Be Still Page 7

  And as the three of them started toward him, there was a noise from across the street.

  Psst!

  A voice.

  Dale turned.

  It was the stranger, standing behind a tall fence with black vertical bars that surrounded one of the properties. The stranger watched them from a gap between the bars. He wore the same clothes as earlier—the baggy sweatshirt and oversized work pants—but he had ditched the sunglasses. The hood of the sweatshirt was again cinched up incredibly tight, and the small bit of exposed face was hidden in shadow.

  The stranger waved.

  And then he turned and darted across the yard, heading for the back side of the property.

  Dale didn’t check to see if Ern or Nash had noticed. He just sprinted across the road and toward the property.

  The gate was closed across the driveway, and as Dale ran up to it and grabbed it, he just knew that it was going to be locked tight.

  But it wasn’t. It swung open when he gave it a tug.

  Ern rushed through and into the yard, and as Dale followed, he stole a quick look back. Nash was standing on the opposite side of the street where they had been before Dale had spotted the stranger. Just watching.

  Good. At least he was finally listening to reason.

  Dale sprinted after Ern, and though Dale was shorter, he had soon passed Ern by. Dale had noted earlier how Ern’s walking was a bit clumsy, and it seemed that the clumsiness extended to his running as well.

  The house was to Dale’s left, a huge structure of dark brick, two stories tall, with a gabled roof and a wraparound porch. As he glanced over, he saw a man peering around the corner of a window, half concealed by the drapes, watching nervously.

  Ahead, the home’s blacktop drive split—one side going to a garage off the main building, and the other side going to a detached two-car garage in the back. As Dale and Ern ran out of the grass and onto the blacktop, Dale feared that the stranger was going to head for the detached building. That would complicate things tremendously.

  But that’s not what he did.

  He kept going. He was heading for the back side of the property, toward the fence and the thick, dark forest beyond.

  Dale reached deep into his reserves, gritted his teeth, and pushed himself harder. He cleared the blacktop and was back in the grass again, the back yard. But after a couple moments of ferocious leg-pumping, he saw that he hadn’t gained on the stranger at all. In fact, the stranger had pulled even farther away. Dale remembered how fast the stranger had been when he and Nash chased him back at the Grand Promenade, how he’d gotten away from them.

  Dale could only watch as the stranger ran up to the fence, slowed down for just a moment…

  And slid right through the bars.

  “Shit!” Dale yelled. “Shit!”

  How had the guy gotten through? The bars were only about six inches across. And how had he done it so quickly? He’d barely broken his stride.

  Dale sprinted up to the fence, and his hands clanged into the bars as he reached out to stop his momentum. Footsteps behind him, at a run, and then Ern was beside him, shuffling to a stop, panting.

  Dale stuck his hand through the gap, testing the size. His estimation had been right. They were only six inches across. If that.

  He turned sideways, pushed his shoulder through. Felt resistance on both sides. It wasn’t gonna happen. And Ern had an even deeper frame and a bit of a gut.

  Dale pulled himself back into the grass. He looked up. The fence was eight feet high, and the bars curved out at the top. He took hold of one of the bars, tried to climb. His hand slipped on the wet bar, extra slippery with its high-gloss paint.

  He looked left and right, scanned the property. Far down at either edge of the yard were ninety-degree corners in the fencing, marked by big, elegant cornerstones made of brick.

  Definitely climbable.

  Ern noticed too, and when they made eye contact, a short series of head movements conveyed the plan: You try the one down there. I’ll try the other one.

  They took off toward opposite corners of the yard. As Dale ran, he pulled out his Model 36. The trees on the other side of the fence were pitch black, and the stranger could be hidden anywhere among them.

  Dale needed his weapon.

  He reached the corner post. Large branches came out from the forest beyond, criss-crossing the top of it. These branches were going to make climbing the thing difficult. He holstered the Model 36 and jumped up, grabbing the cement topper. One of his hands slipped on a wet branch, and his arm dropped.

