Bait (52 page)

Big and menacing, he stood between her and the door. It was obvious to the most casual observer that she had no chance of getting past him. He clearly realized it, too, and savored the knowledge that he had her trapped. Murmuring under his breath, the words not quite audible, he talked to her. The knife waved slowly back and forth in front of him as if to leave her no doubt about what was coming.

For the space of a couple heartbeats, her fear shimmered almost tangibly between them. Then Tara broke. Screaming, she bolted for the door, trying to dodge the man. He was too fast for her, jumping toward her, blocking her exit, catching her. His hand clamped around her arm, yanking her toward him. She screamed again, the sound an explosion of terror and despair.

The knife rose, sliced down ...

Watching from the couch, where he had come bolt upright after having been wakened by who-knew-what from what must have been his third involuntary catnap of the day, Joe Franconi broke out in a cold sweat.

“Like I told you before, pal, you're losing it,” Brian Sawyer observed wryly from behind him. Brian was thirty-five years old, six feet tall, blond, and good looking. He was also dead. That being the case, Joe ignored his comment in favor of listening to the TV reporter, who was now alone on the screen. Violence, even televised violence, was no longer his thing. True crime might be the TV flavor of the month, but to someone like himself, who had seen way more than his fair share of crime in real life, it didn't qualify as entertainment. Didn't even come close.

So why was he still watching?

Good question.

Was it the reporter? She was maybe in her mid-twenties, a slim, good-looking redhead with big brown eyes and a cool, matter-of-fact manner. High cheekbones. Porcelain skin. Full, pouty red lips. Okay, she was hot. In his previous life, though, he'd never once felt the slightest stirring of interest in a talking head, no matter how attractive, and after considering the matter, he was glad to realize that his apathy toward media types remained unchanged.

It wasn't the reporter. But there was something—something ...

Trying to figure out what that something was, Joe frowned and focused on what she was saying.

“Fifteen years ago this month, seventeen-year-old Tara Mitchell was brutally murdered in this house,” the woman said. A shot of a white antebellum mansion, once grand, now sagging and neglected, filled the screen. Three stories, double porches, fluted pillars, overhung by huge live oaks, branches bearded with Spanish moss, leaves the delicate new green that meant spring. Since this was early May, the shot was recent. Or maybe it had been taken in another, past, spring. Whenever, something about the house nagged at him. Joe squinted at the screen, trying to figure out what it was. The shadows that had become an inescapable part of his life kept shifting in and out of the edges of his peripheral vision, which didn't help his concentration any. He ignored them. He was getting pretty good at that, just like he was getting good at ignoring Brian.

The redhead on TV was still talking: “Rebecca Iverson and Lauren Schultz vanished. No trace of them has ever been found. What you just saw was a reenactment of what authorities think may have occurred in the final few minutes of Tara's life, based on the evidence in the house. Earlier that night, Lauren's parents had taken the girls out to dinner to celebrate Lauren's seventeenth birthday, which was the following day. Becky, who was sixteen, and Tara were planning to sleep over at Lauren's house. Lauren's parents dropped them off at the house at around ten-fifteen that night, then went to check on Lauren's grandmother, who lived less than half a mile away. When they returned, it was twenty minutes until midnight. Andrea Schultz, Lauren's mother, describes what they found.”

Another woman, mid-fifties maybe, with short, blond hair, faded blue eyes, and a face that had been deeply etched by time or grief, or some combination of the two, appeared on the screen. She was sitting on a deep gold couch in what appeared to be an upscale living room. A man of approximately the same age was sitting beside her. Gray-haired, a little paunchy, with the look of a solid citizen about him, he was holding her hand.

Mrs. Schultz spoke directly into the camera. “We noticed coming up the driveway that the only light on in the house was in the downstairs bathroom, but that didn't really strike us as odd. We just thought the girls had gone to bed a whole lot earlier than we had expected. We came in through the kitchen door. Mike—my husband—put away the doughnuts and milk we'd picked up for their breakfast, and I went on out into the center hall. When I turned on the light”—her voice shook—“I saw blood on the floor of the hall. Not a lot. A few drops about the size of quarters leading toward the living room. My first thought was that one of the girls had cut herself. I started calling Lauren, and I went into the living room and turned on the light. Tara was there on the couch. She was d-dead.”

