“How the hell should I talk, then, Amanda? Can you tell me it’s gonna be all right? God!” He laughed bitterly. “Can you even tell me that, if by some miracle I was able to dance on it eventually, Charlie would still hold my place for me?”
Amanda and Rhonda exchanged uneasy glances. As they had left the lounge after the aborted rehearsal, they had both heard Charlie telling Lennie to get on the phone and try to locate that guy who had auditioned for him.
“Listen,” Rhonda said sternly. “Nobody expects you to act like Pollyanna. It’s a rotten thing that happened to you. But the only way you’re going to get through this is to take it one step at a time. You can’t just blow it all off before you know exactly what you’ve got to deal with. Maybe the doctors…”
“What?” Pete demanded as her voice trailed off. “Maybe the doctors what?”
“Well, maybe you should get a second opinion, is all. They probably want to see how it heals before they hold out any encouragement. I don’t know, Pete! Just don’t give up on yourself.”
“Yeah, okay,” he agreed. He took a deep breath and wiped at his cheeks with the back of his wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall apart on you like that. It’s just…” His eyes filled up with tears again, and impatiently he shook his head. “No. I’m not going to worry about it tonight—at least, I’ll try not to.”
Pete’s current lover came rushing in at that moment. He fussed around the bed, straightening and touching and exclaiming, and after a few moments of watching his solicitous ministrations, Amanda and Rhonda excused themselves.
They avoided catching each other’s eyes in the elevator, and the ride back to the Cabaret was made in strained silence. It wasn’t until Amanda was already dressed in her costume for the first number and leaning into the lighted mirror to put the finishing touches on her makeup that she raised her head and met Rhonda’s eyes for the first time since leaving Pete’s hospital room.
“What would you do?” she inquired softly beneath the babble of the other dancers’ voices.
“I don’t know.” Rhonda didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’ve been asking myself that very thing since we saw him.” She put down her lipstick and swivelled to face Amanda directly. “Mandy, I feel so damn guilty at the relief I felt knowing it wasn’t me that it happened to.”
Amanda stared at her in astonishment. “Oh, God, you, too? I thought it was only me.” She picked up her elaborate headdress and secured it over her hair. “You know, it’s sort of crazy, but when I think of the guy who’s killing the dancers, I can’t imagine that happening to me. Well, I did briefly when MacLaughlin scared me half to death out in the yard, but not ordinarily, you know? Not even with Maryanne’s death and what happened to you last week in that parking lot. It just doesn’t seem quite real. But something like this—the idea of having your entire life go down the tubes because of some stupid freak accident—that I can imagine, and it scares me to death.”
“Yeah, it could happen.”
“I don’t know what I would do if that happened to me. Dance has been my entire life since I was seven years old: it’s the only thing I know. My friends are all dancers. My social life is built almost exclusively around dance. God, here I am, twenty-eight years old, and I’ve only had three lovers in my entire life, and one of them was a dancer, too.” She closed her eyes briefly. Opening them, she shuddered lightly. “Lord, if I couldn’t do it anymore…”
She watched as Rhonda put a high-heeled foot up on a stool and straightened the sheer tights of her costume by cupping her hands around her trim ankle and smoothing upward over calf, knee, and thigh. Rhonda dropped her leg and hooked a finger beneath the G-string of her costume where it rode the division of her buttocks, squatting slightly to adjust it to a more comfortable fit.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she continued, handing the other woman her headdress. “Feeling that flash of triumph because it hadn’t happened to me might make me feel like a selfish bitch, but I’m going to enjoy dancing tonight. My brain might feel sadness for Pete’s situation and guilt for my own duplicity, but my body feels alive and rarin’ to go. It wants to celebrate its healthy condition.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Mandy Rose—believe me, I do.” Rhonda faced her, and a slight smile curved one corner of her mouth. “But just once in your life, why don’t you celebrate your body’s healthy condition by finding yourself a man after the last show. Pick out some healthy stud, take him home, close the doors, and don’t come out again until you’re both too worn out to think. After all, kid, there’s celebrating, and then there is celebrating.”
