Blind Pursuit (6 page)

11

Harold Gund drove slowly through Tucson’s dark streets, seeking a mailbox.

Best to get Erin’s letter in the mail as soon as possible. Once Annie received it, her fears would be allayed, and any preliminary police investigation into her sister’s disappearance would be terminated.

Still, mail delivery was slow. It might take three days for the letter to reach Annie’s residence. A lot could happen in three days.

Unless he delivered it personally.

There was no particular risk in doing so. Annie would simply assume that Erin herself had delivered the letter in the middle of the night, avoiding the pain of a phone call or a face-to-face encounter, before departing on her mysterious sabbatical. Unusual behavior, but not implausible under the circumstances.

All right, then. Do it.

In less than twenty minutes he reached the Catalina foothills. He guided the van into a townhouse community off Pontatoc Road.

Dangerous to park in the open. He pulled behind an unfinished row of townhouses near the entrance, killed the headlights and engine, and pulled on his gloves before handling the letter again.

On foot he walked along a curving street, illuminated only by low-wattage bulbs above the mailboxes at the head of each driveway.

The development, like most places in the foothills, had no sidewalks. His shoes crackled on scattered dirt at the side of the road.

Annie’s place was just ahead, a single-story home with a red tile roof and desert landscaping, which shared walls with the units on either side. Gund slowed his steps.

Abruptly it occurred to him that if anybody happened to see him here, he could be linked to the letter and thus to Erin’s disappearance.

Then he shook his head. Ridiculous. No one would see him. It was nearly four-thirty in the morning. Everybody in the complex was asleep.

* * *

Annie lay on her living room sofa, staring into the dark.

For the past couple of hours she’d snatched brief intervals of slumber, never quite finding the perfect zone of dreamless oblivion that would have lasted until first light. Every random noise woke her—the creak of the house settling, the rustle of mesquite branches outside her windows, the coyotes’ shrill, distant cries.

She wondered what was really keeping her up, what obscure worry nagged her just below the threshold of awareness.

You’re getting to be like Lydia, she chided herself half seriously, remembering her aunt’s nervous disposition, her medicine chest stocked with antacids and headache remedies and sleeping pills. Before you know it, you ‘II be pacing the floor all night long....

Through the living room windows, a sudden orange glow.

The porch light had snapped on.

Annie sat up, blinking.

The light was wired to an electric eye beamed at the driveway. It was a system installed by the townhouse’s previous owners; personally she’d never felt much need for such protection in this part of town.

What would make the light come on now?

An intruder seemed unlikely. In the three years she had lived in this neighborhood, there had never been a break-in.

A coyote was more probable. Or a band of javelinas. The hairy desert peccaries sometimes ventured out of the dry washes in search of food.

She swung off the sofa and pulled aside the curtains, peering out at the driveway and the front walk.

Nothing was there. The light shone on her mailbox and the tangled clump of cholla at its base. The cholla’s needles glowed like moonlit fur.

If there had been an animal, perhaps it had continued down the street. She walked to the door, intending to look, then paused.

Suppose it wasn’t an animal. Safe as this neighborhood was, a trespasser was always possible.

Her nose wrinkled in irritation. She was scared of her own shadow tonight.

Decisively, in defiance of her fears, she opened the door and stepped outside.

Faintly she heard the crunch of gravel. Footsteps, retreating fast.

Coyote. Had to be. Scared off by the light.

They were timid creatures, despite their unwarranted reputation for aggressiveness. To her knowledge, none had attacked an adult human being.

She padded along the driveway, slippers scuffing the macadam, and peered down the street in the direction of the noise.

Nothing. And the footsteps were no longer audible.

Must have just missed him. Too bad. Encounters with desert animals were among her prime reasons for living on the outskirts of town.

Oh, well. Next time.

She returned to the house. As she was about to shut the door, another sound reached her. The rumble of an engine.

At first she thought it belonged to some passing vehicle on Pontatoc Road. But no, the source was closer than that. Within the townhouse complex.

She listened as the noise diminished, the vehicle—a truck or a van, it sounded like—speeding off into the night.

Maybe what she’d heard hadn’t been a coyote, after all. Maybe it had been the vehicle’s driver, taking a brisk predawn walk before heading to work. Nothing unusual about that.

So why was she afraid?

She couldn’t say. She knew only that the muscles of her shoulders and back were flinching under the caress of a sudden chill.

Erin, she thought abruptly. Please be all right. I’m scared for you ... for both of us ... and I don’t know why.

12

Erin delayed looking at the contents of the manila folder as long as possible. She was quite sure she wouldn’t like what she found.

Finally curiosity won out over apprehension. She picked up the folder, seated herself, and opened it.

The first clipping had been ripped from an inside page of the
Milwaukee Sentinel
, dated February 16, 1980. An article headlined
Stevens Pt. Woman Reported Missing
disclosed the disappearance of Marilyn Vaccaro, twenty-four, last seen leaving a midnight church service. A photo showed a smiling dark-haired woman with large, alert eyes.

Erin stared at that photo for a long time. What did he do to you, Marilyn?

Slowly she turned to the next article in the file.

Hikers Find Skeletal Remains
. Subhead:
Victim May Be Missing Stevens Pt. Woman
.

The date was June 3, 1980. Marilyn had disappeared in February. Erin thought of the hard winter her relatives and friends must have endured, awaiting this grim news.

She hoped the woman’s death had been quick, at least.

