Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (110 page)

His voice was soft and soothing—a true shrink’s voice.

She shut off the tape player and waited.

“Dr. Newton tells me you had a blow to the head.”

“That’s correct.” Crisp, stuffy, not her usual casualness. A defense mechanism. She was on guard. Could she ever trust a shrink after her father? She could remember his threats.
Be careful, girl… there’s a room for you there, Roberta.
If her own father questioned her sanity…?

“Have you always had such keen sensory perception?”

“No.”

“Interesting.’’

“Did Dr. Newton tell you about the nightmare?” she asked.

“He didn’t tell me anything except that you had a serious fall and woke up blind.”

She heard a scraping noise and then his voice came from a lower position than before. She guessed he had pulled up a chair and was sitting.

“I’d like to hear about your experience, if you’d care to talk about it.”

How much should she tell? Go slow. Too little is safer than too much. Robbi wet her lips and began. She told Dr. Reynolds about the accident. She neglected to tell him that while she lay on the rain-soaked ground, injured and unable to move, she saw a man choke a woman to death.

When she finished, he laid a hand on her shoulder and talked of post-trauma and depression. He talked of strength and support.

“Married? Children?” he asked.

“Not yet. My fiancé lives in New York.” She smiled. “He wanted me to visit him there, but instead I chose to go to the mountains. Poor choice, I’m afraid.”

“Ever been to New York?”

“No, but I’ll be moving there soon. Donald’s a stockbroker on Wall Street.”

Why am I telling him this? she wondered. She realized she had a profound need to talk about Donald, about a life before the blindness. Bringing up Donald gave her a sense of normalcy, of a time when problems were easily fixed or fixed themselves. She was going to be all right. Think positive. Don loves me, she told herself. She was certain he’d be sitting at her bedside that very moment, offering his love and support, if he knew she was here.

Dr. Reynolds said he would return in a few days, or sooner if she needed him, then he was gone.

When she was alone, a gut-wrenching pain doubled her over.
Donald didn’t know she was in the hospital because he was too damn busy to call.

Oh, God, how would he react when he found out she was blind?

________

Before opening the door of his ‘55 T-bird, Jake Reynolds paused to look up at the fourth floor windows of Washoe Medical Center. He located Roberta Paxton’s window by the shiny bunch of balloons clustered to one side, the sun reflecting off their metallic casings.

The coma, blindness, and nightmares could very well be psychosomatic. Trauma induced. She had come out of the coma, therefore she could regain her sight. To dream of a storm would be in keeping with this sort of trauma, and dreams of being pursued were not uncommon.

He knew of Roberta Paxton from a newspaper account. She had witnessed the killing of a man by his wife shortly before her accident. At this point it was impossible to say for certain if the nightmares and the killing were related, though a strong possibility existed.

He found himself wondering about her fiancé. If ever there was a time when a woman needed the special man in her life, it was now. Yet he was in New York. What kind of a man was he? If Jake were this guy Donald, he sure as hell wouldn’t be three thousand miles away on Wall Street. He’d be at the bedside of the woman he loved.

________

She was the one.

From a small cocktail table in the rear of the room, Joseph Eckker stared at her trim back as she sat alone at the end of the bar, sipping a straight shot of whiskey.

At 3:20 in the morning the place was nearly empty. The bartender leaned against the back of the bar, his tattooed arms folded across his chest, lost in an old
Rockford Files
rerun on the television. The young blonde stared down into the drink, her hands around the glass, a long, thin cigarette smoldering between her fingers. An old woman dropped a coin in the jukebox and made her selection. The bartender turned and glared at her.

Eckker finished his beer, rose, and with measured steps moved to the bar. From the jukebox Tom Jones asked, “What’s new, pussycat?”

The blond woman turned when she sensed someone behind her. Her gaze swept upward until she was staring into his face with large blue eyes, red-rimmed and smudged with mascara. She had been crying.

She turned back to the bar, lifted her drink, and sipped.

He sensed her fear. She had no reason to fear him.

“Another?” he nodded at her drink.

She shook her head.

He eased onto the stool next to her. She was very pretty. He liked looking at her.

Her eyes darted nervously to the bartender. Then she glanced at him. He smiled. She turned on her stool, offering him a stiff back.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, leaned down, and whispered in her ear, “Too pretty to be so sad.”

She pulled away, trying to dislodge his hand from her shoulder.

“I’d never make you cry.”

She vehemently shook his hand away and jumped from the stool. Without a word or a backward glance, she grabbed her purse and strode off toward the back of the bar. He watched her enter the ladies’ room. As he slid off the stool, he looked around. The bartender, with his back to him, was engrossed in the TV program. The old woman had passed out at the bar, her weathered face a sponge for a puddle of spilled beer.

He went out the front door, stood on a sidewalk littered with cigarette butts, tourist coupons and cocktail glasses, and looked up and down the deserted street.

He walked to the end of the building, then turned left into the alley. Within moments he heard heels clinking along the pavement, coming his way. He stood in the shadows, waiting.