“Rhonda, that just isn’t me.”
“Well, that’s what I’m gonna do.” The discordant notes of the orchestra tuning up faded away, and moments later it began to play in earnest. Rhonda had to raise her voice slightly to be heard over it. The other dancers began to drift out of the dressing room to assemble according to height out in the wings. “And let me tell you, kid, for sheer relaxation, nothing can beat it.”
At Amanda’s skeptically raised dark eyebrows, Rhonda said heatedly, “Don’t you dare tell me again that you’re cold, or asexual, or whatever the hell it is you think you are. Some intellectual type once said there are no frigid women, only inept men. And I say hallelujah. If you aren’t impressed with the benefits of a little sexual therapy, it’s probably because your previous lovers were bumbling idiots whose only interest was in taking care of themselves.”
“Rhonda! Amanda!” Charlie’s voice roared down the corridor. “Get your butts out here. Pronto!”
They trotted for the wings. “Hell, Mandy, you said it yourself,” Rhonda continued with determination. She detested seeing someone as sweet as Amanda go to waste. “You’ve only ever had three lovers. I don’t know about the first two, but I know for a fact that the last one lasted for less than six months before he reconciled with the ex-wife. And heck, if you’re too shy to try your hand with a stranger, you don’t even have to go looking for anyone. You’ve got the perfect candidate living right below you. Just knock on MacLaughlin’s door. I bet he could change your mind in a hurry about the therapeutic benefits of the horizontal boogaloo.”
“Why do you keep trying to link me with MacLaughlin? I’m not the one he sent flowers to.” Although she had to admit she’d begun to regard him with different eyes since he’d made that gesture. It had been such a…such a very…well, human thing to do.
“I don’t know. There’s just something there. I told ya, kid, I’ve got radar when it comes to this sorta thing. It could have something to do with the fact that when he’s around, you hardly look at anyone else. And you’re sure not your usual polite but reserved self with the guy. You let yourself get mad at him, and as funny as this will no doubt sound to someone raised to be the next Miss Manners, that’s actually an improvement over the indifference you show most men.”
“You’re crazy.”
Rhonda laughed. “Like a fox, honey.” She left to take her place in the lineup two dancers down. Amanda drew a deep breath, shook out her hands, and did some preliminary leg exercises to warm up.
“Okay, people, thirty seconds.”
“Hey, Amanda!”
Amanda leaned backward, disturbing the clean line the dancers made as they stood an exact arm’s length apart. Rhonda was doing the same, and she grinned at Amanda and gave her a thumbs-up. The music in the orchestra pit swelled.
“Five seconds to go, people. Four…three…two…”
“Break a leg, kid,” Rhonda called softly and straightened back into line. Her voice drifted back as the dancers began to run lightly toward the stage, smiles lighting their faces the moment the stage lights touched them. “Break a leg.”
“Yo, Lieutenant!”
Tristan looked up from the pile of papers on his desk. God, he hated this bloody paperwork. “Line two’s for you, sir.” One of his men waved a hand at the blinking light on the telephone in front of him. “Insists you’re the only one who can help
him.”
Tristan picked up the receiver, tossed down his pencil, and leaned back in his chair. “MacLaughlin.”
“Well, sure and begor-rrra,” a whispering voice said. “You sounded more like a Scot on the tube.”
Tristan straightened. “Who’s calling, please.” He stuck a finger in his free ear to block out the sound of loud voices, slamming file drawers, erratic typing, and ringing telephones that filled the squad room. The voice coming through the receiver was little more than a scratchy rasp, barely audible over the racket.
