And he had left the boat hidden. Had not wanted it to be seen.
A flurry of splashes and beating wings. In one of the tidal pools, an egret chased down a minnow and snatched it up greedily.
Hunter and prey.
The thought shocked her into action.
She sledded the dinghy through the mud and launched it in the shallows. Climbing aboard, she paddled with her hands till she was out far enough to lower the outboard motor.
She jerked the starter cord. The motor sputtered and died.
A second try. Still nothing.
Oh, hell, was it out of gas? She should have brought a can with her.
She searched Jack’s supplies and found no extra fuel. Dammit. Goddammit to hell.
Panic surged again, threatening to overwhelm her. She forced it down, made herself test the motor once more.
Don’t yank the cord this time, just give it a good firm pull. Easy. Easy…
The motor coughed, rattled, nearly faltered… then caught.
Relief weakened her. She eased the throttle arm forward, and the dinghy headed out of the cove toward open water-and the reef.
21
“Think about it, Stevie,” Jack said smoothly, while Steve listened, hating him. “If not for your little lie and subsequent silence, I would have been arrested seventeen years ago, and none of those other women would be dead now.”
Steve knew what Jack was doing, of course. Trying to manipulate him by preying on his conscience. Jack was a master at exploiting weaknesses to gain control. Throughout their friendship he had always been the leader, the dominant personality. Even as a teenager Steve had been conscious of the subordinate role he played; and though sometimes it galled him, he’d been willing to go along. He’d taken a kind of comfort in surrendering his independence, allowing himself to be pushed and pulled by a force stronger than himself.
But not this time. He wasn’t a kid anymore.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Steve said brusquely.
Jack merely smiled. “Of course you don’t. Truth hurts. Especially this sort of truth. Seven women have died since Meredith. Seven women you helped to kill.”
Steve blinked. “Six. There’ve been six.”
“You’re behind the curve, pal. Another young lady was found dead in Phoenix two weeks ago, on Saturday morning. Veronica Tyler, but everybody called her Ronni. I didn’t, though. Not when I put that needle in her neck. I called her… Meredith.”
Steve gripped the transom with his free hand. The sudden pounding of his heart was like the onset of an anxiety attack. Fear always came on like this whenever he learned of another victim.
“Jesus,” he heard himself breathe. “Oh, Jesus.”
Jack watched him coolly. “Guess you were already on the island by then, huh? Voluntarily out of contact with the outside world?”
“We arrived that day. First thing in the morning.”
“Just as well. Hearing about poor Ronni might have spoiled your vacation. I figure you came here to get away from it all, anyway.”
That was true, but not the whole truth. Yes, he had fastened on the idea of revisiting Pelican Key as a way to escape from the news reports, the mounting body count. But he had also felt an almost mystical yearning for the island. It stood in his mind as a symbol of the most precious part of his life, his years of innocence, the time before Meredith’s drowning and Jack’s false alibi and the beginning of guilt.
Irrationally he had hoped that by returning to Pelican Key he could erase that guilt, wash himself clean of sin, find renewal and redemption.
He’d been wrong. He had escaped from nothing.
And now Jack Dance was here, facing him across five feet of creaking wood, and there could be no escape, not ever.
A plane hummed past, low over the northeast horizon, wings glinting silver in the sun. Steve followed it with his eyes, wishing he were on it, flying away from this place, from his own past, from himself.
“You’ve thought a lot about those women I killed, haven’t you?” Jack asked. “You’ve been torturing yourself for six months.”
Torture. Yes. That was the right word. And with every new victim, the wheel of the rack had turned a little more.
“What’s it done to you, Stevie? How’s your sleep been? Your work? Your marriage?”
He didn’t want to answer. But something inside him, the timid, obedient part of himself that had always responded to Jack’s greater strength, made him speak.
“It’s been hell,” he whispered, surprised by the croaking rasp of his own voice. “I kept wanting to call the police, but I wasn’t certain it was you-wasn’t totally certain even about Meredith, let alone the others. And if I told, I’d be incriminating myself. Even if you were innocent of the murders, I’d be guilty of providing a false alibi.”
“That’s true,” Jack said, and again Steve saw through his technique, saw how he reinforced the idea of guilt, guilt, guilt, like a dramatist obsessively emphasizing a favorite theme. A transparent ploy, yet it was working, wasn’t it? Despite Steve’s best efforts to resist manipulation, it was working.
“So I would wait and hope they’d catch the guy and he would be someone, anyone, other than you. I kept expecting to hear about a break in the case. It was making me crazy. But nothing ever happened except the FBI and the cops would say they were pursuing various leads
… and every two months or so, another woman would die.”
The horizons wheeled slowly, the boat as their axis. Steve imagined himself on a slow-motion carousel, turning, turning. There was something dreamlike and fascinating in the lazy spinning of the world.
“Does Kirstie know any of this?” Jack asked.
“Not a thing. She thinks I’m going through some sort of midlife crisis. Probably thinks our marriage is coming apart. Shit, maybe it is. I don’t know.”
“Tough to hold all that inside you for so long,” Jack said with a pale imitation of sympathy.
“Yeah. And there was one other thing. Not just the guilt. Fear. Of you.”
“Me? Why?”
“I’m the only one who knew your alibi was phony. Suppose you decided I was dangerous to you. That I might make the connection with Mister Twister and go to the authorities. Suppose you decided to launch a preemptive strike.”
Yards away, the water blurred into bubbles and ripples as a school of baitfish, jumping madly, fled some unseen pursuer.
“Sounds like you were getting a little paranoid,” Jack said. “Coming after you never even entered my mind.”
Steve thought that was probably true. Jack could never have seen pitiful, hero-worshiping Stevie as a threat.
Still, he hadn’t been sure. And last night, when Anastasia woke him with her growling, he had been almost certain Jack had tracked him down. Searching the house, the Beretta cocked and ready, he had expected to find Jack folded batlike inside every patch of shadow.
“You looked happy enough to see me on the beach,” Jack said.
Happy? Steve nearly smiled at that. He had been stunned, staggered, his worst fear realized. Yet at some deeper level he had not been surprised at all. It was as if Jack’s arrival had been predestined, as if the two of them were chess figures moved by unseen hands into opposition with each other.
“I tried to act natural,” Steve answered, wishing he could make himself stop talking. “After all, I still didn’t know why the hell you were here. Then you asked if Kirstie and I had watched TV or listened to the radio since we came to the island. And I started to think there might be something in the news about you. That break in the case I’d been waiting for.” Steve gazed at him over the shiny gun barrel. “They identified you, didn’t they?”
“I’m on the run.”
“Well, you picked the wrong place to hide out.”
“I’m not so certain of that.” Jack leaned back against the gunwale, arms folded across his chest. “Think for a minute, Stevie. Just think about what you’ve gotten yourself into. The feds know who I am. And they’re after me. It’s a coast-to-coast manhunt. Now, don’t you think they’re going to look into my background? I’ll bet they’ve got cops or field agents in New Jersey interviewing our high-school friends and neighbors right now. How long will it take before somebody mentions Meredith Turner’s death?”