In the 560 SL, Rachael had moved up front to the driver's seat. It was more comfortable than the cramped storage space, and it was a better position from which to talk with Sarah Kiel. She switched on the little overhead light provided for map reading, confident it would not be seen past the property's thick screen of trees. The moon-pale glow illuminated a portion of the dashboard, the console, Rachael's face, and Sarah's stricken countenance.
The battered girl, having been shaken from her catatonic state, was at last capable of responding to questions. She was holding her curled right hand protectively against her breast, which somehow gave her the look of a small, injured bird. Her torn fingernails had stopped bleeding, but her broken finger was grotesquely swollen. With her left hand, she tenderly explored her blackened eye, bruised cheek, and split lip, frequently wincing and making small, thin sounds of pain. She said nothing, but when her frightened eyes met Rachael's, awareness glimmered in them.
Rachael said, “Honey, we'll get you to a hospital in just a few minutes. Okay?”
The girl nodded.
“Sarah, do you have any idea who I am?”
The girl shook her head.
“I'm Rachael Leben, Eric's wife.”
Fear seemed to darken the blue of Sarah's eyes.
“No, honey, it's all right. I'm on your side. Really. I was in the process of divorcing him. I knew about his young girls, but that has nothing to do with why I left him. The man was sick, honey. Twisted and arrogant and sick. I learned to despise and fear him. So you can speak freely with me. You've got a friend in me. You understand?”
Sarah nodded.
Pausing to look around at the darkness beyond the car, at the blank black windows and patio doors of the house on one side and the untended shrubbery and trees on the other, Rachael locked both doors with the master latch. It was getting warm inside the car. She knew she should open the windows, but she felt safer with them closed.
Returning her attention to the teenager, Rachael said, “Tell me what happened to you, honey. Tell me everything.”
The girl tried to speak, but her voice broke. Violent shivers coursed through her.
“Take it easy,” Rachael said. “You're safe now.” She hoped that was true. “You're safe. Who did this to you?”
In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah's skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”
Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said, “When? When did he do this to you?”
“He came… at half past midnight.”
“Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must've left just before we arrived.”
From the time she'd left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.
“He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just… he just… hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her blackened eye, which was now almost swollen shut. “Hit me and knocked me down and kicked me twice, kicked my legs…”
Rachael remembered the ugly bruises on Sarah's thighs.
“… grabbed me by the hair…”
Rachael took the girl's left hand, held it.
“… dragged me into the bedroom…”
“Go on,” Rachael said.
“… just tore my pajamas off, you know, and… and kept yanking on my hair and hitting me, hitting, punching me…”
“Has he ever beaten you before?”
“N-no. A few slaps. You know… a little roughhouse. That's all. But tonight… tonight he was wild… so full of hatred.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not much. Called me names. Awful names, you know. And his speech — it was funny, slurred.”
“How did he look?” Rachael asked.
“Oh God…”
“Tell me.”
“A couple teeth busted out. Bruised up. He looked bad.”
“How bad?”
“Gray.”
“What about his head, Sarah?”
The girl gripped Rachael's hand very tightly. “His face… all gray… like, you know, like ashes.”
“What about his head?” Rachael repeated.
“He… he was wearing a knitted cap when he came in. He had it pulled way down, you know what I mean, like a toboggan cap. But when he was beating me… when I tried to fight back… the cap came off.”
Rachael waited.
The air in the car was stuffy and tainted by the acid stink of the girl's sweat.
“His head was… it was all banged up,” Sarah said, her voice thickening with terror, horror, and disgust.
“The side of his skull?” Rachael asked. “You saw that?”
“All broken, punched in… terrible, terrible.”
“His eyes. What about his eyes?”
Sarah tried to speak, choked. She lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to regain control of herself.
Seized by the irrational but quite understandable feeling that someone — or something—was stealthily creeping up on the Mercedes, Rachael surveyed the night again. It seemed to pulse against the car, seeking entrance at the windows.
When the brutalized girl raised her head again, Rachael said, “Please, honey, tell me about his eyes.”
“Strange. Hyper. Spaced out, you know? And… clouded…”
“Sort of muddy-looking?”
“Yeah.”
“His movements. Was there anything odd about the way he moved?”
“Sometimes… he seemed jerky… you know, a little spastic. But most of the time he was quick, too quick for me.”
“And you said his speech was slurred.”
“Yeah. Sometimes it didn't make any sense at all. And a couple times he stopped hitting me and just stood there, swaying back and forth, and he seemed… confused, you know, as if he couldn't figure where he was or who he was, as if he'd forgotten all about me.”
Rachael found that she was trembling as badly as Sarah — and that she was drawing as much strength from the contact with the girl's hand as the girl was drawing from her.
“His touch,” Rachael said. “His skin. What did he feel like?”
“You don't even have to ask, do you? 'Cause you already know what he felt like. Huh?” the girl said. “Don't you? Somehow… you already know.”
“But tell me anyway.”
“Cold. He felt too cold.”
“And moist?” Rachael asked.
“Yeah… but… not like sweat.”
“Greasy,” Rachael said.
The memory was so vivid that the girl gagged on it and nodded.
Ever so slightly greasy flesh, like the first stage — the very earliest stage — of putrefaction, Rachael thought, but she was too sick to her stomach and too sick at heart to speak that thought aloud.
Sarah said, “Tonight I watched the eleven o'clock news, and that's when I first heard he'd been killed, hit by a truck earlier in the day, yesterday morning, and I'm wondering how long I can stay in the house before someone comes to put me out, and I'm trying to figure what to do, where to go from here. But then little more than an hour after I see the story about him on the news, he shows up at the door, and at first I think the story must've been all wrong, but then…oh, Christ… then I knew it wasn't wrong. He… he really was killed. He was.”
“Yes.”