“Ach, Scotty, I am disappointed in you. Why, if the papers and the news on TV are to be believed, you’re Reno’s Great White Hope, come to rescue our fair-haired damsels in distress. I thought for sure you were gonna arrive on my doorstep any day now, complete with flashing blue lights and wailing sirens, to slap me in irons. But here you don’t even know who you’re talking to. Major disappointment, bud.”
“Are you the mon who’s been killing the dancers?” All around him the men fell silent. Someone left the room to search for the call-tracing equipment.
“Bull’s-eye.” The laugh that followed was self-satisfied. “I’ve been such a good boy lately, too, MacPrick, and let me tell you, it hasn’t been easy. I’m starting to feel the need for a little action. Yessir, I’m getting a definite itch. You got a special lady I can scratch it with?”
“No.” Tristan ignored the cold sweat that trickled down his backbone.
“Too bad. That could’ve made things more interesting.” There was a short, dead pause, during which Tristan was afraid his man had hung up. Then the raspy voice chuckled. “I did get a tad tired of being such a choirboy, though, so I entertained myself with a little diversion. It was strictly bush league, you understand, and not nearly as much fun as boppin’ the bitches, but still…”
“What did you do?”
“Hey, who’s the big detective around here, bud, you or me? Come on, genius, you’re the answer to all the dancers’ prayers…or so they say. Let’s see you figure it out.” A disdainful snort traveled down the telephone wires. “Not that you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell. When it comes to intelligence, I can run rings right around all you law-abiding bozo types.”
“I’m sure you can,” Tristan agreed and glanced over at the man with the call-tracer. The man shook his head.
“Damn right. Well, listen here, Scotty, beam me up. I’m afraid I gotta run. Give my love to all the dancers.” The man’s laugh raised the short hairs on the back of Tristan’s neck. “Tell them to watch their tails. I have been, and I’m starting to get a little antsy.”
“Wait! I don’t even know what to call you.”
“You can call me Duke, bud. Get it? Pretty fitting, eh? You already know how good I am with my fists.” The voice laughed again. “Ta, ta, mate. We’ll talk again.”
The line went dead.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” the technician on the tracer said. “I didn’t have enough time to run him down. I didn’t even get the lousy first digits.”
“It couldn’t be helped. If the bleedin’ sod is half as smart as he claims to be, he was calling from a pay phone anyhow—and not one close to his home. Shit!” Tristan’s hand slammed down on the desk. “He’s competitive. That makes the situation about as bad as it can get.”
“Will you go public with this, Lieutenant?” Joe asked.
“No. I’m afraid that’s exactly what he wants. If the media gets wind of this, Duke might go on a spree just to show the world how incompetent we are.” Tristan ran a hand through his hair. “I wonder what his side diversion was? Not a murder, obviously. Anything unusual come over the wires lately?”
Nobody knew of anything. “Hell,” Lavander Mason muttered in disgust. “It could be damn near anything—a rape, a beating. Those would still be within his MO, even if he stopped short of murder this time. And if he decided to diversify—shee-it.” He shook his head. “The mind simply boggles.”
“You think he could have been talking about his encounter with the Smith woman?” one of the detectives asked.
“Hell, who knows? I kinda doubt it, though. Rhonda Smith outsmarted the mon, and Duke doesn’t strike me as the type to brag about his failures. He must know we’ve come up empty at the florist shops and dusting her car, but he didn’t mention either, and I get the impression he’d leap at any opportunity to rub our noses in it. No, I’m afraid we’re going to have to search elsewhere.”
Tristan assigned a detail to review the recent complaints. His civilian force called the ER at each of the local hospitals and every out-clinic in the city that dealt with emergency walk-ins. They requested any reports pertaining to victims of violence that didn’t require strict notification of the police. That eliminated all gunshot wounds and other injuries caused by a lethal weapon. But it still left a number of incidents ranging from a wino beaten senseless for no apparent reason, to a homosexual who was beaten and robbed for either monetary gain or because the perpetrator had taken a violent dislike to the man’s sexual preference, to a severely beaten young woman who’d insisted to the skeptical emergency room doctor on duty that her injuries were caused by a fall down a flight of stairs.
