Close to the Bone (15 page)

She remembered his first day, him sweet and a little shy and yet completely competent from the very beginning. She flushed, more from the vision than from the warmth of the tea.

‘Only four or five months when she died, but yes, I remember her. You couldn’t be male and not notice Diana.’

Biting down on her jealous bone, Theresa went on: ‘Did she ever talk to you? You would have been about the same age.’

Don paused, chewing, thinking. ‘Just to say hi to.’ Then he stood and dumped his plate into the garbage can – a typical bachelor, he had learned the convenience of paper dinnerware – and closed up the fried rice carton before handing her one of the two fortune cookies. ‘Here. See what’s going to happen to you.’

She broke open the cellophane wrapper and extracted the slip of paper. ‘The surest sign of intelligence is a willingness to learn.’

He opened his. ‘You will have an unexpected visitor.’

She thought about their current location. Don’s tidy apartment building in Cleveland Heights had a well-lit lot and keyed entries, but beyond that it wasn’t any place she would want to see Rachael living in, meaning it was no fortress. The stairwells were unlocked. No interior security cameras. A deadbolt but no chain or bar on the slender wooden door. Having now visited Don’s apartment, she wanted him to move. She also wished she had a gun. Maybe two.

She stood, slowly. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

Don smiled at her. ‘Silly girl – it’s you. An unexpected visitor.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. We’re the only two names left in the autopsy report. The bodysnatcher who transported, the deskman who received the body, the doctor who did the autopsy. The toxicologist who did her bodily fluids isn’t in there because their reports are always separate. Even we couldn’t read Stone’s name as the diener, so he should be safe. Histology doesn’t get listed since the final call on the tissue samples is made by the pathologist. That just leaves trace evidence – you and the fingernail scrapings, and me and the fibers. You’re listed, aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘In the phone book? It doesn’t matter anyway, he’s been working there for three months, he could have picked up your address any one of a dozen different ways.’

‘Theresa. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. There’s two of us and one of him.’

She bit her lip. ‘I found their bodies, Don.’

‘
Hey
.’ He put his arms around her, and she found her face nestled against his collarbone, hard and strong underneath the soft cotton fabric that smelled faintly of aftershave and soy sauce. She dared to let herself go and allowed her arms to encircle his midsection, breathing deep. Let me have this moment, she thought.
Just let me have this one moment and I won’t ask for anything more
.

‘It will be all right,’ he said.

‘If he wants to get to you he’ll have to go through me,’ she said with embarrassing fervor, sounding like a bad movie and unable to remember when she’d ever meant anything more.

He stopped hugging her and put both hands on her shoulders, pushing her back just enough so they could face each other. ‘Don’t assume he’s going to stick to male victims. You’re next in the report. But at least if he goes to your house he’ll find it empty. And there’s always a chance he’s a state or two away by now. We’ll be fine.’ He moved both hands to her face. ‘We’re going to be fine.’

She felt swayed, of course, by his words, but even without them she wouldn’t have cared if James Allman had knocked on the door in the next two seconds, with an arsenal of weapons in his back pocket. Kiss me, she wished hard enough to have said aloud.
Kissmekissmekissme
—

‘Besides, I’ve got a deadbolt on the door and I doubt he could shinny up two stories of drainpipe,’ he said cheerily, and released her. ‘Now let’s find you some blankets.’

An hour later Theresa lay cocooned on the sofa, watching lights from the passing cars play across the ceiling. Don’s apartment faced Euclid Avenue, and the traffic remained steady, even when people should be in bed. Well, people her age. Especially people her age who had only gotten about two hours of sleep the night before and then had had a number of shocks throughout the day. People her age who knew there was a violent felon roaming around town with, apparently, a list of names which included hers. And yet her eyes stayed open and the neurons in her brain kept firing, not over the reliability of the deadbolt or the reasons Justin Warner/James Allman might have for his recent activities, but pondering instead her current romantic situation. Or rather, stunning lack of same.

