
Karen’s face relaxed. “That would be wonderful.”
The storekeeper smiled. “I’ll clean it for you and make sure it’s in good working order.” He started for the stockroom, then turned in the doorway. “Are you trained to use a pistol?”
“No.” The ever present knot in Karen’s stomach pulled tighter. She’d never fired a gun in her life, and just the thought of touching it made her feel she might be ill.
Jimmy’s brow wrinkled. “You won’t be able to hit the side of a barn, much less a target, unless I give you some practice. Ruth, you better turn the Closed sign around in the window.”
JUDD FOUND THE DEPUTY and his female passenger on the steps of an A-frame that fronted Hamblin Road. Judd hid in the trees as the man thanked the attractive young woman for the coffee, then repeated several times that he thought she had nothing to worry about, but that she should call him immediately if anything came up or if she remembered anything else about the murder. That made Judd smile ruefully: he’d bet the deputy had been using what little authority he had to impress the woman while he dallied at her house, when he was really supposed to be out doing his job. When the patrol car drove off toward town, Judd exhaled and prayed his good luck would hold. If the sheriff’s man had left two minutes earlier, he would have caught Judd on the road.
From his vantage point, he could see the mailbox with Marlene Hall’s number on it. It was the next one up, on the same side of the street Strange Rossini hadn’t mentioned they had a neighbor who was a witness.
He could barely see the corner of Marlene’s white clapboard cottage, about three hundred yards up the steep dirt driveway. Shrubbery grew in from the sides, and deep gullies ran down the length of the roadbed. The lane was obviously no longer used, and it would take a four-wheel drive to climb it. His wide old car would never have made it. If he’d taken Marlene’s body away in his trunk, he would have had to park on Hamblin and carry her down.
He cautiously scouted up the street a bit, but there were no other police cars in sight, and the only human-manufactured sound was a shower running in one of the widely spaced homes.
He went back to get his car, in case one of the sheriff’s men turned up again and he needed to make a quick escape. He drove past Marlene’s mailbox and just out of sight around a bend. He parked behind a big blue Mercedes that seemed vaguely familiar, but
he couldn’t be sure; the coming and going of residents’ vehicles hadn’t seemed important while he’d kept his vigil by the road.
But now he was on full alert. He kept his eyes open as he walked back down Hamblin and turned up Marlene’s driveway. An uncomfortable tightness was forming in his temples. Some sixth sense was telling him there was something up there at the cottage, something that had been waiting for him. He told himself he should have come here earlier, would have come earlier, if the police hadn’t taken him in for questioning yesterday afternoon.
Subconscious fears warned him to turn around and run back down the overgrown track, but he didn’t slacken his pace. Even if this place was haunted, it was time for the ghosts to be laid to rest, for the story of his past to be revealed.
The tiny cottage was in need of paint, its dirty white sides flaking badly in places, its tar-paper roof ragged and coated with green moss where adjacent pines overhung it. A surprisingly clean mullioned window with pretty lace curtains faced the road. Perspiration trickled down Judd’s back as he stepped up and looked in.
It was a woman’s bedroom, delicate and feminine. The bed was covered with a blue satin comforter; an open but empty suitcase lay on it. The residue of black fingerprint powder was visible on the top of the antique bird’s-eye-maple dresser and around the porcelain drawer pulls. How tragic that Marlene had entered this room, perhaps full of happy anticipation, just moments before her death.
Judd grimaced as he proceeded to the next window, on the long side of the house and next to the front door. The wide picture window looked in on a knotty-pine-paneled living room. The mismatched sofa and easy chairs weren’t new, but tasteful, and some pretty vases, filled with wilted flowers, were scattered on the oak tables. A swinging door painted in white enamel undoubtedly led to the kitchen.
Judd stepped back. There was a high window, perhaps over a sink, at the corner of the house; it was covered by a closed venetian blind.
His mouth went dry. He pushed the hair out of his eyes, forced his wooden limbs to move past the window and around the side of the kitchen. There was a concrete parking pad here, cracked by weeds, a rotting clothesline and two more shuttered windows. There must be a kitchen door around the back.
Sure enough, he found a two-step porch leading to a wooden door with glass cutouts, which were not curtained. Judd involuntarily paused for a moment, his heart thudding as he stared at the door. A premonition came over him that a dead body lay just beyond the threshold. His hand shook as he grasped the banister and forced himself up the steps. He cupped his hands around his eyes and moved his face to the glass.
Weak sunlight filtered through the closed blinds of the other windows onto knotty pine cabinets, tiled counters and a simple Formica dinette. He willed his gaze down to the floor; it was clean and bare. Judd breathed a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment: so this was all there was to see.
Then he saw the woman’s body.
She was lying in a twisted heap where she’d collapsed, a puddle of deep red spreading out over the linoleum from the gash in her neck.
Judd was transfixed with the vision; his hand clutched at the door frame as his legs threatened to give way. And a dust storm of bizarre pictures began whirling in his head.
He cried out and squeezed his eyes shut. The pictures flashed by with dizzying speed; he knew they were snapshots of his past life. Some he didn’t recognize, but others were frighteningly familiar. His temples pounded as he tried to regain control of his spinning mind, tried to slow down the images and grab on to the ones he recognized.
After some minutes, his head began to clear. He was able to pull his thoughts into patterns. Slowly a chronology of sorts began to surface.
He’d been here, of course, that fateful night. He’d hurried up the driveway to Marlene’s house, intent on warning her to get out of town, and discovered to his horror that the man he’d been shadowing had beaten him here, for the bronze Jeep Cherokee was parked on the pad. With weapon drawn and running quietly as a cat, he’d circled around to this door, peered in and found Marlene newly slain.
