Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories (31 page)

He looked about him. Matthews was cowering against the mattress. He stood over her. “You're a pig, just like my mommy. This is what I did to her.” He knelt beside her, the plastic bag in his hands. Then her hand swung up. The shackle on her wrist slammed into his face.

He screamed, and for an instant he was stunned, then with a snarl he snapped his fingers around her throat.

•  •  •

The basement was empty too. Where was she? Kevin thought desperately. He was about to run into the garage, when from somewhere
behind the boiler room he heard Mensch howl in pain. And then there came a scream. A woman's scream. Bree was screaming!

An instant later, as August Mensch tightened his hands on Bree Matthews's neck, he felt his head yanked back and then there was a violent punch that caused his knees to buckle. Dazed, he shook his head and then with a guttural cry sprang to his feet. Bree reached out and grabbed his ankle, pulling him off balance as Kevin caught him in a hammer grip around the throat. Moments later, pounding feet on the basement stairs announced the arrival of the FBI. One minute later Bree, now in the shelter of Kevin's arms, watched as Mensch was manacled with chains at his waist and hands and legs, looking dazed.

“Let's see how
you
like being tied up,” she screamed at him.

•  •  •

Two days later, Bree and Kevin stood together at her grandmother's bedside in Connecticut. “The doctor said you'll be fine, Gran,” Bree told her.

“Of course I'm fine. Forget the health talk. Let's hear about your place. I bet you made that contractor squirm in court, didn't you?”

Bree grinned at Kevin's raised eyebrows. “Oh, Gran, I decided to accept his settlement offer after all. I've finally realized that I really hate getting into fights.”

W
estchester County Assistant District Attorney Jack Carroll presented his credentials to the guard at Haviland Hospital for the Criminally Insane and waited for the gate to swing open.

It was the right kind of day to visit a place for psychopathic killers, he thought wryly: wet and raw, with a persistent dampness that chilled the spirit as well as the body. And in all probability, this was a fool's errand. It was the fourth time in as many months that he had come here to question William Koenig, who had been declared incompetent to stand trial for the attempted murder of twenty-four-year-old Emily Winters. His defense was that she had caused his death in another incarnation.

It was Jack Carroll's hunch that Koenig was more than a would-be killer. With every fiber of his being he was convinced that Koenig was responsible for the string of unsolved homicides that had plagued Westchester for the last eight years.

And there's not a shred of evidence
, Jack reminded himself grimly as he pulled into the hospital parking lot. As usual, the frustration of that thought sent a dart of pure anger through him.

Fortunately, his boss, the DA, was willing to go along with him. “I think you're wasting your time, Jack,” he'd said bluntly, “but in the
three years you've been here, your hunches have been damn good. If you can manage to nail Koenig on even one of those homicides, I'll personally pin a medal on you.”

Jack got out of the car, locked it and with rapid steps followed the path to the hospital's main entrance. It was a new facility, deceptively bland with windows that were barely more than slits. There were no bars, but even a monkey couldn't get through that amount of space, he decided.

Inside the building, the large reception area was tastefully decorated. He might have been entering an upscale business office. As always when he was here, Jack hoped the fact that tight security wasn't readily apparent was not a sign that it didn't exist.

Koenig was going to meet his new psychiatrist today. Rhoda Morris, the one who had been assigned to him since his commitment eight months ago, had left for the private sector. Jack was not sorry about the change. In his opinion, Koenig had had Dr. Morris buffaloed. He hoped the new psychiatrist, Dr. Sara Stein, would be older and more experienced.

When he was ushered into her office, he immediately liked what he saw. Dr. Stein was a pleasant-looking, full-figured woman who looked to be in her late fifties, with gray hair and even features in a face dominated by warm and intelligent brown eyes. He felt her scrutiny and hoped her first impression of him was favorable as well.

He knew she was seeing a twenty-eight-year-old, sandy-haired six-footer with a boyish face. He only hoped she wouldn't mistake him for a recent college graduate, the way some people did.

She did not. “I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Carroll,” she said briskly. “As you know, I haven't yet met William Koenig. After reading the file and learning of your interest in him, I decided to have my first session with him with you present. Of course, he knows why you are here.”

Jack drew a deep breath. “Doctor, I'm here because I think William Koenig may be the most dangerous inmate under this roof.”

“We discussed him at the staff meeting this morning. The consensus is that his psychotic tendencies may have been fueled by his experimenting with past-life regression. But as you may have suspected, my colleagues do not agree with you that Koenig is a multiple killer.”

“Dr. Stein, he may not be. On the other hand, if I'm right and we can get to the truth, the families of at least four homicide victims will have some sense of closure.”

He paused for a moment and then continued: “Let me give you an example. Two years ago an elderly woman in Dobbs Ferry was asphyxiated during a fire that had been deliberately set in her home. Her family is making life hell for a twelve-year-old neighborhood kid who had started a campfire in the nearby woods a few days earlier. They're accusing him of being an arsonist.”

“They need someone to blame,” she observed. “But that will have a terrible effect on an innocent child. Let's get Koenig in here.”

“Doctor, try to get him to talk about other lives he may remember. If we knew about them I believe we could begin to understand why he might have selected other victims for retribution.”

She nodded and turned on the intercom. “We're ready for Koenig,” she said.

•  •  •

“William, Assistant District Attorney Carroll wants to talk with you.”

“I've explained to your assistant, Doctor, that I will talk to him only through you,” Koenig said patiently. “I will answer his questions through you. I understand that my answers may be used against me. I do not want to have a lawyer present. I also understand that I can stop answering questions at any point. I do not expect the confidentiality
of a doctor-patient relationship in this matter. You are new here, but I have met Mr. Carroll a number of times before. I will not speak to him directly again. Is there anything else?”

