Last Breath (26 page)

“Of course you didn’t, Mr. Gader,” Rawls said evenly. As Gader’s tone had risen in pitch and intensity, Rawls’s own voice had dropped half an octave and slowed down, as if to compensate. “You didn’t know anything. I hear you.”

“Well, all right. All right. I knew there might be some ... funny business. You know, maybe the women weren’t aware,
fully
aware, that they were being taped. I mean, that was a possibility. A remote possibility.”

“Remote,” Rawls echoed, his voice deepening still further, entering the James Earl Jones range.

“But the other stuff, these killings, it’s news to me. I mean, a complete shock. I never had the slightest ... Look, if I had even suspected ...”

Rawls said nothing. He believed Gader, actually. But he wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. The man was scum. Let him sweat.

“Maybe I’d better call a lawyer,” Gader finished.

“That’s your right.”

Gader trudged out of the room. Rawls stared after him, then glanced at Brand.

“What a prick,” Brand commented without looking up from Gader’s computer.

Rawls laughed, his first laugh in quite a long while. “Ned, you always know the right thing to say.”

His cell phone chirped. He took the call, and his smile vanished when he heard Morris Walsh’s first words.

“Got good news and bad news.” There was no life in his voice, and no hope. “Which do you want to hear first?”

“Just tell it all.”

“We identified Bluebeard. SWAT just raided his apartment. He was there, but he got away.”

“He’s at large?”

“Afraid so.”

“And the victim?”

“No sign of her.”

“You think he already did her?” Rawls hated that ugly euphemism,
did
, which stood for everything from consensual sex to rape to homicide, but he couldn’t bring himself to say
killed
.

On the other end of the line, Walsh sighed. “We don’t know. I had this theory that he holds them for four hours, but ... Well, it looks like I was wrong.”

He sounded tired. More than tired. Defeated. As if he had given up. Not a good sign—for him, for the case, or for C.J. Osborn, if she was still alive.

“Possibly not,” Rawls said, trying to give Walsh some encouragement. “He may have stashed her somewhere.”

“And gone home? Maybe. I don’t think so. You know, the four-hour thing was based mainly on the tattoos.”

“The hourglass,” Rawls said.

“But I guess they had a different significance. Our guy is into spiders.”

This was such a non sequitur that Rawls could only echo, “Spiders?”

A grunt from Walsh. “He laid a trap for our SWAT team ... or for anybody else who tried to corner him in his lair. Installed the cover of a fluorescent lighting panel on the ceiling of the hallway inside his apartment. But there’s no light fixture behind it. Instead, there’s spiders.”

“How many?” Rawls asked softly.

“A million of the goddamned things, for all I know. The asshole locks himself in his bedroom behind a steel door, then kills the hallway light—he rewired the switch so he could operate it from inside his room—then activates a hydraulic cable that runs through the ceiling. Simple principle—the Plexiglas cover of the lighting panel is spring-loaded, and the cable releases the spring. Cover slides back, spiders fall out.”

“A million of them.”

“Give or take.”

“Venomous spiders?”

“Oh, sure. Probably not normally aggressive, but when they’ve been dumped out of their cage like that ...”

“They bite. How bad is it?”

“We’ve got four SWAT members in the hospital, plus another Sheriff’s deputy who got bitten when he reached the scene. Fumigators are spraying the apartment now. Probably have to evacuate the building ... It’s got central air, and some of the spiders may have gotten into the ducts.”

“Nightmare,” Rawls breathed. No wonder the detective sounded beaten.

“Hasn’t been my best day. Or anybody else’s either. Except for the suspect. He got away clean through a secret exit.”

“Take anything?”

“His computer, it looks like. A laptop, obviously. He must own one. There’s a, whatchamacallit, docking station in his bedroom.”

“If he has a mobile connection or he can get access to a phone jack, he can monitor the Web site.”

“And the video feed. I know. I kept it up and running. He knows we’re on to him, but he doesn’t necessarily know we’re aware of the site.”

“Does that help us?”

“Who knows?” Walsh sighed again. “Can’t hurt. Frankly, I’ll take any advantage I can get over this creep. Hold on a sec.”

Rawls heard Walsh talking to somebody in the background, relaying orders in an exhausted voice. He glanced at Brand. “It’s a mess in LA.”

