Shadow Dance

by Susan Andersen

  Well, wasn’t it amazing how naïve she had been an hour ago? It was a hell of a lot easier to be idealistic when you have never been attacked, she decided coldly as she sat on the side of the bed with the gun tucked between her knees, stuffing ammunition into the chambers. A number of bullets fell to the floor. It was a different story when you’d never felt firsthand the kind of pain that could be inflicted by a madman,

  But idealism, she was learning the hard way, was subjective. She set the gun down for a moment and snatched up the phone.

  Damn him to an eternity in hell. It was dead.

  Putting more bullets in her pocket, she grabbed up a scarf and tried to fashion a sling, but it was impossible to tie a knot one-handed. And he was at the door.

  When the door bowed inward with the force of his weight, Amanda pulled the trigger. He howled, but an instant later there was another thud. She fired again, her mind working coldly, remembering everything MacLaughlin had taught her. But Dean must have stood back to kick it that time, for he didn’t make a sound to indicate he had been hit. The door bowed inward again. Then it flew open, smashing against the wall and bouncing back until it almost closed again.

  “Come on, you sick bastard,” Amanda whispered, “come on.”

  There was silence from the other side. Amanda sat on the edge of the bed, training the gun on the door, her broken arm cradled in her lap. Oh, God, she hurt so bad. She could barely see for the pain, and it didn’t help that her right eye was swelling shut from the blow to her cheekbone. The sudden cessation of noise unnerved her. What was he doing?

  Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Still he didn’t make a move. Twice, music blared out of her stereo system in the living room. The first time, Amanda fired her gun at the door in sheer reaction. The second time, she merely jerked convulsively, then sat quivering with nerves until he turned it off again. She rested her gun hand on the bed, but she didn’t take her eyes off the door. She tried telling herself the longer he waited the better were her chances, for Rhonda surely must have heard the gunshots and called the police.

  But what if he had taken care of Rhonda, the way he had taken care of Kalowski, before he even came down here? And with every moment that ticked by, it grew harder to ignore the pain that radiated along her nerve endings, pulsing fresh agony with every heartbeat. Another ten minutes crawled by.

  Then Ace began to cry.

  Oh, God, what was he doing to the dog? Every few minutes Ace began to howl. Then the howls would fade to whimpers before they suddenly escalated again into pained yelps. Amanda’s nerves stretched closer and closer to the breaking point. The tiny bit of hope she had still harbored that Tristan would somehow get here in time to help her splintered beyond repair, and she became a being of pure instinct, embracing the corroding effects of hatred.

  Suddenly, something hurtled through the doorway. Amanda screamed and fired off a shot that went wild. She watched in horror as the object rolled across the carpet, spewing flames. It was some sort of handmade Molotov cocktail—a jar of flammable liquid with a length of cloth for a wick. Only the thickness of her rug prevented it from shattering. As it was, the liquid splashed out and caught fire to a pillow lying on the floor, and she was forced to tuck the gun in her waistband and grab her heavy wool poncho to beat out the flames.

  That was when Dean dove through the door. Amanda screeched and threw her poncho at him. It wrapped around his head and she struggled to extricate the gun from her waistband while he was distracted unwinding it. She was cold and clammy and rapidly losing strength. Her hand trembled badly and the gun wobbled precariously as he rose to his feet and came at her, brandishing one of her kitchen knives. He had another knife tucked into his belt, and the edges gleamed with a fresh sharpening. She took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

  Dean staggered and a new patch of red bloomed beneath his collarbone, but to Amanda’s horror, he kept coming. She didn’t think she could lift the gun one more time, and he was only four feet away.

  She shot him in the foot, then let the gun hang uselessly by her side and watched as he took another step toward her, dragging the injured foot behind him. Her eyes closed as he raised his arm, the knife clenched in his fist. It was silent in the room, except for the labored rasp of their combined breathing.

  Then the front door crashed open. “Amanda!” roared Tristan’s voice throughout the apartment.

