She couldn’t say why the idea came as a shock. His intentions were patently obvious. But the idea of being in the same category with all the dead women she had seen, encountered, worked with . . . the ones who were raped, stabbed, strangled, beaten, and set on fire . . .
She struggled with her bonds in sheer panic, the feeling returning to her hands only as pain when the twine bit into her flesh. The other victims—victims—didn’t have ligature marks on their wrists or bruises on their heads, but she had caught him unawares.
Where had she left her cell phone? If she could call—no, the phone was in her purse, and her purse was in her car, and her car was, she assumed, back in Kopecki’s parking lot, where it would sit for a day or two or three before the employees got curious about it. Perhaps sooner if they noticed the keys she dropped in the storage room.
This is why I don’t carry a gun. If I ever needed it, it would be uselessly resting at the bottom of my purse.
She felt for the trunk latch. If she could get it open, she could jump out . . . except that the steady high speed at which they were moving meant they were on a freeway. Nowhere else in the Cleveland area could he drive for so long without hitting a stop sign or a light. She would simply toss her bound body into oncoming traffic. Not a good idea.
She rolled over instead, turning her back to the rear of the car, and tried to hook the twine over the latch. She felt around for a sharper protrusion and found none. It killed her hands but she rubbed the twine back and forth on the latch.
The car began to slow down. She rubbed harder.
Another car drove by them, the radio bass giving off headache-producing thumps. She heard a burst of conversation, as if people were out on the sidewalk. No light penetrated the trunk. The car stopped, then went on again. The twine had not even weakened. What had he used, nylon?
The other street noises quieted, and she could hear nothing but the sound of the tires on a wet road, the panicked beating of her own pulse, and the relentless scrape of the twine against the trunk latch.
Abruptly the car stopped and the driver’s door opened. She gave up on the twine and started to wriggle round again so that she could face him when he opened the trunk. But his feet crunched away from the car. She heard a faint sound, and then his feet came back and the car rocked gently as he settled into the driver’s seat again.
The car moved forward not more than twenty feet, and he stopped and killed the engine. Then she understood. They had pulled into a garage.
He had a plan. He had everything arranged. She would not live through the night.
In her early twenties, just for something to do, she had taken martial arts training and had forgotten nearly all of it, except for breathing and one other thing: Use your legs. Pound for pound, a woman’s leg muscles are just as strong as a man’s.
She waited for him to open the trunk lid. He had not turned on the light, she could see his silhouette against the windows in the closed overhead door. Before he raised the lid all the way she kicked out with both feet, bracing her back against the spare tire. This awkward position required slamming her thigh against the trunk edge, but it knocked Max backward.
She threw the upper half of her body against the trunk opening; she could not stand up inside the trunk with her ankles tied together and without her hands for balance. She had no choice but to literally fall out of the car, and landed with a painful jolt to her left shoulder on the cement floor.
Max sprang up before she could. She attempted to stand on the bound feet and he simply hooked his toes behind them and pulled. Evelyn fell over instantly, with no way to break the fall. Her head hit the cement floor and bounced, and her vision faded to bursts of white stars against a black background.
She wasn’t unconscious, exactly. She felt—vaguely, as if it were happening to someone else—Max dragged her over to a small rug and rolled her up in it, and she hoped that she wouldn’t suffocate. Then he hefted her over one shoulder—so that her back arched painfully over the top of his shoulder—and moved out of the garage and into, she assumed, the house. She felt brisk air make its way into the open end of the rug roll, yet it did nothing to revive her.
Max made his way carefully down some steps; she could feel them descend. He let her slip to the floor, but gently, as if he didn’t want to damage her further. When he removed the rug she could see an unfinished basement. The light was too bright on her eyes, but she could not blink. How odd, she thought.
Then she passed out.
