Killer (19 page)

I walk off, toward another part of the store—out of view of the saleswomen at the register. I walk all the way through the store and wind my way back through the sweaters and the jeans and the Junior Miss outfits. I pass a row of sweatpants with suggestive things stitched in sequins across the backsides. I keep moving and it just gets worse—
Girls Eight And Under.

I turn and walk straight back out the way I came, not looking at the saleswomen.

I walk out of Nordstrom and down the broad indoor boulevard and out of sight from the store. I smell warm pretzels from a stand nearby and my stomach churns eagerly. The last time I ate was last night, with Nicki, at the Mirabelle.
No wonder I’m screwing up, I can’t think straight because I haven’t eaten.
I watch a man buy a pretzel for his toddler son. I turn and look in the window of an electronics store, waiting for the kid at the pretzel stand to ring up the man’s purchase. The entrance to Nordstrom is reflected in the electronics store window. I can see Laurie at the register, talking to the saleswoman and handing her credit card to her. The man at the stand gives the pretzel to his little son and they leave. I go to the stand.

“Three pretzels, please.”

“Onion garlic or original?” the pimply kid asks me.

“Original.”

The kid picks up a pair of metal tongs and selects three big pretzels off a rack under a heat lamp and folds each of them into a piece of waxed paper and then reaches for a bag. I glance up and see a mall security guard entering Nordstrom. The kid puts the pretzels in the bag and hands them to me.

“Three-forty-five,” he says. I take out my wallet and give him a five dollar bill and look at the window of the electronics store and see my face on six different big screen televisions—the same pictures I saw before: my driver’s license photo and the ragged mug shot from the Richard Bell murder. Then I see Detective Marsh in his blue Gore-Tex, talking into a forest of microphones. I strain to hear what he’s saying but the televisions are muted inside the store. The picture cuts to videotape of a roadblock and I see the truckload of Michigan-bound oranges swarmed by cops.
They found the phone.

The mall security guard, a thickset Latino kid, walks out of Nordstrom. I take off my Devils cap and move behind the pretzel stand where he can’t see me. He walks by the stand without looking back. He is armed only with a bulky black walkie-talkie. I take my change from the pretzel kid and walk back toward Nordstrom for a quick look and see Laurie signing her credit card receipt at the register.

I head for the escalators, devouring the pretzels. I don’t see the guard around, so I take the escalator down. I get to the parking level and wander among the parked cars and suddenly I get the feeling I’m being followed. I turn around and see no one. I walk past Laurie’s car quickly. I hear a shuffling noise. I look around again as I walk and again I see nothing. The parking lot is dark and quiet. It sounded close.

Footsteps?

I strain to listen but hear only the distant sound of car doors slamming and kids’ voices far off, laughing. I wind around between the parked cars, beating a circuitous path back toward my car.
Have they found the Mustang at the gas station and connected it to the Chrysler?

I approach the Chrysler cautiously, half-expecting to get jumped by a SWAT team. But the car is unmolested. No SWAT team. I get in and start the engine and look at my watch. I’ll give her five minutes and then I’m gone. If I keep this up I will be caught before morning. And if I’m caught I’m no use to Laurie Vonn or anyone else.

THINGS PAST

He headed south from New Jersey in his rig, making sure to take a different route back west. He never drove the same highway twice. He drove and drove, down the eastern seaboard and across Georgia. The long stretches of lonely highway gave him time to think, to plan. He would have to get a new van, of course, since Laurie Vonn had seen him in his current one. But his cash reserves were getting low, given how much fuel the rig required. He thought briefly about finding a route and going back to work, but even that seemed dicey. At least for right now. He needed time. He needed to find a place to park and rest for a long stretch, where he could lay low and save money on fuel. He spent a night at an enormous truck stop outside Atlanta and considered staying there for a while. No, a rig lingering at a busy truck stop like that would raise attention. So he kept moving, through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana…waiting, chain-smoking, burning fuel and money and heading nowhere.

He had printed the photo of Laurie Vonn at the business center in the Atlanta truck stop. He pinned it up, over the front page of the
Atlanta Journal Constitution
, and spent nights in his secret room with his Los Angeles Angel and the photos of all of his Angels. But as much as Laurie’s picture excited him, it also reminded him of his mistake, and he couldn’t find release with her image above him, taunting him.

The migraines came back, worse than before, as well as the restless anxiety and irritability that now bordered on rage. The only thing he could do to satisfy himself was read the paperback true-crime book about serial killers. He pictured himself in a book like that; he imagined thousands, maybe millions of people reading about him.

But the fantasies were just that—fantasies. Fleeting and false. He knew he would have to do something to stem the tide of restless rage that was rising in him daily…but what? He had encountered a few potential Angels on his long drive through the South, but that was unthinkably stupid. More than ever now, his desperation to have his story told was urgent to the point that he could hardly bear. He had to find a way…

And then, on a broiling August day in west Texas—a breakthrough. Another miracle. A vision. A plan. At last.

He had driven across Texas all day with the air conditioner off to save fuel, and the suffocating heat had stoked his mounting frustration and rage to a new and dangerous level. He was taking Valium and painkillers daily, with little effect. He needed relief. So after he pulled into a truck stop to gas up, he parked his rig at the stop and walked across the highway to a redneck bar and proceeded to get drunk. He took seven five-milligram Valium and ordered drink after drink, and the next thing he knew, he awoke in his secret room the afternoon of the following day, and all around him were the destroyed remnants of his embalming equipment. He had apparently returned to his rig and, in a blind, drugged, drunken fury, he had smashed everything. He had no memory of it, but his hands were scraped and bloody from beating and tossing around the heavy stainless steel equipment. The only things left intact were the Los Angeles Angel and the photos on the walls. He hadn’t opened either of the two padlocked footlockers that contained his St. Stephen Angel and his West Virginia Angel. Thank God.

