by Joanna Wayne
She stepped out of Dallas’s arms, moved away from the window and walked around the room, finally perching on the edge of Malcomb’s desk. “He was part of the team of doctors who saw my father when he had his heart attack. Then, a few months later, after I’d resigned from my job in Washington and moved back to Shreveport, we ran into each other at a charity function, an auction to raise money for the new children’s wing at the hospital. He was charming, attentive and sophisticated. I thought he was a nice guy, though I wasn’t particularly attracted to him. The next day he sent flowers. After that, he started calling two or three times a week until I agreed to go out with him.”
“So he was always persistent.”
“Yes, but then it seemed flattering. I’d had a rough year, what with Dad dying and my dealing with the added responsibility of making sure Ronnie was taken care of. I’m sure I was more vulnerable than usual.”
“Good timing on Malcomb’s part.”
“Naturally. He’s the master of the game, which at the time was get Nicole Dalton to the altar.”
She put her hands under her hair and lifted it, letting it fall in disarray to her slender shoulders. She didn’t mean the movement to be seductive, but it got to Dallas, made it difficult for him not to touch her or hold her again. He wondered if it would always be like that. But of course, it would be. She was Nicole.
“Do you love him?” He hated himself for asking that question, mainly because he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. She stared into space, her eyes suddenly misty, and his heart felt as if someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer.
“I’m not sure I ever did. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but I’m trying to be honest. I loved being in love, having someone to lean on, believing that what he said was true and that we were destined to be together. But how could I have loved him, when all he ever let me see of him was a perfectly designed mask? And it was never the way…”
Her voice trailed off, but when she looked at him, Dallas saw a trace of the old desire in her eyes. “Not like what, Nicole?”
She shook her head. “It’s not important now. I just have to get through this.”
“And you will. I’ll be here to help you.”
“What do we do now, Dallas?”
“You leave town. Go somewhere safe, a resort on the ocean where you listen to the calming sounds of the waves and think about things other than murder. We’ll handle the investigation.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What do you mean? You admitted to me downstairs that you thought Malcomb might be the killer we’re looking for.”
“He might be. If he is, you’re not going to get him off the streets and behind bars without evidence.”
“I’ll find the evidence. It just takes time.”
“But it might not take as much time if you have a person on the inside. Tell me what to look for. Behavior patterns. Souvenirs he might have taken. Notes he may have kept. A weapon he may have hid.”
“No way! No heroics on my watch. You’re not a cop. You don’t carry a gun. You’re not invited to the dance.”
“I don’t have to be invited. I live here.”
“What are you trying to prove?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. But if Malcomb is the deranged serial killer who’s terrorizing the town, then I’m not going to run away and wait for him to kill someone else, not if there’s even a minuscule chance I can stop him. Besides, serial killers don’t ordinarily kill their spouses.”
“There’s nothing ordinary about this case. And who’s to say what Malcomb might do if he thinks you’re on to him?”
“If I think I’m in danger, I’ll leave.”
“I just hope it’s not in a body bag.” God, how could he have even thought that, much less said it? Now the image tore at him, like a grizzly bear mauling its defenseless prey.
His cell phone rang. He barked a hello, mainly because he couldn’t talk in a normal voice at this point.
“Is this Detective Mitchell?” The voice was male, low and shaky.
“Yeah. Who’s calling?”
“Jim Castle.”
No wonder the guy sounded weak. Still he’d managed to find the phone number Dallas had left with him when they’d talked.
“I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“Are you still in the hospital?”
“Yes. Room 512. Don’t ask anyone if you can come in. They’ll say no. Just walk past them and come to my bed.”
“Want to tell me what this is about?”
“Yeah. I have a confession to make.”
Dallas’s pulse rate shot upward. “Does it have to do with Karen Tucker’s pregnancy?”
“Yes. And about her murder.”
“I’ll be there on the double.”
But Jim didn’t hear his words. The connection had already gone dead and he was staring at a needle that was about to be plunged into his bloodstream.
THE ELEVATOR SEEMED interminably slow. “We could have climbed the steps and been to the fifth floor by now,” Corky said, punching the elevator button again as if that would make the car come more quickly.
Dallas had called him on the way over, and Corky had driven into the parking area right behind Dallas. Finally the bell dinged and the elevator door slid open. They waited while a couple of doctors and two elderly men in coveralls and plaid flannel shirts stepped off. The men smelled of sweat and garlic, the doctors of cologne and antiseptic. Practically a lethal mix, Dallas decided as he all but gagged in reaction.
“I never figured Jim Castle for our Fastidious Freddie,” Corky said, once the elevator doors had closed and the car had resumed its climb. “The guy seems too much a wimp.”
“Doesn’t take a lot of bravery to kill an unsuspecting woman. Besides, he hasn’t actually confessed to anything yet.”
“Yeah, but he attempted suicide. Not the reaction of an innocent man. And he told you he wanted to talk about a murder. A neat little package. Who’d have ever thought it would fall into our laps this easily?”