Mrs. Schultz stumbled over the last word, then stopped, her eyes filling with tears, her composure crumpling. The man—Joe assumed he was her husband—put his arm around her. Then they were gone, and the reporter was back on-screen, looking coolly out at him as she continued.

“Tara was stabbed twenty-seven times that night, with such violence that the knife went all the way through her body to penetrate the couch in at least a dozen places. Her hair had been hacked off to within an inch of her scalp. And her face had been damaged to the point where it was almost unrecognizable.”

“Shit,” Joe said, suddenly transfixed. He'd just figured out what had been nagging at him. That morning, he'd seen a photo of the murder house, which had been in the file he'd been reading through. The file on this case. The details were unforgettable.

“Thought you'd want to see this.” Brian sounded smug. “You would have slept through it, too, if I hadn't dropped the remote on your lap. You can thank me anytime.”

Joe couldn't help it. He glanced down and, sure enough, there was the remote, nestled between his jean-clad thighs, where it would have landed if it had been on his lap when he'd jarred awake. Had it been on his lap when he'd fallen asleep? Christ, he couldn't remember.

“Dave!” he yelled, at the same time doing his best to keep his focus on the screen. Dwelling on the state of his mental health was a good way to drive himself nuts—always supposing he wasn't there already. “Get in here! Stat!”

The program went to a commercial.

“Jeez, Joe, you might want to keep it down. You'll wake the kid,” Dave O'Neil said as he appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, his slow Southern drawl effectively robbing the words of any urgency that they might have been meant to impart. He'd attended his church's five P.M. Sunday service—almost all the local churches had one—but his church jacket and tie were long gone now. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up past his elbows, there was a blue-checked apron tied over his neat gray slacks, and he held a long-tined meat fork in one hand. Thirty-two years old, he was about five-eight, pudgy, and balding, with what was left of his dark brown hair grown long and slicked back in a mostly futile attempt to cover his scalp. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his round cheeks and the tip of his pug nose were rosy, making Joe think he'd just straightened up from checking on the progress of the roast chicken that at some time tonight was supposed to be dinner.

In an unfortunate triumph of hormones over common sense, Dave was infatuated with a high-maintenance divorcée whom he'd recently allowed to move into his house with him—the house he and Joe were currently in—along with her three bratty kids, two of whom thankfully had not yet been returned by their father, who had them for the weekend. The third, a toddler, had fallen asleep shortly after Joe had arrived as agreed at seven for Sunday-night dinner, which was still cooking, although it was now just after eight-fifteen. Amy Martinez, Dave's girlfriend and the children's mother, had run to the corner store for some forgotten essentials a good twenty minutes before, leaving Dave to hold down the fort. Not that Dave had a problem with that. In fact, since Joe had known him, Dave had never to his knowledge had a problem with anything. When Joe had been hired as Chief of Police of tiny Pawleys Island, South Carolina, five months earlier, Dave was already the Assistant Chief of the twelve-man force. Joe's first impression of him had been that he was a slow-moving, slow-talking, slow-thinking bumbler, but he'd kept him on, kept everyone on, just like he'd resisted making any but the most minor of changes in the way things had always been done, whether he'd found them irksome or not. The truth was, he'd needed the job too badly to risk making waves in those first few weeks, and now he found the Southern-fried culture of his department—in fact, the whole island—more soothing than crazy-making. And he'd developed a real fondness for Dave, who had done his best to make his new boss feel at home in what was, for the Jersey vice cop Joe had once been, an environment as alien as Mars.

“I forgot about the kid.” Remembering the two-year-old's pre-bedtime antics, Joe was truly remorseful. Keeping his voice down, he pointed to the TV. “Listen to this.”

