The Shadowkiller (27 page)

A
hot shower revived Mac's brain. Pulling on some fresh sweats, he tossed some leftover pasta into a bowl, threw in some vegetables, and popped it in the microwave. It was a little after ten when he decided to check his messages. The digital counter on his pager seemed to have malfunctioned: he never got that many calls on the busiest day. But the same level of activity on his answering machine turned his stomach because it confirmed that something was very wrong. That many messages couldn't be good. Either it was friends calling to tell him an asteroid was headed toward earth…or it was something worse. His first sickening thought was of Kris. He punched the playback button. The first message was from Carillo saying he'd “heard that Channel Seven bitch was at it again.”

Mac's heart sank, his worst fears confirmed.

Then his boss had called, asking, “Was that you on the tape?” Another call from a friend asked the same. Then it was Carillo again. “Hey, bro,” his voice wary, “what the fuck is this rumor about you telling that cunt we know who the killer is? Tell me you didn't talk to her. Tell me it's bullshit. Call me.”

Mac felt gutshot. He didn't need to tune in to Kris's report—which would be on again in less than an hour—to know what she'd done. But he had to watch if for no other reason than to know how bad the damage was. After a dozen messages ranging from congratulations to mostly confusion, the last was from Sheriff Barkley himself.

“Schneider?” he said. “Be in at seven. I want to talk to you.”

Mac dropped into his chair while the answering machine rewound for the next two minutes. She'd laid him away. But how? What tape? The only time they spoke about it was when they were in bed. He wondered why no one mentioned the big point of the story, that the killer was not a human being.

His spirits sank further. Editing.
Of course.
If she made a tape, she could surely edit it—cut out what she didn't want, keep what supported her case. He prayed she hadn't been vicious enough to have done that. But if she had made a tape, she apparently hadn't electronically altered his voice because everyone recognized him. But that detail aside, it still didn't sound like she named him. His brain whirled for forty minutes, piecing together what had probably happened. At five to eleven, the phone rang. It was Carillo, sounding subdued. “You watchin' this thing?”

“Yeah,” Mac answered warily. “You?”

“Yeah.” He paused. “Was that you?”

Mac couldn't lie, but he could buy time. “I don't know.”

That was enough for Carillo. “Okay. Tomorrow.” He hung up.

Mac knew he was in trouble. At best he'd look stupid or deranged, and at worst…

He paced furiously. The frustration of being trapped had him trying to scrub off nervous energy. At two minutes to eleven he punched the remote and found the channel. The newscast started as usual with the anchors introducing themselves. When the lurid graphic,“Murder in the Mountains: Exclusive Report,” was superimposed behind the male anchor, Mac's vision narrowed as if he were peering down a tunnel. After watching Kris do her setup, Mac wasn't quite ready when his own voice came over the speaker on his TV, a written transcript over-laid on an illustration of a man in silhouette:

Mac was numb, wounded. It was so flagrant, first taping him, then cutting it up like that. After shots of the search areas were shown, the camera came back to Kris in the studio, who acknowledged that the statements were from
“a detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Department who obviously requested anonymity.”
Mac shook his head in disbelief. Crushed by the viciousness of the betrayal, his mind tried to deal with practical questions like how he could defend himself. Considering everything from strong denials to legal action, he knew it was a waste of time because the bell had been rung and couldn't be unrung. She'd really screwed him twice that night.

Ten seconds after they went to the next story, the phone rang. It was Carillo again.

“I can't fuckin' believe it, man,” he started. “I thought I knew you. What the fuck was that all about?”

Mac started to explain and his partner—probably ex now—hung up. Mac fell back into his chair and began mourning the end of his career.

Channel 7 General Manager Lyle Benson eased his BMW 760li into his reserved space next to the elevator. He was irritated. It was nearly midnight and he had been getting ready for bed when his wife, Claire, handed him the phone. It was his news director, screaming bloody murder and demanding he fire Kris Walker “immediately.” Doug Gautier said he would meet him at the station in fifteen minutes. Benson and his wife and four kids lived in a lovely old Victorian mansion at the foot of Queen Anne, five minutes from the station. Benson slipped his keycard in the elevator slot and rode right to the private entrance of his office suite in the station's penthouse. He flipped on a few lights and unlocked the door to the outer hallway. Gautier was already there fuming.

“She's out, done! That's it. Did you see her reports? That tape was as phony as a three-dollar bill. Outrageous!”

Benson went behind his large desk, the panorama of Seattle at Christmastime sparkling behind him. Lyle Benson was forty-eight and balding, and his slight paunchiness didn't look so sleek in his designer workout sweats as it did in his usual Brioni three-button. Benson calmly gestured for Gautier to sit but he paced instead.

“Doug, I haven't heard her report—”

“It's the most flagrant piece of phony journalism I've ever—”

A woman's voice interrupted, “Maybe, but I pulled a nine-one, twenty-three yesterday and tonight…well, I'm betting I'm at least a ten-five, twenty-eight.”

