Last Breath (29 page)

Gavin Treat’s handwriting, every
t
crossed and every
i
dotted, slanted in graceful cursive down the page.

December 21.

Today I found her, she who had been lost, the prodigal. She thought she could hide from me, did Caitlin, or perhaps she thought I had forgotten her after all these years. Or is it that she assumed my tastes ran exclusively to children? But we who are connoisseurs and esthetes in matters of Thanatos must continue to mature and to acquire more sophisticated tastes. Stagnation is the death of soul. As for me, I have put away childish things.

Still, it is true that I had forgotten her, or to put it more precisely, I had not made her the focus of my thoughts for a considerable time. I have been otherwise engaged. One must not dwell on the past.

It was by mere chance that I rediscovered her. Today there was a television report on a local shooting, and one of the patrol officers interviewed was a young brunette who looked so hauntingly familiar. Only after the newscast had ended did I make the connection to my past. Still, I wasn’t sure. I waited for the replay of the report on the late local news, and this time I video-recorded it. Though the officer was unidentified on screen, when I freeze-framed the tape I could read the nametag on her uniform.

OSBORN.

Now there is no doubt.

Naturally, work remains to be done. I must learn her home address—unlisted, of course, like any police officer’s. But I anticipate no insuperable difficulty about that. The shooting took place in Newton Division, logically implying that she works out of the Newton station house. Were an inconspicuous individual to watch the station’s parking lot for a day or two, said individual would be sure to see Officer Osborn enter or leave. Then it would be only a question of following her, or of tracing her license plate.

After so many years, to be reunited with Caitlin! I’m all a-quiver. I believe I’ll make her Miss January—she’s certainly attractive enough. She’ll be such a lovely specimen on display. Yes, give her another month or so to breathe the air. Come late January, she’ll breathe no more.

P.S. Today is the winter solstice, turning point of the year. How apropos. Happy Saturnalia to me! Here’s to a rich harvest of a fine young crop.

“Christ,” Walsh said, looking up from the journal. “What the hell do you make of that?”

“It sounds like this creep has been active for a long time,” Cellini said. “And he used to be into kids.”

“And one of those kids was Osborn.” Walsh frowned. “Her ex said she’d been through some painful childhood experience. He didn’t know the details.”

“And now her past has caught up with her. Damn it.” Cellini closed the journal. “The son of a bitch wasn’t even looking for her. It was just a fluke. A sound bite on the news.”

“And now she’s dead,” Walsh whispered.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Donna. Or yourself. Treat snatched her and killed her, and we let him get away so he can keep on doing it ... again and again and again....”

His cell phone chirped. Walsh pulled it from his pocket and stared at it, thinking emptily that this had better be good news.

“You gonna answer that?” Cellini asked.

He clicked the keypad. “Walsh.”

“Morrie, we’ve got something here.” It was Rawls, his voice crackling over a long-distance connection.

Walsh couldn’t imagine what Rawls could have come up with in Baltimore that would be relevant now. “Give it to me,” he said curtly, in no mood to be affable.

“We got to thinking about whoever sent us the e-mail that tipped us off to the Bluebeard site. Decided to trace it. Linked it to an ISP—that’s an Internet service provider—and obtained the identity of the person who owns the account. He lives in LA. He’s somebody you’d better talk to.”

“What’s his name?” Walsh asked, and then suddenly he knew. He knew even before Rawls answered the question. He knew, and he could have killed himself for not seeing it sooner.

“Adam Nolan,” Rawls was saying. “Spelled N-O-L—”

“
God
damn
it.”

Walsh uttered the profanity so loudly that one of the radio technicians from the communications room leaned into the command center to see if things were okay.

“I gather you don’t need me to spell it,” Rawls said dryly.

