Killer (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Sara runs before me, laughing, her yellow sundress wet with surf. I chase her along the jagged line between sea and sand. It is getting dark and we have wandered along the beach for hours and we have no idea where we are but we don’t care. We are young and in love and we will never know fear or pain or loss because we will always be together and we will live forever.

* * *

I am standing on the beach, staring at the fading pink glow over the cobalt Pacific. My shoes are submerged in sand and I realize I have been standing here, staring at the setting sun, for a long time. I look at my watch. Only 5:40 and the sun is a memory. I have abandoned my plan to go to the storage place. When I fled Parker Center I walked quickly—ran, really—to the car rental agency. I gave them my Amex, they gave me a Ford Escort, and I drove down Third Street to get on the freeway.

But I passed the 110 East to San Gabriel and found myself getting on the Santa Monica freeway and driving west—toward the water, to the edge of the continent, where I drove down the California Incline to Pacific Coast Highway, which I took north until I reached Will Rogers State Beach and I parked the car and got out and stood in the sand in front of my car and stared at Sara’s ghost…gripped by a memory, lost in a memory that I didn’t even know I had until this moment.

The cool, steady ocean breeze has dried the sweat from my shirt and I am breathing again. But my face is wet. I realize I have been crying.

What the hell happened back there?
I fled Parker Center like a felon. My heart pounding, I simply fled. Something in me had been awoken; some deep, forbidden button was pressed. I shut down and got out and drove—no way I could face Sara’s things now. So I drove west, toward…what?

The airport.
That must be it. In the back of my mind there must have been the thought that I could take an earlier flight. Get the hell out of L.A. Yes. But the California Incline only goes one way, and I wound up driving north along Pacific Coast Highway until I came to Will Rogers Beach and the sudden memory of Sara called to me like a siren. A memory from long before the Unspeakable…

“It’s ridiculous,” Sara would say. “We live in L.A. and we never go to the beach.”
I had finally relented and we made a day of it…and half a night…

I shake it off. Get in the car. Maybe there will be an earlier flight. I drive to the exit from the parking lot. I look right, then I look left, and then I see the traffic light, far ahead north—

Temescal Canyon
.

I stop the car in the middle of my right turn onto Pacific Coast Highway. Then, suddenly, I turn the car left, toward Temescal.

I have never liked being afraid and I have learned that anger can trump fear and now I am angry.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Escort’s headlights illuminate the dusty row of eucalyptus trees that line the parking lot in Temescal Canyon Park. I stop the car near the end of the lot, where the darkness starts, and I get out.

It’s warmer here than at the beach. The pavement and dirt and brush hang onto the heat longer than the wet sand. The air is still and saturated with the dry fragrance of eucalyptus and sun-baked sage. I walk toward the darkness at the edge of the parking lot. I don’t know where I’m going and yet, as I approach the edge of the paved lot I somehow know there will be the entrance to a trail…and there it is.

How did I know?

I take the trail, my focus hard ahead of me. I have no idea where I am going, but the landmarks along the way are sudden reminders of…
what?

The cinderblock meeting-house. The tombstone-sized granite slab with the park’s donor’s names on a bronze plaque…

I have never been here but as I climb up the trail, dusty sage bushes brushing my legs, I recognize little things—the boulder with graffiti, the railroad ties embedded as steps where the trail becomes treacherously steep.

And then I come to it: the small plateau—the clearing where Killer buried Grace Beverly in the book.

But I invented this small plateau.

Sara and I drove past this park, when we went to the beach that day. We were driving back, it was late at night, and I noticed the sign that said Temescal Canyon. I liked the name—liked the music of it, and I told her and she liked it too and I reached for it later when I was writing the first book. But I’ve never set foot here. I am certain of it. As certain as I am of anything…

I walk ahead, refusing the fear growing inside me. I walk toward the site where I buried poor young Grace Beverly in my imagination years ago.

As I come closer I am briefly calmed. There is no crime scene tape, nothing to show that the police have ever been here.
Nothing to see here, folks…

And then I see it.

Twenty feet ahead of me, illuminated only by the thumbnail moon over the ridge, is a gash in the ground, partly overgrown now. I know this wound in the earth. I created it. This is the shallow grave where I buried Grace Beverly in
Killer
.

My heart swelling into my throat, I approach the ragged rectangular hole in the dirt.
What the hell am I looking for?

I should run.

But I can’t. I can only move toward the shallow grave on stiff legs, straining my eyes in the colorless moonlight to see inside the grave’s shadow. I come upon it and stop well back, afraid of stumbling in. I lean over the edge of the grave and look inside and see only a black void.

Suddenly, a flash of stark white and a pair of wild eyes snarl up at me from the darkness of the grave and then a scuffling spray of dirt shoots against my legs as something climbs up and out of the ground and rips a hole in the surrounding brush as it tears off into the night.

I stagger back, terrified, and stare after the Thing that has leapt from the grave and I realize I have seen coyotes, a large one followed by a smaller one—a mother and pup, disturbed in their sleep, scrambled by an intruder up and out of their safe hole in the warm desert earth.

I turn and run back down the trail, my heart released from the sudden freeze of fear and now pounding so hard I think that something inside me might break or burst.

I make it back to the parking lot and stop. I try to breathe. I look around and force myself to calm down and I close my eyes and then open them again. My gaze falls upon the row of picnic tables near the cinderblock meeting-house.

Something else…something else is here. Near the tables…

At the end of the row of picnic tables
.
The olive tree…the dark hollow part inside…

I can almost hear a voice urging me on to it. A low, sonorous voice with the sound of a smile behind it.