  “You fucking bitch!” Dean snarled furiously, and Amanda smiled with cold malice, finding the strength to raise the gun one last time and aim it at him with lethal intent. He lunged at her with his knife.

  A shot rang out, and Amanda watched dumbly as finally, finally, Dean crumpled to the floor and was still.

  “Noooo!” she wailed, and the attenuated word was an anguished, animalistic cry. Tristan had shot him—Tristan had. Dammit, he was hers. It was up to her to…she wanted to kill him. She wanted…

  She met Tristan’s eyes across the room and pure revulsion twisted Amanda’s already misshapen features. Breaking eye contact, she regarded the gun in her hand with horror and flung it away. Oh God, what had Dean turned her into? What had that monster…?

  Everything went black.

  Chapter

  19

  “…hospital states her condition as satisfactory.”

  Tristan snapped off the television and looked down at the bed where Amanda slept. Satisfactory. That was one way of looking at it.

  It was true that her arm would mend and her bruises would fade. None of the injuries was permanent, and thank God for that. Tristan only wished he could feel as confident about the healing powers of her spirit.

  Slumped on his tailbone on the chair next to her bed, he watched over her. From the other side of the closed door, he could hear the muted sounds of the hospital settling for the night, as well as the occasional creak of a chair when the man who had been posted outside the door to keep the media away shifted position. Rubber-soled shoes squeaked on linoleum as nurses made their rounds, and down in the emergency entrance, a siren moaned into silence. But here in the room it was dim and quiet. Tristan chewed the skin around his index fingernail and regarded Amanda with unwavering intensity.

  He tried to convince himself that his pessimism was premature. He was probably expecting too much too soon. Hell, Amanda had been through an ordeal this morning that most people couldn’t even imagine. No doubt it would take some time for her to accept the reality of being safe.

  But his captain in Seattle had been fond of saying “don’t kid a kidder,” and the phrase had been running through his head all day long. He couldn’t fool himself—he was worried. He had seen many victims during his years on the force, but he had never seen eyes that had changed as much as Amanda’s had. Her beautiful eyes—those warm, honest, confident eyes—had learned not to trust. They now regarded everyone—friend, lover, and stranger alike—with a cold wariness. Someone he didn’t recognize looked out of Amanda’s familiar face, and it scared the living daylights out of him.

  Her account of her ordeal had been unemotional to the point of eeriness. There hadn’t been a trace of color in her face, except for its various contusions—the bruised-pansy purple of her left eye and the changing hues of her swollen-shut right eye. As white as the plaster on her left arm, she had sat up in her hospital bed, and, with a total lack of expression, recited the details of her encounter and dispassionately answered questions—coldly and precisely, without tremors, tears, or hysteria.

  Tristan rubbed a weary hand over his face. He would have welcomed an emotional display, but Amanda, whose expression was usually so easily read, had been impassively stoic.

  Only once in this entire long day had she seemed like herself, and then only for the briefest moment. It was right before they had brought her to the hospital. As the paramedics had been carrying her out to the ambulance, Rhonda had raced up, breathless and nearly incoherent, trying to simultaneously elicit information about Amanda’s condition and explain her frantic search for a telephone.
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  Apparently, Dean had disabled Rhonda’s car. Cursing her stubborn refusal to own a cell phone, she told them how she’d banged on doors all over the neighborhood before she had finally given up and started running for a convenience store about a mile away. Once there, she said she’d had to practically climb over the counter to convince the high school boy manning it to let her use the telephone. She was still quivering with reaction as she hovered over Amanda like a distraught mother over her only child, reassuring herself that Amanda really was alive and relatively whole.

  Amanda had clutched Rhonda’s arm with her good hand, begging her to find Ace and make sure he was all right. For just an instant, life had flared in her eyes. But as soon as she had obtained Rhonda’s promise to see to the dog, to make sure he was attended by a veterinarian, the wary stranger had returned, snuffing out the light of concern in her eyes. Tristan hadn’t seen a trace of the old Amanda since that moment. He didn’t even attempt to fool himself into believing it was the painkillers the doctors had prescribed that accounted for her cold control. It didn’t take a wizard to see that Amanda had locked herself in a place where she couldn’t be reached, and he just had to hope that she would come out of it again once she had a chance to realize she really was out of danger.

