No Place to Die (28 page)

The radio in the kitchen snapped off in the middle of Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” and thirty seconds later, McClain walked into the bedroom carrying a couple of wine glasses and a Mondavi Reserve Cabernet. Beverly figured that the wine must have set him back at least a hundred bucks, and she wondered what in the hell the bastard thought he was trying to accomplish. He’d opened the bottle in the kitchen. Now he poured an ounce into her glass and waited for her to taste it. She took a sip and nodded her approval.

“Very nice.”

McClain poured her a third of a glass, poured some for himself, and then went back to the kitchen. He returned, using hot pads to carry two plates, and set one
of the plates down in front of Beverly. “Watch out,” he cautioned. “The plate’s extremely hot.”

Dinner consisted of the steaks, baked potatoes, and the vegetable du jour, which tonight was glazed carrots rather than another variation of green beans. Beverly swallowed the first bite of her steak and looked up at McClain. “I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but this is an excellent steak—as good as any I’ve ever had in Mastro’s or Ruth’s Chris. I think you really could have a vocation as a chef.”

McClain shrugged, seemingly embarrassed. “Yeah, well, I found a place that sells prime beef. It’d be pretty hard to screw it up.”

Beverly nodded at the wine. “You went to a lot of trouble tonight.”

Looking at his plate rather than at Beverly, he said, “Well, I figured I owed it to you. Besides, I was afraid you’d probably kill me if I showed up with another damn pizza.”

Beverly looked down at her own plate and the room fell silent. Then McClain shook his head. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Bad joke. Sometimes my mouth gets way ahead of my feeble excuse for a brain.”

Beverly looked up and made eye contact for a moment, then gave him a slight nod and returned to her steak. They ate in silence for the next few minutes, and McClain poured himself some more wine. Holding the bottle, he looked at Beverly’s glass. “You don’t like it?”

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “It’s excellent. I’m just savoring it.”

She took a sip and let him pour another ounce or so into her glass. Then she ate another bite of her steak. “So what do you suppose you’ll do with yourself when you’re finished here, Carl?”

McClain set down his fork, took another sip of wine, and shook his head. “I’m not completely sure. The one
thing I do know is that I’ll be getting the hell out of Phoenix. Leaving aside the obvious reasons why I’d want to put some distance between myself and the local authorities, I have absolutely no desire to live here anymore.”

He took another drink of wine and waited for a moment, lost in thought. Then he looked up to meet her eyes. “You can’t begin to imagine what it was like, Beverly, getting off the bus from Lewis and seeing Phoenix for the first time in seventeen years. I felt like Rip Van Fuckin’ Winkle, or like I’d just stepped out of H. G. Wells’s time machine.”

She allowed him a small smile, and he shook his head again. “No, I mean it. Really. When I was a kid, this valley was a pretty decent place to live. But now…Jesus, what with the number of people who’ve poured in, the endless sprawl, and the air pollution, not to mention the goddamn traffic…Seriously, how in the hell do you stand it?”

“I don’t know”—she shrugged—“but I can certainly understand how disorienting it must have been for you. The Valley
has
grown and changed a lot in that time, and I realize that it must have been one thing to read about it in isolation and another thing altogether to suddenly experience it…”

She pushed a couple of carrots around on the plate with her fork. “I guess that living through all those changes, I experienced them gradually. And like everybody else who’s lived here through that time, I adjusted as I went along. I agree with you that I absolutely hate looking at the mountains and seeing the pollution hanging there, especially on those winter days when it’s really bad. And sometimes the traffic really does suck. But at least the freeway system is a lot better than it was seventeen years ago. And most of the time, except at rush hour, it doesn’t seem to take me all that long to get most of the places I need to go.

“Besides, I still really love the weather here, especially at this time of year—and the recreational opportunities. Even with all the additional people who’ve moved in, you can still take advantage of the mountains and the parks and not feel crowded…I’ve been to a lot of other cities in the last ten years or so, and while I like visiting them, I don’t think I’d want to live permanently in very many of them as opposed to here.”

McClain finished the last of his steak and poured himself some more wine. “Well you’re ahead of me on that score, of course. And I do want to get out and see what the rest of the country looks like after all this time. But I need to find someplace smaller and a helluva lot less congested. Phoenix just doesn’t work for me anymore.”

They sat in silence for the next few minutes as McClain continued to drink his wine, occasionally looking at Beverly and then looking quickly away. She toyed with her glass, occasionally taking a small sip, hoping that he wouldn’t notice that she was allowing him to drink the bulk of the wine. With about a quarter of the bottle remaining, McClain let out a long sigh.