As Mason had said, they were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Not to mention they were searching blind. They didn’t know what type of violence Duke had visited upon his victim, or when, or even if the victim had been a woman. Historically, offenders of Duke’s ilk repeated a pattern with one specific type of prey. But there weren’t any hard-and-fast rules that guaranteed it. They were dealing with the actions of a sociopath, and if it had been him that night in the parking lot with Rhonda, he had already altered the pattern by deliberately selecting a dark-haired woman when all his previous victims had been blondes. Hell, not knowing the nature of the assault, they couldn’t even be reasonably certain that the victim hadn’t either taken care of her own injuries or sought medical attention from her private physician.
It was work that promised to return negligible results, but Tristan knew that even the least likely prospects needed to be checked out thoroughly. If they could track down the proper victim, they would have their first eyewitness. And Tristan wanted that badly, before Duke decided to allow his competitive urges free reign.
Never one to give orders, then go home himself and put his feet up, Tristan worked alongside his task force. He worked double shifts, putting in eighteen-hour days, then went home and fell into a deep sleep for four or five hours. When he dragged himself out of bed, he worked out with his weights, ran three to five miles, showered, dressed, and ate his one meal of the day that didn’t originate in a fast-food joint. Then he went back to work. On the job, he fortified himself with gallons of acidic coffee and ate greasy convenience food when somebody shoved it under his nose.
Each day, Duke called to taunt Tristan with his lack of progress, and Tristan could only be grateful that thus far, the killer seemed satisfied merely to bait him with words. It was stressful enough, listening to him brag about how much smarter he was than Tristan and the rest of the task force. At least Duke hadn’t presented him with another body as well. Tristan decided to count his blessings where he could. Everything else about this case was turning to shit.
The aggravation of his fruitless search and Duke’s daily taunts, plus his lousy diet and lack of proper sleep, culminated in an explosion of uncontrolled aggression a week later. At least, that was what he assumed caused his loss of control—a loss that was more shattering to him than anything he had experienced in years. He was a man who prided himself on maintaining an iron discipline over his actions. He had learned at a tender age never to let his emotions surface for the world to take advantage of, and if he hadn’t awakened with that damned headache pounding in his temples, he never would have…
Oh, bugger all. Maybe he would have. But he wished to hell, if he’d had to lose his bloody temper, it could have been in front of someone other than Amanda Charles. Which was truly laughable, considering she was the on
ly person he knew who could blow his emotions all to hell and gone with what was beginning to be monotonous regularity. It aggravated the hell out of him.
On the other hand, momentarily looking the fool wasn’t necessarily the worst thing a man could do.
Not when you considered that just moments later he had come this close to making love to her. Up against the wall. In broad daylight. In that bonny little alcove outside her front door.
The day after Pete’s accident, Charlie brought in a replacement. His name was Dean Eggars, and he was the same dancer Charlie had held the unprecedented audition for a few weeks earlier.
Disgruntled by the swiftness with which a substitute had been found for one of their rank, the other dancers held themselves aloof from the new man for the first few days. They grumbled that Charlie’d at least had the decency to wait a week before he’d hired a replacement for Maryanne.
But the rampant speculation that Eggars must be one hell of a charmer to have convinced Charlie to grant him an audition in the first place soon proved to be true. He went out of his way to be agreeable to everyone, even at the risk of occasionally incurring Charlie’s wrath. One by one, the dancers succumbed to his considerable charms. Rhonda was one of the first, which Amanda, with unaccustomed cynicism, found not in the least surprising. After all, she decided with some irony, if Rhonda could find something to admire in MacLaughlin, whose charm quotient was zero, why should succumbing to Eggars be a great big shock? He was an attractive man. That had always been reason enough for Rhonda to be friendly in the past.
Shadow Dance Page 17