Mark of the Devil (23 page)

With eyes still shut, Matt’s head rolled to one side, then back against the closet’s doorframe.
Air!
Suddenly, his brain registered
Danger!
He needed air, but he couldn’t breathe.
No control!
Not only lungs, but his entire body.
Helpless! Panic!
His jaw dropped, enlarging the opening for air. With that movement, the whole left side of his face was immediately on fire. More urgent than the pain, however, was the need for air. His brain screamed,
Breathe, exhale, breathe, exhale,
but goddamn it, he couldn’t breathe. He was suffocating.

His head rocked uncontrollably back and forth, the back of his head hitting the doorframe, his open mouth searching for air. Finally, one shallow breath. The hollow cry of his vocal cords rasped in his ears. Another breath and another. Panting as though he’d run a 20-mile, cross-country race, he sucked in thin wisps of air. Only gradually did his chest begin to expand as some semblance of control seeped back into his body.

Matt managed to open his eyes. Through the slight jerking movement of the ocular muscles of which he seemed to have little control, he tried to focus on the water stain on the ceiling. Simultaneously, the ringing in his ears was like a thousand cricket chirps: continuous, running together. It was the sudden nausea churning in his stomach, however, that forced him onto his side. Propped on one elbow and with a single, gut-wrenching heave, vomit spilled from Matt’s mouth and nose, splattering across the hardwood floor.

When it seemed his stomach’s contents had finally evacuated his body, Matt pushed to a sitting position and leaned back against the doorframe. He sat there feeling like all the energy had been drained from every muscle, every sinew and joint, but it was still his inability to take a deep breath and the loud, irregular beat of his heart that scared him. And his eyes. He shut them as tight as he could, afraid they might burst out of his head at any moment.

“God, what’s happening?” he muttered, fighting against the invisible vice that seemed to grip his chest. At the same time it took every bit of strength he could muster to wipe vomit from his mouth with the back of his right hand.

At first, the pistol’s rounded hammer, then the sharpness of the rear sight, drug across his upper lip and caught on the dimple of skin and flesh separating lips from nostrils. Forcing his eyes open, he saw it. Blurred at first, the rich blue-black finish of the barrel gradually became recognizable. No words, only a moan of disbelief as the object in his hand finally registered in an oxygen-starved brain. Fighting the clinging nausea and the throbbing in his head, Matt pushed off the floor with his left arm, eyes glued to the weapon in his right hand. Feet and legs, more like spindly roots than bone and muscle, slowly forced the rest of his body up the edge of the doorframe until he stood. Trying to breathe, and at the same time blink away the dizziness, he slowly eyed his way around the room. Enough light from an overturned lamp to see a bed and bodies, he looked at the weapon in his hand and back at the bed.

“Oh…no!”

Pushing away from the doorframe, Matt staggered to the foot of the bed and, for needed support, grasped the footboard. At the same time he tried to focus on the bodies, tried to identify whose they were, what they were doing. The man, on his stomach, an arm flopped across the woman’s body; the woman, on her back, the left side of her face, chest, and stomach, dark with blood. “No, it can’t…” He raised the pistol and stared at it for a moment. The two bodies formed a bloody background for the weapon until he cried, “Ashley-y-y-y!”

The scrape of a doorknob turning and the sound of aging hinges rubbing metal-against-metal made him turn, left hand still clutching the footboard for support. Four figures, silhouetted by the hall light behind them, pushed through the door, guns drawn. “Police! The weapon, Mr. Berkeley—put it down.” A momentary pause was followed by “Now!”

Matt stared in disbelief at what he decided were three men and a woman, two standing, two quickly dropping to one knee, each with a handgun in firing position, pointed in his direction.

“Now, goddamn it!” the voice ordered.

As though in a dream, Matt turned enough to see Ashley’s body on the bed and laid the pistol between her feet. He sank to his knees as the last of his stomach’s contents swirled upwards into his throat.

Matt didn’t know how long he’d been on the sofa, but he did remember the handcuffs and the almost wire-thin, black plastic leg restraints. Two of the men had literally dragged him from the bedroom, fingers digging into both shoulders and armpits. That was the last he remembered until a woman’s voice, mannish in a way, but distantly familiar, said, “Mr. Berkeley. Do you remember me? Mr. Berkeley?”

The voice, only slightly louder than the crickets that were still chirping in his ears, bit into his consciousness with just enough force for him to push open one eye, then the other. The severe pressure he’d felt in his eyes had lessened, and he was breathing, but the ceiling light directly above glared like the midday sun. It caused him to rapidly blink against its harshness before finding enough voice to say, “I…I don’t know. Where…where’s Ashley?”

The movement of his jaw sent splintery shards of pain through the left side of his face, but the sharpness of the pain seemed to act as a clarifying agent. It swept away much of the sludge that had formed a thick veneer over the surface of his mental faculties. Sensory snapshots in time flicked past his mind’s eye: the living room, muffled gunshots, the bedroom, and the vision of a woman. The figure lay stretched across the bed, wrists and ankles wrapped with duct tape and tied to spindles on the foot and headboards. Or that’s what it looked like. One memory leapt out at him: the dark spot in her left cheek where a bullet had entered, blood seeping over her chin and along her throat, more blood spreading from beneath her breast.

“Oh, Jesus. Ashley!” he shouted.

He tried to push up from the sofa, but someone behind him growled, “No you don’t.” Strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back.