“So I gathered. Hey, this guy always strikes on the last night of the month, right?”

“So?”

“Just strikes me as funny, that’s all. The coincidence, I mean.”

“Coincidence?”

“You getting the tip-off e-mail on the same day when this dude is getting set to knock off victim number three.”

Rawls stared at him, thinking. “Now that you mention it,” he said finally, “it is kind of funny.”

Then Walsh was back on the line. “Sorry about the interruption. Things are pretty hairy here. I’ve got to go.”

“Just one thing, Morrie. You never explained about the tattoos. When I asked, you started talking about spiders. What’s the connection?”

“Black widows. They have that same hourglass mark.”

“I see.”

“That’s what the tats were all about. Goddamned spiders—not time.” Walsh was beating himself up, taking the blame for having made the wrong deduction. Rawls heard the harsh self-accusation in his voice.

“It could be both,” Rawls said gently. “A symbol for both things.”

“Could be, but evidently it isn’t. Christ, did I ever fuck this up.”

“Morrie—”

Walsh kept talking, unwilling to be consoled. “He never had a four-hour timetable. Even the name we had for him was wrong. He’s not the Hourglass Killer. He has another name for himself. A better name.”

“What name?”

“It’s right here in his journal. Yeah, we found that, or at least the Sheriff’s crime-scene people did. He tells us who he really is on the very first line.”

Rawls waited.

“ ‘I am the Webmaster,’ ” Walsh recited. “Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?”

I am the Webmaster.

Treat repeated the words to himself, driving through a village of names.

His car was a secondhand Buick, which he kept in a parking space six blocks from his apartment specifically for emergencies like this. After his escape from the local gendarmes, he had roved through alleys and side streets until he reached the Buick. The key, as always, was hidden in a magnetic case under the chassis. The car was registered under an alias and could not be readily connected to him. Stowed in the trunk were a set of false IDs, wads of cash, a passport, a disguise kit, and an overnight bag containing a change of clothes and a toothbrush. He believed in being prepared.

At first he considered driving out of state, beginning a new life somewhere else. Or ditching the car at LAX and taking a flight to the Midwest—someplace safely banal, like Omaha. But there was a chance the police would be looking for him at the airports. Even the roads might be blocked, though he doubted it.

Besides, he wanted to hang around. There was Caitlin to think of. He still wanted his chance with her.

In the meantime, he had to go someplace. One possibility was the house in Silver Lake where he had committed his crimes. He could hole up in the basement, perhaps. But the defects in this plan were obvious. The authorities had already identified him and tracked him to his home. They might just as easily have discovered his killing ground. He had to steer clear of Silver Lake.

Good thinking, but it had left him with nowhere to go. Aimlessly he’d headed north from Hacienda Heights until he entered the sprawling community of West Covina. Then he had known where his instincts were carrying him, and he’d bowed to their wisdom, driving east on Amar Road and turning south into a sizable tract housing development. He had driven here on other nights. For him, it was a relaxing place to be, a place to decompress.

There was a fashion among housing developers of choosing a theme for street names. Often the streets were named in honor of the wildlife species they had displaced—Spotted Owl Circle, say. Other times a western motif was selected—Stagecoach Lane, Corral Avenue, Saddleback Court. He had seen communities that reached for a regal air with streets like King Henry Drive and Prince Edward Way. But the builders of this particular development had opted for a theme more congenial to Treat’s tastes. Nearly every one of the twisting, winding avenues and byways bore a woman’s name.

He motored slowly through the complex, past neat little houses, windows aglow with reading lights and television sets, and he scanned each signpost as it moved past the Buick’s windshield.

Kimberly Drive.

Then a series of courts—Joan Court, Kate Court, Kerry, Kathleen, June, Jessica, Justine.

Jacqueline Drive. Helen Lane. April Way. Sarah and Sonya and Stacey and Stephanie. Regina and Rebecca and Ruth and Ruby.

So many memories. And the promises of new memories to come.

There had been a Kimberly for him in Utah. She was a waitress in a roadside diner, and he killed her with a garrote at the end of her shift. Her hair was red, and her waitress uniform was red, and her blood was red as it trickled down her neck from the line incised across her throat by the taut piano wire.