The article, bare of details, didn’t say. Yet odd hints suggested the worst: “apparently ritualistic murder ... evidence of sadism ... even veteran investigators are shaken.”

A rustle of paper, and she froze, staring at the third clipping.

Stevens Pt. Woman May Have Been Burned to Death, Authorities Say
.

Burned to death.

“No,” Erin whispered. “No, not that.”

Fire was her greatest fear—hers and Annie’s. Had been ever since that August night in 1973.

She could face any danger, any threat, any form of torture, but not fire. God, not fire. Please, dear God.

Panic welled in her, the same blind, screaming panic she had known when she’d awoken in the dark, bound and helpless.

He killed with flame. Killed women. She would be next. And the local papers would report it in their cold, factual accounts.
Tucson Woman Found Burned Alive
. People would read the story as they sipped their morning coffee.
How terrible
, they would mutter before turning to the sports pages and the movie reviews.

No, that couldn’t happen. She couldn’t die like that, for Christ’s sake. Could not, could not, could
not!

Stop
.

Teeth gritted, she refused to lose control. Refused to let terror break her.

She would deal with this. She would be strong. She had faced other crises. Even as a small child, she had confronted death and survived.

She hugged that thought, drawing comfort from it. If she had kept her composure when she was only seven years old, she could do no less now.

With the back of her hand she wiped her eyes dry, then returned her attention to the article.

Through dental records the remains had been identified as those of Marilyn Vaccaro. Charred bones, disarticulated and slightly scattered by scavengers and blowing snow, were all that was left of her. The clearing in which they had been found was still fire-scarred; according to arson experts, gasoline had been liberally poured. Above and below the blackened skeleton were two metal stakes, hammered into the frozen winter ground.

She had been tied hand and foot to the stakes, soaked in gas, and burned.

That’s how he’ll kill me, too, Erin thought. Stake me to the ground and pour gasoline.

A wave of nausea shuddered through her. She clutched her stomach and fought back the impulse to retch.

The next two articles filled in additional details. Although Marilyn Vaccaro had been kidnapped in Stevens Point, she had died more than a hundred miles northwest of town, in the Chequamegon National Forest near Lake Superior.

Erin remembered her own ride earlier tonight, her utter helplessness and pounding terror. Marilyn’s ride had lasted longer—two hours or more.

Perhaps she had been unconscious most of the time. Or perhaps not.

The next article, culled from the
Grand Rapids Press
, was dated July 27, 1986. Six years had passed since Marilyn’s death.

This time the victim was Sharon Lane, thirty-one, of Holland, Michigan, abducted the previous night and discovered only a few hours later, dead in a wooded area near Rose City in the eastern part of the state.

She, too, had burned. In the dry, hot summer night the fire had spread, consuming acres of forest before firefighters controlled the blaze. Damping down the hot spot, they had stumbled on Sharon’s body.

Again there was a picture of the victim as she had looked in life. The article said Sharon was a young mother; she had been taken from the parking lot of a shopping mall after dark.

Another gap of years, and then, on October 4, 1991, a minor article in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
reported the disappearance of Deborah Collins. The nineteen-year-old had vanished after finishing her night shift at a downtown donut shop.

The following September, her body was found in the woods near Thief River Falls. Like the first victim, she had spent months in snow and rain, her bones worried by scavengers and carpeted in moss. But the telltale metal stakes remained in place, warped by heat and oxidized by flame.

Nothing else in the folder. Deborah Collins had been the last. The killer had been quiet since.

Until now.

She wondered where he would do it when her time came. There were no woods in the immediate vicinity. Would he drive her into the forested mountains, or simply burn her in the desert under the open sky?

Shut up, she told herself angrily, though she hadn’t spoken aloud.

She flung the folder to the floor. Stood and paced the room.

Now she understood why her abductor had been intrigued by her journal articles. All of them had focused on the pathology of fire-starting. It was a subject that had haunted her since childhood.

Even so, she wasn’t certain her specialized expertise actually did apply to this man. He was by no means a typical pyromaniac.

No doubt some of the same compulsions motivated him, however. Nearly all violently antisocial behavior had roots in unresolved conflicts and unconscious hostilities. At least initially, she would have to concentrate on those aspects of the case, the ones she could treat.

Slowly she shook her head. The case. Already she was thinking of him as a patient.

Well, she had better think of him that way—if she wanted to live.

And if she failed to connect with him, failed to help him in time ...

Scorching heat. Bitter smoke.

She would die hearing the crackle of her own skin as it peeled away from her bones. Die writhing like a snake with a broken back.

With a shudder she forced these thoughts away. Couldn’t contemplate her own future tonight. It was too much to absorb, and her mind was sore with use, and she was tired, suddenly more tired than she had ever been.

Wearily she stretched out on the foam pad in the corner, draping herself in the cheap cotton blanket. The pad was eight inches too short for her; she shifted into a fetal position, tucking her right arm under her head.

Rest was all she intended, not sleep. Sleep was out of the question. Though fatigue had numbed her body and blanked her mind, agitation and residual fear would keep her awake all night.

No, she could never hope to sleep. Not here, in this brick-and-concrete dungeon. Not if she remained a captive for ten years.

But at least she could close her eyes, shut out the sight of those bare walls lit by the bare bulb. Close her eyes and breathe easy, easy.

Never sleep. Not tonight. Maybe not for the rest of her life.

Never sleep. Obviously.

Never ...

Erin slept.