“No.” Walsh swallowed hard, ignoring the stares of both Cellini and the technician. “No, I don’t need you to spell it. I’ve met with him. I was in the same room with him three hours ago. He’s her ex-husband, damn it to hell. He set this whole thing up”—he was speaking half into the phone and half to Cellini—“played with us, used Treat for cover. Used a goddamned serial killer as a diversion. That’s why Treat was home tonight, why he didn’t have her. He
never
had her. Nolan did—and still does, if she’s alive.”

Cellini took out her cell phone and speed-dialed.

“Any idea where Nolan is now?” Rawls asked.

“No, but we’ll find him. We’ll find the son of a bitch.”

“You sound like yourself again, Morrie.”

“Who’d I sound like before?”

“Somebody who’d given up.”

“Fuck no. Not me. I’m on the case, Noah. And if it’s humanly possible, I swear to God I’ll save that woman’s life.”

C.J. lay in a shallow ditch, flat against the ground, while headlights swept over her head.

The ditch had been excavated for the purpose of planting hedges. Heaps of dirt rose up on both sides. She had seen the depression in the ground and taken cover there, and now she waited, praying the car would pass by.

The car. Absurd to think of it that way, but on some level she saw the car itself as her enemy, the demon car with its shining halogen eyes and its engine’s guttural purr. Its tires were paws that meant to maul and savage her. Its exhaust was an animal’s panting breath. Its stops and starts, its pivots and reverses, were the maneuvers of a predator on the prowl.

More than once it had come close to grinding her under its wheels. But in the chase she’d had certain advantages over her pursuer. She could take shortcuts a car couldn’t use. She could cut down narrow alleyways, climb over piles of debris, dive into foliage and lose herself in shadows.

Growing up, she had seen hounds chase desert cottontails, and she was the rabbit and the car was the hunter, sniffing out her trail, relentlessly closing in.

She pressed her face to the dirt and waited. Above, near the edge of the ditch, the BMW slowed as if debating where she could have gone.

There were several possible hiding places within view. An unfinished fountain lay across the road in the center of an artificial pond, bone dry. She could have concealed herself there, or behind one of the concrete benches that ringed the pond, or in the ramada on the opposite side. Farther away stood a line of fig trees, newly planted, spindly, bare of leaves but still offering shelter. Behind her lay the start of what appeared to be a bike path or a hiking trail, winding between shelved hillsides landscaped with rocks and wildflowers.

Many places she could have gone. So why had the car stopped alongside the ravine, its engine idling dangerously?

She groped in the dirt and found a rock. A pitiful weapon, but she would use it if she had to. She would not go without a fight.

The car hesitated a moment longer—then backed up with a squeal of tires and shot across an open courtyard, past the pond, into the night.

Gone.

She’d done it. She’d gotten away.

She rose to one knee, then hung her head in exhaustion. She was dirty and bruised; her clothes stuck to her in patches of sweat; her sneakers were thick with clotted mud.

The mud would leave a trail. She kicked her sneakers against the ground until most of the dirt had been knocked loose.

Then she considered what to do.

The car, of course, was not her real adversary. Still, if she could conceal herself someplace where the car couldn’t find her, she was likely to be safe.

All she had to do was enter an office building, leaving no sign of trespassing, and then Adam could circle and recircle the complex for hours without success. Even if he did surmise that she was hidden in one of the buildings, he wouldn’t be able to search them all.

She nodded in approval of her plan and stood up, her legs shaky after the long helter-skelter run. Slowly she climbed out of the ditch, then broke into a weary jog trot, heading down an avenue lined with dark streetlights.

The nearest building was a three-story structure with tiers of windows checkerboarding the unpainted wooden walls. There were panes in the windows, crisscrossed with tape. She pushed upward on one window, but it was locked. To get in, she would have to break the glass.

Adam might notice a broken window. She wondered if she should find another hiding place—

No time.

The car was coming back. She heard the warning growl of its engine, louder than before.

He must have realized he’d lost her. He was retracing his route.

C.J. ran to the farthest window, partially screened by a sapling held upright by two taut ropes. She snapped off one of its branches and used it to punch through the glass, then brushed shards away from the frame to clear a larger entryway.

