Superstition (55 page)

“Sid,” she gasped.

He went still. Then he, too, saw the knob. She knew, because their eyes met in it.

“Hello, sweetie pie.” His tone was as repellent as the slimy, wet underside of a slug.

“Ohmigod,
why
?” It was the merest breath of sound.

She could feel the sudden jerk of his chest against her back as he gave a grunt of laughter.

“You can take all the credit. You gave me the idea. You and your psycho mother. ‘Let’s scare up the dead victims of a serial killer,’ ” he mimicked in a savage falsetto. “Helped me out a lot, actually. I was already working on a way to get rid of that bitch Karen Wise. You handed it to me on a platter. I made it look good, didn’t I? Even to cutting off some of her hair. To make it stick, though, I had to follow through on the whole serial-killer bit. How’d you like those e-mails? Made for good TV, didn’t they? You should thank me: I gave your career a hell of a boost.”

Considering the fact that he was about to kill her, she personally didn’t feel thanks were in order.

“But why Marsha Browning? And Livvy? And me?” Her pulse was pounding so hard that she could hardly hear over the thudding in her ears. Her one thought was to keep him talking as long as possible.

“Why not?” His tone was the equivalent of a shrug.

“I had to kill two more women, and that local reporter was easy. She called me about a possible job. I told her I’d come talk to her about it next time I was in the area”—he chuckled horribly—“and I did. I most certainly did. As for your sister, she was easy, too. Always going in and out. And I thought doing her would add some real emotion to your reporting. I was right about that, too. It did. As for you, I never wanted to kill you. You could have had a real career with us. But twice now you just plain got unlucky. First, you come walking down the driveway right after I finished doing the bitch, and I thought you saw me. Later, I figured out you didn’t, but I didn’t know that then, so you almost bought it that night. Then today you found the tape. I’ve been looking all over the place for that. That bitch was using it to blackmail me.”

“Karen?” Nicky gasped. Something—her shocked tone or her wide eyes reflected in the knob or his own realization of time passing—caused his face to contort. In the instant before his arm tightened punishingly around her throat, Nicky knew that her little reprieve was over. She choked, gasped, and grabbed at his arm as it cut off her air.

“Enough conversation.
Get the goddamned tape.
”

Nicky managed to nod.

His arm loosened fractionally. Nicky wheezed, sucked in air—and opened the silverware drawer, grabbed a steak knife, and plunged it into the arm that was locked around her neck with every bit of strength she had left.

He screamed and let go. Terror gave wings to her feet as she leaped for the door. Time seemed to freeze. Outside, thunder rolled. Lightning lit up the sky. Rain came down in sheets. Cleo danced on her little pig feet, a silent witness to the nightmare inside. Nicky could see it all through the mini-blinds, see escape so tantalizingly close . . .

“I’m going to kill you, bitch,”
Sid howled, and threw himself after her.

Her flailing fingers just brushed the knob as he leaped on her back and brought her down.

Shrieking like a train whistle, twisting even as she fell, Nicky smashed into the floor on her side and rolled onto her back, the impact jarring and painful but nothing compared to her abject fear, her horror at what was getting ready to happen. Sid was on top of her, straddling her, outweighing her by maybe a hundred pounds, still with a death grip on his knife, and she shrieked again despairingly as she lifted her hands in a futile attempt to ward him off. Blood spurted from his arm, wet and warm as it hit her skin; his face was twisted and ugly and, yes,
evil. . . .

From the other room, the living room, she heard sounds, faint sounds as if there was someone at the front door. Sucking in air, she screamed like a siren even as, from the change in his expression, she realized that Sid had heard the sounds, too.

Then she realized exactly what those sounds meant: not succor, but a faster death. He wanted the tape. He would have kept her alive until she gave it to him. But now, with someone at the door, time was up.

She knew who he was.

It was as clear to her as if it were written in the air for her to read:
She had to die.

As she bucked and writhed and fought with all her strength to win free, he lifted the knife high, and it slashed downward, glinting gold as a flash of lightning was caught on its blade. Nicky screamed and lifted her hands in an instinctive gesture of self-protection and slewed violently to one side.

