Killer (8 page)

“Okay,” I realize she’s right. “But how do they know she wasn’t killed and buried after the construction?”

“According to the forensic bug guys, she was buried in the spring. They can tell from the decay of the maggot eggs in her—” Nicki stops herself. “Just take my word for it, okay? I’m eating lunch at my desk. What it boils down to now is we have to account for your whereabouts during the last week of April, 2001 and once we do that we’re in the clear. Any thoughts?”

“Not a one. Like I told you, I don’t remember a thing after Sara died until I sobered up fifteen months later.”

“Nothing at all? For fifteen months?”

“I remember being at her funeral and waking up the next day on someone’s couch. After that it’s only vague impressions….random, nonsensical things.”

“Would you be willing to talk to a forensic psychiatrist about that? He’s an expert in memory recovery. He’s helped me out more than once with witnesses who had fuzzy memories.”

I take another bite of breakfast.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

“It might be important later, if we can’t find any other way to account for your whereabouts.”

“I understand,” I say. “It’s just not a period in my life that I relish looking at very hard.”

“Okay, but I think you should consider it,” she says.

“So does this mean we’re telling them about the hair clip?” I ask, to change the subject.

“Enough with the hair clip. Let’s find out first where you were that last week of April ‘01. Unless you want to tell them about the hair clip so you can get extradited back to L.A. on a murder charge.”

“Not really on my agenda,” I say.

“Don’t blame you. Okay, I’m going to need as much from you as I can get: credit card, ATM, phones, anything that might show a record of your whereabouts.”

“It’s not like I have much in the way of records from then. I was drunk pretty much all the time.”

“Would you sign a release for the bank and the phone company to authorize my access to your information?”

“Sure.”

“While we’re on the subject of your bank we might as well talk about my fee. I have one investigator on this full-time already, as well as me. It could get expensive real fast.”

“I understand.”

“I need twenty thousand just to start.”

“Just let Joel know. He can arrange whatever you need with my accountant.”

“So it’s not about the money, then,” she says.

“What isn’t?”

“Your reluctance to talk to my forensic shrink.”

“No, it’s not about the money. I just don’t want to go there unless I have to.”

“You may have to.”

“Let me know when that time comes,” I say.

“It may come sooner than later, unless we get lucky. By the way, does the name Gregory Dontis mean anything to you?”

“No. Who is he?”

“He was your editor’s assistant when Arnie Brandt first sent your manuscript to Terrapin Publishing.”

“What about him?”

“He’s the only one who read your original manuscript that we haven’t located. He’s also the only one with a criminal record.”

“What’d he do?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon, six years ago.”

“Sounds pretty serious.”

“It could mean he threatened somebody with a cocktail umbrella, for all we know. The case was pleaded down to a misdemeanor. We’re waiting on the paperwork.”

“You work fast,” I say, impressed. “That’s a lot of information in a day and a half.”

“You should see me during a trial,” she says.

“I hope I never do.”

After I hang up I pour myself a cup of coffee and sit at the kitchen table and wonder why I don’t want to talk to the shrink. I think of the low voice I heard at Temescal Canyon and wonder if it’s because I’m afraid that I am going crazy.

No, not crazy. I don’t want to talk to the shrink because I don’t want to remember anything. People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things—where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance—but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget. To forget the sunny afternoon in San Gabriel, of course, but it’s more than that. The thought of sitting with a shrink, delving into my childhood memories, of which there are virtually none, fills me with dread. Who knows what would be dredged up? There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

My coffee is cool enough to drink now and I take a sip. I feel a chill in the room and I turn and see that the kitchen door is standing wide open.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I can understand forgetting to
lock
the back door, but forgetting to
close
it?
Especially since I don’t remember checking it last night before going to bed. Which means the last time I checked the door would have been before I left for Los Angeles. And I certainly wouldn’t have left it standing wide open when I was on my way out of town.

Would I?

It
was
awfully cold in here when I got home last night…

I examine the door. Nothing broken or scratched. The lock works, and it doesn’t have any of the telltale tiny scratches around the keyhole from being picked. But I’m not a locksmith, what the hell do I know?

Do crazy people know it when they start to go crazy?

Of course not, that’s what makes them crazy.

Right?

Enough of this bullshit. I close the kitchen door and lock the deadbolt and drink my coffee and rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. I go put on a pair of jeans which are stained with tiny spots of oil I put in my two-stroke chainsaw engine. I pull on a Cal State sweatshirt that is so old the lettering has flaked off completely, leaving it far more comfortable. Then I put on wool socks and a pair of Vans and now I can go to work. Work will solve everything. And work goes better if you put on pants and a shirt. And shoes make all the difference. Show me a barefoot writer and I’ll show you a rank amateur.

Ten minutes later I’m at my desk, waiting for my computer to boot. My screen comes to life and I open the file that contains the fourth book, which I have titled
Killer Unmasked.

Arnie and the people at Terrapin loved the concept and the title for the fourth book, in which we finally reveal the identity of Killer and he meets Katherine Kendall face to face. Only “we” are having a bit of trouble with that revelation. I have managed to keep Killer’s identity obscured from readers—and from my very smart editors—for one good reason: I don’t know myself.

Actually, that’s not completely true. It’s not that I don’t
know
who he is, the truth is I’m reluctant to reveal him because the gimmick of keeping Killer’s identity hidden has served me well. Whenever there was a shaky story point or an implausible scene that I wanted for dramatic purposes I would simply chalk it up to Killer’s mystique. We don’t know
how
he does certain things, Katherine Kendall can only
surmise
. And alas, even the intrepid Katherine is not always right.