Certainly not Dallas. And he never trusted things that came too easily. That’s why he wasn’t celebrating yet.
He knew something was wrong the second they stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor. It was in the expression of the nurses at the desk, in the stance of the doctor who was filling out forms, in the deathly quiet that seemed to have settled like heavy fog.
Dallas followed Dr. Castle’s instructions, walking past the nurses and going directly to Room 512. The door was ajar. He started to knock, then changed his mind when he heard soft sobs. He eased the door open enough to see inside. The bed was empty. Sara Castle sat in the chair next to it, her face ashen, tears rolling down her cheeks. And standing over her was Dr. Malcomb Lancaster, comforting the new widow with a lot of meaningless words and phrases.
Dallas backed out the door.
“There goes our confession,” Corky said. “If we’d only been here a few minutes sooner, we might have made it before the guy croaked.”
They could build a whole new world on “ifs.”
MALCOMB DIALED THE NUMBER of the private detective he’d hired to watch his house, a man he could trust. A man he paid exceedingly well. More than ever he needed the satisfaction his marriage to Nicole brought him, but he would not have her entertaining that worthless, inferior detective in their home. Who knew what they did once they were behind closed doors?
“I had a message that you’d called,” Malcomb said when Harry Burger answered the phone. “Do you have something to report?”
“You were right. A man matching the description you gave me showed up at your house shortly after you left. Some woman was already there, but she left when the guy showed up.”
That would have been Janice. She’d told him she’d gone by as he’d asked, but she hadn’t mentioned that Dallas was there. She and Nicole were both playing him for a fool. Too bad. He was smarter than all of them.
He’d always been smarte
r than everyone else. Even smarter than Gerald Dalton. Gerald Dalton, the woman-stealing senator. Piece of rotten filthy trash.
The detective was still talking, giving him the details of Dallas’s visit. The time he arrived. The time he left. But the details weren’t important. Malcomb knew enough. Nicole was a slut just like all the rest.
And sluts deserved to die.
Chapter Thirteen
Corky forked up a bite of pancakes, dabbed it in the river of syrup he’d poured in his plate and poked the drippy, sticky mess into his mouth. “Guess our cute little profiler was off target with Fastidious Freddie,” he said, between bites. “Of course, she did say he was in the medical profession. So she wasn’t all wrong. But Jim Castle was a far cry from a smooth operator, and he was about as attractive as a toad.”
“You’re talking about the dead.”
“Yeah, a dead lunatic who tortured women for pleasure. As if being a shrink wasn’t bad enough.”
It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since they’d stood in the doorway of Room 512 and heard Malcomb Lancaster mouth words of sympathy to his friend’s widow. Nothing had been released to the news media as yet, but both Corky and the chief believed that their serial killer was lying in state at the local funeral home.
“I’m not convinced Jim killed anyone,” Dallas said, voicing the doubts that plagued him. “And certainly not the three victims before Karen.”
“What do you want? Pictures? The guy all but confessed.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Only because he died first. We should have the DNA report back by this afternoon. I’m willing to bet it’ll show he was the father of the baby Karen never got to have.”
“And even if it does, it won’t prove murder.”
“It’s all the proof I need, and you can’t take a corpse to trial, anyway, so we don’t have to convince a jury.”
“Still, it doesn’t explain the nude snapshots Malcomb has in his possession.”
“Face it, partner. Your old girlfriend married a pervert. If she’s smart, she’ll divorce him. If you’re smart, you’ll take up where you left off years ago. It’s for damn sure you’re still stuck on her.”
“You make it all sound so easy.”
“And you’re just looking for complications where there aren’t any. For some reason yet to be discovered, and in ways we’ll probably never know, Jim Castle managed to pick up good-looking women. Then, because he was nuts, he tortured and killed them instead of just screwing them like a normal red-blooded guy.”
“Then explain Karen Tucker. He kept her around long enough to get her pregnant. Even then he didn’t kill right away. He tried to break it off. She wouldn’t let go. Then he killed her. That doesn’t fit the pattern.”
“So he had a special affinity for nurses. And she liked him. That probably didn’t happen too often. But eventually he got upset and killed her, the same way he had the others.”
“Only not exactly the same way,” Dallas said, still running the situation over in his mind. “No torture. A sloppy cleanup job. No excess gratuitous DNA contaminating the scene.”
“Maybe he was having a bad hair day.”
“Too many suppositions.”
“If the killings stop, that’s good enough for me. Happens with the drug dealers all the time. One of the major players gets gunned down, and we can write off a string of unsolved murders we know he committed, but couldn’t find people brave or suicidal enough to testify against him.”
“Yeah. But there’s that photography club that Penny Washington mentioned.”
“We’ve both tried to run that down. There’s no sign it exists. And you said yourself you thought her call to Nicole was a put-up deal.”
“But that doesn’t mean that everything she said was a lie. I know you think it’s over, but I’m still not quite ready to call this one solved.”
“Then you might be interested in something I uncovered this morning.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember how Malcomb said his parents were dead?”