The ferret – named Garlic, and Theresa hadn’t asked why – scratched at the glass of his large terrarium. Every time she so much as breathed deeply, the animal darted back and forth in the cage, no doubt wondering why someone had invaded his living room. Either ferrets were nocturnal, or she was not the only mammal losing sleep that night.

If Don felt more for her than simple friendship, he probably would never have a better opportunity to let her know. If he had wanted to kiss her, he could have. Unless he was restricted by concern that he would be taking advantage of her vulnerability in the wake of an overwrought day, that perhaps she didn’t feel the same, that their age difference would prove too great to bridge – or that an order of General Tso’s chicken would have detrimential effects on the breath – he could have.

And hadn’t.

So this idea that had been milling about in the back of her mind for a robust number of years had finally been dragged to the forefront – only to be shot down and then stabbed for good measure.

Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.

Stop it
. It had been a stupid schoolgirl crush in the first place, no matter how real it felt, no matter how her heart ached, no matter how her neurons seemed to fire more rapidly the moment he walked into the room.
He doesn’t love you
. He doesn’t need you. He needs a sweet kindergarten teacher, with a good sense of humor and breasts like rocks and twenty-five-year-old skin so tight it snaps, so he can settle down and start raising a family of his own, not a divorcée on the wrong side of forty with a child already halfway through college.

But he
hadn’t
found a kindergarten teacher, so … maybe …

She awoke with a start, and her head shifted on the gift-from-ex pillows. Don had not offered to give her his bed – apparently, even he had a Limit of Awkward, and she wouldn’t have let him do it anyway – but the sofa proved fairly comfortable provided she didn’t try to turn over. That and exhaustion must have taken over; it seemed that she had only just closed her eyes, but the noise from the street had lessened to only the occasional rumble and the room seemed darker, as if a few storefronts had closed down for the night. She did not know what had woken her, and she thought with one wild stab of hope that Don had decided to press his home-field advantage after all, and after lying awake thinking of her had emerged to—

But no one hovered over her still form. No one obstructed her view of the ceiling. She saw nothing to make her think anyone else on the planet stirred except for her.

Then she heard a sound, the hushed whooshing
shuck
of a door being closed and the knob releasing its bolt, very, very quietly, back into the jamb. This would not have been so worrisome had it come from Don’s room – a bathroom break, perhaps, or maybe he really had rethought their relationship … but the sound had clearly come from the short hallway leading to the outer door.

Garlic the ferret sat up, rustling his wood shavings.

Someone had just entered the apartment.

SEVENTEEN

I
t will be a girlfriend, Theresa thought furiously to herself, one of several he has, one who decided to be super-cute and show up in the wee hours wearing nothing but a trench coat and high heels, to announce in a husky voice how she couldn’t sleep—

Or perhaps Don himself had gone out and now returned. Maybe he had made his own booty call, reassuring his current squeeze that Theresa was simply a co-worker, an older lady he needed to look out for. Perhaps he’d taken up a smoking habit … No, she would have smelled that.

While her mind flipped through the myriad and mostly harmless possibilities, her body rolled off the cushions – which gave only the slightest creak – and into the space on the floor between the sofa and coffee table. Her right hand snuck under the sofa frame to locate the steak knife she had liberated from the wooden block on Don’s counter after he’d gone to bed. Thus prepared, she peered from behind the upholstery, her chin touching the floor, her body as still as death.

For a moment she saw nothing but the tan walls and the framed picture of the Grand Canyon and thought that her imagination had been playing tricks on her, but then a lighter piece of shadow moved apart from the gloom of the hallway. It did not belong, she felt certain, to Don’s slender form. It seemed to be a giant, an amorphous being of hulking menace.

It – he – stood at the edge of the dark, gazing into the living room, slowly scanning the area from left to right. She did not move, praying he wouldn’t come closer – how could he not see her? Perhaps the coffee table blocked enough of the ambient light from the window to cast her nest into a shadow deep enough to hide her. Perhaps he simply didn’t expect anyone else to be in the apartment. Or the rustling ferret distracted him. She held her breath until her lungs felt like bursting. Then he moved.