But after three books the gimmick is starting to feel tired and it is time to progress the series and unmask the monster to my heroine and I am hesitating. From here on it will be harder. It may even mean the series is drawing to a close. And it’s too late to back out now. Terrapin has already leaked word that the soon-to-be-published
Killer Unmasked
will
“reveal the true identity of Killer once and for all!”
as the advance promotion has promised. The waiting lists for the book are double what they usually are.

So I have stuck myself with a problem and now I must solve it. I have put it off until the end of the book and now, of course, anything will seem anticlimactic. I sit staring at the screen and I realize I have been asking the wrong question. It’s not a matter of
how
to reveal him—the real question is,
Does it matter?

The most terrifying thing on earth is the human imagination. Consult the horrors of history and you will trace each horror back to the Big Idea someone thought up and then put into action. And when you conjure a monster for a book, it is not only your imagination at work, it is the
reader’s
imagination that will focus the finest details of your monster. If the reader wants to picture the killer as their eighth-grade math teacher or their ex-husband it’s best to let them—they’ll do it anyway. But if you spend chapter after chapter detailing every single aspect of your monster’s appearance and personality you run the risk of drowning the reader’s images with yours, and you will wind up with a list of characteristics instead of a character. But now I am rationalizing and I know it.

I pick up a pencil and roll it between my palms, thinking. How do I have my cake and eat it too? Until now I have enjoyed the luxury of writing a human monster with as few details as possible, leaving Killer as a nameless free-floating malevolence bedeviling Katherine Kendall. But now the piper must be paid.

Katherine has a vague physical description of him—deliberately vague. He is the overlooked man in the crowd: average height and weight, medium brown hair, small brown eyes obscured behind rectangular wire-framed glasses. But the vague, average quality of his appearance isn’t just a dodge on my part. His non-descript appearance is inherent to his madness. This is where I am with the book now, and Katherine Kendall is about to spell out the rest for me. I put the pencil down and begin to type notes on Killer’s personality that have been rattling around in my brain for years; notes that will become the shape and sense of the final chapter in the book, in Katherine’s voice, as she writes her final report:

All of Killer’s victims had, in random encounters, ignored him or not acknowledged him in some way, and this is the fuel that sets his molten rage to flame. The key to his pathology is the volatile mix of two opposing and compelling forces: his innate grandiosity, and the fact that from a very young age he was treated quite literally as though he didn’t exist. For Killer, any kind of neglect, avoidance, or inadvertent inattention can spell a death sentence. There was never a consistent male figure in his life, thus woe betide the young woman who pays him no heed.

I read the note I just made, then I add:

But despite his average appearance he does have one distinct quality: his voice. Low, sonorous, with a hint of a smile behind it…

I stop, my hands frozen above the keyboard.

The voice.

Jesus.

How could I not have realized that?

It hasn’t occurred to me until this moment that the voice I imagined at Temescal was the same voice I have imagined right here, for five years, as the voice of Killer. I must have been so panicked…

Of course. The association between Killer and whoever had done that poor girl in had been made in my head.

Low, laconic, almost lazy, with that audible smile…

I stare blindly out the window at the gray sky, my mind returning to the events of the last twenty-four hours.

I shake it off and return to the computer. But I lose concentration quickly, and find I am staring at the Documents icon beckoning me from the bottom of the screen. I click on it and I can see at a glance all of the files containing all four of the
Killer
books. Each book about one murder. I look at the file for
Killer At Large,
the second book, which I began reading last night.

If I knew those things from the first book, what about the other murders, from the other books…?

I select the file that contains the drafts of my second book,
Killer At Large,
and once again, I begin to read.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

St. Stephen, Missouri, was incorporated in 1846 as a last supply point before travelers crossed the Missouri River on their way to the West. The town’s only claims to fame were the two banks that Jesse James robbed, and the typesetting machine that Mark Twain invented there and lost a fortune trying to peddle. Shannon Belson had probably learned these facts in school, but as a bright, pretty, 20 year-old woman at the dawn of the 21
^st
century she doubtless had little occasion to recall them.

Katherine looked down at the remains of Shannon Belson in her shallow grave and let her mind play over the facts of Shannon Belson’s life and death. Killer had stayed true to his M.O., walking around the grave before finishing it. A DNA sample would reach the lab in a matter of hours for positive ID, since Shannon’s head and hands were missing, but Katherine wasn’t waiting to hear from Quantico. Katherine knew the minute she saw the yearbook photo of Shannon. She fit the victim profile to a T: age, size, the long, silky hair, and the manner of death and disposal. Killer was nothing if not consistent in his predilections.

But this time something was different. They had found Shannon buried in the woods beside an overgrown cemetery next to the Calvary Assembly of God Chapel on the outskirts of St. Stephen, near a ravaged asphalt rural route that wound through the hills along the muddy Missouri river.

What significance was the proximity to the church? Was it merely convenience to the road? Or was it something more? And the cemetery…?

Katherine pulled her North Face jacket close and looked up from the shallow grave. She looked at the abandoned church that was just visible through the trees, a hundred feet away. Here and there she could see a few headstones in the church cemetery, which bordered the thick woods.

Katherine walked out of the woods and among the headstones. The names on the grave markers had a musty old-west feel: Seamus Galloway, Christian son of Victor and Marybell Galloway… Susannah Lorraine Buford, Beloved Mother of Three, 1842-1903... Samuel Clay, Deacon of Calvary Assembly of God, 1876-1933…

Here and there Katherine saw a flat stone with only a surname and the dates marking the birth and death of the grave’s inhabitant. A surprising number of them were children; their simple, square grave markers little monuments to unimaginable grief, obscured by stoic words engraved in stone that had softened with the patina of age and forgotten pain.