“And Destiny Pierson? Did you offer her a coupon, too?”
“That was something.” He spoke as if it were a good fishing story that she just had to hear. “Right off the street, all her friends babbling and running along like a pack of jackals, and I plucked her out without a sound. I couldn’t believe it worked, frankly. I had to have been three blocks away before they even missed her.”
“But why?”
“She was so on—as in onstage. She just had that presence, you know? Smart. Snotty, but in a way that made you laugh.”
“But she got away from you,” Evelyn pointed out.
The memory didn’t disturb him. “I said she was smart. But don’t get your hopes up. I’ve made some improvements in my design.”
Great, she thought. A psycho killer who learns from his mistakes. She gazed hungrily at the outside world, at the neon sign of a closed beauty salon, at teenage couples leaving a movie theater. Too far away to hear her if she screamed or hit the window with her head, they might as well have been on a different planet. “Blair Danilov?”
“Who’s that?”
“Another of your victims, I’m guessing.”
He drove along like a well-trained chauffeur, staying well below the speed limit and using his turn signals, staying away from other cars and populated sidewalks. He appeared to give her question careful consideration. “What did she look like?”
“Medium blond hair, blue eyes. Five-six. Slender.” If she could just get out of the car. The knee she had injured falling out of the trunk sent shooting pains through her thigh, but still she turned her body slowly, quietly, so that the hands bound behind her were nearer the door handle. If she could get it open and tumble out . . . if the fall didn’t kill her, the oncoming traffic might, but it would be worth it. Except that she couldn’t tumble, not with a bucket of concrete on her feet. If she threw her upper body out, she’d be dragged alongside until Max stopped the car and finished her off. She’d have to throw the bucket, which had to weigh close to eighty pounds, out first. They hadn’t covered this in martial arts training.
“Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“A graphic artist. Did greeting cards.”
“Never heard of her.”
She could feel the armrest, the cracked vinyl . . . her fingertips found the handle.
“Sit still, Evelyn. Don’t make me come back there. Isn’t that what Daddy always says? If I have to stop this car and come back there—”
“Disappeared August thirty-first.”
Max caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “I haven’t killed everyone, you know. I’m sure Blair whoever—”
“Danilov.” She pulled the handle. Nothing happened.
“—Danilov is a very nice girl, but I don’t know her. And you can’t open that door from back there, you know. Only Fords unlock when you pull the handle. This is a Chevy.”
She settled back in her seat. The knob had been unscrewed from the door lock, leaving it a vertical piece of stainless steel with threads, lurking uncooperatively in the door frame. She’d never reach it with her hands even if Max let her try. Perhaps with her toe, if she could get her legs out of the bucket. The cement had the consistency of very thick peanut butter. She was no longer strapped to the chair.
She pulled. The chains from her body looped around the bucket handle, which rested against her shins, and something must have secured the loops because the chains would not slide off. She couldn’t see much in the dark backseat, but somehow the chain system kept her legs in place. Max had been right. He had made improvements.
“Thalia Johnson?” Her brain still went through the motions while her body occupied itself.
He didn’t respond at first. She had to hurry, for the storefronts had given way to a residential neighborhood; at any moment she could find herself at a park entrance and that would be that. Even if she escaped the car, there would be no one around to help. No one would be strolling through a dark city park in the freezing cold of a November weeknight.
“Black girl,” he said. “About to get married.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Evelyn closed her eyes, said a silent prayer for Mrs. Johnson, still waiting for her daughter to return. “How did you get her? Did you convince her to get in the car with you or—”
“I just gave her a ride. She recognized me, of course. I told her I lived nearby and had a question about her menu. Brides panic when you say that. They are obsessed with perfection for the only time in their lives.”
“And no one noticed you, driving along in an all-black neighborhood?”
He turned the corner gently, driving past a sign that read: Cleveland Metroparks—Mastick Road Entrance. “I guess not. You really shouldn’t be such a racist. What do you think they would have done, stormed my car? I just drove along and offered her a ride home. She was too sweet to refuse. She had good taste in food, too. She loved my idea for zucchini puffs.”
“Why did you kill her if you liked her so much?”
He studied her again via the rearview mirror. His dark eyes reflected the passing streetlights and little else. “People are always coming and going. They come into my world and then they leave again. Sometimes I want them to stay.”
“So you weighted her down and threw her in the river?”
“Now I’m the only one who knows where she is. She exists only in my world.”
“It’s about power.”
He corrected her firmly. “It’s about love.”
“Excuse me if I find that hard to believe.”
“Killing is a very intimate thing. Look how much time you and I have already spent together. Would I do all that for someone I didn’t care about?”
“Sure. Nothing shows your affection like a bucket full of cement.”
David refused to let Riley drive, even while he spoke on both a cell phone and a police radio to the police dive team and the Metropark Rangers, respectively. Riley had the Homicide chief on a phone in one hand and held on to the dash with the other.
“Bring every diver you can call in and bring a spare tank. If she goes in the water, it won’t be a simple matter of throwing a life jacket. Understand?”