Dr. Stein glanced at Jack Carroll, who shook his head.

“No, nothing else, William,” she said.

“Then I think we should proceed. The state is paying you handsomely to probe my mind, Doctor. Why don't you start earning your money?”

William Koenig smiled gently to take the sting out of his words. He was quietly counting the hours until this evening but wanted nothing in his demeanor to suggest that this was his last day here. His escape plan was foolproof.

William hoped that the weather would continue to be gray and rain-filled at least through tomorrow. His manacled hands clasped in his lap, a restraining strap across his waist, the guard studying him through the heavily glassed door, he sat in silent contempt across the desk from his new psychiatrist, Dr. Stein, and his old adversary, Jack Carroll.

Behind his seemingly anxious-to-please smile, he was thinking that Stein was dowdy, with her hair slipping from where she'd twisted it into a bun. She didn't wear makeup, either. His last psychiatrist had been pretty. He'd liked her—she was so engagingly naive.

Carroll was a nice-looking guy, the kind who probably had all the girls after him in school. He was smart too, the only one smart enough to wonder if maybe he, William Koenig, was responsible for a string of unsolved homicides.

But all they could prove was that last February he had tried to strangle Emily Winters.

“William, I hope you'll be comfortable with me and help me to understand you. In your own words, will you tell me why you attacked Emily Winters?”

William knew perfectly well that Stein had studied his file backward and forward. Even so, it was flattering to see the interest in
her eyes when he told her—in his own words, as she put it—that in 1708, in his life as Simon Guiness, he had been hanged in London because of the false testimony of Kate Fallow, a woman who had become obsessed with him.

“She killed her husband, then made it look as though he had been a victim of a random attack on the road to their estate,” William explained gravely. “Then, when I rejected her, she went to the magistrate and claimed that I had stabbed her husband because I coveted her.”

He shivered as he spoke, remembering the misery that followed. They had believed Kate Fallow. For months he had rotted in a damp and dirty prison until execution ended his life as Simon Guiness.

“When did you first know that you had a past life, William?”

“I learned that about myself when I was in high school. I became interested in parapsychology and succeeded in hypnotizing myself and finding my own path into all that had gone before.”

William realized that Dr. Stein did not believe that he had the power to hypnotize himself. “It's not hard if you concentrate,” he said impatiently. “You sit in front of a mirror in a dark room with just one candle burning. With a pen or crayon, put a dot in the center of your forehead to indicate your third eye. Then stare at that dot in the mirror.” His voice lowered. “You will see the change beginning as you find your way into the past.”

“Change, William?”

“You will see it in the mirror,” he whispered. “Your present image will dissolve and disappear, as mine did. Other faces will appear, faces of the people you were in previous lives.”

He glanced over at Jack Carroll. “I've explained all this to him,” he told the doctor. “I bet he's tried to see if he could hypnotize himself. Tried and failed. He's too sensible. He doesn't get it.”

“Will I know what happened to those people in my past lives if I am able to hypnotize myself?” Dr. Stein asked.

“Oh, yes, Doctor, you will remember all the details.”

“How many lives do you remember, William?”

William stared at the green wall behind Dr. Stein's desk. Moss green. He was very proud that he understood shades, not just colors. They all tried to trick him into telling about the other lives he had lived, about punishments he had meted out to people who had hurt him in the past.

If you only knew
, William thought. There were eleven others. A smile played around his lips as he recalled the first, the old woman he'd followed home from the railroad station because he realized she was the witch who had put a curse on him in Salem. He had waited until he was sure she was asleep and then set fire to her house. Fire for fire.

He chose his words carefully. “The face that was clear to me at the time I happened to come across the woman you call Emily Winters was that of Simon Guiness. Knowing the terrible fate I suffered as Simon, you can understand why the sight of a young woman with red-gold hair and wide blue eyes upset me so much.”

“Did seeing a woman with that appearance always upset you, William?”

“Oh, no, it began a little over three years ago—after I had relived my life as Simon Guiness.”

“Tell me about finding Emily.”

He remembered how he had spotted her from the street. She was waiting on a window table in the restaurant. “I studied her, to be absolutely sure it was Kate,” he reminisced. “Then I went into the restaurant. It wasn't very crowded, so I was able to observed her very carefully. . . .”

William's voice trailed off as he remembered the thrill of realizing he had finally tracked down Kate Fallow. “When she passed my table, I touched her arm,” he confided. “She looked terrified,
then frightened. I'm certain that she sensed danger, even though I apologized.”

“Did you say anything to her, William?”

“I asked, ‘Haven't we met before?' ”

“Then you waited outside until she left the restaurant?”

“Yes, she began to walk home. I followed her from a distance. I saw her turn into a gated area. It was easy to climb the fence out of sight of the guard. I caught up with her at the driveway of a lovely home not unlike the mansion I lived in as Simon Guiness. I thought it was a rather inappropriate dwelling for a woman who makes her living as a waitress. Later I learned that she is a law-school student who works evenings and house-sits for a couple named Adamson, the absent owners of that dwelling.”

“You broke into the house.”

“That is too crude a word. I waited for hours and observed that an upstairs bedroom had an open window, which meant it would not be alarmed. It was easy to climb the tree nearby and slip inside from there.”

“It was Emily's bedroom?”

“Yes. She was asleep. The moon was quite bright, and I was able to study her for a long time. The memories came flooding back of her persistent efforts to win my attention when we lived on neighboring estates in England.”

Jack Carroll listened with mounting fury. Emily had told him that she'd sensed Koenig when he came in the window. She knew she couldn't get away in time, that her only hope was to push the panic button on the side of the bed. The security-conscious Mr. Adamson had ordered that each bed be equipped with one. It was wired into the station of the private guards who patrolled the gated community. They knew instantly what room she was in, and they had a key to the house.