Chapter 34
EVERYTHING HURT BUT HER feet. Her feet felt pretty good, even cozy. Her neck stung and her head felt like she had one of those three-day, no-aspirin-in-the-world-could-touch-it sinus headaches. Time to have a cup of tea and go to bed.
Then she opened her eyes and realized that tea would not be provided.
Her legs, from just below the knee downward, were lost in a five-gallon bucket of heavy gray warm cement.
As Destiny had done, she immediately began to wriggle. That set the chains to clinking against each other.
“Stop that,” Max said.
She lifted her head slowly, straining the stiffened neck muscles. Lancets of pain stabbed her spine.
Max leaned against a bare wooden workbench, but not casually. His arms crossed over his chest as if holding his body together, hunched under his boyish but turbulent face. He had a bruise on his chin where her foot had caught him and a red mark the size of a baseball on his neck. He spoke calmly enough but with an underlying sense of urgency.
“I’m glad you’re here, Evelyn. I like you. I just wish it didn’t have to be like this.”
“You mean,” she whispered, her voice as broken as she felt, “you wish you didn’t have to kill me?”
He gave her an irritated look, as if bemused that she could be so far off. “No. I have to kill you, that’s the whole point. I just wish I could do it properly. I hate rushing. I mean, I have time, I just feel like I don’t. You know how it is when you have too much to do all at once? After all,” he added, “no one’s going to look for you here.”
She swallowed, trying to moisturize her throat, but it felt like a dirt road after a drought. “Actually, they will. I told two people at the ME’s office where I was going before I left.”
“And where were you going? Kopecki’s? That doesn’t help. You were totally surprised to see me, so you didn’t know I worked there. Neither will they. Why did you go there?”
“Tablecloths.”
He laughed. “What?”
She shook her head. Find me, David. Please find me. But why would he? What would possibly direct him to Kopecki’s?
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get you down. Go ahead and talk if you want. Do you want something to eat? I’ve got salmon chutney I’ve been experimenting with, though I can’t get the cilantro adjusted right. We have quite a while to go before that hardens.”
And when it did, he’d drop her in the Cuyahoga. The freezing waters would close over her head and there would be no more breath. Her body would not be found. Angel would never know where she had gone. Her mother . . . “Thanks for the offer. You must be quite a cook.”
“I’m a great cook.”
She nodded at the cement. “Does this take a long time to dry?”
“Oh, yeah, hours and hours. But it’s heavy, and frankly, that’s all that’s required of it. Once it sets a little bit and it gets completely dark outside, we’ll be good to go.”
His cool tone nauseated her more than the chloroform. A man in his element. His basement, his cocoon, and a woman he could never possess under his complete control. “Where’d you get the bucket, by the way? Do you have a pool? We thought maybe you had a pool.” She was babbling, yes, but why not?
“City pool. It’s only three streets over. A good, solid pool—and I ought to know, I poured the concrete myself, when I worked with my great-uncle at the utilities department. He used to tell me about cement shoes from his father’s younger days. They really used to do
that, you know, it’s not just some kind of urban myth. He told me you have to have the cement come up past the calves. Just the feet isn’t good enough. I added the chains myself, though.”
“The cops know. We met you at the funeral. I did know you worked at Kopecki’s. I just didn’t exactly remember what you looked like. So they will get your address from your boss—”
“Well,” he interrupted, completely unconcerned by these ideas, “that’s another long story.”
David drove along the city streets at an unsafe speed, refusing to slow even after near collisions with a bicyclist and a protruding garbage can. A practical voice in his head pointed out that while he was driving his own car, any accidents would go on his own insurance. If it were the city’s car, that would be a different story.
He sped up.
Why would she go to Kopecki’s? Had he told her that Christine Sabian worked there? He couldn’t remember.
The portable radio crackled with information, none of it comforting. Max Chisholm’s gold Lumina had not been spotted. Riley was en route to meet him at Max’s house. Two uniformed officers were checking out Jimmy’s house, just in case. It could still have been a two-man operation. Max picked some victims, Jimmy picked others. Jimmy got the chloroform, Max brought the cement.