Cleo crashed hard against the glass, startling them both, attracting Sid’s attention, deflecting his aim. Nicky felt a shock of burning pain as the knife sliced through her upper arm. Grabbing for his wrist, she fought to hold on as he cursed and punched her and tried to yank free and Cleo crashed into the glass again and there was a flurry of movement in the living room.

“Police! Freeze!” Joe roared, leaping through the kitchen door, gun drawn. “Drop the knife!”

Behind him thundered what seemed like half of the police force.

Having just yanked his wrist free, Sid froze in the act of rearing up again with the knife in hand.

“Freeze!” Joe screamed again. “Get your hands in the air!”

Sid’s face twisted furiously. And then he dropped the knife. It hit the floor beside Nicky’s head with a clatter as his hands rose in the air.

Someone scooped up the knife. Someone else hauled Sid to his feet, slapped cuffs on him, and started reading him his rights.

“Nicky? Oh, God, Nicky.” Joe crouched down beside her, his face absolutely white, his eyes black with fear as they collided with hers, then moved frantically over her as she lay panting on the floor. She was, she realized, covered with blood—Sid’s and her own.

“It’s okay,” she managed, although her voice was raspy and she was trembling from head to toe with reaction. “I’m okay.”

Then, as he reached for her, Nicky sat up and melted into his arms.

HAVING HIS LIFE PASS before his eyes was not an experience he enjoyed, Joe reflected. He had discovered that when he had arrived on his own front stoop and heard Nicky screaming through the locked door. His already-pounding heart had threatened to go into cardiac arrest as he struggled to get the key in the lock and the door open in the near-darkness and pouring rain while a flotilla of backup cars with squealing brakes slammed into park in front of his house and Nicky shrieked like a banshee inside. By the time he’d gotten the damned door open, he was sweating buckets and cursing a blue streak and suffering the closest thing to a near-death experience that he’d had in two years. Then, when he and a contingent of Pawleys Island’s finest had burst into the living room, they’d found Cohen bleeding out on the couch. Despite the fact that Cohen was one of his men and a good guy and a friend, Joe hadn’t even slowed down as he had hurtled toward the kitchen and the source of the screams.

When he’d seen Sid Levin on the floor, crouched over Nicky, he’d gone half-crazy at the idea that maybe he’d been that half second too late.

That was a little more than an hour ago. Now he had recovered his equilibrium to some degree, and she was sitting in the kitchen, giving her formal statement to Dave, because Joe simply wasn’t up to hearing the hair-raising tale for a second time. Just thinking about how close she’d come to getting killed still had the power to make him break into a cold sweat. One missed connection, a couple extra minutes before his good buddy had gotten back to him, and the outcome would have been very different.

Nicky would have been dead. And for him, the light would have gone out of the world for good.

His house was now officially a crime scene. It was crawling with cops, his own men and the better part of at least three other departments, too, all turned out because the murder of a cop is, to other cops, as bad as it gets. They were working with grim determination, getting photographs, bagging evidence, taking statements. The media contingent that had been hanging out on the courthouse lawn was starting to arrive as word trickled out that the Lazarus Killer had been caught. There was a satellite truck on the street, and reporters had started pestering people as they exited or entered the house. The neighbors were out in force, drawn no doubt by the shrieking sirens and stroboscopic lights. Fortunately, the crime-scene tape set up around the perimeter of his yard kept everybody who wasn’t supposed to be there at a little distance. Unfortunately, the rain had dried up until it was no more than a gentle drizzle. If the earlier downpour had continued unabated, maybe they would have been spared some of the circus.

Or maybe not.

“How you doing?” he asked Nicky, who was sitting at the kitchen table with Dave across from her.

