The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (28 page)

***

Maddie cut between two cars and sped up the off ramp. Her speed dropped to eighty, seventy, and then fifty. She slammed on her brakes and skidded into the turn entering KC’s neighborhood.

***

They’ll never find me. The media will scream for results. The mayor will pressure Chief Layton. He’ll put the screws to Lieutenant Harrison who will demand that Sergeant Richards get results or heads will roll. The media will pressure the governor’s office. To release that pressure they’ll arrest Steve Gibbs and throw the little twerp to the wolves. I’ll wait till the city relaxes, maybe until the middle of the trial for that simpleton. Then I’ll take another victim, throwing the city back into a panic. They’ll have to release Gibbs. Then it’ll all start again, with even more intensity. I hold the city’s heart in my hands. I can squeeze anytime. Release, wait, and then squeeze again. Squeeze until every beautiful woman in the city is afraid for her life.

***

“Jed. Maddie.”

“I heard about KC. I’m—”

“I got no time for that, Jed.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the side of the road near KC’s place. You said if I ever needed you. Well, I do.”

“Is it time for Curtis to disappear?”

“Oh, stuff it, Jed. I’m serious. I need your help.”

“Name it.”

“Can you be at my house in the morning? I want you to take my mother and Bradley to her sister’s place near Thousand Oaks, California. It’s a little north of L.A. I need to know they’re safe.”

“Safe? What’s going on Maddie?”

She swore him to secrecy about the dark sedan Gary Packard had seen near her home.

“One thing wrong with that thinking,” Jed said, “Gary Packard could be the Beholder.”

“Okay. Yes. He could, but I don’t buy it. I don’t have time now to explain but the angles on the murder of Packard’s wife don’t connect.”

“If Gary’s the killer, the story about the dark sedan near your home is bullshit. He’s playing with you.”

“I don’t have time for all this. Bottom line: I need to know my mother and son are safe. I can’t get police protection because Curtis will use it to support his claim that Bradley is in danger living with me. I have no one else I can ask. Will you do it?”

“Of course, on one condition.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Gary Packard where they’re going.”

“Sure. Sure. That makes sense. I need to get to KC’s. Thank you, Jed.”

“Maddie, I’ll guard them with my life.”

Chapter 41

Maddie stomped on her brake pedal. The tires skidding until the right front wheel of her Taurus smacked the curb. The M.E.’s van was parked fifty feet in front of her, its batwing rear doors sagging on their hinges, a collapsed metal gurney on standby inside.

Maddie forced her head high and walked through the flashbulbs charging the air around her. She didn’t want to go in, but her only alternative was resigning from the force on the spot. She had asked for this case and she had gotten it. And she wouldn’t stop short of finding whoever killed KC. If it was the last case she would ever handle, she would handle this one. Maddie fixed her eyes on her friend’s front door and willed herself forward. When she stepped onto the porch, an internal voice told her to stop at the door. The lock had not been broken. The door had not been damaged. Like the other victims, KC had let the bastard in.

Despite the well-publicized threat of this maniac, women were stepping back, smiling and saying, “Come in and do what you will.”

What is compelling these women to act so recklessly? Maddie asked, expecting no answers. Looks? Charm? Authority? What?

***

An officer near KC’s front door glanced at Maddie’s creds, his standard procedure. She thought he looked familiar, but her recognition of him stopped with that. She walked past him, her hands at her sides. Her stare fixed on the hall inside KC’s home. Instincts told her to wave her hand in front of her face to clear the fog, but she knew the cloud hung only in her mind. She continued down the corridor toward the master bedroom at its end, her heart galloping like the horses on Arizona’s Wild Horse Mesa.

Maddie saw her friend right where she expected she would, on her bed.

Like the three women before her, KC’s naked legs were pulled apart, tied open with the same type knots. Spread for a direct assault that had never come, before tonight. On the wall above the bed, a new message: The Beholder.

Maddie wanted to run back out the door. Run as far as she could. Run as fast as she could. Run from the department. Run from the murder and mayhem. Grab Bradley and hide in some small town in the mountains protected by an old-time sheriff, a big, strong, smart sheriff like those played by her mother’s fantasy toy, Kirk Douglas.