A waist-high barricade of black plastic trash bags lined the curb. Opposite them, she was walking briskly. He quickly moved to intercept her. She turned, saw him, and stopped cold.

He was within a foot of her when she spun around toward the street and started to run. The bags tripped her up. She fell into them as he reached for her. The expression on her face changed from fearful to feral. She brought her hands up, the fingers clawlike.

He moved in, pinning her to the trash bags, his massive hairy hand closed around her throat.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said low in his throat. As he squeezed, she clawed at him, raking long furrows of skin from his hands and wrists. He squeezed until she ceased to struggle against her bed of black plastic bags.

________

Robbi jerked awake in the darkness. She was sitting upright in the hospital bed, gulping for air. Icy sweat stung her eyes and she rubbed them. Moaning now, she rocked back and forth.

The nightmare faded rapidly, but the ominous vision closed around her with suffocating clarity. The large man, the woman, the trash bags. What did it mean?

Robbi clutched the sheet, brought it to her stinging eyes. She wiped one eye, then the other. Though barely visible in the dim light of the hospital room, she realized she was staring at a white sheet held in long, tapered fingers.

Her own fingers.

She opened her eyes wide, straining to see. A pale moon glow reflected off a chrome paper towel dispenser across the room. The balloons in the window—four of them—shifted softly, catching the light. The large clock on the wall read 3:32.

Roberta sucked in a deep breath.

She could see again.

CHAPTER NINE

Margaret Winston opened her eyes and stared into a glaring light. She quickly closed them. Taking a few moments to get her bearings, she opened her eyes again, more slowly. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling in the middle of the tiny room. Where the hell was she? How had she gotten here?

As she looked around, she began to recall things she didn’t want to recall. The bar. The big man with the black eyes.
Oh, God, no.

Her hand went to her throat. It felt tender both inside and out. It all came back to her in a rush. He had jumped her outside the bar, choked her into unconsciousness then brought her to this place.

She sat up quickly. She was fully clothed in the casino black and whites, her black high heels on the floor at her feet. Her nylons were snagged on both legs but still mostly intact.

She swiveled around, taking in her surroundings. The room was approximately five by six feet. She sat on a narrow army cot covered with a lavender chenille spread. The walls and ceiling were a mosaic of various carpet scraps, a straw mat fit corner to corner on the floor. Adhered to the walls with masking tape were pages torn from magazines. Three pictures: a mountain lake, two deer grazing in a golden meadow, and a single dewdrop rose.

She reached out and pulled back a corner flap of carpet on the wall. Behind it she saw a layer of Styrofoam. Styrofoam was used for insulation. It could also soundproof a room. She’d learned that from Sonny. Her boyfriend, Carl Masser—she called him Sonny— was a carpenter.
Sonny.
They’d had a fight last night after she’d gone home from work. To punish him she had stormed out of their apartment and ended up at the Stardust, a bar she hung out at before she met Sonny.
Oh, Jesus, Maggie, you really did it this time.

Beyond the small room she heard scratching. The door opened and he ducked down and came through. His huge bulk seemed to choke the tiny space.

Margaret’s heart slammed painfully in her chest.

The man remained hunched over, the back of his head touching the angled ceiling. He looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time, then his gaze settled on her. He smiled that same lopsided smile.

“Time to eat.”

Margaret only stared.

“Come.”

“I wan—” Maggie’s voice cracked, partly from fear and partly from the physical trauma to it “—to go home.”

“C’mon.” He stepped away from the doorway.

Maggie stood, began to slip a foot into one shoe.

“You won’t need those.”

She walked ahead of him through the door. Her legs shook. Any minute she expected a blow to the back of her head. She had to crouch down, walk crablike to an even smaller door at the end of a short, dark passage. He was right behind her as she entered a main room.

She straightened. He had kept in the closed-in stairwell. She started toward a main staircase, a sense of urgency giving her wobbly legs the strength she’d need to climb.

He held her back. “No.” He pointed to a small Formica-topped table.

Margaret wanted to scream. If she opened her mouth just a tiny bit, a blood-curdling scream would rush out and paralyze her with fear. She pressed her lips together and allowed the big man to propel her, on leaden feet, to the table. From out of nowhere he produced a limp bouquet of wildflowers. She took them, held them in a death grip.

They were in a basement of some sort. She saw old furniture, a wood stove, things that failed to register fully in her numbed brain.

She heard him saying something about fixing the place up… she only had to tell him what she liked … anything she wanted … wanted … wanted…

She sank down on a plastic and chrome chair, exposed straw stuffing prickly through her thin blouse. In a daze she watched him open a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup with the blade of a Swiss army knife. He poured the soup into a tin coffee mug and put it in front of her. He pushed a spoon to her.

Maggie stared at the cold soup. Pale chunks of hardened fat floated on the surface. “Where … where are we?” she asked quietly.

He smiled. “Home.”

Despair overwhelmed her. The wildflowers slipped from her fingers.