“I’m okay.” She glanced up at him, smiled, and at the warmth in her eyes for him, his heart gave a little lurch. Having her look at him like that made him feel like the man who, after wandering cold and hungry and lost through the wilderness, unexpectedly comes across a cabin complete with welcoming hosts, food, and a fire: a little disbelieving of his own good fortune, a little luckier than hell. A temporary bandage was wrapped around her upper arm, where the knife had sliced through skin and some fatty tissue but done no permanent damage. She had two good-sized bumps on the head where the bastard had hit her, and a bruise was just beginning to darken on her cheek. A visit to the island clinic was definitely on the night’s agenda, but the paramedic who had treated her had said that none of her injuries required urgent care, and Nicky didn’t want to go without Joe, which suited him fine. As far as he was concerned, she was never getting out of his sight again for the rest of his life.

“I was just telling Dave that Cleo was a hero. Uh, heroine. She saw what was happening and tried to get in and made enough noise to distract Sid at the crucial moment. She—and you guys—saved my life.”

Okay, pig,
Joe thought with a glance at the door where Cleo still stood looking in,
consider yourself in bacon and bologna for the rest of your life.

“So, did he talk at all?” Dave asked him. Joe knew he was referring to Sid, who had just been taken away by a contingent of state police. With the murder of Andy Cohen, emotions were running too high in the Pawleys Island Police Department for them to keep custody. Joe knew how these things worked, and under the circumstances, he didn’t want to take responsibility for the prisoner’s life.

“Not to us.” Joe sat down, and George Locke, who was in the kitchen, too, poured him a cup of coffee and handed it to him. Nicky and Dave, he saw, already had coffee in front of them. He nodded his thanks to George and took a sip. The brew was strong and hot, and welcome. He needed caffeine in the worst way.

“But since we caught him in the act, and he already shot off his mouth to Nicky”—who had told him everything within minutes of being wrapped up in his arms—“it doesn’t matter. This is your basic textbook open-and-shut case.” He looked at Nicky. “The window in the spare bedroom is broken. He must have smashed the glass, unlatched the window, and come in that way. I’m betting he was already in the house when you and Cohen got here.” Joe took a swallow of coffee to mask the pain he felt when he thought about Cohen. “He wanted the tape, which at that time, you had in your pocket, right?” Nicky nodded. She’d already told him that. “My question is, how did he know you were coming here?”

“I told him. When I spoke to him on the phone. He asked me if I was going to stay at my mother’s, and I said no, I was coming over here. I . . . thought he was in Chicago.” The idea that Sid had been right there in Pawleys Island, plotting her murder at the time, made her skin crawl.

Joe nodded. “He counted on that. See, he could call people on his cell phone and they would think he was still in Chicago. Which is what he did to Karen Wise on the night of her murder. It was his call that lured her from the house. He called her and pretended there was static on the phone, and told her to go outside so she’d have better reception. He was out there waiting, and he killed her.” Joe gave a grim little smile of satisfaction. “See, that’s the thing about cell phones. The signal bounces off a tower in the area where the call is made. That’s what tripped Sid up. I started thinking that it had to be somebody connected with your TV show, and Sid was the last incoming call on Karen Wise’s cell phone. I had a buddy check it out, and bingo—that call bounced off the tower here. His alibi was that he was in Chicago at the time of the murder, and that blew it straight to hell: He was lying. Which made him Suspect Number One.”

“Sid said Karen was using the tape to blackmail him,” Nicky said.

Joe nodded. “She had the goods on him, too. I just got done listening to that tape, and it’s all on there. Really raunchy stuff. Apparently, she was threatening to file a multimillion-dollar sexual-harassment suit against him if he didn’t pay her big bucks in hush money. From the time she started working for Santee Productions in August, Sid came on to her, made lewd suggestions to her. Then, when she didn’t give him what he wanted, he threatened her with the loss of her job. She got it all on tape and turned the tables on him. She had him sweating bullets. He would have been fired, at the very least. His career would have been irreparably damaged, and he would have had to pay her no telling how much money.”

“So he killed her.”

Joe nodded. “Yep. And after that, it was basically like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up momentum as it went. He’s a pilot, has his own plane. We found records in his wallet showing that he’s been flying into Charleston. The dates all fit. He’s our guy.”

“So I was totally off base with the whole Tara Mitchell’s father being involved in something unsavory thing.” Nicky sounded a little disappointed, and Joe remembered that they’d been having their own private investigative war. He’d definitely won, any way you looked at it—because Nicky was alive.