  She stirred. Tristan stood up and leaned over her expectantly, but she merely shifted her cast-encased arm a fraction of an inch. Her legs moved restlessly, looking for a more comfortable position, and she whimpered softly when she didn’t find one before lapsing deeper into sleep. Tenderly, Tristan pulled the sheet up over her shoulders and whispered a kiss across her mouth. When he straightened, he pulled his glasses off and ground the heels of his hands into his scorched eye sockets, massaging the pounding in his forehead and temples with his fingertips. He felt ten years older than he had this time last night.

  He had killed a man today, and he was finding it tough to come to terms with his reactions.

  Unlike their counterparts on television, real policemen don’t have shoot-outs on a weekly basis. And when they were forced to draw their guns and shoot, there were damn few who were ever able to view taking a life lightly. Dean Eggars was a cold-blooded murderer who’d deserved to die, he tried to assure himself. But Tristan experienced a sick regret all the same that it was by his hand the man had done so. Yet, as he looked at the damage Eggars had done to his Mandy, he felt a vengeful desire to have him alive once again and at his mercy, to experience the pleasure of beating the man, if not to death, then to within an inch of his life.

  Guilt and self-recrimination, in the form of a relentless leaden weight in his gut, had been constant companions all day long as he had tried to balance his obligations as a policeman and his emotions as the victim’s lover. For the first time since he had joined the force, he had resented his duty to his badge. Even though Amanda apparently had no use or need for him, it had torn him in two to be dragged away from her hospital bed for the better part of the day while he collected evidence at Eggar’s apartment, cleaned up loose ends, and dealt with the media.

  He had left her this morning when she had begged him to stay, and her accusation, which had so angered and hurt him at the time, had come true. While he was interrogating the wrong man, the killer had managed to get to Amanda. Kalowski had been a minimal deterrent at best; they had found his body in the shadowy alcove next to Amanda’s front door. Tristan felt responsible and he hadn’t wanted to leave her bedside. Only years of self-discipline had been able to pry him away.

  It didn’t alleviate his guilt to remember the look of loathing Amanda had given him or to keep hearing her demented cry when she’d realized he had killed Eggars. He didn’t understand it. From her own account of the events, she had tried her damnedest to kill the man herself, yet she had regarded Tristan with a revulsion he couldn’t erase from his mind. For just an instant, she had looked at him as if she hated him. And since that moment, she had treated him like a stranger.

  He felt as if he were caught up in the middle of a nightmare. Hadn’t he feared all along that his gun would somehow be instrumental in the ruination of their relationship? God, he would give anything not to have used it, for the look in Amanda’s eyes said their relationship was shattered. And he had an ugly suspicion that even if he could somehow gather together all the scattered pieces, he wasn’t going to be able to piece it back together again.

  Light spilled into the room as the door whispered open. Tristan exchanged quiet greetings with the nurse and watched her as she monitored Amanda’s vital signs. When she finished, she looked Tristan over and a faint frown drew her brows together. “Miss Charles is going to sleep through the night,” she whispered. “Why don’t you go home and get some rest? You look as though you could use it.”

  “Aye,” he agreed wearily, his massive shoulders sagging with defeat. “Not much sense in staying, I guess.”

  He left shortly thereafter and drove straight home, where he wandered around Amanda’s apartment for a while, picking up and discarding her possessions. Finally he went into the bedroom. It smelled of scorched wool, and he made a mental note to have the carpet cleaned or replaced before Amanda came home from the hospital. Staring down at the empty bed as he peeled out of his clothes, he thought it was unlikely he’d be able to sleep without her here beside him. But the moment his head touched the pillow, he was out.