“Killed in a car crash in Little Rock, Arkansas. They owned a car dealership there.”
“Well, that’s not exactly the truth. Jackson and Mildred Lancaster lived their whole lives in and around Monticello, Arkansas. They still do. Only his old man doesn’t own a dealership. He’s a mechanic who works out of a garage behind his house.”
Dallas muttered a curse. “How did you learn that?”
“Practicing my detective skills while you were schmoozing with the chief this morning.”
“Looks like I need to take a run up to Monticello.”
“Why? If Malcomb’s not even claiming their alive, they probably don’t know beans about him.”
“Just practicing my detective skills.” Dallas finished his omelette, drank the rest of his coffee and was just about to fish some bills out of his pocket to pay the check when his police radio squawked out the bad news.
Another woman’s body had been found.
THE CRIME SCENE WAS as gruesome as the first three. The woman hadn’t been dead long: somewhere between three and eight hours, would be Dallas’s educated guess. Forensics would probably pin it down a lot closer. She’d been tortured like the first three victims, her throat cut, then she’d been scrubbed as clean as if she’d been bathed in a tub of soapy water.
“Looks like she was posing for a picture in a girly magazine,” one of the cops said, as he strung a ribbon of yellow police tape around the scene. “One hand flung out. The other holding her crotch.”
“A pretty sickening picture,” Corky said. “Not like any girly magazine I’d buy.”
A sickening picture. Like the ones Nicole had found hanging on the wall in Malcomb’s immaculate and perfectly organized study and hobby area. Maybe even like some of the black-and-white snapshots he may have taken himself.
Dallas’s instincts were razor sharp as he finished his work at the crime scene. He wanted every scrap of evidence he could get. If Malcomb had killed this woman…
His heart constricted painfully, as if bound by barbed wire. Innocent or guilty, Malcomb would be going home to Nicole tonight. Dallas had to get her out of that house. And this time he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not even if he had to throw her over his shoulder and carry her home with him like some Neanderthal.
He’d keep Nicole safe. And he’d catch this killer. Those two thoughts stayed with him, drove him, kept the adrenaline high as he did what he had to do.
To serve and protect. It was the life of any good cop. But what he felt for Nicole went miles beyond that.
NICOLE WALKED THE PATH that meandered along the Red River and edged Clyde Fant Parkway, listening to Dallas’s announcement that another body had been found. And this time there was no way to blame the murder on Jim Castle. So there was nothing for her to do but deal with the same cold, faceless fear that would torment women all over the city. Fear for themselves, their friends, their daughters.
“Was Malcomb home last night?” Dallas asked.
“For a while. He was called to the hospital about 2:00 a.m. for an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency does a heart surgeon have? He surely doesn’t do surgery in the middle of the night.”
“One of the men he operated on yesterday was experiencing complications. He likes to be there when that happens.”
“Did he come home after that?”
“Around daybreak.”
“Which means he had the opportunity to commit last night’s murder.” Dallas kicked at a pebble in his path, sending it bouncing along the walk. “You have to get away from Malcomb.”
She exhaled sharply. “Nothing’s changed, Dallas, and we’ve already talked about this.”
“Things have changed for me. I visited yet another crime scene, saw the killer’s handiwork again. He’s a brutal psychopath with no conscience.”
“Malcomb’s friends and colleagues would think you were crazy for even suspecting he co
uld be a deranged serial killer. My friends would think you’re off your rocker. Janice would believe you’re mad.”
“From Janice, that would be an improvement. But I really don’t give a damn what any of those people think. I want you safe.”
“Don’t you think I want to leave? Do you think I like sitting across the table from Malcomb when all the time I’m thinking of those horrible pictures and wondering just what he’s capable of? Do you think it doesn’t make me sick at my stomach when he touches me or kisses me?”
“Then listen to reason.”
“Reason? Four women are dead. My husband may be the killer. How can you get reason from that?”
Her voice was too loud and her body was trembling. Dallas took her arm, tugged her off the path to a bench that faced the water.
He sat down beside her, so close their bodies touched. “You have to think of yourself.”
“Why? That’s not what you’re doing. And if Malcomb is the killer, it seems that trying to find a way to stop him is the least I can do. So unless you can guarantee me that Malcomb didn’t kill those women, I have a responsibility to the thousands of innocent women in this town.”
“You know I can’t make that guarantee. I think it’s very possible that he did kill them.”
“So we have a stalemate.”
“I’m not buying that.”
“So you’ve said.”
He grunted, a man’s version of a frustrated sigh, she suspected. “What has Malcomb told you about his parents?” he asked.
“Not a lot. He was an only child and very close to them until they were killed in an automobile accident right after he started med school. I’m thankful now that they are dead. I can’t even imagine how hurt they would be if it turns out that he’s guilty.”
“They’re not dead. They’re alive and well and living in Monticello, Arkansas.”
She exhaled sharply, trying unsuccessfully to bite back the caustic anger. “Are you serious?”