He sped up again.
A patrol car came up behind him and flashed the blue and red lights. He waited until they reported his vehicle description to dispatch, then used their call number to talk to them. They turned off the lights but stayed with the parade—assisting in a Homicide arrest sounded more attractive than passing out speeding tickets.
The more, the merrier, David thought. For once he didn’t want to go it alone. The more backup he had with this nut, the better.
He didn’t think about what the guy might be doing to Evelyn right at that moment. He steered his thoughts away from her, pretending that it was not Evelyn involved in this drama but some sort of stand-in. He did not have time to ponder what he might have to do to this guy if he hurt her.
If he killed her.
If he wrapped her beautiful body in cement and dropped it into the ice-cold river, so that she drowned, screaming and struggling in the silent water.
If Darryl Pierson had Jimmy killed for killing Destiny, David thought, I’m not going to do a damn thing about it. I might even ask the mayor for the name of a good hit man. No, wait, I already have one.
He pulled onto Pullman Avenue, just off West Twenty-fifth. Brick houses were comfortably lit along the empty street. Music emanated at an easy level from one, as if the occupants had gotten an early start on Thanksgiving. He had one block to go.
He’d known Evelyn for only a week or two, really. She was just another cop—well, not a cop, but similar. It would be a pity if she died in the line of duty, but others had, right? It wasn’t personal.
Right.
It was very personal.
He sped up.
She kept moving her legs. It had worked for Destiny, it would work for her. But how had the girl gotten out of the chains? Max had removed her parka, leaving only a white turtleneck sweater and jeans. The chains snaked around her neck, under her armpits, across her waist. They went between her wrists, too, but Max had left the twine there for good measure. Houdini couldn’t have escaped from this.
The empty basement offered no help. The few tools on the workbench were too far out of reach. The chloroform mask lay on the planking, abandoned, underneath a 1994 calendar and a dusty photograph of a young woman with long dark hair and a stunning smile. Max had gone upstairs for a snack, he said, pounding up the staircase somewhere behind her. Now she heard his footsteps on the kitchen floor. He sat up there eating his salmon chutney, killing time before it was killing time.
She wiggled her legs. The cement felt like warm putty, heavy but not uncomfortable. Nothing stirred in the rest of the house, or outside it as far as she could hear. She could scream, but that would just get her another snoutful of chloroform and she’d be dead long before she woke up. For a moment it seemed like an attractive prospect. Why be awake for her own murder if she didn’t have to be?
The idea made her want to throw up even more.
She debated the slight chance that someone might be looking for her. She hadn’t told anyone her plans—except for Jason, who had probably gone out on a date and would not give her another thought for days—and she hadn’t called David or Riley. No one had made the connection to Max as far as she knew. No reason why they should; only she knew about the tablecloth. No one would be checking out Kopecki’s in the near future. Angel might call the ME’s office looking for her, if she had come home at all, if she even cared where her mother had gotten to, and if she didn’t just assume Evelyn had worked late and gone to bed. Even if anyone missed her, the last place they would think to look would be Jimmy Neal’s cousin Max’s basement. Now she knew why cops always told Dispatch where they were headed, but she wasn’t a cop and didn’t have a dispatcher and because of that she was going to die.
Not only die, but disappear, and that she really couldn’t stand. That Angel and her mother might be doomed to the same kind of hell that tortured Thalia Johnson’s family . . .
This couldn’t happen.
She wiggled her legs. If she had been able to stand, she could have pulled the chains out of the concrete, but Max had thought of that. Straps held her butt firmly to the chair, and the chair seemed to be bolted to the floor. Chains even kept the bucket against the rungs so she couldn’t push it away. He had improved on his ancestor’s model, had thought of everything. He had left her no way out.
There had to be time. The women’s deaths had seemed bizarre from the beginning because that elaborate setup of cement and chains had to take time. How long did it take to harden again?
