“Yes. Please be careful, Adam. Your vest is on correctly? You’re protected?”
“Yeah.” He touched his fingertips to her cheek, then dropped his arm. “Stay alert.”
It seemed to Adam that it took him damned near an hour to run those twenty feet. Every step was long and heavy and so loud it shook the earth. It seemed to him that every night sound, from owls to crickets, stopped in those moments. Watching, he thought, they were all watching to see what would happen. Nothing from the house, no movement, no sound, not a single quick shadow. He flattened against the side of the house, his pistol held between both hands, then slowly, slowly, he looked around into a bedroom filled with old white rattan furniture with cheap faded red cushions, a dim-watted bulb shining from an old Lava lamp on a nightstand next to a single bed. He saw nothing, no movement, no one. The cover on the twin-size bed barely covered the top of the mattress. He could see that there was nothing beneath the bed except big-time dust balls. No, no one in the room. If anyone was in there, he was in the closet, on the far side, the door closed. He saw that the door to the bedroom was also shut. He quietly tested the window, paused, listened intently. Still nothing. The window wasn’t locked. He raised it slowly, the sounds of creaking and scraping against old paint as loud as thunder in his head.
The window was some five feet off the ground. Because he had to, he stuck his pistol in the waistband of his jeans. He’d always hated doing that ever since he’d heard the story some decades back that an agent had stuck his gun in his pants and hit against a car fender in some weird way that pulled the trigger. He shot off the end of his dick. Damn, no, he didn’t want to do that. He pulled himself up and eased his leg over the windowsill. He waved back at Becca, motioning for her to stay back and keep hidden. But, of course, she didn’t. She trotted right up to the house and stuck out her hand for him to help her through the window.
“Only if you stay hidden in here while I check the rest of the house.”
“I promise. Pull me up, hurry. I don’t like this, Adam. She was alone here. I know he’s done something bad.”
A lone owl hooted fifty feet away, from the safety of the woods and a tall tree. The moon glistened down on her face. Adam pulled her over the ledge and she swung her legs to the floor.
She watched him walk toward the closet door, listen intently, then jerk it open. Nothing. Then she watched him walk to the closed bedroom door, staying to the side, never directly facing the door. He slowly turned the knob, then smashed the door open, sending it banging back, and stepped into the hallway, his pistol up. Then he was gone. She stood there shaking, wishing she wasn’t, listening to that owl, loud and clear, sounding from the forest.
Where was he? Time passed as slowly as it did in the dentist’s office. Maybe even slower.
Finally, she heard him shout, “Becca, go back out the window and tell Savich it’s okay for everyone to come in. He’s not here.”
“No, I want to come out-”
“Out the window, Becca. Please.”
When he was sure she was outside, Adam stepped out onto the sagging front porch with its scarred and peeling railing and said, “He’s gone. Savich, come here a moment. The rest of you just stay outside and keep watch, okay?”
“Yeah, we’ll keep watch, but this is nuts,” Tommy said and pulled out his pipe. “No one moved after we got here and we converged on the place not ten minutes after you called, Adam.”
Savich said slowly, “Then he knew, of course, that we’d tapped the phone.”
“Yes,” Adam said. “The bastard knew, all right. In the kitchen, Savich.”
“I don’t like this,” Becca said to Sherlock as she pressed toward the front door. “Why can’t we go in the house?”
“Just stay there for the moment, Becca.”
Several minutes passed. No one said anything, but one by one the men walked into the farmhouse through the open front door.
Becca didn’t know what to do. Sherlock, who was standing on the small front porch, her 9mm SIG drawn, sweeping in a wide arc around her, scanning the perimeter, said, “I’ll go check. Becca, why don’t you wait out here just a while longer?”
Becca stared at her. “Why?”
“Just wait,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “That’s an order.”
Becca heard the men talking, knew all of them but her were in the house. Why didn’t they want her in there? She ran around to the back of the house and slipped in behind one of the men who was standing in the middle of the back door. The kitchen was painfully bright with two-hundred-watt bulbs hanging naked from the ceiling. The kitchen was small, the appliances were harsh white, clean, and very old. There was an old wooden table, scarred, a beautiful old vase holding dead roses in the center. It had been pushed against the wall. Two of the chairs were overturned on the floor. The refrigerator was humming loudly, like an old train chugging up a hill.
She slipped around the man in the doorway. He tried to hold her back, but she pulled free. Tommy, Savich, and Sherlock were standing in a near circle staring down at the pale-green linoleum floor. Adam rose slowly.
And suddenly Becca could see her.
17
The woman had no face. Her head looked like a bowl filled with smashed bone, flesh, and teeth. He’d struck her hard, viciously, repeatedly. There were two broken teeth on the floor beside the woman’s head. There was dried blood everywhere, congealed and black on her face and on the worn linoleum, streaks of blood, like lightning bolts, down the white wall. Her hair was matted to her head, blood-soaked dark clumps falling away onto the floor. And there was dirt mixed in with the dried bloody hair.
“She’s young,” she heard a man say, his voice low, calm, detached, but underlying that voice was a thick layer of fury. “Jesus, too young. It’s Linda Cartwright, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “He killed her right here in the kitchen.”
Linda Cartwright lay on her back on the floor wearing a ratty old chenille bathrobe that had been washed so many times it was nearly white rather than pink, except for the dirt that clung to the robe, dirt everywhere, even on her feet, which were bare, her toenails painted a bright, happy red. Becca eased closer. It was real, it was horrifyingly real, in front of her, and the woman was dead. “Oh, God. Oh God, no, no.”
She watched Savich bend down to unpin a note that was fastened to the front of Linda Cartwright’s bathrobe. She saw for the first time that the woman was heavy, just as Savich had read off her driver’s license. “Don’t let Becca come in here,” he said to Sherlock, not looking up as he read the note. “This is too much. Make sure she stays outside.”
“I’m already here,” Becca said, swallowing again and again against the nausea in her stomach, the vomit rising in her throat. “What is that note?”
“Becca-”
It was Adam and he was turning toward her. She put up her hands. “What is that note?” she asked again. “Read it, please.”
Savich paused, then read slowly, his voice firm and clear:
Hey, Rebecca, you can call her Gleason. Since she didn’t look like a dog, I had to smash her up a bit. Now she does. A dead dog. She’s nice and fat, though, just like Gleason, and that’s good. You killed her. You and no one else. Give her a good wake. This is all for you, Rebecca. I’ll see you soon and it’ll be you and me, from then to eternity.Your Boyfriend