SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (75 page)

“She killed some of them,” Charlene said finally. “The first ones. The Gulf Water killings.”

Then he understood everything. The murders of men who had been in the exotic clubs. The rap sheets most of them had. Shadow telling him her husband had committed suicide. Her cold refusal to show any grief over the fact. The washing up of the bodies not far from where they lived in the big brooding mansion on the shoreline. The copycat?

“There's a copycat killer?” He had shouted to make her come to her senses. She was gibbering and trying to tear loose from his hands. “Is there someone else doing the killings, too, is that what you're saying? And Shadow went there to meet him?”

Charlene bobbed her head. “She's going to kill him if she can. But he might, he might . . . And she didn't mean to do these things. The first one, the one who was stabbed, he got into the house one night and tried to . . . tried to . . . he was on top of me . . . and . . . Shadow came . . . and . . .”

Samson turned for the door. Kay Mandel and a copycat killer. Together, working in some kind of unholy tandem, they had killed eight men. He had made love with, fallen in love with, a woman who poisoned men. How did it happen? What did it say about him and his perceptions, his investigative abilities, his total blindness to where the facts had been pointing all this time? How goddamn crazy had the world become that a beautiful woman would kill strangers and then sleep with a homicide detective? How goddamn crazy was he not to have had even a thought that she could be involved?

Christ, he'd invited her into his home. He had spent nights with her. He had made love to her in the bed where she might have . . .

He raced to his car and hurriedly got it started. As he backed from the drive, he didn't notice the two older women standing in front of the house watching him leave while Pavlov raced around the yard in circles, yelping with newfound delight.

~*~

Son helped the drunk maneuver the spiral staircase in the dark.

“This is creepy shit,” the old guy said, slurring his words.

“We'll have a party,” Son said, pressing him forward and upward. On the landing he took the man's arm. “What's your name, pal?”

“Ch . . . cha . . . Charlie.”

“Well, come on, Charlie, we have a while to wait. Let's cross this catwalk. On the other side is the living room and a place to sit down.”

He swung the beam of the flashlight ahead of them, his other hand in the small of Charlie's back to push him ahead. Their footsteps boomed along the metal walkway in the emptiness.

“I ca . . . can't see my hand in front of my fa . . . face.”

Son hated the stuttering. It drove him batshit. He'd had to listen to it in the car all the way across the city. “Just keep going, I've got you. Follow the flashlight.”

They exited onto another landing and Son led him down the staircase. In the living room he pushed him onto a leather sofa.

“Ha . . . ha . . . hey. Whatta we doin' here, you said, didn't you?”

“Waiting for a friend of mine. It won't be long. Take it easy.”

“You got anything to dra . . . drink?”

Son had a pint of doctored whiskey in his coat pocket, but he couldn't give that to him yet. Not time.

“You'll get something, just wait.” He crossed the room to the front door and stood watching. Waiting. She should arrive soon. Until then the show was on hold.

Thirty-Eight

She stood at the front door, hands gripping the wrought-iron bars. He stood on the other side with a flashlight, unlocking the deadbolt. She stepped back, felt in her shoulder purse for the gun. She had put it there before leaving the car. She had a firm hold on the handgrip.

Her breath came in shallow gasps and her pulse hammered until she felt she was on the precipice of a dizzy spell. She had to do it. This should not have felt any different to the other times when she gave the men poison. But it was different, it meant survival. And this man was not bedazzled with her lies. He knew how dangerous she could be. He would be on guard.

He gestured she step inside. She moved past him, heard him closing and relocking the door, imprisoning her, and she was about to turn to protest, but a voice interrupted in the near dark to say, “Oh, guh . . . guh . . . good, you called over a gur . . . gur . . . girl to join the party.”

Son moved away from the door and closer to the other man who Shadow could now see sat on the sofa near the fireplace. “This is our guest of honor,” he said to Shadow. “Meet Charles. He has no idea he's here to serve as an object lesson.”

“Huh?” Charles turned his head to look up at Son. “I'm a wha . . . what?”