Both men stopped and turned as Kris entered the room. Benson looked at the plasma monitor on his desk and clicked a few keys on his computer. “She's right. Yesterday in her quarter hour she pulled a nine-one rating, twenty-three share. The instants spiked during her report.” Benson's eye returned to Doug Gautier, whose face flushed with anger that numbers alone were her defense. His rage flashed at Benson and he clenched his jaw.

“She goes or I go.”

Benson sighed. “Doug, don't be so dramatic, her—”

“She goes
or I go.
”

Benson gestured. “I want you two to sit down and talk this—”

Doug Gautier spun on his heels and headed to the door. “You'll have my resignation in your box downstairs in ten minutes.” He exited, slamming the door.

Benson leveled an angry stare at Kris. “He was an excellent news director, top-notch, and you caused him to leave. What do I do about you? How about I fire you?”

Kris confidently moved across the room and came around his desk. “You won't.”

“Oh really? You're fired. There.”

Kris only snickered. “A nine-one, twenty-three? I'm too good.”

“No reporter is worth losing one of the best news directors in—”

Kris knelt before him and swung his chair to face her.

Lyle Benson didn't like being manipulated. “What do you think you're doing?”

“What I do best,” she cooed. She reached under his desk and pressed a button that locked the door. “Making you relax. Either with my fantastic reporting…or this.”

She put her palms on his thighs and then curled her fingers around the elastic waistband of his pants. Benson tried to resist but it was a weak effort.

“Work with me, Lyle.”

Benson pretended to be put out, but he stood. She pulled down his pants.

“And see?” She observed,“I'm understanding. I know you have to get home to Claire, so I'll make this quick. Or should I say, I'll make
you
quick.” Benson rested his hands on her blond head and closed his eyes.

A
t six fifty the next morning, Susan Hunter's silver Accord wheeled down the driveway of her parents' secluded home. One of her terrible expectations was to find her parents debilitated by some unknown illness and waiting to be rescued. True, they were healthy but they were also old. The other crises spinning through her mind were everything from power outages to fires—any event that could overwhelm them before they could contact relatives.

But she found something else: quiet, a house intact.

None of the usual reassuring sounds of her parents' home greeted her—a television blaring to compensate for her mother's poor hearing or her dad's chain saw as he bucked scrub around the property or the dogs barking. Just…silence.

With her hand on the front door knob, she noticed something to her left, at the corner of the house past a clump of rhododendrons. It looked out of place in their tidy little estate, a pink something against green grass. Walking toward it, she made out a piece of fabric, cottony…

Her stomach dropped when she recognized it as a sleeve from her mother's pajamas. She picked it up and saw it had been ripped from the garment. And it was streaked with dried blood. As she looked down the side of the house, the sight of the gaping, ragged aperture, previously occupied by the bedroom window, was far too much for Susan. She fainted dead away.

When she recovered consciousness a few seconds later, she found herself sprawled on the wet grass. Rising shakily, she staggered to her car and placed a sobbing call to the police. Their warning to stay in her car was moot. Fearing the worst, she was too rattled to move.

Ronnie entered the front door of her company amid waved hellos and passing small talk with coworkers. She was unaware of the whispered office scuttlebutt as to why two sheriff's detectives had come by the day before to question her and she also had no idea that the same brush-cut detective with the mustache was, at this moment, rolling up her driveway, followed by three other sheriff's cruisers and armed with a search warrant.

Kris sat in her car, deep in the underground parking facility at the television station, inhaling the last inch of a cigarette and sipping her Starbucks double caffè doppio, essentially
two
double espressos. She was reveling in how satisfying it had been to send her news director to the cornfield. She thought of Lyle Benson and how their relationship had returned huge dividends to her. She recalled that in many primitive cultures, having sex with someone was believed to transfer some of the life force of that person to you. Kris smiled at that.

A tap on her window startled her and she dropped the glowing butt into her lap.

“Goddamn it! Shit!” she raged.

The apologetic young face in her window belonged to one of the newsroom interns. Kris had never bothered to remember his name. She cracked her door and erupted. “Do you do this in your spare time? Scare the complete shit out of people?”

“Sorry, Miss Walker, but I think they were, uh, looking for you in the newsroom.”

“I'm two hours early, why would they be looking for me?”

“I mean I think they were calling you.”

In her mind's eye Kris suddenly saw her pager, sitting on her bathroom counter. Then she realized she'd also turned off her cell phone, partly out of concern Mac might call. The upshot was she'd been out of the loop all morning. She downed her coffee and got out of the car.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“I dunno,” said the excited intern, “but I think it has to do with somebody else missing.”

Kris hoped this kid, who was only five or six years younger than she, wasn't wrong.

They entered the elevator area and Kris impatiently punched the button while lighting another cigarette.