But then, when the plans fell through, he had resorted to simply strangling Destiny Pierson. And with Jimmy, he hadn’t even mixed the cement. Perhaps he had decided not to bother with the more ornate form of murder, especially for a rush job.
Max Chisholm’s house, a forlorn two-story firetrap, huddled in the shadows of its healthier neighbors. Duct tape held one window together and the second step leading to the porch had snapped through. David pulled into the driveway behind a patrol car, its occupants waiting for him to lead the way, and his heart sank like a marble in water. Something was wrong. The place felt abandoned. No lights, no car. He vaulted out of his vehicle before the engine died, eighteen-inch Maglite in hand.
He checked the garage first, aiming the light through the glass windows. Boxes, cobwebs, and a rat or two topped a few decades’ worth of garbage, all of which looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the last millennium. He headed for the house.
Riley joined him halfway across the snow-filled grass. “What’s up?”
“It’s Jimmy’s cousin Max,” David told him. “That’s who our killer is. He has Evelyn.”
Riley began to spout questions, which David did not answer or even hear. He pounded on the back door to the house with enough force to knock its hinges askew, waited exactly one second for a response, then raised his leg and kicked the door just beneath the knob. It flew open and bounced against the inner wall.
“Do we have a warrant?” Riley asked, more from habit than any real concern, but David was already inside and searching.
Followed closely by the uniformed patrolmen, they turned on every light and searched every room and closet, moving more quickly than safety SOPs would tolerate but to no avail. They found no one.
David stood in the kitchen and fought the rising swells of panic. Riley thundered through the upstairs rooms and a uniformed officer searched the basement, just to double-check, but David felt sure they wouldn’t find any clues to Evelyn’s whereabouts. Aside from some dusty mail, stale food, and last week’s TV Guide on the coffee table, the place seemed uninhabited.
He had not anticipated this.
Max was neither at work, at home, nor at Jimmy’s. So where the hell was he? And what
was he doing to Evelyn right at this very moment as David stood motionless, without the slightest idea of what to do next?
She was going to die.
She was going to die because he, David, had screwed up. He should have investigated Kopecki’s as part of the Christine Sabian disappearance. He should have put surveillance on Jimmy’s relatives. He should have made Marcus tell him what he knew.
Evelyn would die while he waded in a morass of self-recrimination.
He pulled his portable radio from his belt and told the police operators to call the Metropark Rangers and get every man they had on the road, particularly those near bodies of water, and that they should check anyone out and about on this cold, dark night. Then he went out to his car and plucked the case file from the front seat. He had the reports of interviews with Jimmy’s family members, which would be Max’s family members as well.
He dialed the first phone number he came to and listened to the ringing on the other end of the line, eyeing the room. The curtains were atrocious but clean. Washed dishes gathered dust in a wooden rack on the counter. A wall calendar with a picture of an Alaskan glacier featured the correct month, the only notation a 1:00 pm scrawled on the fourth Thursday. Evidently Max planned to take a break from killing people for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Under the calendar hung a framed photo, in which a very pretty young woman stood in front of an older house, her arms thrown up as if celebrating a victory. A much older woman scowled on the porch. Behind her, a child hovered in the entranceway, the screen door dissecting his image into a pixilated ghost.
No one answered the phone. David went on to the second report, propping the cell phone against his shoulder as he opened each drawer. Towels, silverware, Tupperware containers. Even the butcher knives looked harmless. The phone rang again and again. He cursed again as he figured it out—all Max’s relatives were probably at a local funeral home, attending or at least planning Jimmy’s wake.
But he didn’t know what else to do. He tried a third number, that of Jimmy’s uncle, also named Chisholm. As it rang, David opened another drawer and found a stack of self-stick notes and a battered address book. As if heaven had rewarded him for his perseverance, someone picked up just as he opened the book to the C section.
Trace Evidence Page 24