Last Breath (17 page)

Involuntarily a groan escaped her, so low and muffled that she wasn’t sure Adam heard.

But he did. His circling footsteps stopped abruptly.

She froze, hating herself for the weakness that had voiced itself in that groan. She had shortened her remaining time, and she couldn’t afford to lose any of it, not when every minute was precious now.

He came toward her. She heard the sharp claps of his footfalls on the concrete. He was wearing hard-soled shoes—his dress shoes from work? No, he wouldn’t be that stupid. He would know that shoe prints could be identified by forensics experts. He would not make such an obvious mistake.

A stir of air, and she sensed that he was kneeling by her. Rustle of clothing, caress of leather on her cheek.

His gloved hand. Touching her.

She struggled not to react. He did not necessarily know she was awake. People groaned in their sleep, after all. As long as she stayed absolutely still, he might not be sure if she remained unconscious or was merely playing possum.

It was all about buying time, more time. Time seemed suddenly the most important thing in the world, or maybe it always had been, and these circumstances were required to bring home this truth that she always should have known.

His gloved finger slipped under her chin and stroked her. Tickled her.

“Hey, C.J. Wake up, sleepyhead.”

Words he used to say to her on lazy weekend mornings. Then as now, he had tickled her gently. Then as now, he had eased his hand under her chin, fingering the sensitive hollow of her jaw ...

Abruptly his grip tightened. His hand clutched her throat.

She jerked her head back with a gasp.

He withdrew.

“Thought that would get your attention,” he said.

No purpose was served in pretending to be unconscious any longer. She tried to pose a question to him: “Where am I?” The hollow rubber ball clamped between her teeth distorted her words and made them almost unintelligible. She tried again. “Where ... am ... I?”

“I heard you the first time, C.J. Where are you? You’re in the same place you put me for the last year. You’re in hell.”

Walsh called the other members of the task force on his cell phone while Cellini drove him from Parker Center to the Wilshire Division address. If they had been TV cops, they would have used a dashboard flasher to clear away the traffic, but in reality few unmarked cars carried one. Cellini made good time anyway, guiding the Caprice west on freeways and surface streets. Walsh, in the passenger seat, filled in Stark, Merriwether, Boyle, and Sotheby with the bare details.

“Sounds like the real thing,” Ed Lopez said, his voice crackly and faint on the cell phone’s cheap receiver.

“It is,” Walsh affirmed. “And the worst part is, this woman he’s got—she’s one of our own.”

Walsh finished the last call just as Cellini pulled into the driveway of C.J. Osborn’s bungalow. He was glad to be done with the calls. Ordinarily he would have used a landline to convey sensitive information, but tonight there wasn’t time. He had to hope these digital phones were as resistant to eavesdropping as the manufacturers claimed.

Tanner and his partner, whose nameplate read “CHANG,” were waiting at the back door. The two deputies led Walsh and Cellini inside the house, pointing out the knife that lay untouched on the hall floor.

“What’s this about you seeing us on the Internet?” Tanner asked while Cellini first photographed the knife, then sealed it in an evidence bag.

“There’s a camera in her bedroom,” Walsh explained. “It’s a, uh, whatchamacallit.”

“Webcam,” Cellini said without looking up.

“Right. Live TV feed from the bedroom to the Internet.”

Tanner frowned. “C.J. wouldn’t be into anything like that.”

“No, but the guy who kidnapped her is.”

“So you know who we’re dealing with?”

“Not by name—but I’ve seen his work,” Walsh said, thinking of Martha Eversol on the autopsy table.

“Well, whoever he is, he must have been following her. C.J. told me she was tailed earlier today by a white van.”

“Make, model?”

“She didn’t know.”

“Damn. She tell you anything else?”

“She got an e-mail that spooked her. Spooked Detective Hyannis too, when I told him about it.”

“What e-mail?”

“It said, ‘Welcome to the Four-H Club.’ “

Walsh looked at Cellini. “Oh, Jesus,” Cellini said.

“That’s pretty much the way Hyannis reacted.” Tanner was losing patience, which Walsh figured was understandable, especially if C.J. Osborn was his girlfriend or something. “What is all this shit about the Four-H Club anyway?”