He got up from the table, closed the bedroom door, and snapped off the overhead light, leaving only the small lamp on the nightstand to illuminate the room. Then he walked back to the table and touched his hand to Beverly’s shoulder. She sat, staring at her wineglass, refusing to meet his eyes. He waited a few seconds, then said in a soft voice, “Take your off clothes, Beverly.”

She sat for another moment, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Then she finished the last of her wine, set down the glass, and rose from the table.

By ten o’clock, we were increasingly resigned to the fact that McClain would probably not be leaving the house again before morning. Maggie and I remained in the small surveillance van closest to the house. Chickris was still in a truck at the back, and Al Harris continued to direct the Special Assignments team from his command truck two blocks away. Otherwise, the second shift of the Special Assignments team had rotated into place, all except for Curt Hesler, who insisted that he was still good to go, at least for the time being.

A patrolman had slipped into our van with a takeout pizza and some soft drinks, and for only the second or third time since we’d been teamed together, Maggie made no complaint about eating fast food. We sat on stools in the back of the van along with two members of the Special Assignments team, taking turns watching the front of the house, while all of us continued to listen to the radio chatter through our headphones.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t all that much to listen to. Vehicles continued to pass on the street in front of the house, and the occasional pedestrian walked or staggered by. Light continued to show from McClain’s living room and kitchen, while the back of the house remained dark. As the evening progressed, Hesler made several more trips around the house but reported hearing nothing, save for the occasional sound of muted voices coming from the one bedroom.
But he was still unable to determine whether the sound was coming from people conversing in the room or from a radio or television set.

At ten twenty, I drained the last of a Coke and watched as Maggie stifled a yawn. I touched her knee and said, “You want to take a break—go home and sleep for a while? This asshole’s not going anywhere tonight.”

She shot me a skeptical look. “Yeah, Richardson. I’ll go home and take a nap about the same time you do.”

She stretched briefly and rotated her head around her neck. “I just hope to hell we don’t sit here all night and discover tomorrow that this asshole’s just a freelancer who was hoping to score a story that he could sell to one of the papers.”

“Oh, Jesus, Maggs, don’t even suggest it. But if that’s the case, why is he renting this house using the name Alan Fischer and then trying to set up the interview with Mike Miller as Jason Barnes? More to the point, why can’t we find any record of Jason Barnes at all, and no record of Alan Fischer that goes back more than three months ago?”

“Yeah, I know,” she sighed. “It’s gotta be McClain. But if it’s not, I’m gonna ream the fucker a new asshole.”

McClain pulled on his T-shirt, underwear, and jeans, then felt his way toward the door, leaving Beverly naked and crying softly on the bed behind him. He opened the door, and light from the hallway flooded into the room. McClain went back to the table, picked up his glass and the bottle of Cabernet, and then left, pulling the door closed behind him.

For the first time since he’d abducted Beverly, he’d been unable to go through with the rape. On his order, she had obediently gotten up from the table, stripped off her T-shirt, sweatpants, and panties, and lain down on the bed. He’d slowly taken off his own clothes,
looking at her body and watching her reaction as his erection firmed up.

A tear fell out of her eye and slipped down her cheek as he climbed on top of her. He wiped the tear away with his thumb and lowered his mouth to her breast. She began sobbing even harder, and in a soft voice, she pleaded again, “Why are you doing this to me?”

McClain reached out and slapped the lamp off the nightstand and onto the floor, breaking the bulb and plunging the room into darkness. He grabbed her wrists and, using one hand, held them together above her head. With his other hand, he roughly forced her legs apart, willing himself to ignore the sound of her crying as he attempted once again to summon up the rage that had first brought him to her door nine nights earlier.

But it was useless. Struggling to force himself into her, he felt his erection slipping away. He released her wrists and lay still on top of her for another minute or so, listening to her cry. Then he pushed himself up to his elbows and touched her cheek in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

And then he was gone.

Beverly listened as McClain made his way across the room and pulled the door closed behind him. Then she opened her eyes in the darkness and wiped them with the back of her hands. She swung her legs off the bed and was just about to set her feet on the floor when she remembered the broken lamp. She crawled across to the other side of the bed, got up, and slowly felt her way around the room to the door.

She flipped the light on, made her way to the bathroom, and took a hurried shower in the lukewarm water. Even though McClain had not successfully penetrated her, she was nonetheless desperate to scrub the memory of his touch from her skin.

She toweled herself off, went back into the bedroom, and used the T-shirt she’d been wearing earlier to push the fragments of the broken lightbulb into a small pile out of the way up against the wall. Then she pulled on a fresh pair of panties, a clean T-shirt, and her sweatpants.