  Try again.

  He repositioned and pulled himself up, relying on his abdominal strength. And as he brought his head level with the top of the post, he saw that it was completely blocked by the branches.

  Still, the ledge gave him a high spot to hold onto. He steadied himself and reached out with his leg to the fencing, hooked one of the bars with his foot. He started to transfer his weight to the fence…

  And his boot slipped on the wet metal.

  He lost his hold on the post and fell, landing on his back in the wet grass.

  Looking up from the ground, he saw the complexity of the branches hanging above the corner post. He wasn’t going to be able to clear it.

  He hopped back to his feet and drew his Model 36 again. He saw that at the other end of the yard, the opposite corner post was unattended. Ern had cleared it. He was somewhere in those dark trees.

  And so was the stranger.

  Dale stopped for a moment, listened. It was surprisingly quiet. A few insomniac birds. Faint drops of the mist dripping off leaves. But no footsteps.

  Dale kept two hands on the gun—steady and ready to go—and he took off toward the opposite corner post, not quite running, keeping part of his attention on his forward progression and the other part on those pitch black trees.

  As he drew closer to the corner post, he saw how Plunkett had been able to clear it. Unlike the post Dale had tried to climb, there were no branches blocking the top, and it was positioned in a way that—

  A hand grabbed Dale’s arm.

  Dale sucked in a breath, and in one solid movement he swiped the hand from his wrist and pointed his gun through the fence.

  And found Ern Plunkett.

  Smiling at him.

  Dale exhaled. “You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Ern said, still smiling.

  Even though he was smiling, Ern looked incredibly uncomfortable. Branches squeezed in around him from all sides, digging into his uniform, and he was pressed up tight against the metal bars.

  “The guy’s gone. I haven’t heard a peep since I got back here,” Ern said. “He sure must know his way around here, because I can’t seem to move an inch without running into something.”

  He chuckled.

  Dale holstered his gun.

  “All right,” Dale said. “I’ll meet you at the corner post. We gotta let HSPD know the guy got away.”

  Plunkett laughed again. “That’s easy for you to say. I don’t know if I can get out of here. In fact, I’m not sure how I got this far in!”

  Ern looked at him with that warm toad-smile.

  Then his eyes opened wide.

  And he shrieked.

  It was something unlike anything Dale had ever heard, and he instantly knew that he would never forget it. It was high-pitched and wailing, and it didn’t sound like something that should come out of someone who looked like Ern.

  In fact, it didn’t even sound human.

  There was another sound with it, a quick-fire set of thumps. Three of them. Wet and solid.

  Thump-thump-thump.

  With this sound was a shadow. And movement. The shadow came up behind Ern, much shorter than him. The movement was at Ern’s side. A blur of and arm and the glint of metal.

  Three stabs to Ern’s ribs. Quick and efficient. Ruthlessly precise. Shatteringly objective.

  It had all happened in a moment—Ern’s eyes, the shadow, a shrie
k, the wet sounds of metal going into flesh. So fast that by the time Dale had drawn his gun, the shadow was already disappearing into the trees.

  Dale fired through the fence. Three times. Rapidly.

  And listened.

  Footsteps. Disappearing into the distance. Vanishing into the trees.

  Gurgling noises came from Ern’s mouth. Blood flowed through his fingers, at his side.

  “Ern!”

  Ern looked past him. And fell forward. His head clanked into the fence, lodged between two bars. He now faced the yard, coughing, as he slid downward. His body hit the ground, propped at an angle, leaving his face hovering several inches above the ground. More coughing.

  Dale dropped down in front of him.

  “Ern! Ern!!”

  Ern coughed loudly. Blood sprayed on Dale’s face.

  Gurgling noises. A sudden twist. And he stopped moving.

