Nikki yawned. Jessica yawned. I yawned. We all yawned again, simultaneously, then we laughed about it.
A set of headlights pricked the darkness down at the curve of the road. That was fast. Too fast.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I sent Nikki and Jessica into the woods with orders to run like hell if necessary. I turned out the lights in the house and stood in the darkness just inside the door. The lights came steadily closer. When they reached the driveway, I could make out the shape of the vehicle. An old pickup with one occupant. The lights swept across me as the driver angled in beside the Cadillac. He left the motor running and got out, standing by the door of the truck. He was wearing old jeans, cowboy boots, and a western hat that shadowed his face. His right hand was in the big pocket of his denim chore coat.
I pushed the screen door open and stood in the doorway, holding my gun out of sight behind the doorjamb.
“Looks like you got a fire,” the man said.
“Yeah, looks that way.”
“You call the fire department?”
“There’s no phone.”
We had run out of conversation. We stood and stared at each other for a while. He kept his hand in his pocket.
I walked across the porch and down the stairs, my right hand down at my side, holding the gun behind my leg. The man used his left hand to rub his chin.
“It won’t spread,” he said. “Ground’s too wet.”
I nodded my agreement.
We were fifteen feet apart. Neither of us seemed to have any idea what to do so we just stood there looking at each other for a couple of minutes. His jacket pocket looked too bulky to be holding nothing but a hand.
Some part of the barn collapsed, sending flames whooshing upward. The glow lit up the front yard, obliterating shadows. I could see the man’s face clearly—a hooked nose, a jutting chin, a shock of gray hair showing under the hat. He must have been able to see my face clearly, too, because he grinned and said, “Bundy told me you look like Superman.”
The cavalry had arrived.
Within minutes, the old house was bustling with activity. The driver of the pickup was the local county sheriff and the four men who hopped out of the bed of the truck were his deputies. “Bundy didn’t fill me in,” the sheriff told me. “Just said we had rape and murder and Christ knows what-all going on up here. The place is so damn isolated we decided we better come in undercover, see if we could figure out what we were up against instead of barreling in with red lights and sirens.” He looked around the living room. “Looks like we missed all the excitement.”
Two sheriff’s cars arrived, closely followed by a fire truck and an ambulance. The firemen stood around and watched the barn burn safely to the ground while the wounded men were removed and I tried to give a coherent, chronological account of the night’s events. I must have made some sense. The Sheriff didn’t ask many questions. Nikki filled in the missing part, which I had already figured out. After he delivered his message to me in Portland, he had been accosted by the jock and the smoker and was hustled into the Buick at gunpoint.
Jessica sat close beside me while she told her story, her voice calm and clear, her nails digging scarlet crescents into her palms. She had gone to the Northwest Acting and Modeling School Thursday morning. After the discouraging reception at the Rose City School of Performing Arts, Virginia’s interest and encouragement had seemed miraculous. Virginia had talked to her for a long time and had suggested a screen test for “art films.” Jessica agreed and Blackbeard and Nikki’s jock drove her out to the house that same morning. By the time Jason and Lily showed up in my office Sunday afternoon, their daughter had been filmed performing a nude dance and had been raped on-camera.
When Jessica found out what type of “art films” the fat man made, she flatly refused to make a movie with any kind of sex in it, real or simulated, but the fat man’s offer of a thousand dollars cash for a solo nude dance was too good for a girl on the run to turn down.
The dance was filmed on Friday and that night she woke to sudden bright lights and two naked men wearing ski masks. She fought and lost and spent the rest of the night huddled in terror on the bed. She thought at first that the rapists were intruders and that the fat man and his friends had been murdered. But sometime in that long night, Jessica put it all together, the locked room and the bright lights and the mirrored wall. She wasn’t surprised when the fat man walked into the rom the next morning.
He took her downstairs and made her watch both tapes, her nude dance and the recording of her own rape. He told her that if she went to the police, the dance tape would prove that she had known the rape was a movie scene.
“He was crazy,” Jessica said. “They all were. No one would believe that was acting. No one can act that good. I couldn’t believe they were going to let me go. How could they think I’d let them get away with it? I thought they were going to kill me.”
Desperate to save her life, Jessica put on the show of a lifetime. She pouted for a while, then treated the rape as a good joke. She offered to make more movies and questioned the fat man at length about how much money she could make. “The others were gone a lot of the time and I was alone with Edward—that’s that fat pig upstairs. He was like a little kid. I don’t think any girl ever acted like she liked him before or even talked to him. Well, who would? He’s totally disgusting.”
The fat man not only fell for Jessica’s act but fell for her as well. “I flirted with him and sat on his lap and stuff like that. I would have thrown up if he wanted to… do anything else but he wasn’t interested anyway. I think maybe he couldn’t. I mean, he couldn’t be very healthy, could he?
“I was hoping I could get him to trust me and then I was going to tell him I was bored out here and see if I could talk him into taking me out to dinner. I thought maybe I could get away or at least get to a telephone.”