Don had shut his bedroom door – further dashing any tender hope of hers – and the man-thing put his hand on the knob.

Theresa debated what to do. This was not some late-night lover, unless Don liked them hefty enough to start for the Browns, and she could think of no other reasonable explanation. She had a knife, and this man or thing or whatever was going after Don. It had killed George Bain and Darryl Johnson and Hubert Reese. Don came next on its list.

Theresa wished she had readied a flashlight along with the steak knife. Then she could blind him.

It turned the knob. The door swung silently open.

She had two options: a blitz attack, slide that blade into his midsection before he even realized she was there, or – based on the very slim possibility that there might after all be an innocent explanation for this midnight visitor and adding in her lack of experience in stabbing people – she could shout, startling the intruder and warning Don.

She made the choice without conscious thought.

In one movement she leapt to her feet and shouted, ‘Stop!’

It – he – straightened and turned from the door so sharply that she could have sworn she had scared the shit out of him, to the point where it would have been comical had he not immediately launched himself at her. He flew through the air and struck her mid-section as if he really did play for the football team, smashing her to the ground and slamming her right shoulder against the edge of the coffee table, her head against the base of an armchair, and her tailbone against the thinly carpeted hardwood. It all hurt like everlasting hell. Not to mention that his weight on her chest prevented her from breathing.

She did not, however, lose her grip on the knife.

But neither could she get much of an arc going to use it with her arm stuck under the coffee table and her entire upper body pinned to the ground.

But she tried. She snaked the knife out and drove it into what should have been the intercostal space between the sixth and seventh rib – not, perhaps, with all the might she had, more like an experimental tap to see, first, if she could do it at all, and second, if it might be enough to spur him to a more reasonable exchange.

She could, and it didn’t.

He hit her. He drew back one arm and slugged her in the face, snapping her head to one side and making her vision turn to nothing but white, shooting stars. She tried to suck in some oxygen and couldn’t. The knife hand sagged.

The ferret dashed from one end of his cage to the other, making some sort of concerned, snuffling sound. The room flashed into sudden illumination. Someone had hit the lights.

Vaguely, she heard a thump in the distance, and then Don loomed behind the intruder, shouting something she couldn’t quite make out. The weight on her torso lifted, abandoned her, and she sucked in air as if she hadn’t tasted it in weeks. This cleared some of the stars, but by no means all.

It – he – rose, knocking the coffee table completely over, and moved toward Don. Slender, peaceable Don.

Theresa rolled over, still gasping in oxygen, and pushed herself up with her aching arms. The man advanced on Don, who had his arms up and fists ready.

She still had the knife.

‘Stop!’ she shouted again, or at least tried – her starved lungs couldn’t produce much more than a squeak. The man ignored it.

He raised his right fist as he moved. Theresa had no idea what his fighting abilities might include and did not intend to find out the hard way.

She took three steps forward and sank the knife into the man’s upper back.

Though
sank
, as it turned out, put it a bit too strongly. The blade went in about a half-inch before it seemed to hit a shoulder blade, and stopped. Or perhaps that represented the limits of her strength. In any event, all it did was piss him off.

He turned, his arm stretched the length of Theresa’s, and grabbed her shoulder. With one jerk he pulled her from where she stood and twirled her around him so she now dangled between himself and Don. With his other hand he encircled her fist, which held the knife, and pushed the blade up against her own throat.

Damn
, he was fast.

And strong. His fingers and arm might as well have been cast from solid iron; she could no more shove the knife away from herself than she could move through his body to back away from it.

‘Stop moving,’ he hissed.

The hell she would. She kicked at the inside of his knee, a single thrust outward as she had learned in a short-lived, long-ago karate class. It would have broken his leg, if she could have gotten more momentum and his iliotibial band hadn’t been made of steel. Annoyed, he pulled the knife closer to her throat until she felt a stinging, paper-cut kind of pain slice through her skin.