The Christine Murders (28 page)

Inside the boat’s tiny cabin, Luther fired up an old hurricane lantern and placed it in the center of a table. The vessel was old, but the interior of
The Gemstone
was as neat and spotlessly clean as her blue and white exterior. The Laos had taken good care of her. Luther pulled the cabin curtains closed. They had not passed anyone on their walk to the boat, yet he knew there were people living nearby. He wanted nothing to attract attention to
The Gemstone
tonight.

Christine stood by the table, in the flickering lamp light, watching Luther carefully. Still clutching the knife, he leaned across the table toward her. “Relax, Christine. We’re going to have fun here tonight, even though I know you don’t want me. But too bad. It will be a night to remember, although you won’t have too long to savor it.” He shook his head. “You know too much about me. I’ve told you too much, you see. And there’s the problem of your friend Bill, who – you were so kind enough to tell me – will recover. All better and able to identify me, right? So I can’t let you live, as much as I’d like to take you away with me, just us.” He laughed. “And I have plans for Bill, too, never fear. I’ll be paying him a visit early tomorrow morning, after I’m finished with you.” He walked around the table slowly. “We’ll be heading out to sea very shortly. We can’t stay docked here too long.”

He could tell that she was frightened. Good. She wouldn’t give him any trouble. She would do anything he asked her, hoping he might spare her life later on. Just like those other three women. That Kelley had given him a good fight, but the others had been so easy.

For a moment, he thought about the doctor again. Ann. He really had liked her, very much so. Perhaps he should have tried harder to stay in control of himself. Maybe there had been a chance for him with Ann, instead of Christine . . . but no, she’d tried to get away from him, and the voices had told him what he had to do with Ann. Damn the voices! If only he could have lived his life as he wished without them.

As he approached Christine now she inched farther away from him. “You can’t get away now, so stay put, will you. Sit down. Take off your coat. Suppose I make you a nice drink, shall I? Yes, that’s what we’ll do, have a drink before we start to play. It will calm you down. What would you like? The bar here is well stocked, and now it’s my turn to play host.” He opened a large bar cabinet across the small cabin.

“I went to the police about you,” Christine told him. “I knew about you, Luther. I saw that composite and I knew. You asked me about John, remember? You wanted to know who John is. He’s in charge of finding you, and he knows who you are too. He knows more than you realize.

“So no matter what you do to me, you’ll never get away with it, not anymore, because too many people are going to be looking for you. Where would you go? John’s already been to your offices. You see you were not as clever as you thought you were. Bill figured you out, too, yes of course he did. So it won’t be long before your name will be in the news together with your picture. And then the whole city will know, even the people who work for you. What will you do then? And don’t think you can harm Bill anymore. You know you won’t be able to get anywhere near that hospital. You’re finished. And you can’t stay out at sea forever either. You will have to dock again somewhere.”

He hated what he was hearing now. Was she telling him the truth, or only trying to spare herself? He knew he had feared that she might have known, might have recognized him from that damn composite. But worse than what she said was the way she said it – the sarcasm, the ridicule. She didn’t seem afraid of him anymore, afraid of what she knew he could do to her. Why, she was even laughing now. How dare she laugh at him!

“Alyson was so right, Luther,” she continued. “You need help. You do need help. You are a sick twisted creep that somebody should have done something about a long time ago and it’s a pity that nobody did.”

He slammed the knife onto the table and lunged at her then, dropping the bottle of scotch he’d just opened across the table top as he did so. Taken off guard, Christine screamed loudly and lost her footing, falling across the table with her arms outstretched and knocking over the lantern as she stumbled.

Kerosene and flame and alcohol met and gushed out across the old wooden table, striking Luther and burning him as he threw himself forward trying to right the lantern. But it was too late. The flames caught him full force. He screeched and tried to beat fire from his body, while Christine pushed herself up and away from the burning table before toppling backwards against the opposite cabin wall.

She was all the way across the cabin from him now, mercifully closest to the steps leading back up to the deck, the table burning vigorously between them and the climbing flames spreading.