“You're not going to hurt him,” Shadow said. She made herself move closer. The shadows in the room hid too much of her target. She still had her hand in the shoulder purse, the gun warm as the palm of her hand now, a real part of her. “I want you to let him go.”

“What's this?” Charles asked. “Something ain't right, now, and I . . . I . . . I think I ought to be get . . . getting on.” He began to rise from the depths of the leather, pulling himself to his feet by holding onto the sofa arm.

Son reached over and pushed him down again. “Stay put, Charlie. You're not going anywhere.”

“Let him up. Charlie, get out of here. He's going to kill you.”

“Oh, look what you did,” Son said, but he sounded a little amused. “The guy didn't have to know that. Then again, it may be fun that he does.”

Before Shadow expected a move, Son turned and pushed Charlie sideways onto the sofa and straddled him. He pulled something from his coat and fiddled with it. Charlie began to yell like a man on fire. “Let me ah . . . ah . . . up! Help, don't let him hurt ma . . . ma . . . me!”

Shadow moved as quickly as she could. She had the gun out, felt her hand shaking, tried to hold it steady, and fired, the gun seeming to go off in her hand without her help, leaping up and nearly out of her grasp, causing her to scream.

She tried to see if she'd hit him, but he had rolled to the floor, and something clunked and rolled away from him. He came to his feet, muttering. Charlie was off the sofa in a flash, stumbling toward the stairs, running up them, sobbing.

Shadow aimed again, but she couldn't see, could only see deeper darkness and then that dark was moving, streaking toward her. She squeezed the trigger of the gun, tried to brace for the jerk of her hand, felt herself go off balance, stepped backward, trying to right herself.

She spun back, swinging the gun, and fired wildly, hitting the wall. A chunk of plaster fell with a crash to the white marble floor.

She was alone in the room. She heard sounds all over the house, unable to tell where they came from, which direction. She checked the dark near the sofa and saw he was really gone. He had vanished after Charlie up the stairs and onto the landing.

She couldn't catch her breath. She had been breathing so hard she was now hyperventilating. Her hands shook and she relaxed her finger on the trigger of the gun, terrified that she'd missed him, that now it was a game of hide and seek and she would never find him before he found her.

Her foot struck something on the floor. It rolled with a clatter two feet away and stopped. She retrieved it and found a flashlight. She flicked it on and pointed it up the stairs. Emptiness. Silence ringing against her ears like distant sirens in the night.

Where had he vanished to? She had bungled her only real chance of stopping him.

Now she must track him down through the echoing rooms.

She shut tight her eyes and thought of Mitch, of Charlene, of Scott and the children. Of the four victims she had dropped over the side of the motor boat.

She opened her eyes and carefully approached the stairway. There was no other choice. In her life, she thought, there had never been any choices. She did what she had to, what she was compelled to do, and no more.

~*~

Son found another stairway at the end of a hallway that took him down to the swimming pool. Overhead, little light streamed in through the green glass ceiling; there was but a slip of a moon and clouds covered the stars.

He stood with his back to the wall listening to the sounds of movement in the house. He knew the drunk had crossed the catwalk and had gone down the spiral stairs to the garage-door exit. He had heard him pounding across the walkway, his footsteps fading as he went down in the back of the house. He'd be on his way for help now. The police would come. They couldn't find him here. They'd have to find Shadow. Dead. He hadn't much time left. What he had hoped to be the fulfillment of a dream had turned into a messy nightmare.

He had never shared a murder before. She had ruined everything for him.

It was her fault. He hadn't thought she'd turn on him that way. He knew she didn't want to go through with the killings anymore, but he never thought she'd regard him as her enemy. Didn't she understand that she was the catalyst, that she had begun it all?

She was furious with him because he had taken the game to new heights. He was calling the shots for the first time in his life. Didn't his mother just hate it when he did that? Were all women the same?

He felt something dripping from his shoulder and reached up to find out what. His fingers came away sticky. He touched his forefinger to thumb and the liquid smeared there was gummy. He brought it to his nose to smell. He thought . . . He put a finger to his mouth and tasted with the tip of his tongue.

