Shadowfires Page 14

  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.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not much. Called me names. Awful names, you know. And his speech—it was funny, slurred.”

  “How did he look?” Rachael asked.

  “Oh God …”

  “Tell me.”

  “A couple teeth busted out. Bruised up. He looked bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “Gray.”

  “What about his head, Sarah?”

  The girl gripped Rachael’s hand very tightly. “His face … all gray … like, you know, like ashes.”

  “What about his head?” Rachael repeated.

  “He … he was wearing a knitted cap when he came in. He had it pulled way down, you know what I mean, like a toboggan cap. But when he was beating me … when I tried to fight back … the cap came off.”

  Rachael waited.

  The air in the car was stuffy and tainted by the acid stink of the girl’s sweat.

  “His head was … it was all banged up,” Sarah said, her voice thickening with terror, horror, and disgust.

  “The side of his skull?” Rachael asked. “You saw that?”

  “All broken, punched in … terrible, terrible.”

  “His eyes. What about his eyes?”

  Sarah tried to speak, choked. She lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to regain control of herself.

  Seized by the irrational but quite understandable feeling that someone—or something—was stealthily creeping up on the Mercedes, Rachael surveyed the night again. It seemed to pulse against the car, seeking entrance at the windows.

  When the brutalized girl raised her head again, Rachael said, “Please, honey, tell me about his eyes.”

  “Strange. Hyper. Spaced out, you know? And … clouded …”

  “Sort of muddy-looking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “His movements. Was there anything odd about the way he moved?”

  “Sometimes … he seemed jerky … you know, a little spastic. But most of the time he was quick, too quick for me.”

  “And you said his speech was slurred.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense at all. And a couple times he stopped hitting me and just stood there, swaying back and forth, and he seemed … confused, you know, as if he couldn’t figure where he was or who he was, as if he’d forgotten all about me.”

  Rachael found that she was trembling as badly as Sarah—and that she was drawing as much strength from the contact with the girl’s hand as the girl was drawing from her.

  “His touch,” Rachael said. “His skin. What did he feel like?”

  “You don’t even have to ask, do you? ’Cause you already know what he felt like. Huh?” the girl said. “Don’t you? Somehow … you already know.”

  “But tell me anyway.”

  “Cold. He felt too cold.”

  “And moist?” Rachael asked.

  “Yeah … but … not like sweat.”

  “Greasy,” Rachael said.

  The memory was so vivid that the girl gagged on it and nodded.

  Ever so slightly greasy flesh, like the first stage—the very earliest stage—of putrefaction, Rachael thought, but she was too sick to her stomach and too sick at heart to speak that thought aloud.

  Sarah said, “Tonight I watched the eleven o’clock news, and that’s when I first heard he’d been killed, hit by a truck earlier in the day, yesterday morning, and I’m wondering how long I can stay in the house before someone comes to put me out, and I’m trying to figure what to do, where to go from here. But then little more than an hour after I see the story about him on the news, he shows up at the door, and at first I think the story must’ve been all wrong, but then …oh, Christ … then I knew it wasn’t wrong. He … he really was killed. He was.”

  “Yes.”

  The girl tenderly licked her split lip. “But somehow …”

  “Yes.”

  “ … he came back.”

  “Yes,” Rachael said. “He came back. In fact, he’s still coming back. He’s not made it all the way back yet and probably won’t ever make it.”

  “But how—”

  “Never mind how. You don’t want to know.”

  “And who—”

  “You don’t want to know who! Believe me, you don’t want to know, can’t afford to know. Honey, you’ve got to listen closely now, and I want you to take to heart what I’m saying to you. You can’t tell anyone what you’ve seen. Not anyone. Understand? If you do … you’ll be in terrible danger. There’re people who’d kill you in a minute to keep you from talking about Eric’s resurrection. There’s more involved here than you can ever know, and they’ll kill as many people as necessary to keep their secrets.”

  A dark, ironic, and not entirely sane laugh escaped the girl. “Who could I tell that would believe me, anyway?”

  “Exactly,” Rachael said.

  “They’d think I was crazy. It’s nuts, the whole thing, just plain impossible.”

  Sarah’s voice had a bleak edge, a haunted note, and it was clear that what she had seen tonight had changed her forever, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. She would never be the same again. And for a long time, perhaps for the rest of her life, sleep would not be easily attained, for she would always fear what dreams might come.

  Rachael said, “All right. Now, when we get you to a hospital, I’ll pay all your bills. And I’m going to give you a check for ten thousand dollars as well, which I hope to God you won’t throw away on drugs. And if you want me to, I’ll call your parents out there in Kansas and ask them to come for you.”

  “I … I think I’d like that.”

  “Good. I think that’s very good, honey. I’m sure they’ve been worried about you.”

  “You know … Eric would’ve killed me. I’m sure that’s what he wanted. To kill me. Maybe not me in particular. Just someone. He just felt like he had to kill someone, like it was a need in him, in his blood. And I was there. You know? Convenient.”

  “How did you get away from him?”

  “He … he sort of phased out for a couple of minutes. Like I told you, he seemed confused at times. And then at one point his eyes ju
st sort of clouded up even worse, and he started making this funny little wheezing noise. He turned away from me and looked around, as if he was really mixed up … you know, bewildered. He seemed to get weak, too, because he leaned against the wall there by the bathroom door and hung his head down.”

  Rachael remembered the bloody palmprint on the bedroom wall, beside the bathroom door.

  “And when he was like that,” Sarah said, “when he was distracted, I was flat on the bathroom floor, hurt real bad, hardly able to move, and so the best I could do was crawl into the shower stall, and I was sure he’d come in after me when he got his senses back, you know, but he didn’t. Like he forgot me. Came to his senses and either didn’t remember I’d been there or couldn’t figure out where I’d gone to. And then, after a while, I heard him farther back in the house, pounding things, breaking things.”

  “He pretty much wrecked the kitchen,” Rachael said, and in a dark corner of her memory was the image of the knives driven deep into the kitchen wall.

  Tears slid first from Sarah’s good eye, then from the blackened and swollen one, and she said, “I can’t figure …”

  “What?” Rachael asked.

  “Why he’d come after me.”

  “He probably didn’t come after you specifically,” Rachael said. “If there was a wall safe in the house, he would’ve wanted the money from it. But basically, I think he’s just … looking for a place to go to ground for a while, until the process … runs its course. Then, when he blanked out for a moment and you hid from him, and when he came around again and didn’t see you, he probably figured you’d gone for help, so he had to get out of there fast, go somewhere else.”

  “The cabin, I’ll bet.”

  “What cabin?”

  “You don’t know about his cabin up at Lake Arrowhead?”

  “No,” Rachael said.

  “It’s not on the lake, really. Farther up there on the mountain. He took me up to it once. He owns a couple of acres of woods and this neat cabin—”

  Someone tapped on the window.

  Rachael and Sarah cried out in surprise.

  It was only Benny. He pulled open Rachael’s door and said, “Come on. I’ve got us a new set of wheels. It’s a gray Subaru—one hell of a lot less conspicuous than this buggy.”

  Rachael hesitated, catching her breath, waiting for her drumming heartbeat to slow down. She felt as if she and Sarah were kids who’d been sitting at a camp fire, telling ghost stories, trying to spook each other and succeeding all too well. For an instant, crazily, she had been certain that the tapping at the window was the hard, bony click-click-click of a skeletal finger.

  12

  SHARP

  From the moment Julio met Anson Sharp, he disliked the man. Minute by minute, his dislike intensified.

  Sharp came into Rachael Leben’s house in Placentia in more of a swagger than a walk, flashing his Defense Security Agency credentials as if ordinary policemen were expected to fall to their knees and venerate a federal agent of such high position. He looked at Becky Klienstad crucified on the wall, shook his head, and said, “Too bad. She was a nice-looking piece, wasn’t she?” With an authoritarian briskness that seemed calculated to offend, he told them that the murders of the Hernandez and Klienstad women were now part of an extremely sensitive federal case, removed from the jurisdiction of local police agencies, for reasons that he could not—or would not—divulge. He asked questions and demanded answers, but he would give no answers of his own. He was a big man, even bigger than Reese, with chest and shoulders and arms that looked as if they had been hewn from immense timbers, and his neck was almost as thick as his head. Unlike Reese, he enjoyed using his size to intimidate others and had a habit of standing too close, intentionally violating your space, looming over you when he talked to you, looking down with a vague, barely perceptible, yet nevertheless infuriating smirk. He had a handsome face and seemed vain about his looks, and he had thick blond hair expensively razor-cut, and his jewel-bright green eyes said, I’m better than you, smarter than you, more clever than you, and I always will be.

  Sharp told Orin Mulveck and the other Placentia police officers that they were to vacate the premises and immediately desist in their investigation. “All of the evidence you’ve collected, photographs you’ve taken, and paperwork you’ve generated will be turned over to my own team at once. You will leave one patrol car and two officers at the curb and assign them to assist us in any way we see fit.”

  Clearly, Orin Mulveck was no happier with Sharp than Julio and Reese were. Mulveck and his people had been reduced to the role of the federal agent’s glorified messenger boys, and none of them liked it, though they would have been considerably less offended if Sharp had handled them with more tact—hell, with any tact at all.