“Ashley,” he cried, “For God’s sake, it was Ashley, wasn’t it? Goddamn it! She’s—”

“If Ashley’s the one on the bed, she’s dead, Mr. Berkeley.” It was the woman’s voice again. Her face gradually materialized from out of the haze that slipped from his eyes like the parting of a veil. The face, the graying hair, horn-rimmed trifocals highlighting a set of piercing eyes that seemed to reach into his thoughts, the white surgical smock with blood stains on the front and sleeves—he knew her. Another time, another white surgical smock with blood smears on the front and sleeves. And behind her, people coming and going from the bedroom.

“And you killed her, Berkeley. In cold blood.” The voice behind him, the voice of the man who had pulled him back onto the sofa, forced him to tilt his head backward on the arm of the sofa.

“You…Ham…Hammer something.”

“Detective Hammersmith,” he said. Hammersmith leaned over until his face was almost touching Matt’s ear, whispering, “You friggin’ killed your wife, Berkeley.”

“No!”

Again, Hammersmith’s hands were on Matt’s shoulders, pushing him down into the clutching softness of the sofa.

“That’s enough, Detective,” the woman ordered. “It’s Fay Lundgren, Mr. Berkeley,” she said, once more getting Matt’s attention. “Dr. Fay Lundgren, Duval County Medical Examiner. You remember me?”

“Jackie, my sister. You were…”

“Yes, when she was murdered. The Azrael case. I have to ask, Mr. Berkeley, did you kill the man and woman in the bedroom?” She nodded toward the back of the house.

“No, damn it! Hell no! It was Ashley, wasn’t it? My wife, Ashley?”

“That’s what we think. Detective Hammersmith says the woman is…was your wife. He met her once while you were away, when someone attacked her here at the house. This house.”

“I don’t…I don’t know anything about that, but I couldn’t have killed her.” It was so hard to breathe, to concentrate, but he was lucid enough to know, to say, “I love her. No! I couldn’t kill Ashley.”

“Little difficult to believe, Mr. Berkeley!” A quiet Southern drawl reached in from the doorway leading to the bedrooms. Moving to the sofa as she pulled a pair of opaque latex gloves from her hands, Detective Terri Good said, “You had the weapon in your hand when we entered the room.”

“I know it can be traumatic finding your wife with another man,” Fay Lundgren said, “but there has to be a better way than—”

“I didn’t find her with another man, damn it, and I didn’t kill her or the man or anybody else.” Still fighting to take in enough air to fill his lungs, Matt tried to push himself into a sitting position. “Uhhhhh,” he groaned, bringing both hands to his head. Using the tips of his fingers, he very carefully explored both the six-day-old stitches in his forehead and the badly swollen flesh on the left side of his face. He felt dried blood caked in his hair, a crust of blood clinging to his outer ear. “Somebody beat the hell out of me.”

“Yeah, and I believe in the Easter bunny,” Hammersmith said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling a cloud of smoke toward Matt’s face. “Blacked out after you did the dirty deed and busted up your head when you fell; that’s all.”

“You really think I did this to myself?” Matt asked in disbelief, almost panting for air.

“C’mon, Doc,” Hammersmith said, as though he didn’t hear Matt’s question, “let’s get this over with and get him locked up before he takes out somebody else.” Spewing another stream of smoke in Berkeley’s face, he bent closer. “I been studying up on you since you took off for Europe, and I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of bodies you’ve left lyin’ around. And from the look of those stitches in your forehead, I’d say somebody whacked you while you were in Europe. How many’d you kill over there?”

“That’s enough, Detective,” Lundgren said. “Mr. Berkeley, there are several things I want to check before they take you away.”

“Like what?”

“First, your hands.”

“You’ve already got my fingerprints on file,” Matt said, his memory and reasoning becoming clearer by the moment. “The Azrael case, remember?”

“Yes, I know.”

Hammersmith butted in. “There’re prints all over the weapon you had in your hand, Berkeley, and I’ll bet the house on whose they match.”

“That’s right, Mr. Berkeley,” Good added. “A Walther PPK slant S. Fires seven rounds, thirty-two automatic ammo. So far, we’ve found seven shells, but only six rounds. Techs are still looking for the seventh we’re sure you fired.”

“I didn’t fire—”

“Bullshit,” Hammersmith spat out. “Same type semiautomatic used to kill your buddy Gravely up in Northern Virginia and that guy Fitzwellen. I’m bettin’ after ballistics checks with the Fairfax County, Virginia, folks, it’ll be the same weapon. Right?”

Fay Lundgren reached into what appeared to be an oversized, matte-finish aluminum briefcase sitting on the floor next to the sofa and took out a small bottle containing a clear liquid marked “Nitric Acid—Diluted” and a white paper package. First, she removed the cap from the bottle; then she ripped open the end of the paper package. Withdrawing a cotton swab, she dipped the swab in the bottle before taking Matt’s right hand in hers. “Spread the thumb and forefinger, please.”

“Gunshot residue?” Matt asked.

As she swabbed the webbed area between Matt’s thumb and forefinger, Lundgren explained, “We’ve already swabbed two of the cartridges found in the bedroom.” Using additional swabs, she rubbed the cotton ends over the palm and back of his hand, adding, “Deposits of barium and antimony, two components of the primer charge used in nearly all ammunition. If we find any on your hands, and it matches that from the cartridges, it’s definitely not in your favor.”

“You want me to get one of the crime scene people to do that, Doctor?” Terri Good asked.

“No, Mr. Berkeley and I go way back. I’ll take care of it.”

“If you’ve got an empty magazine and spent cartridges, especially the magazine,” Matt said, “check them for fingerprints. Whoever loaded the gun wasn’t me.” At the same time he shook his head in defeat. The rush of breath from his mouth signaled his frustration. “Anyway, whatever you find, if Ashley’s dead, I don’t guess it makes a helluva lot of difference, one way or the other. All I can say is, I didn’t kill her.”