Jessica’s plan to win the fat man’s confidence went along just fine until I showed up at the Northwest Acting and Modeling School Monday morning. Virginia called the house. The fat man was furious because Jessica had lied to Virginia, claiming she was from Pennsylvania and had run away months ago. When they found out she lived in Oregon and her parents had enough money to hire a private detective, things got very tense at the old house. Jessica was locked in her rom most of the time but she overheard enough conversations to figure out that at least one girl had been killed and that they were following me around.
The calls to Hank were Jessica’s idea. She thought if I stopped looking for her, things would calm down and she could eventually get away. The fat man told her to say she was in downtown Portland, hoping to limit my movements and keep me confined to an area where I could be tailed easily.
After she finished her story, the sheriff questioned her briefly about the rapists. She had heard their voices and was sure they were strangers, not the men in the house now. She described her attackers’ bodies as swell as she could. One of them had a big hairy mole on his groin. I almost threw up listening to her.
Jessica fell asleep with her head against my shoulder. Nikki was already asleep, stretched out on the couch on my other side, with his head on my thigh. One of the deputies came into the room and waved a small white telephone at me. He had found it in an oatmeal box.
The fire captain came into the house and crouched in front of me, clipboard on his knee. He was a freckle-faced redhead with eyes that had seen too many things go up in smoke.
“Any idea how the fire started?” he asked.
“I set it.”
He jotted something on his report form, nodded, and said, “Why?”
“Signal fire.”
“We got 911 out here,” he said.
“I couldn’t find a phone.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “What about the fire in the kitchen?”
“I set that one, too.”
He jotted, nodded, and asked why.
“Diversionary tactic.”
“Uh-huh. You know anything
about the car down in the ravine?”
“It’s mine. I headed it down the hill and jumped out.”
“Why?”
“Uh…”
“Diversionary tactic?”
“That’ll do.”
He looked at the smoke-blackened wall by the ruined radio and didn’t bother asking. “Busy night,” he said and went back outside.
I was asleep with my cheek on Jessica’s head when Bundy arrived. He shook me awake and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty.”
He looked around the living room, shaking his head. The redhead was still on the floor where he had fallen, blood blackening the carpet around him. The smoker’s body was on a stretcher by the door. There was a heated discussion going on about the best way to get a four-hundred-pound dead body down the stairs.
“It got a little messy. I guess you found Virginia.”
“We staked out the school and her apartment. She came home about thirty minutes after you called me. Her car was crammed with pornographic photographs of minors. Another of the school’s sidelines. They were moving the whole operation. We had to wait for a lawyer but eventually she talked. She’s claiming all she did was recruit girls for movies and she doesn’t know anything about rape or murder. But she told us about this place. Wilson and Garcia had called in by then, saying you’d given them the slip. I didn’t know what the hell you thought you were doing but this seemed like a good place to start, so I called the sheriff and told him to get up here.”
“They kidnapped Nikki.”
“Yeah, the sheriff already filled me in. Featherhill’s from California. He disappeared about eight months ago when the cops were closing in on a porno ring he was running down there. I need to talk to the sheriff then I’m taking you and the kids back to Portland. Finney’s meeting us at the hospital.”
“Featherhill?”
“The fat man. Edward Featherhill.”
“That fat blob’s name is Featherhill?”
“Go back to sleep.”
It was four-thirty in the morning when Bundy shook me awake again. Nikki and Jessica and I stumbled out to his car. The kids fell asleep again immediately. It took us less than an hour to reach the outskirts of Portland. The Buick had taken a circuitous route, maybe to be sure I was lost or to avoid cops or maybe they needed to waste some time so the second car would be in place waiting for me. I had seen enough of rural Oregon to last me for a while. The lights of Portland were friendly and welcoming.
Jason and Lily were waiting in the emergency room at the hospital. I had been wrong about Lily. She didn’t look better without the makeup, just older. The Finney family reunion was painfully awkward. Jessica seemed to be the oldest of the three, calmly reassuring her parents while Lily made clumsy, ineffectual mothering motions and Jason became very busy with paperwork at the admissions window.
Jessica gave me a quick hug and a whispered “Thank you,” then she and her mother followed a nurse down the hall. Jason watched them go then turned to me and said, “Well, that’s over. You’ll be sending your bill, of course. Itemized, please.” He walked off down the hall.
Bundy looked stunned.
“He doesn’t like goodbyes,” I said.
“Or thank yous. Where did Nikki get to?”
I shrugged. Nikki had made a phone call as soon as we got to the hospital and the last I saw of him he was blowing me a kiss from the entrance. A long silver-gray shape was waiting at the curb for him.
Bundy shrugged, too. “We can find him when we need him,” he said. We went to the Justice Center. As soon as we walked into his office, Bundy picked up the Sunday Oregonian that was on his desk. He glanced at the headlines, then flipped the paper over to look at the bottom half of the front page.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “The Mackie cops figured out who done it.”