“I’ll explain later,” Walsh said. “Show us the rest of the house.”

Tanner and Chang led the two detectives through the living room and into the kitchen. Walsh spent some time looking at the dinner dishes in the sink.

“We’ll have to call her husband,” Tanner said.

Cellini glanced at him. “She’s married?”

“Ex-husband. Adam somebody. He needs to know.”

“They still close?” Walsh asked.

“I don’t think so, but I saw him with her today.”

“He came by the station to see her,” Chang added.

“Huh.” Cellini pursed her lips. “Under other circumstances he’d be a prime suspect.”

“Maybe he is anyway,” Walsh said. “Maybe he’s our guy.”

“And the other women?”

“Diversions. He killed them just to throw us off the trail.”

“Weak,” Cellini said.

“Very,” Walsh conceded. “I need to interview him anyway. His phone number must be in Osborn’s file.”

“Excuse me,” Tanner cut in, “but what other women?”

Walsh patted the deputy’s arm, a fatherly gesture rare for him. “She’s the third one taken this way. The third one who was spied on over the Web.”

“The third?” Then Tanner understood. He took a step backward, as if to put distance between himself and Walsh’s reassuring touch. “The Hourglass Killer. You’re heading up the task force. And Hyannis—”

“Detective Hyannis is the LASD liaison. You see ... Hell, Donna, you tell him.”

“The two previous victims were both found with index cards that said ‘Welcome to the Four-H Club,’” Cellini said. “We think the term stands for Four-Hour Club and that the victims ... well, that they’re kept alive for exactly four hours.”

“How come this four-hour angle hasn’t made the papers?” Chang asked. “They’re covering the Hourglass Killer like crazy.”

“We kept a lid on it,” Walsh said. “It almost got into the
LA Times
. They were set to run with it, but we prevailed upon the Metro editor to kill the story. It never ran in print, but somehow it turned up as a rumor on the Internet. Probably some copy editor at the
Times
blabbed in a, uh, what are those things called?”

“Chat room,” Cellini suggested.

Walsh shook his head. “God, I hate this Internet stuff.”

“But maybe now it can help us,” Cellini said. “We may be able to trace the e-mail if it’s been saved on her computer.”

“Worth a shot,” Walsh agreed. “Unless it’s like the video feed—sent through a proxy. Can you do that with e-mail?”

“Sure. And probably that’s exactly how it was sent. Whatever else you can say about this guy, he’s not stupid.”

Tanner had been listening to all this with a blank expression. Now he said simply, “Four hours?”

Walsh nodded.

“When I talked to her on the phone, she sounded funny.”

“Speaking under duress?”

“Could have been.”

“What time was this?”

Tanner looked at Chang, who checked his watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”

“So,” Tanner said, “if your theory is right ...”

“She has three hours and fifteen minutes left,” Walsh said.

The room was silent after that.

It was hard to talk with the throttle in place, but not impossible. She struggled to force out each word.

“Please, Adam. You don’t ... want to ... do this.”

“If that’s what you think,” he answered, “then you really don’t know me at all.”

“
Adam,”
she moaned, the gag blurring the word.

No response.

She had to think of something to do. There must be a course of action she could follow, a miraculous way out. She was the good guy in the story, and the good guy didn’t die like this, trussed and humiliated and cut off from help.

She had always believed that life, for all its apparent senselessness, had a purpose behind it. But where was the purpose in dying like this? Was everything just a sick joke, and would Adam get the last laugh?

“Why?” she mumbled.

He withdrew a little—she could feel the movement of the air displaced by his body—and she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can explain the why. It requires a logical justification that may be lacking in this case.”

She waited, knowing he would say more if he chose to.

“Why,” he said again, as if testing the word. “That’s what journalists are taught to ask. Who, what, why, where, when? But they leave out the most important one. How? That’s the real question. If you know how a thing happened, you don’t need to know the why. Prove exactly how a man killed his wife—just as an example—and his motivation can be filled in by the jury. They’ve all seen enough episodes of
Murder, She Wrote
. They’ll give you the why. You have to give them the how.”

So tell me how, she thought. Tell me anything, Adam, talk to me.