  Dale scrambled to his feet. “Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  He threw his Model 36 into its holster and sprinted to the corner post. The alarms in his head were blaring, and his mind and senses trusted his intuition. In a flurry of activity that his body completed on auto-pilot, he somehow propelled himself over the corner post and into the trees, through the branches and undergrowth tearing at his clothes and face, and placed him at Ern’s side.

  Ern was still angled against the fence, his face lodged between the bars. Dale grabbed his shoulder, pulled him off the fence and onto his back. His eyes were wide open, staring into the black sky.

  Dale feebly, stupidly put a pair of fingers to Ern’s neck.

  Dead.

  Dale took two steps backwards. His back struck a tree. His eyes locked on Ern’s body. He put his hands in his hair, and he slid down the tree till he hit the earth.

  Movement on the other side of the fence. He looked. Red-and-blue lights from the street outside the house. The family inside, clustered by the glass rear doors, silhouetted by warm light. Cops running across the lawn toward him

  And standing on the sidewalk, under a pool of light from a streetlight, was Nash.

  Dale’s hands were still in his hair, his elbows on his knees. He looked at Ern again and reached out to close the man’s eyelids.

  In a movie, this would be a special moment. In a movie, the eyes would close when Dale brushed his hand over them.

  But when Dale retracted his hand, the eyes were still open, still looking into the black sky.

  Dale reached out, tried again. And finally the damn things closed.

  He shuddered. And put his hands back in his hair as the shouting of the cops drew nearer.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As Ventress watched Harbick describe how Conley had led Plunkett to his death, she saw the man grow quieter again.

  Harbick had been acting tougher, being more assertive. But it was all false bravado. Bring a little death into the equation, and little boys like Harbick turn in on themselves.

  Harbick had just described how he crossed the yard with the local police and found Conley sitting on the other side of the fence, a foot away from Plunkett’s dead body. Elbows on his knees, hands in his hair, head hung.

  “I’d never seen him like that,” Harbick said.

  “Distraught?”

  “No. Still in control of himself but ... distant. Almost shell-shocked.”

  “And yet he’d just met Plunkett, only hours earlier,” Ventress said. “I’m sure Conley has seen lots of people die in front of him in his line of work. What makes Ernie Plunkett’s murder different? Gee, it’s almost as though Conley felt guilt for dragging a guy into an investigation he was never supposed to be a part of, only to get the guy killed a few hours later.”

  Harbick still had a somber look in his eye, and his voice was quiet as he described Conley’s reaction. “Dale couldn’t get over that Ern had just invited us to meet his wife and kids. For some reason Dale was fixated on that.”

  Jesus. What a sap.

  Ventress felt like she was reading some sort of cheesy women’s romance, full of high emotion and lofty language and cliches. She’d let Harbick wallow in his pathetic feelings. She had work to do.

  She turned away from him, looked over the table at the others.

  “Had the killer claimed another victim?” she said to no one in particular.

  Detective Sadler leaned forward in his seat, placed his arms on the table.

  “Lenora Page. Twenty-four-year-old black female. Owner of one of the art galleries downtown. Her throat was slashed—but not as deep as the Mancini girl’s. Our guy didn’t mutilate her like he did Mancini either. She was found in the space between her detached studio and her home.”

  “Another message?”

  Sadler nodded and grabbed a ratty old briefcase off the ground, plopped it on the table.

  “He’d scrawled it out on the studio’s wall,” Sadler said, digging through a stack of loose, bent-up papers in the briefcase. “He used artist’s paint he’d gotten from inside the studio. Here.”

  He pulled out an eight-by-ten photo, held it up for the room to see. It was another crude message, like those in the other two photos Ventress had seen.

  She read it aloud.

  “She was a real peach.” Ventress let the words roll through her brain for a moment, then she turned her attention back to Harbick. “And Conley, in all his historical genius, was able to make a connection to an unsolved serial killer?”