The radio crackled and the dive-team captain’s voice crackled as well. “I understand perfectly.”
“How long can she be underwater?” David stammered, cringing at the stupidity of the question, but he couldn’t put his racing thoughts into coherent words, or perhaps he didn’t want to.
After a pause, the captain said kindly, “As long as she can hold her breath.”
“And after that?”
The second pause sounded even more disbelieving than the first. “Three, maybe four minutes before brain damage.”
David could feel his pride deserting him at a great gallop, and didn’t care. “What I’m really asking is, if she goes in the water, is there any hope?”
“There’s always hope.”
David resisted the overwhelming desire to throw the radio out the window. He switched to the cell phone instead, momentarily leaving the wheel free until Riley’s gasp brought it to his attention.
“Lieutenant?” he asked, prompting a response from the ranger leader on the other end.
“Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”
“Where is this bridge, now?”
“Mmmm . . . you’re on Lakeshore now, right?”
“Yes!”
“Get off at Riverside Drive. You see, this bridge I mean is the closest to your location physically, you understand”—he paused until David wanted to scream and instead cut off a tractor-trailer in a burst of self-destructiveness—“but it’s fairly busy. You get a lot of traffic across it, even though it’s only five hundred feet long, but it’s near the hospital, see—”
“What are you getting at?” David shouted, and cringed at the sound of his own voice. He’d be squealing like a little girl in another minute. Either that or he’d find this lieutenant and kill him.
“If yo
ur boy knows the parks, he might not pick this one. Hell, all told, there’s forty-two bridges he could choose from in the whole system. But let’s concentrate on the upper west side.”
David waited for him to go on, then prompted: “So what do you think would be a better place, more isolated, for his purposes?”
“Well, you’re right there at the beginning of the Scenic Park Trailhead—dunno. Isaac, what do you think?” he asked to someone on his side of the phone.
I can’t stand it, David thought. I can’t take this.
“Yeah”—he could hear the lieutenant’s voice continuing—“but what about the—oh, the Valley Parkway? You sure?”
Just as David was ready to explode, the lieutenant spoke again. “Well, hey, Detective, Isaac here has an idea. A couple miles down from the bridge we’re talking about is a footbridge off the Valley Parkway. It’d be more private for your guy, like, and there’s a parking area there.”
“Perfect.”
“But at the end of the trailhead there’s a covered bridge. That’s a deep part of the river and there ain’t much traffic there. I think at night that covered bridge makes people nervous. Too dark. But then your guy might want that.”
“And that is where?”
“About another four miles down the road. It’s just past—shoot, Isaac, where is that—”
“Lieutenant,” David said through politely clenched teeth, “may I speak to Isaac?”
The trees, only the barest outlines against the night sky, crowded around as if they, too, were trying to hide her from the outside world. She gazed at them in terror as the car wound slowly around a bend in the road. Lost in a dark world, she had entered their valley; they were the only authority and claimed Max as one of theirs. He belonged here.
She began to panic. She could feel the waves of hysteria surge up from her panting lungs, through her heart, and up to her throat, and she prepared to scream.
Instead, she bent over and vomited, coughing up a thin bile onto the floor behind the driver’s seat. She spit the last of it out and wiped her mouth on the seat before sitting up.
“It’s all right, Evelyn,” Max said even as the noxious fumes wafted through the car. “The chloroform makes people sick. Lia threw up in my basement. Took me a while to get that smell out.”
“I’m glad,” Evelyn hissed. “Let them find my DNA on the floor after they search your car. You’ll have a tough time explaining that.”
“I’ll wash it out.”
“Won’t help.”
“I’ll use bleach.”
“It’ll still be there,” she lied. “What about Christine Sabian?”
He took his time to respond. “What about her?”
“Did you like her, too?”
He glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Everyone liked Christine.”
His shimmering eyes made her skin crawl, but she prodded him to go on. “What was she like?”
“Everyone wanted to learn from her. So did I. She showed me how to make ham pinwheels and foolproof hollandaise sauce. I could never get it right until I met her. She was going to help me on my way.”
“Way to where?” Keep talking. Just keep talking, though she no longer cared. The ghost of Christine Sabian could not help her. No one could help her.
“Hollywood.” He smiled. “Max Chisholm, chef to the stars. All you need is a little self-promotion. I mean, the Food Network is on 24-7, how hard can it be to land a spot?”
She blinked at him. Even without the streetlights she could see his face darken.
“You think that’s a dumb idea?”
“No! No, I don’t. You’re right—cooking shows are so popular these days. People want new, unique things to eat.” He nodded, but his eyes continued to shimmer. Evelyn asked, “Christine helped you? Then why did you hurt her?”
He didn’t answer.
“She was nice to you.”
No response.
“But then she went home to her real family, didn’t she?”
He stopped at a red light, stepping too hard on the brakes. The car slid a foot before coming to a rest.
“Like Lia Ripetti and Destiny Pierson. Christine walked away.”
