Final Notice (26 page)

He passed the short-barreled Winchester over the car seat, stock-end first. I opened the door, stepped out into the lot the shotgun in my right hand- and gazed through the thin white mist of rain at the two rows of cars parked on the asphalt. The Pinto was there, all right, about halfway up the second row.

"At least she got this far safely," I said to Al.

He nodded. "Do you need a key to get in the lobby door?"

I shook my head. "But the rear one's locked." I pulled my house keys out of my pants pocket and tossed them over to Cal Levy. "It's the blue one, Cal. And the door's right over there." I pointed to a metal door set in the rear of the building between two rosebushes. "Give us a minute to get around to the front, then come on up."

Al and I walked quickly to the top of the lot, then up the four concrete steps, past the dogwoods, to the cement walkway that led 'to the lobby. I glanced up at my front window, but there was no light on inside. And that worried me. I pulled back the pump on the shotgun, flipped off the safety, and started to run. Once I got through the door, I bounded up the stairs two at a time, swinging around the banisters with one hand and clutching the shotgun with my other. By the time I got to the fourth floor landing, my thighs and lungs felt as if they were on fire.

I didn't wait for Al to catch up with me. Just marched straight down to my apartment and put my hand to the doorknob. The door opened effortlessly -it wasn't locked. I threw the shotgun to my shoulder and pointed the barrel into the room. Foster had made it upstairs by then. He was leaning against the sash, his Police Special in his hand. I edged through the doorway into the darkness and whispered, "Kate?"

There wasn't a sound.

"I'm going to turn on a light, Al," I said.

I reached for the wall switch and flipped it on. For a second I had the eerie feeling I was in the wrong apartment. The lamp that usually stood by the couch was lying on the floor in front of the coffee table. In the dim, uneven light I could see the Zenith Globemaster sitting on its side like an unpacked box. Papers were scattered on the rug. And the baize armchair had been overturned and slashed open. White cotton stuffing dripped from the ripped cushion.

"Jesus," I whispered.

Then I started shouting-her name. Tearing through the apartment. Opening doors. Rifling closets. And shouting her name. But she wasn't there. At least, she wasn't there anymore.

"My God," I said helplessly to Foster. "He's got her!"

Al didn't say anything. I sat down on the couch and held my head in my hands. "Kate."

Levy and DeVries filed through the door and when they saw me sitting there, they looked away.

"What the hell could she have taken that would have made him come after her like this?" Foster said furiously. "What the hell was in those pictures?"

I stared at the papers scattered on the floor, but I couldn't make my voice work. My throat was too full of grief.

"If those pictures were what he was after," DeVries said, "why didn't he just take the damn things and ... I mean he didn't do anything to the girl. At least, not in here."

He was right. There wasn't any blood on the floor. Or any of the gruesome remains that the Ripper usually left behind him. In fact, once I'd made myself calm down, I realized that the room didn't look right at all -not, that is, if it had been the scene of a struggle. Nothing was broken. Not even the lamp that was lying in front of the coffee table. And Kate knew enough karate to have put up a fight that would have left half the room in shambles and awakened every tenant on the fourth floor. Jake had been in the apartment, all right. The slashed cushion told me that. But I began to think that Kate hadn't been there with him, that he must have tricked her into going back down to the lot or to the lobby, sapped her, then taken her keys and come up to the apartment on his own. But why would he have done that if, as George had said, the two drawings were all he'd been after? Perhaps he thought she'd hidden the pictures somewhere in the apartment. Only there wasn't any sign of a search. Just the pile of papers, the overturned lamp and radio, and the slashed-up chair.