“Uh, I don't think you can smoke in—”

Her withering glare sealed the young man's mouth. He stole furtive glances at her painfully beautiful face. He was both smitten and scared to death.

Kris felt his fear and reveled in it. If he was frightened, then so were others. Kris wanted everyone to know she didn't play by the rules. For if what the kid told her was true, then her stock had just gone up again.
Please let it be true. Give me another missing person. A body, if I'm really lucky.

Kris took a couple of deep, luxurious drags on the cigarette before putting it out on their floor. Former assignment editor Janey Murkowski, who only that morning had been made acting news director after Doug Gautier's abrupt departure, met her on the way to her desk.

“Kris, thank God you're here. There's been another abduction, this time a little west of the mountain biker. Old couple, signs of a struggle. Take a crew and go, ten minutes ago.”

Kris nodded as the woman sped off to marshal more forces for the story. She slowly, deliberately organized the stuff on her desk. Taking her time, she wanted to savor the moment.
Abduction? Signs of a struggle?
And
a couple,
not just one. It was an early Christmas for Kris Walker. She floated to the motor pool, barely believing what she had just heard.

Ty watched the sheriff's officers going through his stuff. They searched his office, with Carillo overseeing every moment of it. They were respectful of Ty's things and Ty wasn't angry. He even offered them coffee. It took them a while to search the entire house, then they moved to the garage. Ty followed them outside, and when they were done, Carillo strode angrily over to him.

“I know you hid those fake feet, shithead. I'm gonna find 'em or find a connection to pin this on you and you will go down hard.”

Ty's calm demeanor infuriated Carillo. “You do whatever you think is best, Detective, but I'm not the guy and I think you know it. I'm pretty sure your partner knows.”

Carillo stepped toe to toe with Ty, despite Ty's five-inch advantage. “He's not my partner anymore. What he thinks doesn't mean shit, and what you think doesn't mean shit.”

Since Deputy Bill Alexander had been involved in the missing persons cases from the outset, and now that all the disappearances had been tied together by the media, he was included in the group dispatched to the Krinkel home. He was given instructions to report to Carillo about anything he might find. It also helped that he had met the old couple the previous year when one of their dogs was missing. The dog had been found but now they were missing. Bill hoped they were as lucky as their dog.

He arrived to find four department vehicles—a crime scene investigation van, two other patrol units, and an unmarked. He waved to Carillo and noticed a distraught, fortyish woman being questioned by two other deputies. He walked over to a group of deputies and CSIs examining a ragged hole in the side of the house where there once had been a window. The nature of the damage shocked him. He hoped the old couple had disappeared by “conventional” means, but suddenly it wasn't looking that way.

“What happened?” he asked.

One of the deputies pointed at the hole. “Looks like the old lady was either pulled out or thrown through. There's actually evidence of both, a break-in and then a blowing out. It's almost like whoever kidnapped her just reached in the window and pulled her out.”

Bill looked at the splintered opening and mentally discounted the other deputy's modifier “it's almost like.”
No, that's exactly what happened.
Though he felt a rising guilt for knowing what probably caused this, he kept his mouth shut because what might come out of it was just too outrageous. His internal conflict was growing: now it wasn't trucks being turned over, it was people being snatched right out of their beds. Old ladies even. His stomach churned.

“You okay?” one of the cops asked.

Bill came back from his nightmare reverie to find the others looking at him. His numbed expression gave him away.

“Somethin' wrong?” queried another. “Got any ideas? 'Cause we don't.”

Deputy Bill shook his head. “No, just wondering what happened. That's all.”

The other cops went back to examining, measuring, and speculating. Bill looked around for footprints.

“Any fingerprints?” Afraid to ask the question he really meant, he paused for a moment and tried to sound casual. “Any footprints?”

One of the men gestured to where Carillo was standing. “Over there. Looks like a smeared boot print or something. No identifying tread.”

Bill walked over and looked at the crushed grass. He looked at Carillo. “What do you think that is?”

“It looks like some asshole who didn't know how to make a decent footprint.” Then Carillo walked away. Bill not only didn't understand Carillo's comment but wondered what had pissed him off. The deputy walked back to the other cops.

“Where was the old man?” asked Bill. “Both in the bedroom?”

One of them turned to him. “We're pretty sure the old man was out back, by the dog kennel. We found his slippers about twenty feet apart. We also found a flashlight nearby, still on, batteries dead. Found the dogs too. They're okay, but whoever did this made an impression on 'em.”

“How's that?” Bill asked.

“They were hungry but scared bad. Wouldn't come out of their shed. They were out of food but it took a while for them to come over to their bowls when we filled 'em. I got boxers and pit mixes and I've never seen hungry dogs act like that.”

All heads turned as the Channel 7 van arrived. Bill had seen Kris Walker's story with the so-called secret tape of the detective. He watched Kris alight and made a point of staying away from her.