At first he was furious with himself for losing control. Who knows what he could have done while he was drunk and drugged like that? Try as he might, he could not remember a thing from the night before. He could have said things, told people things…

The thought of suicide came to him, and he was suddenly overcome with nausea and he vomited into the bucket where he collected body fluids.

He could have said things, told people things…told them about his Angels…

And in that moment, on his hands and knees in the stifling little room, trembling with nausea, tortured with self-loathing, he was suddenly struck with an idea—a brilliant revelation which, merely by thinking of it, calmed him completely, and glimmered with promise.

He dumped the bucket out from the back of the trailer, then hurried to the cab and turned on his notebook computer and began searching for medical articles on the combined effects of Valium and alcohol. He also read several articles about memory and brain function. He read for eight hours. The articles were very encouraging.

Then he entered a name into a search engine—an illegal site he had used to find information about his Angels as part of his careful preparation.

The name he entered he knew well—he had seen it a thousand times. And in half and hour he had an address, a brief biography, and various other bits of information.

He memorized all of it—never writing anything down—then he started his rig and headed west, brimming with hope and driving with purpose now. He figured he could reach San Gabriel, California in two days, maybe three if he took a less direct route.

Three days.

Three days of driving, a few weeks of watching and following, and he could be face to face with him—the man he could tell his stories to, and maybe, just maybe—the man who could become his St. Paul.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I spend five minutes in the parking lot of the shopping mall, behind the wheel of the Chrysler, trying to think up a way to warn Laurie Vonn. I could call the police hotline myself and tell
them
to watch out for her. Would they believe me? They would if I gave them information only I would know…

No, the minute I do that my location can be pinpointed instantly. Right now I could be anywhere, unless I’ve been spotted somewhere I don’t know about. By someone I didn’t see. Unlikely. But I have to call Nicki at some point. It will be helpful to find out what the police know, beyond the news reports.

I could leave a note on Laurie Vonn’s car.
You are in danger. Call the police immediately. Someone wants to kill you.

Jesus. And I’m a
writer.

But what could I write?
Call Detective Marsh and tell him…

Tell him what?
How would I say it? What could I write that would convince her?
Come on, think—you routinely write two thousand words a day and now you can’t come up with twelve?

I look at my watch. Five minutes are up. I start the car.
Give her one more minute
.
Think for one more minute.
At least come up with something
or this girl could wind up—

I see the security guard riding down the escalator and I drive off immediately.

Damn it.

I drive to the exit and pay for my parking and get back on the bypass road. It is dark now and sleeting, the tiny ice particles melting as they hit my windshield. I finish the last pretzel and my stomach growls so loudly I can hear it over the hiss of the tires on the wet pavement. Now I’m hungry
and
thirsty. I need to eat. I need to find another car. I need a shower and a shave and a new identity and five million in an offshore account.

I stop at a red light and glance at my rearview mirror and see Laurie Vonn’s dirty red Honda pull out of the parking structure and head away from me, in the opposite direction.

I take the next right, onto a dark street, and make a u-turn, scanning wildly around for police, and then back onto the bypass road and after the Honda.

I will follow her home and warn her and then get the hell out of here.

I follow her back to the interstate. She merges with the evening rush hour and I pull up two cars behind her, watching the passing signs for a gas station or supermarket where I can pick off a car. I turn on the radio and I am once again the lead item in the news. They talk about the FBI’s dead end in Michigan. They mention the stolen Mustang and give its license number, and I hear about them finding my truck. Several “experts” are summoned to talk about me. They speculate about my alcoholism and my “obsession” with the three dead women and my “wife’s tragic suicide” and my previous arrest for the murder of Richard Bell. I am a
loner, a recluse who has withdrawn into his bizarre world of fantasy.
Maybe these sages will figure out what the fuck is happening and let me know. They congratulate each other on their insights and joke and laugh as they discuss the murder and mutilation of young women.
You can opine about my “twisted psyche” all you want, but you don’t know about my Chrysler.
I am still “at large,” and the anchor reads the police tip line three times. Good. The more I hear that tip line number the more I am assured they don’t have any idea where I am. I look at the cars surrounding me and wonder how many people are listening to this. Millions of people will come home tonight and hear about me and see my picture and look at the phone number. Maybe they will write it down. Maybe I look like their cousin or their ex-husband and they will remember my face.

We come to the 53
^rd
street exit off the interstate and I get in the right lane, anticipating that Laurie will take the exit to go home but she doesn’t.

“Where to now, girl?” I say aloud, exasperated.

She passes the exit and continues north on the highway. I nudge the Chrysler up alongside her and catch a glimpse of her behind the wheel but the car ahead of me slows and I back off and blend in with the herd of commuters.

God knows where she is going. Dinner? Market? Boyfriend? I have done what I can and risked capture doing it and now I have to get another car. But the traffic is too thick to get off right away so I follow her through the stop-and-go all the way to the New Jersey Turnpike which she takes north out of Trenton.

Where the hell is she going?

THINGS PAST

It was easy to track the author Rhodes. He had a simple routine: head from his little place in San Gabriel to a dive bar in Pasadena around two in the afternoon and stay there until closing. The guy was a drunk—another stroke of unexpected good fortune.

He followed Rhodes for a couple of weeks, then one night he entered the dark, dingy bar, and watched as the writer drank his Jack Daniel’s on the rocks until his shoulders slumped and his head began to bob and weave.

He waited until Rhodes was drunk enough—but not too drunk—then ordered a bottle of Jack and two glasses. He dropped three Valium into one of the glasses and stirred them until they dissolved in the brown whiskey. Then he approached the booth where the writer sat hunched over his drink.