Blood.

She had shot him, the stupid bitch. He was wounded. He felt again and found the hole in the upper meaty portion of his shoulder just above his socket. The bullet must have gone right through him. He hadn't felt the pain. His mind was elsewhere, dealing with catastrophe.

Now he felt it, the burning and sharp, shrieking bolts of pain shooting down his arm and into his chest. Well, holy Christ. He didn't have anything to put over the hole, to stop the bleeding. He had to find something, some kind of cloth.

He crept from his hiding place in the deep shadow and felt his way along the wall. There had to be something down here—a room, a curtain, something. He moved as quietly as he could and halted, listening, when he heard footsteps overhead at the entrance to the catwalk.

“Son, where are you? Come out. We can't stay here all night. Charlie left. He'll bring the police.”

He smiled up at her silhouette against the sky overhead. Yes, he thought. You'd like for me to come out so this time you can finish me. You'd really like for it to be so easy for you.

He watched her while moving along the brick wall, feeling with his right hand for a door. Just as soon as he found something to pack over his wound, he would go to her. He remembered his fleeting fanciful thoughts when he had sat outside this house, watching. How alike he and Shadow were. How they were equal parts of the same organism, working toward the same ends. She the machine, he the gears. She the darkness, he the light. Killers, compatriots, both engaged in the most meaningful activities of their lives, complementing one another.

Now he knew the truth. She was just another woman. Women could never be trusted. Sometimes they lived just to spite you. Sometimes they died for the same reason. They were never, by God, there when you needed them most.

~*~

Shadow turned off the flashlight, afraid suddenly that it made her an easy prey. She couldn't see Son, didn't know where he was, but if she used the light, he would know exactly where she was.

She became conscious of every sound. She needed to get off the catwalk. She tried to tiptoe off the metal grid, heading again for the front of the house, but she was still making too much noise. She decided there was no way to silence her passage and finally hurried, shoes ringing on the catwalk, until she reached the landing. When she got there, her heart was racing and she felt perspiration wetting the material under her arms.

She had the gun in one hand, the flashlight in the other. She needed to keep the gun close to her body so that he could not come out of the shadows and knock it from her grasp or twist it out of her hand.

She strained to see if anything moved on the landing, down the long hallways, ahead of her on the stairs leading to the front room.

Where was he?

She could leave the house and let the police find him here. That might be the most practical move. But what would they charge him with, breaking and entering? He hadn't really harmed the man named Charlie.

No, she couldn't leave him here alive. As soon as Mitch heard of Charlie's complaint, he would put everything together, and he'd know she had something to do with the murders. He would have them check the house. They might find the spots of blood from her victims on the old mattress still lying on the cast-iron bed in her bedroom. Why hadn't she thought to haul it out back and set fire to it? That small amount of blood was the only evidence of her crimes. As careful as she had been with the plastic covering, when she and Charlene rolled up the bodies and took them from the house, there had always been small accidents, little drips of blood that slid from the plastic to soak into the mattress beneath. When they left the mansion, she had no idea anyone would ever question the few small stains; they wouldn't have had reason to. Mitch would, though. He would know who to suspect.

From the corner of her eye she thought she saw movement in the shadows in the direction of the hall where Charlene had stayed. She turned and pointed the gun. A vision shimmered there and disappeared, shimmered again, then faded. That couldn't have been Scott. She must be hallucinating. He was long dead and could no longer hurt her.

She heard the sound of a child's voice, softly laughing, coming from behind her where the catwalk began. She turned again, panicked. Were there ghosts here just as Charlene claimed? Had that sound come from her own lost children or from the boys who had played around the pool?

She mentally shook herself, throwing off the notion. She had heard nothing. Nothing. She had seen nothing. She was losing it, that's what was happening. She wished she had some kind of tranquilizer so her nerves would stop jumping, her mind stop slipping away into dungeons from the hellish past. She'd give anything to be away from this house and the madman who stalked her.