Instead, she held her ground, shame standing tall within her. Shame for the jealousies she had harbored toward this faceless woman, shame over letting what pulled them apart, so often trump what had brought them together. If only she had told KC, what she had forever lost the opportunity to say: I love you, Katie; you were the sister I never had.

Then the truth slapped Maddie full in the face. KC lay twisted and torn for one reason: Sergeant Madeline Jane Richards had not done her job. Maddie slumped against the wall. She swallowed dryly. Her heart repeatedly slammed her ribs. She closed her eyes and waited for her adrenal gland to flood her with its magic. But nothing came. The guilt had dammed it all up.

Right then, a familiar voice crawled through her fog. “Are you okay, Sergeant Richards? Maddie?”

It was Doctor Ripley, his cousinly hand canoodled her shoulder, then the base of her neck. “I know Katie Carson had been your lifelong friend. I’m so sorry.”

She thanked him and turned to the window, standing close enough to feel the desert warmth radiating through the glass. After a minute, she mumbled to no one. “Let’s go to work.”

As had been true with the others, KC’s breasts had been violently hacked from her body. Like with Carmen, Abigail, and Folami before her, KC’s legs were tied with her own nylon stockings. Maddie recognized the brand and shade, the baggy toe of each nylon dangled beside the ankle-positioned knots. The tying of each leg had likely followed the removal of both nylons. The victims had to have been unconscious at the time they were bound.

Maddie stepped outside and voided her lungs of the malodorous air. Someone had organized a few uniformed officers to cordon off the media which was busily working itself into frenzy over the loss of one of its own. She recognized the voice, Gil Ortega. He just might be okay, she thought as he came toward her. His bulk a dark mass fronting the headlights of a squad car parked in the driveway.

He took her shoulders into his massive hands. She looked up into his eyes. He said, “I’m sorry.” He said nothing more. There was nothing more to say. The time had come to roll up their sleeves and do what they had been trained to do.

“Thanks for taking care of the press,” she said. “Go work the crowd. Get their identities and tell them we’ll talk to them individually later. Talk to them away from the media. And be alert for someone on the fringe, hanging back alone, watching. This sicko could be in our audience.”

Maddie went back inside the house, back inside KC’s bedroom. Her friend’s teeth, straightened by two years of braces as a child, and ivory-white treatments for the appetite of the camera, illuminated the center of her raw, red face, shining like a penlight impaled within uncooked hamburger. Her hair that had always glistened like strands of silk now resembled the mane on a downed lion.

Maddie worked her tongue forward and back against the roof of her mouth hoping to draw moisture while she watched Rip, amazed at how relaxed, no, that wasn’t the right word, how accepting he was of what lay before him. People could, she realized, become accustomed to almost anything if they did it regularly enough.

Maddie slid her pen behind the handle of KC’s nightstand and leveraged the drawer open. There it was. Katie’s Black Tomcat, a ladylike Italian gun that could have put the Beholder down for the count. Maddie and KC had bought matching Tomcats last summer, and Maddie had taught KC how to shoot.

Why hadn’t KC been scared enough to take her gun to the door?

KC had to have known the Beholder. That’s why she had let him in. Why she turned her back to him. If she had been afraid, she would have taken the Tomcat to the door. She had let in someone she trusted or instinctively thought of as above suspicion. Realizing that it was very unlikely the sick bastard was close to all his diverse victims, the Beholder had to be someone that strangers or casual acquaintances would instinctively accept as trustworthy.

Doyle Brackett was a man who had no respect for women? Could he be this angry at the department for marooning him in vice? Could Dink be worse than a lonely, leering letch? Could Steve Gibbs really be the beast? Had Jed’s warning been right? Was Gary Packard the Beholder? The Chi-town cops did suspect him of murdering his wife with a knife. Or, perhaps, her hunt was for that rarest of creatures, a woman serial killer. If so, could she be shy Steve Gibbs’s smothering Aunt Cornelia? Steve’s mother had disappeared, and Cornelia had clearly been jealous of her sister’s beauty. Perhaps Cornelia’s hatred had festered years ago until she killed her own sister so she could keep Steve for her own? Aunt Cornelia could have played the elderly woman in distress, perhaps faking car trouble to get her victims to let her into their homes.