Guilt and disbelief had overwhelmed him. For six months, he’d tracked a serial killer from Los Angeles to Seattle to Silver Creek, committed every fiber of his being to preventing the loss of another innocent young woman’s life. He was an FBI agent, but this case had become more than an assignment; it had been an obsession. If he’d been more decisive, arrived only moments sooner, he could have prevented this senseless abomination.
The killer was heavily armed, and taking him without assistance would be nearly impossible. Judd’s only advantage had been that the man didn’t spot him. He’d followed the Cherokee, intending to stop and call for backup at the first available phone. Then…nothing.
Judd shook his head as if to dislodge the skip in his memory. The murderer. Who was he? He tried to focus on the face he’d seen as the perpetrator staggered from the house, carrying Marlene’s limp body wrapped in a blanket. As the features became more detailed, Judd realized he’d seen the same man, only days ago…at Karen’s house.
“Stay right there, with your hands up,” a voice called behind him. “Very nice. Yes, you may turn around. Slowly!”
Judd faced a .45 revolver pointed at his chest. Without surprise, he locked eyes with Truman Cohen.
Chapter Fifteen
The short, mustached man was dressed in pressed gabardines, tasseled loafers, a silk shirt buttoned at the collar and a white cashmere golf sweater. The thought crossed Judd’s mind that, had this been a movie, the dapper, erudite gentleman before him would make a perfect evil twin for Hercule Poirot. However, Judd knew from experience there was nothing comical about the demented mind behind Cohen’s intense black eyes.
“Keep your hands up—I want to see what you do with them.” When Judd mutely obeyed, Cohen continued, “So you did see me kill Marlene. I could tell, from your expression as you stood there just now, looking in. You see, until this moment, I wasn’t sure. The first time Ruth told me there was an amnesia victim in town, and where and when they’d found you, I began to wonder. Then this morning, I had the strangest feeling you’d turn up here. Perhaps there is some kind of psychic connection between us.”
With all the time Judd had spent tracking Cohen, trying to get inside the head of the serial killer, Truman might be right. Recalling the paranoia he had felt in the early days of his amnesia, that he was in danger, Judd was sure now that deep in his subconscious he had been aware of Cohen’s existence all the time. A man without a memory would have been a sitting duck for a killer bent on eliminating his only witness. But for all Cohen had learned, he still seemed to be ignorant of the fact that Judd was FBI, and Judd wasn’t about to say anything to tip him off.
“Why did you murder Ed Thomas?” Judd asked. “Was he on to you?”
“No, actually he hadn’t connected me with Marlene.” Cohen worked his tongue around his mouth, obviously tempted to go on. “We were very circumspect, you see, but my wife thought I’d been behaving in an evasive manner, so she hired Mr. Thomas to spy on me. Well, somehow he discovered I’d been seeing other women on my lecture tours, and he called last night, asking to see me. I had an early flight scheduled, so he agreed to meet me in his office before dawn. You understand, he wanted to offer me the gentlemanly way out, to allow me to tell Ruth the truth, before he gave her his report. He probably thought she would forgive me if I made a clean breast of it, but I knew better. And Ruth’s income…well, let’s just say it would cause certain difficulties if she decided to divorce me.”
“So you shot him?”
“Thomas’s gun was lying on the desk. He’d been cleaning and loading it when I arrived.” Cohen’s eyes flicked to the PI’s revolver in his hand. “I realized I could accomplish two objectives at once—silence Thomas, and make it look as though you had done the deed. That way, the police would never believe you if you suddenly regained your memory and claimed you’d witnessed me kill Marlene.”
Judd listene
d with sick fascination. “How could you be sure the police would blame me for Ed’s murder?”
“I typed the first paragraph of a report into his computer, claiming he’d uncovered evidence that proved you killed Marlene.”
“You bastard!”
Judd lunged down the steps; Cohen backed up a foot, but halted Judd with a stab of the gun. “I wouldn’t insult me, if I were you, Mr. Maxwell. I’m intelligent and resourceful, but not a criminal. Marlene Hall forced me to do what I did.”
Judd couldn’t contain his anger. “And the other women, what about them? What crimes against your dignity did they commit that made them deserve death?”
Cohen’s brows rose into the bangs of his toupee. “You know far more than is good for you, Mr. Maxwell, and you’ve made my decision for me. The police will theorize that guilt finally caught up with you and made you commit suicide at the scene of one of your killings, with the weapon you used from your last murder.”
Neither man hesitated. Judd recognized the cold-blooded resolve in Cohen’s eyes and dived for the ground as the other man pulled the trigger. The bullet scored his left arm, but Judd recovered his balance and scuttled into the trees. The second shot whizzed past and lodged in a pine trunk. Cohen cursed inelegantly and sprang after him.
Judd had reconnoitered the woods around Marlene’s cottage the first day he suspected she was involved with Truman. There was a dry creek bed running between the properties down to Hamblin Road. He cut a zigzag path through the trees, the killer following with less speed and more difficulty. A well-sighted third short missed Judd’s left ear by inches and made him shy. He found the gully and slid down into it.
Judd stopped a moment to listen. There was an oath, then silence, behind him. The creek bed wasn’t apparent until you got almost on top of it; it sounded as though Cohen was baffled by the sudden disappearance of his quarry. Bending low and moving as quietly as he could, Judd headed downstream.
Only A Memory Away Page 18