“Thank you…” Alice laughed. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Syd. My name is Syd.”
“Thank you, Syd.”
And now it was time to tell her the truth about the cancer, Syd thought. “There’s something you should know Alice…” Syd trailed off as she saw Ryan step into the living room. Alice saw Syd’s reaction and turned to see who was there.
And that’s what Ryan saw, the Lady in Red turning toward him, a gun in her right hand. Years of training kicked in and purely on instinct, Ryan raised his Glock and fired twice even as Syd called, “Ryan, no!”
Both shots hit Alice in the chest. She staggered back and then crumpled to the floor. Syd dropped next to her. Blood pumped from the two chest wounds. “Alice,” Syd cried as she tried to stem the bleeding. But it was too late. Alice placed her hands over Syd’s, looked her new friend in the eye, managed a feeble smile, and died.
FORTY-EIGHT
Ryan rushed to Syd, knelt down. “Are you all right?”
Syd stared at Ryan, a bit dazed, trying to make sense out of what just happened. “I’m fine. What’re you doing here?”
Ryan looked at her, confused. “You called me, left a message. I called back but you didn’t answer. You sure you’re okay.”
No, thought Syd. But she said, “I’m sure, yeah, I’m fine.”
The sound of distant sirens cut through the night. Syd reacted, surprised. “You called for backup?”
“When I pulled up, I saw your car. You didn’t answer your phone, so yeah. I called Hanrahan, told him to send the cavalry.” His eyes slid off her to the Lady in Red. “Want to tell me what happened before I got here?”
Syd had a decision to make. Trust Ryan or lie. Finally telling someone about her stepfather had felt good. Syd would love to tell Ryan about her stepfather; what he did to her, why she’d felt a bond to the Lady in Red, how she was about to let the Lady in Red go. She wanted to trust Ryan with everything. Tell him about those first terrible years in Hollywood, about Ernesto, the EMT, Eric Templeton, his sister, Andrea. To trust him with everything. Yesterday it would have been a no-brainer, yesterday she trusted him with her life.
But tonight, after seeing him in Anne’s arms, she wasn’t so sure.
Syd said, “I only got here a few minutes ago, saw the body on the living room floor and started searching for the Lady in Red. But I fucked up, Ryan. When I was looking here in the office, she got the drop on me.”
Syd could see doubt in Ryan’s eyes, but she plowed ahead before he could poke at her story. “I was actually talking to her when you showed up, trying to get her to turn herself in. She came here to kill Blake Hunter, but he got the gun away from her, shot her in the shoulder; she fought back with the scalpel, got the gun back and killed him.”
Ryan glanced at the Lady in Red, saw the bloodstain on her shoulder.
“Take a look at what she did to Blake Hunter, Ryan. He’s a mess.”
Ryan hesitated, he knew Syd well enough to know he wasn’t getting the whole story, but he figured no need to rush it, especially since he had a bagful of his own deceit to deal with.
So he stood up, stepped carefully around the bloodstains to examine Blake Hunter. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Ryan muttered. “She filleted him.”
“They must’ve had one hell of a fight,” Syd said. “Check out the master bathroom, there’s blood everywhere.”
Ryan was happy to look at anything but Blake’s butchered face.
“Down the hall to the left,” Syd said, pointing. As soon as Ryan disappeared down the hall, Syd hustled to the DVD player and hit the eject button. The High School Pool Party disc slid out. She stuck it in her jacket pocket. Next she grabbed the digital tape out of the video camera and tucked it safely away.
In the bathroom Ryan stared at the bloodstained towels, discarded bandage packaging, open medicine cabinets. Something on one of the bottles caught his attention; he put on his surgical gloves, carefully picked up the bottle. A bloody fingerprint was on the label. Then he noticed the same fingerprints on other bottles. The Lady in Red had gone through Blake’s drugs. Looking for what? Then he saw the open bottle of Betadine; she was looking for antiseptic he realized. She wanted to disinfect the gunshot wound.
He looked back at the fingerprint on the label again, the fragment of an idea stirring in the back of his head.
Syd stepped into the bathroom. “She left plenty of DNA this time,” Syd said.
“And fingerprints,” Ryan said. “Either you interrupted her before she could clean up or she didn’t care anymore.”
“I don’t think she cared anymore. She’d finished what she started.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’d killed the men who raped her. I talked to her parents, Ryan, found out what happened. Eleven years ago, when Alice was a high school senior, she was invited to a party by a boy she had a crush on, Adam Devlin. Only there was no party, just three horny high school boys, Adam, Colin Wood and Blake Hunter. They drugged her then gang raped her. Blake videotaped the whole thing. The next day he emailed nude pictures of Alice having sex to all his friends. She wanted to go to the police but a lawyer representing the three boys showed up and paid Alice’s family a million dollars to walk away.”
“And let me guess, the lawyer’s name was Zachary Stone.”
“Give the smart detective a cigar.”
Ryan digested the story; the refocused picture of the Lady in Red didn’t sit well. She’d just been transformed from serial murderer to victim. And he’d killed her. He sagged a bit as the implications pierced his soul.
Syd saw remorse flood his face. “You had no choice, Ryan. You saw a suspect holding a weapon turning toward you. You had to shoot.” Syd meant every word. If anything, she knew it was her fault Alice was dead. If Syd hadn’t been pissed at Ryan and just answered his phone call, he wouldn’t have charged into the house with his gun drawn.
The sirens had been steadily getting louder. Now they reached a crescendo and suddenly stopped.
“We’ve got company,” Syd said.
Chaos. That was the best way to describe the crime scene an hour later. Since Malibu falls under the L.A. County Sheriff’s jurisdiction, when Lieutenant Hanrahan got the call from Ryan, Hanrahan phoned the Sheriff’s Department and they scrambled two patrol cars to secure the scene.
Officially, the murder of Blake Hunter would be a L.A. County Sheriff’s investigation, but since LAPD had processed the scenes of the Lady in Red’s last two murders, and since an LAPD officer was involved in a shooting, it became a dual investigation. So detectives and crime scene technicians from both departments soon swarmed Blake Hunter’s beach house.
That kind of manpower can confuse any crime scene but it was nothing compared to the gathering media circus.
The press monitors LAPD and Sheriff’s Department frequencies so it wasn’t long before word of a murder in Malibu spread throughout the city. And if that wasn’t newsworthy enough, minutes later it was confirmed that it was a Lady in Red story. She had murdered another victim and then she had been killed in a shootout with an LAPD detective. But not just any detective, it was Detective Ryan Magee, the lottery-winning cop who was about to get a check for tens of millions of dollars.
And though it was midnight, cell phones rang, engines started, helicopter blades whirled; every resource was scrambled to cover the story. Soon the Pacific Coast Highway was clogged with satellite trucks, the sky was filled with news choppers and the shoreline outside Blake Hunter’s beach house was choked with camera-toting boats.
Sheriff’s deputies and police barricades kept the Press at bay, but the reporters, photographers and cameramen knew that Ryan Magee would have to come out at some point and they wanted to be there when he did.