Shadowfires (17 page)

Julio had never seen anything as savage as the crucifixion of the dead woman, yet it had obviously been done not in a white-hot madness but with cold calculation. Clearly, the woman had already been dead when brought here, for the nail holes weren’t bleeding. Her slender throat had been slashed, and that was evidently the mortal wound. The killer—or killers—had expended considerable time and energy finding the nails and the hammer (which now lay on the floor in one corner of the room), hoisting the corpse against the wall, holding it in place, and precisely driving the impaling spikes through the cool dead flesh. Apparently the head had drooped down, chin to chest, and apparently the killer had wanted the dead woman to be staring at the bedroom door (a grisly surprise for Rachael Leben), so he had looped a wire under the chin and had tied it tautly to a nail driven into the wall above her skull, to keep her facing out. Finally he had taped her eyes open—so she would be staring sightlessly at whomever discovered her.

“I understand,” Julio said.

“Yes,” Reese Hagerstrom said shakily.

Mulveck blinked in surprise. Pearls of sweat glistened on his pale forehead, perhaps not because of the June heat. “You’ve got to be joking. You understand this . . . madness? You see a
reason
for it?”

Julio said, “Ernestina and this girl were murdered primarily because the killer needed a car, and they
had
a car. But when he saw what the Klienstad woman looked like, he dumped the other one and brought the second body here to leave this message.”

Mulveck nervously combed one hand through his hair. “But if this psycho intended to kill Mrs. Leben, if she was his primary target, why not just come here and get her? Why just leave a . . . a message?”

“The killer must have had reason to suspect that she wouldn’t be at home. Maybe he even called first,” Julio said.

He was remembering Rachael Leben’s extreme nervousness when he had questioned her at the morgue earlier this evening. He had sensed that she was hiding something and that she was very much afraid. Now he knew that, even then, she had realized her life was in danger.

But who was she afraid of, and why couldn’t she turn to the police for help? What was she hiding?

The police photographer’s camera click-flashed.

Julio continued: “The killer knew he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on her right away, but he wanted her to know she could expect him later. He—or they—wanted to scare her witless. And when he took a good look at this Klienstad woman he had killed, he knew what he must do.”

“Huh?” Mulveck said. “I don’t follow.”

“Rebecca Klienstad was voluptuous,” Julio said, indicating the crucified woman. “So is Rachael Leben. Very similar body types.”

“And Mrs. Leben has hair much the same as the Klienstad girl’s,” Reese said. “Coppery brown.”

“Titian,” Julio said. “And although this woman isn’t nearly as lovely as Mrs. Leben, there’s a vague resemblance, a similarity of facial structure.”

The photographer paused to put new film in his camera.

Officer Mulveck shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The way it was supposed to work—Mrs. Leben would eventually come home and when she walked into this room she would see this woman crucified and know, by the similarities, that it was
her
this psycho really wanted to nail to the wall.”

“Yes,” Julio said, “I think so.”

“Yes,” Reese agreed.

“Good God,” Mulveck said, “do you realize how black, how bitter, how deep this hatred must be? Whoever he is, what could Mrs. Leben possibly have done to make him hate her like that? What sort of enemies does she have?”

“Very dangerous enemies,” Julio said. “That’s all I know. And . . . if we don’t find her quickly, we won’t find her alive.”

The photographer’s camera flashed.

The corpse seemed to twitch.

Flash, twitch.

Flash, twitch.

When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but cooperative.

No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.

Benny kept looking desperately left and right.

Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.

Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a FOR SALE sign in the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in need of a gardener’s attention.

“Eureka,” Benny said.

He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the headlights, the engine.

Darkness fell over them.

The car’s hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.

The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.

Benny said, “Give me your gun.”

From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.

Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but no longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to have jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other, earlier violence.

Benny opened his door and started to get out.

Rachael said, “Where are you going?”

“I want to make sure they go past and don’t double back. Then I’ve got to find another car.”

“We can change the tire—”

“No. This heap’s too easy to spot. We need something ordinary.”

“But where will you get another car?”

“Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come, slipped around the corner of the house, and was gone.

 

Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of the house, Ben heard a chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and ambulances were probably still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a mile or two away, where the bullet-riddled cops had ridden their cruiser through the windows of a boutique.

Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming along the street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and cautiously peered between branches of the overgrown oleander bushes, which were heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries. The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that there were three men inside. He could see only one clearly—the guy in the front passenger’s seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt features, and a mean slash of a mouth.

They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were smart enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy niche and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had not left obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn that he’d traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn’t been watered as regularly as it should have been, so it was badly blotched with brown patches, which provided a natural camouflage to further conceal the marks of the Mercedes’s passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry’s trail.

Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge confronting him. He’d been a real-estate salesman too long. He was not up to this sort of thing anymore, not for an extended length of time. He was thirty-seven, and he’d last been a man of action when he’d been twenty-one, which seemed a date lost in the mists of the Paleolithic era. Although he had kept in shape over the years, he was rusty. To Rachael, he had looked formidable when he’d gone after the man named Vincent Baresco in Eric Leben’s Newport Beach office, and his handling of the car had no doubt impressed her, but he knew his reflexes weren’t what they had once been. And he knew these people, his nameless enemies, were deadly serious.

He was scared.

They had blown away those two cops as if swatting a couple of annoying flies. Jesus.

What secret did they share with Rachael? What could be so damn important that they would kill anyone, even cops, to keep a lid on it?

If he lived through the next hour, he would get the truth out of her one way or another. Damned if he would let her keep stalling.

The Caddy’s engine sort of purred and sort of rumbled, and the car moved past at a crawl, and the guy with the mustache looked right at Ben for a moment, or seemed to, stared right between the oleander branches that Ben was holding slightly apart. Ben wanted to let the branches close up, but he was afraid the movement would be seen, slight as it was, so he just looked back into the other man’s eyes, expecting the Caddy to stop and the doors to fly open, expecting a submachine gun to start crackling, shredding the oleander leaves with a thousand bullets. But the car kept moving past the house and on down the street. Watching its taillights dwindle, Ben let out his breath with a shudder.

He crept free of the shrubbery, went out to the street, and stood in the shadows by a tall jacaranda growing near the curb. He stared after the Cadillac until it had traveled three blocks, climbed a small hill, and disappeared over the crest.

In the distance, there were still sirens, though fewer. They had sounded angry before. Now they sounded mournful.

Holding the thirty-two pistol at his side, he hurried off into the night-cloaked neighborhood in search of a car to steal.

 

In the 560 SL, Rachael had moved up front to the driver’s seat. It was more comfortable than the cramped storage space, and it was a better position from which to talk with Sarah Kiel. She switched on the little overhead light provided for map reading, confident it would not be seen past the property’s thick screen of trees. The moon-pale glow illuminated a portion of the dashboard, the console, Rachael’s face, and Sarah’s stricken countenance.

The battered girl, having been shaken from her catatonic state, was at last capable of responding to questions. She was holding her curled right hand protectively against her breast, which somehow gave her the look of a small, injured bird. Her torn fingernails had stopped bleeding, but her broken finger was grotesquely swollen. With her left hand, she tenderly explored her blackened eye, bruised cheek, and split lip, frequently wincing and making small, thin sounds of pain. She said nothing, but when her frightened eyes met Rachael’s, awareness glimmered in them.

Rachael said, “Honey, we’ll get you to a hospital in just a few minutes. Okay?”

The girl nodded.

“Sarah, do you have any idea who I am?”

The girl shook her head.

“I’m Rachael Leben, Eric’s wife.”

Fear seemed to darken the blue of Sarah’s eyes.

“No, honey, it’s all right. I’m on your side. Really. I was in the process of divorcing him. I knew about his young girls, but that has nothing to do with why I left him. The man was sick, honey. Twisted and arrogant and sick. I learned to despise and fear him. So you can speak freely with me. You’ve got a friend in me. You understand?”

Sarah nodded.

Pausing to look around at the darkness beyond the car, at the blank black windows and patio doors of the house on one side and the untended shrubbery and trees on the other, Rachael locked both doors with the master latch. It was getting warm inside the car. She knew she should open the windows, but she felt safer with them closed.

Returning her attention to the teenager, Rachael said, “Tell me what happened to you, honey. Tell me everything.”

The girl tried to speak, but her voice broke. Violent shivers coursed through her.

“Take it easy,” Rachael said. “You’re safe now.” She hoped that was true. “You’re safe. Who did this to you?”

In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah’s skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”

Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said, “When? When did he do this to you?”

“He came . . . at half past midnight.”

“Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must’ve left just before we arrived.”

From the time she’d left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.

“He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just . . . he just . . . hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her blackened eye, which was now almost swollen shut. “Hit me and knocked me down and kicked me twice, kicked my legs . . .”

Rachael remembered the ugly bruises on Sarah’s thighs.

“ . . . grabbed me by the hair . . .”

Rachael took the girl’s left hand, held it.

“ . . . dragged me into the bedroom . . .”

“Go on,” Rachael said.

“ . . . just
tore
my pajamas off, you know, and . . . and kept yanking on my hair and hitting me, hitting, punching me . . .”

“Has he ever beaten you before?”

“N-no. A few slaps. You know . . . a little roughhouse. That’s all. But tonight . . . tonight he was wild . . . so full of
hatred.
”