  “He was,” Harbick replied, once more using that edgier tone she’d picked up on. “The Atlanta Ripper. A black serial killer. 1911 to 1912. Never brought to justice. Sliced black women’s throats. It fit the pattern Dale had found. Each new murder emulated an unidentified serial killer from history, and the victims were modeled after the original victims.”

  “So Conley was able to decipher a pattern,” Ventress said. “Yet he wasn’t able to make a connection between the different serial killers our guy is imitating, was he? He wasn’t able to figure out when or where or who our guy is going to strike next, was he?”

  “Obviously not,” Harbick said coldly.

  The petulant little shit.

  “Yes, ‘obviously not,’ is right,” Ventress said. “Because after you two weren’t able to stop Lenora Page’s murder last night, you got a call in the wee hours of the morning today … about a fourth attack.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The ringing telephone woke Dale with a jolt.

  He propped himself on an elbow, and it only took him half a moment to remember where he was.

  The Sawmill Inn. A cheap motor lodge.

  With all the historic hotels in Hot Springs, Dale had found himself in a place like this. What a shame. But cheap motels were company policy. Or, rather, the policy of his boss, SAC Walter Taft, who required his agents to get the second cheapest lodging available during their assignments. It saved Taft money—Taft being a notorious penny-pincher—but it also covered Taft’s ass. If anyone asked, he could honestly say that he didn’t force his agents to stay at the cheapest available lodging.

  Dale tugged the chain on the small lamp at his bedside. Squinted at the light. The blanket covering him was thin, scratchy. Walls were scuffed. The TV was small and black-and-white.

  He grabbed his watch from the nightstand. It was 3:45 in the morning. He picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  He listened.

  And then he said, “We’ll be right there.”

  The smell of hospitals always got to Dale. It had since he was a kid. Something about the combination of cleaners and disinfectants and medicines and body odor. And as he stood at the nurses’ station, he tried to push the nauseated feeling side, focusing instead on the highly attractive nurse he was talking to. Even if she’d not responded at all to his attempt at charm.

  Oblivious. She was just oblivious. Yes, that had to be it.

  “Around the corner. At the end of the hall,” the nurse said, pointing, but not looking up from her clipboard.

  “Thank you,” Dale sa
id, giving a big smile to the top of her head as he turned to leave. Nash followed.

  As they headed toward the corner the nurse had indicated, Dale heard something. In the distance.

  Screams.

  He and Nash exchanged a look.

  They turned the corner and saw at the end of the hall a young, black, uniformed cop standing beside an open doorway. Through the doorway, Dale could see a curtain drawn around a hospital bed. There was a gap in the curtain, and through this gap he could see flurries of activity—thrashing limbs of someone in the bed and multiple medical personnel. A very short man in dingy dress clothes stood outside the curtain, watching, his back to the doorway.

  The man in dress clothes turned around. It was Sadler. He saw them approaching and stepped outside the room, walked up to them outside the doorway.

  “Conley, good to see you again, bud. How you doing after last night?”

  Dale shook his hand. “I’m good. Thanks, Sadler.”

  Sadler glanced at Nash. “Mr. Harbick.”

  “Detective.”

  Dale nodded toward the hospital room and the commotion. “What do we got?”

  “An attempted victim. Attacked in her home. She managed to trip the guy and slip away. She got in her car and sped off. Made it a mile before she drove off the road into a telephone pole.”

  “What’s her condition?”

  “Physically, she’s going to be fine. Multiple cuts and stab wounds, but nothing deeper than an inch. Abrasions. Contusions to the neck. Wounds to her right ear. Mentally, though ... that’s a different story. She’s been in hysterics since they found her in her car.”

  “Name?”

  “Mira Lyndon.”

  “What do we know about her?”

  “A local, like the other victims. Lifelong Hot Springs resident. She works at one of the hotels. A maid. She’s the girlfriend of Clyde Bowen.”

  “You say that name like it means something,” Dale said. “Is he a big shot in town?”