Swiftly, before he could recover himself, she shoved the flaming bottom of the toppled lantern straight across the table toward him, screaming again as the metal burned her hands. The lantern slid over the edge and hit Luther squarely. With another agonizing scream, he fell backwards onto the floor. The lantern and bottle had burst and exploded over him, and suddenly the entire side of the cabin was engulfed in fire.

Knowing she had only minutes left in which to escape, Christine stumbled through smoke, feeling her way, until she reached the four steps leading up to the small deck. Already the cabin was fully involved, and Luther’s horrible screams rose from the fire. Had she been on the other side of the table when the fire started, there would have been little chance of escaping.
The Gemstone
had been nearly fully involved in flames in mere seconds.

Remembering her flight attendant training on exiting a burning aircraft, she dropped to her knees and pulled herself up on deck through thick acrid smoke. Behind her, the fire spread across the old wooden boat, eating up other areas swiftly. Her eyes smarted and she choked for breath, yet she was vaguely aware now of someone on the dock yelling to her. Someone had finally come to help.

There was neither sign nor sound of Luther now.

Several people were running in the darkness along the pier toward the burning boat. Through a cloud of sparks which pierced her legs, she picked her way toward the edge of the deck, beating frantically at her body to keep her clothes from bursting into flame. She threw off her coat and shoes. She couldn’t see anything now, and she feared the deck beneath her would collapse and send her crashing down into the inferno below.

Suddenly there were hands and arms reaching out and up and pulling her roughly off
The Gemstone
and back onto the dock. Her hands and legs were paining her terribly now, and she was light-headed for lack of oxygen. And although logic told her otherwise, she feared Luther would appear behind her again at any minute, his evil eyes shining in the light of the flames, his hands grasping at her to pull her back to him. She felt her legs give out and she slid down onto the surface of the dock.

“He’s in there . . . don’t let him . . . don’t let him get me again, please,” she gasped.

She heard sirens and saw lights flashing. “You’re okay now, nobody is going to hurt you,” someone told her. Then arms were picking her up gently, carrying her away from the smoke and fire. Luther was gone. She was safe, and it was over, finally. She had been determined not to go to her death humbly, and she had won. But it had only been by accident, only by grace of the fire. Had it not been for that, she knew Luther would eventually have killed her tonight, just as he’d killed Alyson and the other women.

She felt herself slipping in and out of darkness. The strong arms carrying her placed her on something very cool and soft, and a mask dropped over her face. She gulped oxygen in deeply, still aware of the smell of burning and the flames shooting across the night sky not far from where she lay.

Her hands and legs were wrapped in cool soft bandages. Someone put a cold wet cloth on her forehead. Then the group of faces above her parted, and a tall man pushed in and kneeled on the ground beside her. She thought she was dreaming, but it was John Kinsella. How did he know she was here?

He leaned over and kissed her gently. “You’re all right, Christine. It’s over. You will be okay now. Everything is over. Nothing to fear anymore. I love you so much, do you know that? I do. More than anything. All day I’ve wanted to say that to you, what I should have said this morning. I love you, my sweet brave girl.” He felt his heart wrench when he saw the dark blue silk scarf draped around her neck. How close he’d come to losing her forever!

She couldn’t speak, so she continued to lie there silently, drinking oxygen, still in shock, while he soothed her and bathed her forehead with the wet cloth.

In spite of all the pain, Christine felt deliriously happy.

Until she was lifted into an ambulance a short time later, and taken away by paramedics, she just kept looking at John Kinsella’s handsome face.

He had finally told her he loved her.

EPILOGUE

While she was still in the hospital, Christine knew she’d somehow become a celebrity. The media had tagged the serial killings “The Christine Murders” and extensive coverage was given to the beautiful flight attendant who had bravely stood up to Luther Ross-Wilkerson and survived.