Maddie needed to find out Steve’s mother’s bra size.

Sue Martin came through the door holding out her arms. Words of comfort seemed a waste. They hugged.

“Katie did stop at the station just after lunch,” Sue said. “She was wearing gray poplin slacks and a short-sleeved green blouse with three-quarter sleeves.”

“Find out if that outfit is here,” Maddie told Sue, “any part of it.”

“Do you want me to check her drawers to get her bra size?”

“KC wore thirty-six-C. Our statistical sample grows. And try to ignore what’s happening in this room.”

“I’m okay with this sort of thing,” Sue said. “My uncle operated a funeral parlor. I used to help him quite a bit. I’ve been around a lot of dead people … I’m sorry. That wasn’t very sensitive.”

“You never cease to amaze me, Officer Martin,” Maddie said dryly. “The outfit? Go.”

The blood splatter near KC’s head suggested that the Beholder had skinned KC’s face before she died. Why the change? Why, this time, did the taking of the breasts come last?

The picture the Beholder left at his scenes was changing, growing more grotesque. His previous slogan had always been drawn on the wall in the victims’ blood. This time, his new message, the name KC had given him, had been affixed to the wall using strips of KC’s own flesh, held in place by their own gumminess. Maddie covered her mouth. Was there no limit to inhumanity, even by this sick fuck?

Another change was KC’s cordless microphone had been jammed up between her legs. Maddie had seen KC practice with that mike in search of the placement that would pick up her voice properly, while not blocking her face. This penetration, using the microphone, might well be a precursor to a direct sexual assault. The Beholder was unraveling. His blood festival had grown more intense, his past perversions were no longer adequate. She would call Lincoln Rogers and get his take on these changes.

Dr. Ripley and the physical-evidence team were working through their fourth such scene in three weeks. Someone came in carrying the dark body bag.

Sue came back into the room and moved close to Maddie. “The outfit’s not here, Sergeant.”

“Neither the slacks nor the top?”

“None of it.”

There was no longer any doubt. In Maddie’s mind there hadn’t been much since the Knight killing. The Beholder was stealing the clothes his victims had been wearing when he took control over them.

Gil came in next. “The lookers were all neighbors. No one had seen anything the night before. There was no one lingering on the fringe.”

Maddie would have Doyle Brackett take another run at them tomorrow. Doyle was a cynical, bitter man and a chauvinist, but a capable detective. He would ask questions in a different way. It wasn’t much, but such was the composition of homicide work.

It was nine-forty-five and Maddie still had to talk with her mother about taking Bradley to California. She really didn’t want to deal with that tonight but she had no choice. Jed would be there to pick them up in the morning. She hoped her mother would not be difficult.

***

At ten-fifteen Maddie pulled into her garage, hit the button on the remote, then sat there watching the red from her taillights reflect against the inside of the garage door as it lowered behind her car. She took her foot off the pedal and got out. After putting her purse on the washing machine, she stripped down to her panties. It took no conscious thought to know what to put on, a faded, baggy extra-large sweatshirt she had worn and laundered so many times that it had been permanently exiled to the garage. One of those outfits a person knows should be thrown away, but isn’t because somehow that baggy sweatshirt had become akin to the blanket dragged around by Charley Brown’s friend, Linus, a symbol of warmth, safety and comfort. She’d decide later whether to launder the outfit she had taken off or donate it to the needy, but she wasn’t about to carry the smell of KC’s death into her own bedroom.

By this hour, her mother would have told Kirk Douglas good night, and either was asleep or had gone out to the patio, funny how we all have our little routines. And, sure enough, her mother had been on the patio. She came inside.

“I know about KC, dear. I watched the evening news.” Her mother had made a big pot of chamomile, her customary salve for life’s stresses. Maddie went into her mother’s arms and had a long cry. She had needed that and she had needed her mother to hold her while she did.

Her mother poured tea. Maddie took a sip and, after a few minutes, she brought up the trip to California. For as long as Maddie could remember, her mother had often silently negotiated with her head, a nod for yes, a shake for no, with shrugs meaning maybe. Hers was an inflexible style, but there’s something to be said for brevity. This time her mother simply nodded. The trip was set. The news that Jed would drive them had been helpful. Her mother had known Jed since he was her husband’s partner.