WIDOW (47 page)

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.

She had to search him out if he would not show himself. She still had the gun. She still had resolve. What she didn't have much of was time.

Son found a bathroom with one tiny window set in an outside wall that let through weak light. He felt along the sink counter and found nothing. He opened drawers as quietly as he could and they were empty. He swore to himself. He was bleeding badly, had to find something to staunch the flow.

He opened the lower cabinet doors and felt inside. The space was empty too. He had just turned to retreat from the room when he saw there was a closet or pantry door. He opened it and saw folded objects on the shelves. Towels and washcloths. That's what he needed!

He shook out a towel, dropped it. It was too big, too thick. He snatched at the towels, trying to find something smaller. He finally found a hand towel that would do, unbuttoned his shirt, reached up to his shoulder and laid the towel over the wound, front and back. He rebuttoned his shirt and tucked it into the waist of his pants to hold the towel in place.

Now he could attend to Shadow.

Stepping from the bathroom door into the hall, he saw her coming toward him. He jerked back into the doorway and caught his breath, readied himself to grab her when she neared. He had to watch for the gun, make sure he took her arm, and held it away from himself. He would not die because of her. She was no real threat at all. He had taken down much stronger, more intelligent enemies.

He heard her footsteps nearing the open door. He must be swift and sure. The moment she moved into his line of sight, she was his.

 

Thirty-Nine

 

She saw the lights shining through the front of the house before she heard the engine of the approaching car. She halted, turned, rushed to the landing again to see if it was the police. She had not heard sirens, wouldn't they have turned on their sirens?

She moved down the curving staircase to the living room and went to the door. When the car parked right before the steps and the door opened, she saw Mitch emerge, his face grim in the flooding amber light from the car's interior.

She looked over her shoulder. Where was Son? How could she let Mitch find her here? How did he know she had come back to the mansion? It was Charlene. She knew it. Charlene had told him everything.

What could she do now? He knew she was a murderer. He must know about the Copycat and why she'd been called to return here.

She ran from the door, knowing it was locked, that he could not enter from there. She was beneath the landing and in a long hallway that supplied two exits, one to the swimming pool and the community showers there, one to the chest-high brick maze. She swung right, toward the maze, watching every shadow, imagining a figure leaping from cover to take away her life.

Overhead on the landing above, she heard footsteps. She paused. It couldn't be Mitch, he couldn't have gotten inside yet. She suspected Son had broken in from the back of the house, through the garage. That's where Mitch would have to come from. So the sounds she heard above her had to be the result of Son, creeping through the dark. She wanted to hide. She wanted to flee. She wanted . . . she wished . . . God, how she wished she had never been born.

It stunned him when Shadow left the hallway. His muscles relaxed and his hands unclenched. He had been seconds away from rushing her.

He came from the bathroom doorway to follow behind. Then he saw the headlights from a car soaring across the walls, spearing Shadow as she stood bathed in the glow on the landing. The river of light moved on then disappeared. Someone was here. He should have killed the drunk, he shouldn't have waited for Shadow. He should have done it right away, as soon as they reached the mansion. The bastard had called the police and they were already here. He had to get out. If they caught him in the house, she would implicate him in the murders. Wasn't he already doomed now that Charlie could identify him?

He might pack up his things and leave Houston. Disappear to another state, maybe another country, before they found his whereabouts.

And leave Mother? Lying in her bed without decent burial? He couldn't do that! He wished he had arranged things more carefully now. He must have been mad to let her death go so long without his attention. What would they think if he left and they found her that way, naked and cold, the crocheted pillows propping her up in the bed? They would think he was a poor excuse for a son. He could never explain to them that he had not wanted to lose her totally from his life, that her presence, even in death, in some way soothed his troubled mind. She had been his touchstone to reality, the rock that steadied him during the mental storms that periodically tossed him about in a sea of confusion. He needed her, but they would never understand that, never.

When again he looked for Shadow, she was gone. But which way?

A man stood at the front door, trying the doorknob. Son could not make out his features. He appeared to be alone. Had the police sent only one man? How terribly odd. How stupid of them.