“Of course I’m just a corporate lawyer. Not an expert in this sordid criminal stuff. I may be getting it all wrong. Still it seems to me that if you knew how, then the why would present itself to you. Do you want to know the how of it, C.J.? Would that please you, satisfy your restless curiosity?”

She made no response, not even a nod of her head. She knew he would tell her what he wanted her to hear. He enjoyed toying with her. And hearing himself talk had always been one of his chief pleasures.

“Okay, picture this. You dump me, right? You walk out of my life. You say, ‘Fuck you,’ and you go. Now I’m sure you felt you were justified. I had, after all, been balling Ashley behind your back, but you know what? It wasn’t anything you didn’t deserve. You’re the one who broke our vows, not me. You swore to be there for me, to have and to hold, all that crap. And were you? Were you there for me, C.J.? Were you there for me at night? No, you were riding around in a cop car, cuffing bad guys. Were you there for me on the weekends? No, you had to work extra shifts. Were you ever there? To have and to hold—shit, I would’ve settled for a little quickie squeezed into your busy schedule. But you didn’t have time for that. You were into your own thing. You walked out on me a long time before Ashley came into the picture.”

There were so many answers she could give, and none of them would help her. She was almost glad he had gagged her, glad the conversation had to be one-sided. An argument would be worse than pointless now.

“So you catch me with Ashley, and you get all aggrieved, like I’m the one who’s done something wrong. Okay, you’re gone, and I’m alone. I move into that shit-hole apartment in Venice. You were there. You saw it. Living the high life, right? Ashley leaves me—I think you scared her off when you confronted her on campus. You even had to take that away from me. Nice, C.J. Hell hath no fury, and all that jazz. Well, you got what you wanted. I was alone. Every night. Stuck in that two-by-four apartment with no air conditioning and next-door neighbors who played Eminem at top volume all night long. It was like being in jail, except in jail I would’ve had more company.”

She realized he expected her to feel sorry for him.

“So I do what a lot of lonely guys do. I start spending too much time on my computer. I surf the Web. I look for women online. I try chat rooms, but it’s just a lot of garbage. Nobody knows how to have a conversation in those forums. Have you ever tried one? PrettyGirl says, ‘What’s the weather like where you are?’ And Man-at-Work says, ‘Overcast, might rain.’ And Lilypad says, ‘I like the rain.’ Blah blah blah. And the dirty ones are worse. Maybe some guys can get their rocks off, looking at a bunch of sexual fantasies typed on a computer screen, but it doesn’t do squat for me. So that’s out. I start looking for other kinds of relief online. Porno, the raunchier the better. I download some of these pictures, and let me tell you, C.J., I imagined your face on every body. If I’d had one of those picture-editing programs, maybe I would have actually put your face in there. Picture it. C.J. in chains, tickled by a cat-o’-nine-tails ...”

She swallowed, hearing not only his words but the growly ugliness of his voice.

“Yeah, I got into the S-and-M stuff before long. There’s a lot of it on the Web. You can find anything if you look hard enough and if you’ve got time. I had plenty of time. You know there are sites where they take celebrities’ faces and paste them into bondage shots? A lot of supermodels are going under the knife, and not for a breast implant. They’ve even got fucking cartoon characters in bondage. You want to see Wonder Woman all tied up with nowhere to go? She’s on there somewhere. It’s a whole subculture, every fetish you can think of. And message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging to go along with all of it. It’s a substitute life for people who don’t have any real life. I guess you’d picture virgins in dorm rooms doing most of this stuff, and here I was, a divorced guy, thirty years old, going for a law degree, and I was one of them. Do you know how humiliating it was for me to be reduced to that level? I’d never been lonely and desperate in college, not even in high school, but now I was. You did that to me, C.J. I couldn’t get over you, couldn’t get past what had happened to my life when you kissed me off. So if you’re wondering whose fault it is that you’re here tonight, well, it’s your goddamned fault. Think about that. Your fault, C.J., not mine. Keep that in mind while I’m killing you.”

Killing you.

There. He had said it outright. He had expressed his final intention, and what was so frightening was that there had been no hesitation in his voice, only cold certainty.