There could only be one explanation for the look of the room, and the fact that I wanted to believe it -that I had to believe it, in order to keep from falling apart again -didn't make it any less reasonable. For some reason Jake Lord wanted me to know that he'd been in my apartment; he wanted me to know that he had taken Kate. Just as he'd wanted me to know that he was planning to kill again. Like the drawing he'd left in the farmhouse, the artful way he'd disarranged the room was meant to be another clue -something between a taunt and a cry for help, as if he were saying "this is what I'll do, if you don't stop me." I thought again of what Benson Howell had said about the games psychopaths played and knew that Jacob Lord was coming to the end of the match. He was declaring himself openly, serving his version of a final notice, challenging me to find him before he fulfilled his own prophecy and killed a third time.

But if it was a kind of game to him -a contest between pursuer and pursued- and if, as Howell had claimed, he actually wanted to be caught, then there had to be something else in that room that he'd left behind to guide me. If it was a game, he was waiting somewhere with Kate, waiting and watching to see if the hunter was shrewd enough for the prey. If I wasn't shrewd enough, if I didn't read his signals right ... Kate would be dead. She could be dead at that moment, but I refused to believe it. I refused to believe that Jake would have gone to such trouble to abduct her, when, as DeVries had said, he could have killed her on the spot. I stared at the papers scattered on the floor. Outside of the lamp, the radio, and the chair, they were the only anomalies in the room. Blank sheets of typing paper, mostly. A few bills that he could have pulled out of the rolltop desk. And something else. I got up from the couch and walked over to where they were lying on top of the pile. Two oversized sheets of drawing paper, torn from a sketch pad.

"What is that?" Foster said, as I picked one of them up.

I flipped it over and my heart began to pound in my chest. He had left something behind him to guide me. The drawingprobably one of the drawings that Kate had taken from his room -was another clue, another connection between what we'd found in the farmhouse and what was waiting for us somewhere in the night.

"What is it?" Foster said again.

I'd never seen her before. But I'd heard her described. Sweet, round face, like a child's drawing of mother. That's what Aamons had said. "I think it's a sketch of Twyla. Twyla Belton."

Al leaned over my shoulder and studied the drawing. "That's her, all right," he said grimly. "I saw her in the morgue when they brought her in."

Levy said, "Then he didn't take the drawings with him after all."

I bent down and picked up the second piece of paper, halfknowing, as I flipped it over, what would be on the other side. Knowing because it was the only thing that explained his actions, that explained why he'd taken Kate and why he let us know that he'd taken her.

"Good God!" Levy said as I held the picture at arm's length. "It's the girl!"

It was, indeed, a line sketch of Kate Davis -with the eyes and the mouth and the breasts and genitals neatly cut away. I dropped the sketch on the floor and sat down hard on the couch. I'd warned her it could happen when I'd first met her; but I hadn't really believed it. She hadn't believed it either. It had seemed so far-fetched, then. I could only imagine the thrill of terror she must have felt when she'd found her own likeness alongside the drawing of the dead girl, when she realized that it was she herself who was the Ripper's next intended victim. That was what had sent her rushing out of the Lord house and sent Jacob Lord after her.

It all made such terrifying sense. She'd started working at the library in late July, just about the time Hack had begun to fall apart and Jake had gone searching for his own kind of scapegoat. He must have watched her from the stacks, as she sat on that stool in front of the art shelves day after day, until the pretty blonde girl and the picture books and all the pain they stood for merged into a single obsession. He'd tried to resist it. Judging from what he'd left in my room, he was still trying. But it was a battle he wasn't going to win. And that, I thought finally, was what he was trying to tell me, that was the real meaning of the slash mark and of the two pictures and of the drawing of the Overlook he'd left for his dead brother to see. He couldn't stop himself, unless someone got to him quickly.

But then Jake Lord had told me where he'd be. He'd told me twice. Once in the farmhouse. And once in my own living room, when he deliberately left the two pictures behind him one of a girl he had murdered, one of a girl he was planning to kill.

"Let's go!" I said to the three men.

"Go where?" DeVries said.

"To where Jake said he'd be. To where he killed Twyla and where he'll kill again, if we don't stop him. To the Overlook in Eden Park."
 