Then he spoke softly. “Not anymore.”
The car accelerated, under control once more.
“Your victims—the women you pick—they look like your mother, did you ever notice that? Young, pretty, long dark hair.”
“Is that psychology, Evelyn? Behavioral profiling? Impressive.”
“I’m too old and my hair is short. I don’t fit.”
“Neither did Jimmy,” he pointed out with chilling finality. And then, long before she was ready, he pulled the car off the road and put out the lights.
Chapter 37
ONE GLANCE AT THE Scenic Park Trailhead bridge, and David dismissed it. Too well lit, too public. He’d have to be nuts to try it here, and this guy seemed too cool to be nuts. He kept driving, with Isaac spouting directions in one ear and Riley spouting APB reports in the other.
“How many cops we got in this damn city, and they can’t find one stinking Chevy Lumina?” he grumbled to David. “They’ll let that grounder go right between their legs. What’s next?”
“The footbridge. Tell the dive team we’re moving on. And please tell me that dive team means they have more than one diver.”
Riley consulted. “Two. They got Jerry out of bed.”
“Send one to the footbridge and one to the covered bridge.”
Riley relayed these instructions, then asked as if despite himself: “What if it’s neither of these places?”
“Then she’s dead.”
The tiny lot had spaces for no more than four cars. A single street lamp threw a flickering orange light over the car and the snow. The river flowed as a black nothingness, visible only as a rushing sound. Max reached back into her seat, unlocked her door, and then got out and rummaged around in the trunk. He pulled out the two-wheeled dolly. They had not passed another vehicle in the past five miles. They were alone in the world, and she was about to die.
Max came around the side of the car.
Evelyn smashed her temple down on the bare screw in the door, locking it.
“Shit,” David said. “Shitshitshit!”
The footbridge appeared like something out of a Robert Frost poem, sweet and old-fashioned. And empty.
“Let’s go on,” Riley suggested. They stared through the windshield as a man in a wet suit approached them.
“Nobody here,” he told them, to David’s despair.
“She may be there. She could be under the water and the guy’s already gone. Could you—”
“No.”
David’s blood turned from ice to fire. “Look, you—”
“There’s no footprints,” the diver explained. “And the snow isn’t falling that hard. Nobody’s been on that bridge tonight.”
David swallowed. “Let’s move on, then.”
“Bet you wish you had electric locks on this model,” Evelyn said to him, even as she felt the trickle of blood down her face.
“Very funny, Evelyn.” He returned to the driver’s seat and unlocked the door again. He also unlocked the passenger door, then walked around the car.
She tried to hit the stripped knob with her elbow, but her arm wouldn’t reach that far. She had no choice but to use her head again, piercing the skin once more and buying her exactly another second and a half of life, because Max merely opened the passenger door, reached back, held the screw up, and pulled the back door open from the outside.
His right hand still held the screw, and she leaned forward and bit his wrist.
He yelled, but not very loud. He pulled and she bit deeper, her teeth piercing his flesh. She could feel the salty tang of his blood in her mouth, and the bones of his wrist under her teeth. She couldn’t hurt him, but she temporarily immobilized him. He was stuck with one arm through the passenger door and the rest of his body outside. As long as she didn’t let go, he couldn�
��t move.
He reached his other arm through the open rear door and grabbed her hair, pulling the red curls tight. The pain only made her jaw clench tighter. He let out a groan. She tried to pull back, immobilizing him against the door frame.
But he had heard enough tips for women on how to fight off an attacker—resort to the classics. He stuck an index finger in her right eye.
The pain was intense. The world went white and starry and she let go of his hand, falling back in the seat. She turned her face away from him and rested her eyes against the seat cushion, trying to calm the raging bolts of lightning that flashed across her vision. It took a second or two before she could hear anything, and another sixty before she could see. The right eye ached but it functioned. When her vision cleared she saw Max tying a rag around his wounded wrist.
“That wasn’t very dignified, Evelyn.” His patience had reached its limit.
So had hers.
“The hell with dignity. If you think I’m going down without a fight, then you sadly misjudged this victim. I have a daughter.”
“Do you?” he asked, looking up.
Damn, damn, damn.
She just told him the last thing she wanted him to know. Now what had she set in motion?
She turned her head and vomited on the floor of the car once again, then spit until she could no longer taste his blood.
He waited with what seemed like patience, but wasn’t. He simply enjoyed her weakness. “Are you ready?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” she lied.
He reached in, grasped the handle of the bucket, and dragged it outside, with her shins in painful tow. With the bucket on the gravel, he tipped it and slid the lip of the dolly underneath.
“Come on,” he said to Evelyn, still lying on the backseat.
“All right.” She sprung her body up in an arc, thrusting all her weight at him like a wrecking ball. Her face hit his chest, and the dolly tipped back on him. They tumbled to the ground.
The covered bridge looked just as the Ranger lieutenant had described it. Dark. Scary. And unfortunately empty.
“Stop here,” Riley told David. “Are there any tracks?”
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