Back in the bathroom, she closed the door and picked up the plunger from beside the toilet. She took a deep breath, said a silent prayer, and then flushed the noisy toilet. As the water gurgled out of the tank and into the bowl, she snapped off the handle of the plunger.

It made less noise than she thought it would, and in her right hand, she now held the top eighteen inches or so of the handle, which tapered down to a broken jagged point. She turned off the water, dropped the rest of the plunger into the wastebasket, and covered it with the
Newsweek
that McClain had bought her on Valentine’s Day.

Holding the weapon at her side, she cracked open the bathroom door and looked into the bedroom. Thankfully, the room was empty and the door to the hall was still closed. She turned off the bathroom light, moved quickly to the bed, and lifted up the mattress. She stuck the broken handle under the mattress right at the place where her arm would naturally fall when she was lying with her head on her pillow.

That done, Beverly walked over to the door and snapped off the light. Then she felt her way back across the room, lay down on top of the covers, and waited for Carl McClain to come back to bed.

At ten twenty-eight, we watched the light disappear from McClain’s kitchen window, and a couple of minutes later, the living room went dark as well. I picked up my radio and keyed the mic. “Greg, he’s turned off the lights in the front of the house. What’s happening back there?”

“Nothing. It’s still completely dark. I haven’t seen even a tiny glimmer of light from the back of the place since I got here.”

“What’s he got for window coverings back there?”

“There’s one small window that I assume is in the bathroom. It’s completely black. The other windows have shades in them and what must be white curtains behind the shades. The shades were closed when I got here, and I could see a narrow strip of white cloth around the edges of one of them. But nobody’s touched the shades during the time I’ve been watching.”

“And there’s no light at all showing through any of the windows back there?”

“Nope.”

Curt Hesler had worked his way around to the back of the house again, and I asked him if he could hear anything.

“No, sorry, Sean,” he whispered. “I’m not picking up a thing back here now.”

“Well shit,” I sighed into the radio. “It looks like he’s giving it up for the night. But everybody stay alert. If he hasn’t gone to bed, don’t let him slip out of there in the dark without us seeing him.”

McClain snapped off the light in the kitchen and made his way to the living room with his glass and what remained of the bottle of Cabernet. He dropped into the easy chair, poured himself half a glass of the wine, and set the bottle on the table next to the chair. Then he propped his feet up on the ottoman and turned off the floor lamp. Alone in the darkened room, he took a healthy drink of the wine and tried to figure out what in the hell he was going to do about Beverly Thompson.

He understood now that he should have finished with her after the first two or three days, back when he still knew for certain that she was the stupid, incompetent bitch who’d let them send him to prison for life—back before he’d begun to wonder if she might have been some other woman all along.

But of course, that was then and this was now. And he realized that despite the doubts that might be gnawing at him, he had no real choice in the matter. His only option was to finish what he’d started here. His own survival depended on it.

He drained the last of the wine and sat there for another thirty minutes, his mind running in circles. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, and for a few seconds, the floor seemed to be shifting under his feet. He was somewhat surprised to realize that he was slightly drunk, but he wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t know what needed to be done.

Attempting to move quietly, he walked down the hall in his stocking feet and stopped in front of the bedroom door. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it free of his jeans, and looped the end of the belt back through the buckle. Then he slowly opened the door, slipped into the room, and made his way toward the bed.

After sitting in the dark for thirty minutes, his eyes had adjusted to the little ambient light that filtered into the house from the outside, and he could just make out Beverly’s vague shape lying on top of the covers. He
stood beside her for several long minutes, holding the belt and willing himself to get it over and done with.

Beverly’s head was turned away from him and she was breathing softly and regularly. McClain reasoned that it would be a fairly simple matter to quickly slip the loop in the belt over her head and pull it tightly around her neck. With any luck, she’d be dead before she was even awake enough to realize what was happening to her. But his hands remained at his sides, stubbornly refusing to execute the command that his brain kept repeating insistently.

Finally, after wrestling with the issue for another couple of minutes, it occurred to him that the better plan might be to wait until morning when he was completely sober and thinking a bit more clearly. He could get up early and get his things packed into the Taurus. Then he could finally finish with Beverly and be out on the road immediately after.

Relieved at having conjured up a more sensible approach to the problem, McClain reached out and lightly touched Beverly’s leg. Then he sighed and walked slowly around to his own side of the bed. He slipped out of his jeans and lay down beside her, setting the belt on the floor next to the bed. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough.