CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (41 page)

Harold Adams, the nursing home's superintendent, has put extra security on duty at the home.

Item two weeks later:

WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN HER CAR

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By Bret Febre

Atlanta Journal

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By all accounts of those involved in the investigation of the homicide of Joy Davis of Atlanta, her killer can be considered armed and extremely dangerous.

Davis's car was found near midnight on a deserted street in the west part of the city. There was a flat tire on the front of the 1990 Ford Pinto she was driving. Police officers Roy Sands and Stephen Corinski found the car abandoned with the keys in the ignition. When they checked the truck, they found Ms. Davis's body. She had been stabbed "numerous" times, Sands said, and "mutilated." One- inch strips of flesh had been taken from her chest and legs.

"This is a grisly one," Sands reported. "I've never seen anything like it."

Asked if this murder was similar to the one that happened March 10 at the Golden Wings Nursing Home, Sands had no comment.

Carla folded the clippings and slid them into a leather folder when she noticed she'd attracted the curiosity of the man sitting next to her on the plane. She could not fathom why Lansing had not been caught. Did no one notice a serial murderer was again turning the state of Georgia into his private mortuary? She hugged the folder to her chest and rested her head on the back of the seat to discourage the man next to her from starting a conversation. The deep underlying roar of the jet engines calmed her racing heart. She was going home. She was going after Martin Lansing.

It was worth dying for.

CHAPTER 2

Carla carefully worded the ad while nibbling on a fresh peach that tasted to her like summer in her hand. Sully paced the floor, muttering.

"Come on, Sully, calm down. I'm ready this time."

He stood beside her at the kitchen table a moment before resuming his pacing. "'Who, but Satan himself, could be ready for Martin Lansing?"

"Me. I told you it's going to work. Maybe you should be the one taking a vacation this time."

"But offering a reward, Carla! It's all the money you have. It took you four years to save it."

"Frannie's not worth it?"

"That's not fair. Jesus, that's not what I meant. It's just..."

Carla held aloft the paper she had been writing on for Sully's inspection. "This," she said. "is going to bring him to me, Sully. If someone turns him in, fine, it's worth my savings. But you know as well as I that no one's been able to stop him, and a reward won't help catch him, either. This is bait. Sun Tzu was a Chinese theorist. He said, 'Hold out baits to entice the enemy.' That's what I'm doing."

Sully sank down into a chair. "All the stuff I put into this house won't stop him from getting in if he wants to, Carla. I wish you'd stayed in Israel."

No, Carla thought; the steel-center doors, the dead bolts, the alarm system--it wouldn't stop Lansing, but she would. By God, this time she would.

She put her arm around Sully. "You look terrible. I should have come home sooner."

"I sold the store," he said quietly.

"You sold it! But Sully, the Torrance Hardware Store was an institution. It belonged to your father and to your grandfather. How could you do that?"

"I stopped caring. I made enough from the sale to live comfortably for a long time."

"What do you have to care for now?"

"I have you," he said.

Carla looked at his shadowy unshaven cheeks and his hollow eyes. "Sully, it's none of my business, but Frannie's been gone four years, and I think she'd want me to say this. What about marrying again? You should be seeing someone."

He turned aside his face and blinked. "Frannie was the only woman I ever wanted."

Carla sighed and hugged him close. Oh, Sully, Sully, she thought, your loneliness is like a heavy chain dragging you down.

She said, "Come with me to run this ad?"

"I think I'll garden a while." He stood and went to the back door. "My tomatoes are renowned. Biggest in the state." He smiled wistfully.

Carla sat reading over the reward offer she was making for information leading to the whereabouts of Francine Torrance's killer. A four-year-old murder; there were no leads or clues or witnesses, she knew that. Yet every newspaper in the state was going to run this ad. She wanted Lansing to see it, know she hadn't forgotten. She wanted him to come for her.

Her hand went to the buttons on her blouse. Lansing's exact words when he made the incisions on her body haunted her like a child's melody, a repetitive singsong in her head.

"Carla"--the switchblade flicked from its black handle and glinted in the light--"I want to give you a parting gift"--the tip of the knife felt cool to her damp skin--"I want you to remember"--the blade edge sliced cleanly, smoothly, drawing a precise line across her body and she couldn't move, didn't dare twitch a muscle--"remember Carla"--droplets of blood curled from beneath the parted layers of skin and muscles--"that I can come back for you"--she stopped looking at the blade and stared into his strangely angelic eyes. "I can come back, Carla, and kill you slow." But he hadn't meant it. He was not going to leave her lying on the bed to live another day. He was going to kill her, and would have had Flap not rushed into the house in time to save her. So not only was he a demented killer, but he was also a black-hearted liar, a demon dispensing hope and ripping it away.

A tear fell onto her hand and she flinched. She stood and lifted her purse from the table. She left the house, angrily wiping at the corners of her eyes.

She had the bait. She had the necessary training. She hoped to do to him what he had promised, so solemnly and with such calm, to do to her.

#

When she came through the front door, unlocking three different locks before getting inside, she found Sully sitting in the rocking chair with the leather folder of clippings on his lap. Some of her notes had fallen to the carpet at his feet. She dropped her keys in her purse and set it on top of the television set.

"I see you found my file," she said. Sully looked worse, if that was possible, than when she had left him earlier in the day.

"You're obsessed with him," he said simply. He had still not shaved, and the lower half of his face looked as if it had been immersed in ink.

She shrugged and walked into the kitchen. "I'm hungry. Have you eaten?"

"Carla, we've got to talk about it."

Her fury came out of nowhere and assaulted her like a stiff wind. She swirled around, crossed the den, jerked the folder from his hands. He cowered. Even his eyes narrowed as if expecting a blow. She felt her heart clench in her chest and was instantly ashamed of her temper. Sully was not her enemy.

"Goddamnit, Sully, if it's going to be this way, it's going to be harder for us both. I tried to forget it. I tried to make a new life. Did you know the Shin Bet wanted to recruit me?"

He shook his head. He bent over to pick up the scribbled notes and hand them to her.

"They're one of the top counterintelligence agencies in Israel. In the world! I'm somebody, Sully, that's what I learned while I was gone. I'm not an expendable human being. I'm a Jew, an American, a woman, a sister, a friend, a lover, a fighter. A guerrilla fighter, Sully, do you know what that is? Do you know how deadly an adversary I am now?"

"You are also obsessed with this. That's dangerous, Carla. Everyone's vulnerable in some way. I can't stand to lose you."

She opened the folder and shook loose the clippings. She picked one, held it up before his face. "He's a killing machine, Sully. Look at this--a woman in Atlanta, one in Waycross, another one that might be his work in Augusta."

She hadn't finished. Her voice was rising until she shouted. "He killed my sister! He cut Frannie into strips, Sully, God, why shouldn't I be obsessed? He butchered a defenseless old man and woman. He tormented the two of us for eighteen hours in our own house! He was going to kill us.
He left me scarred so I'd remember!"

She dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands. Sully was on the floor beside her, the folder between them.

"All right," he said. "All right, what can I do? What do you want me to do, Carla?"

She turned her head into his shoulder and let him hold her. When she felt she could speak without shouting or crying, she said, "Just stay out of my way, Sully. That's all you have to do. Please. I can handle him. You have to believe me."

He shushed her and rocked her in his arms. Frannie's kid sister had grown up and he didn't even know it until now. The little pigtailed soldier-in-the-making was a grown woman with passionate concerns to set the ledgers right. There was nothing he could do to change that.

"Le€t's go fix supper," she said, letting him help her to her feet.

"You didn't lose your Southern accent or expressions," he said, smiling gently. "If we're fixing to fix supper, you're still my little Georgia girl."

"I didn't lose anything." She thought about the career offered to her as an agent with the Shin Bet. She thought about a sister lost to the grave. She thought about the normal lives being lived by her playmates from childhood. In essence, she had lost nearly everything other twenty-two-year-olds took for granted. But it did not do to grieve for the roads untraveled, and she would not admit aloud to having lost any opportunity. Perhaps one day, when all this was over, she could go back to yearning for the goals others desired. If she survived, life might be long and full. If she did not survive, she reasoned, she would never miss it.

CHAPTER 3

"Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total."

Sun Tzu

Sully puttered around in his vegetable garden, Carla studied a giant abnormal-psychology book she had taken from the Jamison Public Library. There were so many kinds of aberrant personalities she was having trouble drawing any conclusions; schizophrenics, manic-depressives, paranoids, neurotics, psychotics, violent, nonviolent, self-destructive, mass murderers, serial murderers. State institutions and private clinics overflowed with them. Therapy ranged from group encounters to psychosurgery. Theories ranged from childhood abuse to a chemical imbalance in the brain.

How was she supposed to ferret out one specific malady from the dozens the medical community had classified? Which one described Martin Lansing?

She put down the heavy tome and scrubbed down her face with her hands.

Sun Tzu counseled a guerrilla fighter must know herself. She had that one covered, at least. She knew exactly what she was about. She was twenty-two, strong as any man her equal weight, and she was dedicated to a cause. She was a woman of deep emotion; love and hate were twin torrential rivers flooding through her soul. She believed in absolutes. Absolute evil. Absolute good. Hypocrites and fence-sitters didn't stand a chance with her. She could spot pretensions in either direction instantaneously. She was a human barometer that never failed to test true.

She was not especially beautiful, and that did not bother her. Her hands had roughened from the work on the kibbutz farms. She had cut her long hair, adopting a short, wind-blown style and it took away the alluring femininity she once possessed. As she matured, she fell into the habit of frowning when in thought, and there were already lines on each side of her lips as a result.

She knew she lacked an ability to show outward affection for others, but she did not intentionally hurt people. She had a one-track mind so that when she was determined, threat of death could not deter her. It was a necessary trait for survival during life-threatening ordeals, but she knew she often appeared to be too detached from the mainstream flow of life.

Over the four-year span in Israel, she recognized the kind of woman she was becoming and welcomed the subtle changes. They would not prepare her to live like other normal American young women who were intent upon career advancement and a family. But they were changes which helped assure her victory over the enemy.

"Know the ground, know the weather," the war theorist advised.

She knew the land surrounding Sully's house fairly well, having grown up as a country youngster, but she must retrace her childhood wanderings. She needed to relearn the land and how it had evolved in the past fourteen years. Sully told her Lansing lived in a lean-to somewhere in the woods back of the house before he broke in that last night. After four years all evidence of it surely had disappeared, but he had also mentioned a stream. She knew where the stream was. She wanted to scout the area anyway, imagine Lansing living in a ground cave near there like a cornered, snarling, wild animal. It was a pleasure to imagine his suffering.

She knew the weather. It was spring, a temperamental Georgian spring. Each night and each morning, she turned on the cable TV weather station and listened to the predictions for their part of the state. She would always know the weather.

She picked up the book she had put aside and reopened it. She was handicapped because she knew so little about Martin Lansing's mentality. She knew the psychology of primitive, guerrilla warfare. She did not understand the psychology of a murderer. But then, did anyone?

She paused, looked up from the page, smiled. Maybe they were not so far apart, those two--warriors and murderers. Didn't men who made war kill? Weren't killers the best warriors?

Her smile grew and the lines at her mouth deepened. That could be the answer she sought. She need not search for Lansing in a textbook. She had merely to look into herself. Like herself, the enemy moved in one direction until he had gone as far as he could possibly go. He let nothing deflect him. Nothing frighten him. Nothing intimidate him.

Nothing stop him.

Sully came through the French doors, his hands soiled, and spots of high color in his cheeks. "What are you grinning about?" he asked.

"Secret," she said, laying aside the psychology book for good. "My secret, that's all."