The police photographer's camera click-flashed.
Julio continued: “The killer knew he wouldn't be able to get his hands on her right away, but he wanted her to know she could expect him later. He — or they — wanted to scare her witless. And when he took a good look at this Klienstad woman he had killed, he knew what he must do.”
“Huh?” Mulveck said. “I don't follow.”
“Rebecca Klienstad was voluptuous,” Julio said, indicating the crucified woman. “So is Rachael Leben. Very similar body types.”
“And Mrs. Leben has hair much the same as the Klienstad girl's,” Reese said. “Coppery brown.”
“Titian,” Julio said. “And although this woman isn't nearly as lovely as Mrs. Leben, there's a vague resemblance, a similarity of facial structure.”
The photographer paused to put new film in his camera.
Officer Mulveck shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The way it was supposed to work — Mrs. Leben would eventually come home and when she walked into this room she would see this woman crucified and know, by the similarities, that it was her this psycho really wanted to nail to the wall.”
“Yes,” Julio said, “I think so.”
“Yes,” Reese agreed.
“Good God,” Mulveck said, “do you realize how black, how bitter, how deep this hatred must be? Whoever he is, what could Mrs. Leben possibly have done to make him hate her like that? What sort of enemies does she have?”
“Very dangerous enemies,” Julio said. “That's all I know. And… if we don't find her quickly, we won't find her alive.”
The photographer's camera flashed.
The corpse seemed to twitch.
Flash, twitch.
Flash, twitch.
11
GHOST STORY
When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but cooperative.
No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.
Benny kept looking desperately left and right.
Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.
Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a for SALE sign in the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in need of a gardener's attention.
“Eureka,” Benny said.
He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the headlights, the engine.
Darkness fell over them.
The car's hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.
The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.
Benny said, “Give me your gun.”
From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.
Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but no longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to have jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other, earlier violence.
Benny opened his door and started to get out.
Rachael said, “Where are you going?”
“I want to make sure they go past and don't double back. Then I've got to find another car.”
“We can change the tire—”
“No. This heap's too easy to spot. We need something ordinary.”
“But where will you get another car?”
“Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”
He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come, slipped around the corner of the house, and was gone.
Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of the house, Ben heard a chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and ambulances were probably still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a mile or two away, where the bullet-riddled cops had ridden their cruiser through the windows of a boutique.
Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming along the street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and cautiously peered between branches of the overgrown oleander bushes, which were heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries.
The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that there were three men inside. He could see only one clearly — the guy in the front passenger's seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt features, and a mean slash of a mouth.
They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were smart enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy niche and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had not left obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn that he'd traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn't been watered as regularly as it should have been, so it was badly blotched with brown patches, which provided a natural camouflage to further conceal the marks of the Mercedes's passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry's trail.
Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge confronting him. He'd been a real-estate salesman too long. He was not up to this sort of thing anymore, not for an extended length of time. He was thirty-seven, and he'd last been a man of action when he'd been twenty-one, which seemed a date lost in the mists of the Paleolithic era. Although he had kept in shape over the years, he was rusty. To Rachael, he had looked formidable when he'd gone after the man named Vincent Baresco in Eric Leben's Newport Beach office, and his handling of the car had no doubt impressed her, but he knew his reflexes weren't what they had once been. And he knew these people, his nameless enemies, were deadly serious.
He was scared.
They had blown away those two cops as if swatting a couple of annoying flies. Jesus.
What secret did they share with Rachael? What could be so damn important that they would kill anyone, even cops, to keep a lid on it?
If he lived through the next hour, he would get the truth out of her one way or another. Damned if he would let her keep stalling.
The Caddy's engine sort of purred and sort of rumbled, and the car moved past at a crawl, and the guy with the mustache looked right at Ben for a moment, or seemed to, stared right between the oleander branches that Ben was holding slightly apart. Ben wanted to let the branches close up, but he was afraid the movement would be seen, slight as it was, so he just looked back into the other man's eyes, expecting the Caddy to stop and the doors to fly open, expecting a submachine gun to start crackling, shredding the oleander leaves with a thousand bullets. But the car kept moving past the house and on down the street. Watching its taillights dwindle, Ben let out his breath with a shudder.
He crept free of the shrubbery, went out to the street, and stood in the shadows by a tall jacaranda growing near the curb. He stared after the Cadillac until it had traveled three blocks, climbed a small hill, and disappeared over the crest.
In the distance, there were still sirens, though fewer. They had sounded angry before. Now they sounded mournful.
Holding the thirty-two pistol at his side, he hurried off into the night-cloaked neighborhood in search of a car to steal.