The man at the door went down the steps again and Son could not see him. He'd try the other entrances now. He'd find the broken door in the garage. That's where he would enter, up the spiral stairs and onto the catwalk.

Son turned his back on the front of the house and put his hand on the catwalk's railing. He'd wait here. It was better that he wait than to go hunting. Sooner or later both of them, Shadow and the man, would fall into his hands if only he had the patience to wait for them. He hadn't a gun, his only weapon was the bottle of poisoned whiskey still in his pocket, and his own two bare hands. Nevertheless, he was not frightened. He would have surprise on his side.

His concentration blocked out everything but the catwalk. The soft throbbing in the tender open wound in his shoulder was hardly noticeable. He focused on the sounds in the big empty house. He breathed evenly, regularly, and a calm filled him. No matter how it turned out, he was prepared to deal with it. He had not succeeded this many years by letting panic and fear overcome him. Death held no terror for him. It never had. He had been the instrument of death for too many for it to hold any supernatural power of dread over him.

He almost sighed in a kind of ecstasy, so sure was he that he would persevere and escape, unharmed, whole, free to plot and kill again.

Mitchell knew Shadow was in the house. Her car sat in the driveway. Another car was parked in the underground garage. He supposed it belonged to the copycat killer, if Charlene had been telling the truth.

The only way he could find to enter the house was at a door leading from the garage. He saw the door had been jimmied and broken from its frame. He opened it and stepped forward. Facing him was a staircase that spiraled up into the darkness to the first and second floors of the house. He remembered being on the catwalk with Shadow, looking down at the swimming pool. He placed this stairway at the far end of that catwalk.

He had his service revolver from its shoulder holster. He knew he should have called for backup. Why he hadn't was something he didn't want to think about too closely right now. He knew his reluctance had to do with protecting Shadow from involvement. But he couldn't do that, not really, not if it was true she had killed those men.

Yet, Charlene might be wrong. She was, after all, mentally unstable. She might have imagined anything in her fevered state of mind. That Shadow knew something about the murders, he had no doubt, but he could not quite convince himself she had poisoned men. He realized he just didn't want to believe it. If he did, it meant he had made too many mistakes, he had been willingly duped, and perhaps used in a way he couldn't accept. Wasn't it just as likely that there was no “copycat?” That the “copycat” Charlene told him about was the serial killer and he had gotten Shadow mixed up in it in some bizarre fashion? Anything was possible. If he had learned nothing else in his years as a cop, he knew that. The more a thing seemed to be true, the more it must be false.

He crept up the stairs, cringing at the hollow sound the metal steps made as he stepped on them. Once on the catwalk, he'd be an easy target. How else could he cross to the other side, though? That was the portion of the house where Shadow and Charlene had lived when they were here. For some reason he did not think anyone was hiding in this part of the huge house. They were both over there.

He must go to them. It was up to him to take the battle to the enemy. He could only hope the killer, who had never before used a gun in any of the murders, did not now have one in his possession. If he did, when Mitch crossed the catwalk, he was dead meat.

Shadow crouched in the maze and was unable to see overhead to the middle of the two-story space to the catwalk. She heard footsteps there, but was suddenly afraid to look. Someone might see her. As long as she stayed low and out of sight, she was safe from discovery. She looked both ways in the heavy dark, wondering if she could see Son if he came toward her around the sharp turns at either end of the center of the maze where she hid. She held her hand in front of her face and could not see it. She might as well be in a sealed room without window or light source, it was so dark.

She felt a wetness on her cheeks and reached up to feel the tears there. She didn't know she had been crying. She buried her head in her knees and wrapped her arms around herself. She felt five years old again, hiding from her abusive father, and the screams of her battered mother. She shut out the sounds on the catwalk and tried with all her might to get away from whatever it was making those sounds. If she was not present in spirit and mind, she would not know what was happening.

She vaguely remembered another time she had done this, and recalled how easy it had been to do. At that time she had escaped seeing her husband and children lying dead on the floor, pieces of their brains and skulls all around, blood splattered in random patterns on the walls, the carpet . . .