It was big enough now. Go.

She hoisted herself through the window as a memory of entering Ramon Sanchez’s converted garage flashed in her mind. How long ago was that? Ten hours? It seemed as if weeks had passed, and the scared man with the baby in one hand and the gun in the other was only a half-forgotten dream.

She dropped into a dark space—a room or stairwell or hallway—then risked a glance outside.

Headlights. The car was approaching.

If Adam saw the litter of glass, he would know where she was. She had to go deeper into the building, find a hiding place near an exit. If he searched the place, she would hunker down as long as possible, reserving the option to escape if necessary.

She turned and took a step forward into the darkness, and then somebody was screaming.

No. Not a scream. An alarm. Shrill and piercing, a hundred-decibel siren inside the building.

The place was equipped with a security system, and she had triggered it—not by breaking the window but by moving forward.

Motion sensor, probably mounted on the wall or ceiling, with at least a twenty-foot range ...

Wasn’t important. What mattered was that the siren could be heard from outside. Through the window the glare of Adam’s headlights brightened.

She took off down a stretch of blackness that revealed itself as a corridor, then stumbled against a wall and groped her way to a doorway and went through into a large open space that would be a work area when it was finished. Now it was only bare walls and empty floor. The building was a shell. There was no place to hide. And still the alarm was reverberating throughout the hollow interior.

It occurred to her that now she knew why the power had been left on. The whole complex must be protected by a security system, which had been installed early in construction, so the wires could run inside the walls.

If the system was monitored by an outside agency, then a patrol unit would be dispatched to investigate the ringing alarm.

She could hope so. But no patrol unit’s response time would be fast enough to save her if she didn’t find a way out.

She crossed yards of emptiness and blundered into another wall, then crabbed along it, seeking a doorway. Her hip smacked against something that rattled—a worktable. She groped among a selection of tools and closed her hand over a large claw hammer. A weapon.

Finally she discovered a doorway and scrambled into a hallway that glowed with ambient light at its far end. She ran for the light and found herself in what must be the lobby. Windows flanked a central door. She got the door open and burst outside, shutting it behind her, muffling the alarm.

Let Adam waste time searching the building. Meanwhile she would find another, safer place to hide.

She was sprinting across the street when the BMW rounded the corner at full speed.

He hadn’t pursued her into the building. He had known she would escape out the front.

She flung herself sideways even as the car veered to mow her down.

A patch of scraggly weeds flew up into her face, and then she was rolling down a short incline while the car overshot its mark, screamed to a halt, and reversed.

At the bottom of the slope lay another office building, outwardly identical to the one she had just left. She tumbled up against the foundation as the car plowed down the slope. In the headlights’ dazzle she saw an opening between the foundation and the first floor.

Crawl space.

A shiver of fear eddied through her, but she fought it off and bellied inside. Fans of bright light wavered past her to illumine a low, claustrophobic passageway interspersed with lumber posts and knots of copper plumbing pipes.

She wriggled into the center of the crawl space and peered around in the glare of the headlights, looking for another way out.

There wasn’t any. The building, erected on uneven ground, allowed access to the crawl space only from one side. The other walls were flush against the foundation blocks.

The car eased to a stop. The headlights snapped off.

She was in total darkness now. Huddled, waiting, a hammer in her hand.

A child again.

Only back then she’d had a knife—a better weapon.

Maybe I was meant to die this way, C.J. thought. In a crawl space, in the dark.

She waited for whatever Adam would do next.

Adam Nolan resided in a two-bedroom condo in Brentwood, not far from the infamous spot where two of the most famous homicides in LA history had occurred a few years earlier. As the whole world knew, it was a neighborhood where, even after dark, people liked to go out for a stroll or walk their dogs.

Tonight, however, Brentwood seemed empty. There were no pedestrians on Nolan’s side street. No dogs barked. No traffic passed by.