IT WAS almost five A.M. when we reached the circular drive of the Overlook on the northeast edge of Eden Park. A1 pulled in beneath a clump of elder trees at the park gate. For a minute or two, we just stared up the road to where it curved beneath the low stone wall on top of the hillside. Lovers sat on that wall in the summertime and gazed down the hill at the riverlights and at the woody, moonlit hamlets on the Kentucky shore. In the afternoon or at twilight, it was a place for lovers. And for artists. The stone wall and the benches set beneath it and the small park in the middle of the circular drive, with its oak trees and its reflecting pool and its graceful walks and arched bridges and, of course, the statue -Jake's statue gleaming in the soft powdery light of a gas lamp. Somewhere in that beautiful little place, the Ripper was waiting like the serpent tatooed on his brother's arm. A serpent in a garden. Waiting to strike or to be trod under. I prayed we weren't too late.

"I'm going in alone," I said to Foster.

"The hell you are," he snapped.

"We don't have time to argue, Al. He's got Kate out there and he's been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow since the first day he saw me. He wants me -maybe because I was the first one to put two and two together and come up with Twyla Belton. Who knows exactly how his mind works? But part of that madman in the park wants to be stopped. And I think I can reach that part. I think he thinks so, too. That's why he trashed the room when he didn't have to leave a clue. If he sees a whole army of us coming after him, he'll certainly kill her and maybe himself. I'm sure of it. That is, if he hasn't killed her already."

I cracked open the car door. "Stay out of it, Foster," I said, "The rest of you stay out, too. If you don't ... when this thing is over, I'll kill you."

I slammed the door shut and walked quickly down the sidewalk and into Eden Park.
 
 

A gas light was sputtering beside a boarded-up refreshment stand on the east rim of the drive. I walked up to it, leaned against the siding, and waited. The Overlook wasn't a large park, but it was much too big for one man to cover. Anyway, I figured if I was right -if Jake really had been leaving clues for me to follow- then he'd come to me, once he was sure I was alone.

I stood by the slat shack for about five minutes, listening to the rain dripping down the naked rock wall behind me and studying the tall oaks and the gaslit drive. Then I heard the footsteps. Even, unhurried footsteps, echoing above the patter of the rain. I put a hand to my brow and squinted through the drizzle until I saw him. He was stepping out of the shadows on the west side of the park. He was wearing a windbreaker and he had a green ski mask over his head.

I blew all the air I could out of my lungs, waited a second, then sucked in. The fresh oxygen made me a little giddy, I exhaled again, breathed in. Then I pulled the Colt Commander out of my shoulder holster, cocked it, flipped off the safety, and stuck it in my overcoat pocket. I took one more deep breath and walked out into the gaslight -to my rendezvous with Jacob Lord.

He'd seated himself on the low stone wall that runs around the crest of the hill. His hands were buried in his jacket pockets; his face was bent toward the sidewalk. He didn't look up when I sat down across from him on one of the benches. Just stared through the eyeholes in the ski mask at the rain-soaked pavement at his feet.

"Did you find Haskell?" he said after a moment.

"Yes."

"And the drawings?"

"Yes."

"I knew you would," he said and rolled his head a bit, side to side, like a little boy who's very pleased with himself. "You're a smart man -finding me out, like you did."

"I didn't do it alone, Jacob. I had some help."

"You mean your friend, Ms. Davis?"

I shook my head. "I mean you."

He looked up and I could see his teeth flash behind that mask. "I did give you a few hints, didn't I?"

"You did, indeed. Why do you think you did that, Jake?"

He shrugged. "Who can answer that question -why? Why did my brother have to die the way he did? Why am I like I am? Somebody probably knows, but he's not telling." Jacob put a finger to his lips and said, "I'm not telling, either. Do you want to know where Ms. Davis is?"

"Yes."

He laughed softly. "I thought you might. She's a very attractive woman. Don't you want to know what I've done to her?"