The San Francisco papers and newscasts were filled with the story. It seemed no one could get enough of it. Since Luther’s death, avid reporters had unearthed an amazing amount of material about him. Some had even gone to Britain where shocked members of the aristocratic Ross-Wilkerson family reluctantly spoke about the odd little boy with such cruel tendencies and few friends who had grown into an equally odd young man. No one had been sorry to see Luther leave home. Indeed, his own father had forced him to go. And no one was entirely surprised at what evil he had eventually brought about, in spite of how successful his business had become. His poor mother was especially heartbroken over the deaths he had been responsible for.

“We tried so hard to help him, to do something with him for so many years, but nothing helped, nothing worked,” she tearfully told one reporter. “He resisted us, in every way, no matter what we did for him. It was a relief when he left us, but I always feared there would be serious trouble, no matter where he went. And sadly, I was right.”

His employees and the people he did business with told a different story. They knew Luther as quiet and reclusive, as Shirley Lao had told Kinsella and Lawrence. But he had been kind and fair in all his professional dealings with them.

Shirley Lao gave several interviews. It was she who had finally led the police to the boat in Sausalito, after Kinsella had called her in desperation Sunday evening, begging her to think of some place she might know of where Luther might have taken Christine.

Shirley had mentioned
The Gemstone
only casually, but Kinsella immediately recalled that Antoinette Bauer had told him that Alyson Merlott’s boyfriend had kept a boat in Sausalito. So
The Gemstone
became his target after discovering Christine’s unlocked and empty, disheveled apartment. Thankfully, he had been right, although as he approached the dock and saw the flames ahead he had nearly given up hope.

It was Christine, however, whom the media sought most diligently, jamming the sidewalks outside Sutter Court every day in hopes of catching a glimpse of her. She had turned down all requests for interviews. She was stunned when someone called about doing a book and TV movie. Reality shows called to ask her to appear on programs about serial killers. Overwhelmed, she began wondering if there was any possible way to escape the madness Luther’s death had generated and if she would ever again have any peace.

Sleep came uneasily at first. Night after night, she woke from the same terrifying dream in which Luther, tattered and horribly burned, stood over her bed with a length of silk scarf in his scorched hands. She would wake shaking and terrified, remembering that last night on
The Gemstone
and how close she had come to death. Although there was nothing to fear any longer, it would take much time before she could live at ease again without thinking about the dreadful things that had happened.

Peter Breen began spending nights with her in her apartment, just so someone would be there to soothe her and help her when she awoke yelling from one of her nightmares. Other times, John was by her side, holding and loving her back to the safe reality that was finally hers now.

She visited Bill nearly every day. He was home and recovering nicely; it would not be too long before he would be cleared to go back to work. Peter had moved in with him, and the two men seemed quite happy together. Both she and Bill marveled how, out of this tragedy, they had both stumbled onto love without even looking for it.

Ted MacIntyre began showing up daily at Sutter Court as well, with armfuls of flowers, seeing the present situation as a way to rekindle their relationship. The media people camped outside the building easily identified him, so very soon the press pulled a new angle into its obsession with Christine Lindsey: a love affair with San Francisco’s most eligible and wealthiest young bachelor. Still Christine said nothing; it was John Kinsella who had become the center of her life now, but she preferred not letting anyone but Bill and Peter know about that.

Kinsella had become a celebrity, too. Interviewed extensively as head of the serial killer task force, his handsome face appeared everywhere. Christine watched him on TV and read every interview he gave. Each time, he had modestly given all the credit to her and to Antoinette Bauer. “It was Mrs. Bauer who first told me about the Merlott case, when she noticed the similarities, and then Miss Lindsey brought Luther Ross-Wilkerson himself to my attention,” he told one reporter. “We were deadlocked. We had a description, a very accurate one, but no identity to tag onto it. And no clues. Miss Lindsey recognized Ross-Wilkerson and came to me. And one of the gifts he’d sent her was a silk scarf, the same kind used to strangle Kelley Grant, Dr. Heald, and Susan Sayles. This piece of information had never been released, to anyone.