  “I’ll have to check your orders with my chief,” Mulveck said.

  “By all means,” Sharp said. “Meanwhile, please get all your people out of this house. And you are all under orders not to speak of anything you’ve seen here. Is that understood?”

  “I’ll check with my chief,” Mulveck said. His face was red and the arteries were pounding in his temples when he stalked out.

  Two men in dark suits had come with Sharp, neither as large as he, neither as imposing, but both of them cool and smug. They stood just inside the bedroom, one on each side of the door, like temple guards, watching Julio and Reese with unconcealed suspicion.

  Julio had never encountered Defense Security Agency men before. They were far different from the FBI agents that he had sometimes worked with, less like policemen than FBI men were. They wore elitism as if it were a pungent cologne.

  To Julio and Reese, Sharp said, “I know who you are, and I know a little bit about your reputations—two hound dogs. You bite into a case and you just never let go. Usually that’s admirable. This time, however, you’ve got to unclench your teeth and let go. I can’t make it clear enough. Understand me?”

  “It’s basically our case,” Julio said tightly. “It started in our jurisdiction, and we caught the first call.”

  Sharp frowned. “I’m telling you it’s over and you’re out. As far as your department’s concerned, there is no case for you to work on here. The files on Hernandez, Klienstad, and Leben have all been pulled from your records, as if they never existed, and from now on we handle everything. I’ve got my own forensics team driving in from L.A. right now. We don’t need or want anything you can provide. Comprende, amigo? Listen, Lieutenant Verdad, you’re gone. Check with your superiors if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t like it,” Julio said.

  “You don’t have to like it,” Sharp said.

  Julio drove only two blocks from Rachael Leben’s house before he had to pull over to the curb and stop. He threw the car into park with a violent swipe at the gearshift and said, “Damn! Sharp’s so sold on himself he probably thinks someone ought to bottle his piss and sell it as perfume.”

  During the ten years Reese had worked with Julio, he had never seen his partner this angry. Furious. His eyes looked hard and hot. A tic in his right cheek made half his face twitch. The muscles in his jaws clenched and unclenched, and the cords in his neck were taut. He looked like he wanted to break something in half. Reese was struck by the weird thought that if Julio had been a cartoon character, steam would have been pouring from his ears.

  Reese said, “He’s an asshole, sure, but he’s an asshole with a lot of authority and connections.”

  “Acts like a damn storm trooper.”

  “I suppose he’s got his job to do.”

  “Yeah, but it’s our job he’s doing.”

  “Let it go,” Reese said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Let it go.”

  Julio shook his head. “No. This is a special case. I feel a special obligation to that Hernandez girl. Don’t ask me to explain it. You’d think I was getting sentimental in my old age. Anyway, if it was just an ordinary case, just the usual homicide, I’d let
it go in a minute, I would, I really would, but this one is special.”

  Reese sighed.

  To Julio, nearly every case was special. He was a small man, especially for a detective, but he was committed, damned if he wasn’t, and one way or another he found an excuse for persevering in a case when any other cop would have given up, when common sense said there was no point in continuing, and when the law of diminishing returns made it perfectly clear that the time had come to move on to something else. Sometimes he said, “Reese, I feel a special commitment to this victim ’cause he was so young, never had a chance to know life, and it isn’t fair, it eats at me.” And sometimes he said, “Reese, this case is personal and special to me because the victim was so old, so old and defenseless, and if we don’t go an extra mile to protect our elderly citizens, then we’re a very sick society; this eats at me, Reese.” Sometimes the case was special to Julio because the victim was pretty, and it seemed such a tragedy for any beauty to be lost to the world that it just ate at him. But he could be equally eaten because the victim was ugly, therefore already disadvantaged in life, which made the additional curse of death too unfair to be borne. This time, Reese suspected that Julio had formed a special attachment to Ernestina because her name was similar to that of his long-dead little brother. It didn’t take much to elicit a fierce commitment from Julio Verdad. Almost any little thing would do. The problem was that Julio had such a deep reservoir of compassion and empathy that he was always in danger of drowning in it.

  Sitting rigidly behind the steering wheel, lightly but repeatedly thumping one fist against his thigh, Julio said, “Obviously, the snatching of Eric Leben’s corpse and the murders of these two women are connected. But how? Did the people who stole his body kill Ernestina and Becky? And why? And why nail her to the wall in Mrs. Leben’s bedroom? That’s so grotesque!”

  Reese said, “Let it go.”

  “And where’s Mrs. Leben? What’s she know about this? Something. When I questioned her, I sensed she was holding something back.”

  “Let it go.”

  “And why would this be a national security matter requiring Anson Sharp and his damn Defense Security Agency?”