The redhead was on again. She was standing in front of the house in which the crime had been committed, the Old Taylor Place, as it was called, if his memory served him correctly. The case she was profiling was the only unsolved homicide in the island's recorded history, and it had come to his attention for just that reason: The file had been the only one in its section. This time, Joe didn't miss the signs that she was operating in what was now his territory: The pink and white of the overgrown oleanders that crowded around the wide front porch, the head-high clump of sweetgrass off to the reporter's left, the hot, bright blaze of the sun, and, underlying it all, the faint gurgle of the ocean that he had learned was the never-ending backdrop to life on Pawleys Island.

“The police investigated,” she said, “but the crime has never been solved. Over the years, evidence has been lost or has deteriorated, witnesses' memories have blurred, and the detectives on the case have long since moved on to other, more urgent priorities. But the girls' families haven't forgotten. Their friends and neighbors haven't forgotten. They continue to wait for justice to be done. And some say that the girls are waiting for justice, too. They say that their spirits still linger here in the place where they were last seen alive—this once majestic Southern mansion at the heart of Pawleys Island.”

A panoramic shot of the island taken from the air filled the screen. It was all there, the ingredients that made Pawleys Island a picture-perfect mini-paradise: the sapphire ocean, the sugar-white beaches, the swooping gulls and egrets wheeling through a cloudless azure sky, the deep green of near-tropical vegetation, the small, pastel bungalows clustered near the center of the island like sprinkles on a cupcake, the more imposing, multistoried summer “cottages” that predated air-conditioning—and, in many cases, the Civil War—hugging the outer edges along the waterfront. The best way to describe it, Joe had decided not long after taking up residence here, was as the place that time forgot.

As proof of what the island lifestyle did to a person, he had to remind himself less and less often lately that there wasn't anything wrong with that.

The redhead was still talking. “The Schultz family sold the property two years after Tara's murder and Lauren and Becky's disappearance. Since then, four other families have moved in—and moved out. None has stayed longer than six months. For the last three years, the house has been on the market. So far, no takers. Why? Because local folks say the house is haunted by the ghost of Tara Mitchell and, though their bodies have never been found and their families still cling to a last faint hope that they are alive and maybe one day they will come home, by the ghosts of Lauren Schultz and Rebecca Iverson, too.”

The shot cut to a gleaming white kitchen. A fortyish man and woman and a pair of teenagers were sitting around a table in the middle of the room, looking earnestly out at the TV audience.

The redhead was standing beside the table, talking into the camera. “I'm here with Paul and Susan Cook and their children Ben, twelve, and Elizabeth, fourteen. The Cooks bought the house four years ago, and were the last family to live in it.” She turned to the Cooks. “You only stayed in the house for six weeks, isn't that right? Can you tell us why you moved out?”

“It was Elizabeth,” Paul Cook said. The camera zoomed in on the girl. She was petite, cute rather than pretty, with dark hair, a freckled nose, and braces. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a low ponytail, and she wore a white button-down blouse.

“They came into my bedroom at night,” Elizabeth said in a small voice. “I know it was them now—those three girls. Back then, when it was happening, I didn't have a clue what was going on. See, I would be asleep, and then I would wake up and the room would be cold as ice and I knew I wasn't alone. At first I just kind of heard them, like their footsteps, like they were walking across the floor. And ... and sometimes the closet door would open and close again, even though I always checked to make sure it was shut when I went to bed. A couple of times I heard them giggling. Once, once it felt like one of them sat down on the edge of the bed. I felt the mattress sink and kind of jiggle like a weight was on it, and this ...
presence.
” Elizabeth shuddered. “I kept telling my mom, but she said it was bad dreams and I should just close my eyes and go back to sleep. Then ... then I saw them. All three of them. It was the middle of the night, and I heard them and opened my eyes, and they were standing around my bed, looking at me. Just these three kind of shapes, you know, like girls only—not solid. They were real pale, with like these black holes where their faces should have been.”