And there had been a Kate, as well. Schoolteacher in Boulder, Colorado. He had been repairing telephone lines back then. He fixed the static on her line, then returned a few weeks later and fixed her. He had always disliked educators, and it had given him special pleasure to teach her this final lesson, a lesson in pain.

Oddly, he’d had no J’s. No Joan, June, Jessica, Justine, Jacqueline. He could have—should have—had a Caitlin Jean tonight. But he preferred not to think about that. No point dwelling on a rare failure, when he had enjoyed so many successes.

The S’s had been particularly productive for him. Never a Sarah, but there’d been a Sonya in Austin and a Stacey in Wyoming and two Stephanies. The first had been a nine-year-old girl in the Mojave—this was during his desert wanderings. The second, more recent—a nurse in Salem, Oregon. He didn’t think her body had ever been found. There was a lot of wilderness in that part of country, and carrion flesh didn’t last long.

He drove farther along the curving avenues. Patty and Petra and Priscilla passed him by without eliciting any nostalgic recollections. But Paula Street brought a smile to his face. Paula had been a memorable one. Barmaid, Houston, 1991. Hot summer night, with that insufferable Texas humidity choking the air. She went home with another man. Treat followed. The man didn’t stay the night. When he left, Treat broke in and smothered Paula under a pillow. The pillowcase was a daffodil print—funny how he remembered that. Later he read that the unlucky bar patron who picked her up had been arrested and charged with the homicide. Treat never followed up on the case to learn if the man was convicted.

Yes, Paula. A good one.

Serial killers were said to take souvenirs, mementos of their kills. No doubt most did, but Treat had never been much of a collector. He saw no point in weighing himself down with a lot of bric-a-brac when he was so often on the move. And why give the police any help in apprehending him, or in making a conviction stick? A room full of incriminating evidence was just the break they needed.

So he had not followed the example of other killers like himself. He took nothing from his victims except their breath, their lives, and their names. This was the secret hoard stashed in the treasure chest of his soul. He remembered their names, always.

Amanda Street. Bernadette Court. Cynthia Court.

He’d had his share of A’s, B’s, and C’s, but not those particular ones. He headed toward the other end of the community, past more sleepy homes, more droning TV sets, more affectionate couples and cranky kids, more of the normality that surrounded him but never touched him, was never fully real.

Into the G’s now. Gabriella, Gina, Gloria, Gail. He’d had a Gina in West Palm Beach. Left her dead in her condo with the air conditioning turned up high to keep the body cold. He hadn’t wanted the smell of decomposition to alert the neighbors until he was far away.

Faith, Frieda, Flora, Felicia. He recalled a Faith in the Mojave, eleven years old. A Felicia, too, though she had been one of his less satisfying kills—a patrol car nearly spotted him as he was dragging her into an arroyo, and he had to quickly cut her throat and flee in case the cops doubled back to investigate. A waste. Treat sighed sadly. He hated waste.

Erica, Erin, Evangelina, Evelyn, Elena ...

So many names. And he’d had no small number of them. Erica in Las Cruces, killed in an alley during a street festival, left on the pavement with cotton candy sticking to her face. Erin, another child of the Mojave. Evelyn—she’d been a driving instructor in San Francisco, whom he’d met during a stroll in Golden Gate Park. She had rebuffed his advances, but she hadn’t noticed him follow her home. San Francisco was a fun town. All those people living atop an earthquake fault line that could rupture at any moment. Crowded life and mass death so closely intertwined. He would like to return there someday.

More streets, more names. He paid less attention. Occasionally a sign would catch his eye—Christie Lane; he’d known a Christie in New Orleans, pretty girl, slightly plump, squealed like a stuck pig when he put the ice pick in her skull—but mostly he just drove and let his thoughts wander.

After a traumatic experience, such as his run-in with officers of the law in their stormtrooper regalia, it was best to relax and reorient oneself. Nervous exhaustion would lead to panic, and panic produced stupidity, and stupidity was the single vice he could not abide.

Had he been stupid, he would not have lasted this long.

He’d been at the game for twenty years now. His first kill had been claimed at the tender age of twenty-one. He had preyed on children in the early years. In retrospect, he could see that his choice of victim had been dictated by his youthful insecurities. He had not felt competent to go after adults.