Not now, I thought. But it was now. Bundy held the paper so I could see it. Allison, in living color, in a classic graduation pose, an off-the-shoulder black velvet drape contrasting beautifully with her hair, the diamond from her mother’s wedding ring sparkling against creamy skin. I returned her smile weakly. “Pretty,” I said.
Bundy scanned the story. “Mary Allison Vanzetti. Seventeen. Vanzetti’s daughter. Jesus, how old was he? Sixty-eight? Must have been a change-of-life surprise. Ran away from a private school in Connecticut Sunday. The school made some discreet inquiries before it finally notified the police and hired a private detective who found out she flew from New York to Portland Sunday. Portland PB was routinely notified and, bingo, Mackie’s got its killer. All they have to do is find her.”
“Is there a warrant?”
“Being sought for questioning right now. Wonder why she killed him. Big-time criminal and he gets killed by his own kid.”
“Any chance of getting a cup of coffee?” I asked.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was almost eight o’clock when Bundy let me go. A uniformed cop dropped me off at the motel. Allison was awake and pacing. And furious.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “You said you’d be back by three o’clock. I kept waking up all night and you didn’t come home and I thought something awful happened.”
She flung herself at me, sobbing. “I pattered her back and made comforting noises, thinking, Home. Jesus, what have I done now?
With her face against my neck, Allison said, “Carrie called about six o’clock. She sounded worried. You’re supposed to call her. And your answering service called just a few minutes ago.” She stepped back and really looked at me for the first time. “What happened to your face?” she asked, then her eyes widened as she took in my ripped, muddy, bloody clothes. “What happened?”
“I lost a fight with some blackberries. I’ll tell you all about it after I take a shower.”
I made the phone calls first. I assured Carried that she still had a brother and that I definitely did not want to hear what she dreamed last night, then I called the answering service. Russell Garvey wanted to talk to me as soon as possible. I called the store in Allentown.
“Hey, man,” Sarge said. “This is a murder investigation.”
“Yeah, I know. What did they ask you?”
“Not much. They were out here yesterday evening. They asked if I saw the girl and what time it was and if she talked to anyone and if I saw how she left. They weren’t interested in the customers, just asked the waitresses if any of them had talked to the girl. I didn’t have to tell any lies, but look, this is murder, man. I’m withholding information. That’s a fucking felony.”
“It’ll all be cleared up soon. It’s been almost a week now. You could have actually forgotten I was there. There’s no way they can prove you remembered.”
“Yeah, I guess, but still…”
“It’ll be cleared up soon. You won’t get in any trouble.”
Sarge still seemed uneasy but he agreed to keep quiet. I told him I’d explain the whole thing to him later.
I called the lobby and asked for a two o’clock wake-up call, then I took a long hot shower. I put on my sweatpants and joined Allison in her bed and told her the granddaddy of all why-I-didn’t-come-home-last-night stories.
She listened quietly, then said, “Well, you could have at least called.”
I smiled against her hair. “I thought you’d be sleeping”
She raised up on her elbow and looked at me, her midnight eyes solemn. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Me, too.”
I pulled her down against me. “You had a rough night,” I said.
She nodded against my shoulder then we both started laughing and we laughed ourselves right to sleep.
I slept like the dead until the phone rang at two. So did Allison. Must have been a very rough night. Her day was going to be even rougher. While she was in the shower, I went down to the lobby and bought a newspaper. I considered getting her something to eat first but decided against it. She’d just throw it up.
I
waited until she was dressed and had the tangles combed out of her hair, then I motioned for her to join me at the table. I put the newspaper in front of her. She stared at her graduation picture, her face draining of color. “Oh, god, what am I going to do?” she asked. Then she got up and went into the bathroom. I listened to her retching and gasping. So much for keeping her stomach empty.
She got into bed when she came out of the bathroom. She was shaking and pale, clutching Mr. Smith tightly. I sat beside her and stroked her hair. I couldn’t think of any way to help except to keep her from doing something foolish.
After a few minutes, I got up and changed clothes. She was sitting up in bed when I came out of the bathroom. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I have an appointment with the DA about last night. I thought I’d try to look respectable.” I was wearing a gray three-piece suit that clashed badly with the scratches all over my face and hands. “You just stay here until I get back,” I added.
She didn’t say anything until I was at the door with my hands full. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m afraid you’ll panic and try to run.”
“Please, Zachariah, don’t take my things. I’ll stay here, I promise.”
“Then you won’t need these, will you?” Something soft hit the door behind me as I closed it. Mr. Smith, probably. Like hell she’d stay there.
I called a cab from the lobby and directed the driver to take me to a car rental agency. I needed a trunk so I could stash Allison’s things. I had the feeling the DA might look a bit askance at me if I showed up in his office carrying a pair of white leather sandals, a pair of women’s Adidas, a floppy-brimmed straw hat, and a big white leather purse. As it was, the cab driver looked a bit askance at me. He kept sneaking peeks at me in the mirror, no doubt committing my face to memory for when the cops came around looking for a serial killer with a shoe fetish.
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