  The phone ringing the next morning awakened him, and for just an instant, remembering yesterday’s events, he hesitated to pick it up. Then, shaking his head impatiently, he reached for the receiver. It might be Amanda or the hospital.

  It was Captain Weller, in Seattle. He congratulated Tristan, and discussed at length the abundance of evidence that had been unearthed in Dean Eggars’s apartment, marveling at the twisted mind that would keep a souvenir of the murder of each of his victims.

  “He had a flamin’ shrine in there,” Tristan said, sitting up and reaching for his jeans. “There was a studio portrait of a young, pretty lass on the dresser in his bedroom. It was in the most elaborate frame I’ve ever seen, and surrounded by a semicircle of candles. At its foot, like some bleedin’ sacrificial virgin, was this damned bundle of unopened letters, frigging gift-wrapped in a red ribbon. They were all stamped ‘Return to Sender’ and addressed to a Marsha Cranston, who, it turns out, was Eggars’s sister. That was his real name, incidentally: Dean Eggars Cranston.” Tristan ran his hand over the rough stubble on his cheek. “Anyway, NYPD contacted her for us. They said she didn’t sound at all surprised to hear about her brother. Seems she’s been waiting for something like this to occur for some time now. Said her brother’s always been dead odd.”

  “There’s odd,” Weller growled. “And then there’s flat-out crazy. Sounds to me like her brother was a helluva lot closer to crazy.”

  “Yeah, well.” Tristan shrugged. “She claims Eggars was often kicked about as a child by their mother’s various lovers. Mum was an exotic dancer in some dive, when she worked. Seems she had a wee fondness for the bottle.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Miss Cranston said she herself was a fragile child, often sick, and she was spared a great deal of the abuse her brother received.” Tristan began to speak quickly, anxious to wrap this up and get off the line. He wanted to go see Amanda.

  “To make a long story short, Eggars apparently idolized his sister. She was enrolled in dance classes to build her strength, and more to be with her than for any other reason, Eggars joined, too, which is how he got his own start as a dancer, I suppose. He called her his little Madonna. But one day when she was twenty and he was twenty-two, he caught his little Madonna in bed with a neighborhood tough. He roughed her up pretty badly. Stopped just short of killing her. He was, in fact, the one to bring her to the hospital. While she was recovering, he convinced himself that she must have been forced against her will. But although he was prepared to forgive her, she wasn’t feeling equally charitable toward him. She said she was scared to death of him from that point on, and refused to have anything fur
ther to do with him. She dropped out of two different dance companies when he joined them in order to be with her, and finally went underground. Eggars never stopped trying to contact her, if the letters we found are any indication. They were all addressed to her, in care of their mother.”

  “Which may or may not be the basis for this guy’s sick obsession,” Weller stated without any apparent interest. Who would ever know or care? Eggars had destroyed too many lives for most people to feel pain at this late date for his childhood traumas. “So, how long’s it gonna take you to tie up the loose ends?”

  Tristan hesitated, running his hand through his hair. It was obvious, from Weller’s abrupt change of tone, that he wanted Tristan back in Seattle, and Tristan was in no hurry to return. “It’s hard to say,” he finally replied. “Too many of those souvenirs didn’t belong to the four victims whose names we know. I’ve got bulletins out to other cities likely to employ a lot of dancers. Atlantic City responded to our earlier requests for information, so we’re clearing a couple of their cases off the books, but the rest are going to take a bit of time.”

  “Let someone else handle it,” Weller stated with callous unconcern. “I need you back here.”

  “I’m not ready to return.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Is this the same man who didn’t want to go to Reno in the first place?” Weller finally asked.

  “Aye. I’ve…become involved. With Amanda Charles. I can’t be leavin’ her now.”

  Weller swore softly under his breath at the tone of finality in Tristan’s voice. They both knew he could order Tristan back to Seattle. If he chose, Weller could place Tristan’s entire career on the line.

  “Two weeks, MacLaughlin,” he finally ordered. “Two weeks, and then I want to see your ass back up here where it belongs.” The connection was severed.