Like a sleepwalker, I move toward the olive tree. As I come closer I can see that it looks diseased; half of it grows with hale greenery, the other half is clearly dying, no leaf or bud on any branch, and between the two halves of this sad, doomed tree is an oval opening. A dark, hollow place that—once again—I somehow knew would be here.

Come closer,
I hear the deep, sonorous voice say.
Look inside
.

I see only darkness and I move my head around to catch the moonlight—and I see a faint sparkle inside the hole in the tree. I clamp my jaw shut tight to fight back the fear and I reach inside and grab a handful of something damp and cold and stringy. Like reaching into a freshly carved jack ‘o lantern.

I pull my hand out and I am holding a clump of mottled bark and grime. But in the middle of the clump is something—I shake it off and once again the sudden recognition of my own imagined horror washes over me.

I am holding a hair clip—a large, cheap, plastic thing, bedecked with purple glass beads—and I recognize it as the clip that I described Grace Beverly wearing to hold her hair back in the book. The clip that Killer adjusted to hold her hair out of the way when he applied to the knife across her neck…

Attached to the hair clip is what I can tell now is a clump of hair, and dangling at the end of the tangle of hair is a dark, papery shred of what I realize is scalp. A small insect crawls around the patch of dried skin.

I make a shuddering, involuntary sound and stuff the thing back into the tree and run to the car and fumble with the keys like a teenager in a slasher movie and get inside and start the engine and drive like hell out of there.

CHAPTER SIX

I drive down the freeway, my mind racing:
I have never been there. I have never hurt anyone, ever. I could never do a thing like…no matter how out of my mind with booze and…I could never do it…never do that…never, ever...

I realize I am saying this aloud. I’ve been saying it, over and over, for most of the drive to the airport. I look down and see that I’m going ninety miles an hour. I slow down suddenly and nearly miss the exit to LAX.

How did I know?

I leave the car where I’m supposed to for the rental pickup, then take the shuttle to the terminal. More than enough time to make my flight. More than enough. I cling to my small carry-on as I get off the shuttle and get in the endless series of lines to find my gate, my plane, my escape.

I don’t care how drunk or out of my mind with grief and pain… Never. Never.

I get through the airport lines, avoiding the eyes of every cop and security officer I pass. There is a heart-stopping moment when the chrome alloy parts in my repaired wrist set off the metal detector, but they let me through and I take the escalator to the departure gates and find my gate and sit down in the closest chair near me. It feels like I haven’t breathed for hours. I sit back and place my small bag on the stained carpet at my feet and relax my grip. I force myself to breathe, letting the panic subside. And it does. After a few moments the racing thoughts drift into the background and I slowly become more aware of my surroundings.

I look up at the gate. The sign above the empty desk reads
Newark 11:58 – On Time.

Thank God. I look at my watch. 9:10. Two hours until we board, then the flight, then connect to Burlington and then home...

I just have to calm down. Stop my mind from running. Calm down.

Never. I could never…

I have to think clearly. There
has
to be an explanation. She was taken…kidnapped, but she wasn’t killed until after the book…
Forensics is still breaking that down,
Marsh had said.

But how could I have known those things? The grave, the hair clip…

I try to remember the details of the murder from the book but I can’t. Five years and three books later and the details are gone.

I turn, looking for a newsstand, and I see one at the end of the terminal. I get up and hurry toward it—then slow down as I pass a security camera pointed at me. I duck my head and continue to the store.

In the store I go to the back, toward the magazines—
yes.
A long row of shelves with paperbacks. I turn my head to read the authors’ names, going alphabetically to find…there, on the bottom shelf, I recognize the cover for the paperback edition of
Killer.

I grab the book
and thumb through it as I kneel on the floor. I haven’t looked at my first book in years and I am surprised at how little I recognize. I flip through it, trying to find a sequence describing the crime scene but I can’t find one.

Frustrated, I get up and go to the cashier and buy the damned thing. I also buy a copy of the New York Times to wrap around it, hiding my photo. Then I walk back to my gate, past the security cameras, and I sit down and begin to read.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Katherine Kendall stood over the shallow grave. The crime scene unit’s banks of 2,000 watt floodlights filled the grave with a harsh, shadowless glare. Grace Beverly’s body had been removed by the coroner’s people hours ago, and already Katherine knew her boss was right to send her out here.

It was Killer. Katherine was certain. Decapitation between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, amputation of the hands at the radiocarpal joint—all of it done with a rubber-handled knife at least 10” long with moderate serration. All of the cutting done premortem.

FBI Behavioral Science called him Killer because they had nothing else to call him. He hadn’t murdered enough to be given a clever nickname—at least not that they knew of—and the news media hadn’t connected the murders. FBI kept the bit about the heads and the hands out of the news, to filter out the scores of nutcases and attention-seekers who routinely call to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

After three murders in three different states they knew only the barest facts—the general profile of the victims, the cause of death, the weapon, the method of disposal, and little else. After the facts there was the reasoned speculation: he was a white male, 30’s or 40’s, average height and weight; he was strong, he was smart, he was cool-headed, and he was meticulous. Katherine had seen all manner of crime scene photographs of other murder victims’ graves, but this was the first time Katherine, in her rookie year as an FBI Special Agent, had seen Killer’s handiwork up close and in person.

The most telling thing, she thought, was the pattern of footprints around the grave. It was always the same. Not the prints themselves—Killer changed his shoes for each murder, using different sized shoes. It was the
pattern
of the footprints that revealed him to her. She could tell from the footprints that he had walked around the grave for a long time, looking down at Grace Beverly before he began dumping dirt on her. All of the other footprints—approaching the scene, carrying the body, then leaving—showed an economy of action. His movements were direct and certain; he knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going and there were no false starts, there was no backtracking. Except for the burial itself. And then, at each gravesite, he would move around the grave many times, walking around and around it several times…