Summer, with its blazing desert heat, was a somewhat less busy tourist season in Palm Springs than other times of the year, and at one-fifteen in the morning the main street was virtually deserted. In the hot and windless June night, the palm trees stood as still as images painted on canvas, illuminated and slightly silvered by the streetlights. The many shops were dark. The sidewalks were empty. The traffic signals still cycled from green to yellow to red to green again, although hers was the only car passing through most of the intersections.
She almost felt as if she were driving through a post-Armageddon world, depopulated by disease. For a moment she was half convinced that if she switched on the radio, there would be no music — only the cold empty hiss of static all the way across the dial.
Since receiving the news of Eric's missing corpse, she had known that something terrible had come into the world, and hour by hour she had grown more bleak. Now even an empty street, which would have looked peaceful to anyone else, stirred ominous thoughts in her. She knew she was overreacting. No matter what happened in the next few days, this was not the end of the world.
On the other hand, she thought, it might be the end of me, the end of my world.
Driving from the commercial district into residential areas, from neighborhoods of modest means into wealthier streets, she encountered even fewer signs of life, until at last she pulled into a Futura Stone driveway and parked in front of a low, sleek, flat-roofed stucco house that was the epitome of clean-lined desert architecture. The lush landscaping was distinctly not of the desert — ficus trees, benjamina, impatiens, begonias, beds of marigolds and Gerber daisies — green and thick and flower-laden in the soft glow of a series of Malibu lights. Those were the only lights burning; all the front windows were dark.
She had told Benny that this was another of Eric's houses — though she had been closemouthed about the reason she had come. Now, as she switched off the headlights, he said, “Nice little vacation retreat.”
She said, “No. This is where he kept his mistress.”
Enough soft light fell from the Malibu fixtures, rebounded from the lawn and from the edge of the driveway, penetrated the windows of the car, and touched Benny's face to reveal his look of surprise. “How did you know?”
“A little over a year ago, just a week before I left him, she — Cindy Wasloff was her name — she called the house in Villa Park. Eric had told her never to phone there except in the direst emergency, and if she spoke with anyone but him, she was supposed to say she was the secretary of some business associate. But she was furious with him because, the night before, he'd beaten her pretty badly, and she was leaving him. First, however, she wanted to let me know he'd been keeping her.”
“Had you suspected?”
“That he had a mistress? No. But it didn't matter. By then I'd already decided to call it quits. I listened to her and commiserated, got the address of the house, because I thought maybe the day would come when I might be able to use the fact of Eric's adultery to pry myself loose from him if he wouldn't cooperate in the divorce. Even as ugly as it got, it never got quite that tawdry, thank God. And it would have been exceedingly tawdry indeed if I'd had to go public with it… because the girl was only sixteen.”
“What? The mistress?”
“Yes. Sixteen. A runaway. One of those lost kids, from the sound of her. You know the type. They start doing drugs in junior high and just seem to… burn away too many gray cells. No, that's not right, either. The drugs don't destroy brain cells so much as they… eat away at their souls, leave them empty and purposeless. They're pathetic.”
“Some are,” he said. “And some are scary. Bored and listless kids who've tried everything. They either become amoral sociopaths as dangerous as rattlesnakes — or they become easy prey. I gather you're telling me that Cindy Wasloff was easy prey and that Eric swept her in out of the gutter for some fun and games.”
“And apparently she wasn't the first.”
“He had a thing for teenage girls, huh?”
Rachael said, “What he had a thing about was getting old. It terrified him. He was only forty-one when I left him, still a young man, but every year when his birthday rolled around he was crazier about it than the year before, as if at any moment he'd blink and find himself in a nursing home, decrepit and senile. He had an irrational fear of growing old and dying, and the fear expressed itself in all sorts of ways. For one thing, year by year, newness in everything became increasingly important to him: new cars every year, as if a twelve-month-old Mercedes was ready for the scrap heap; a constant change of wardrobe, out with the old and in with the new…”
“And the modern art, modern architecture, all the ultramodern furniture.”
“Yes. And the latest electronic gadgetry. And I guess teenage girls were just another part of his obsession with staying young and… cheating death. I guess, in his twisted mind, being with young girls kept him young, too. When I learned about Cindy Wasloff and this house in Palm Springs, I realized that one of the main reasons he'd married me was because I was twelve years younger than him, twenty-three to his thirty-five. I was just one more means of slowing down the flow of time for him, and when I started to get into my late twenties, when he could see me getting a little older, then I no longer served that purpose quite as well for him, so he needed younger flesh like Cindy.”
She opened her door and got out of the car, and Benny got out on his side. He said, “So exactly what're we looking for here? Not just his current mistress; you wouldn't have rocketed out here like a race-car driver just to get a peek at his latest bimbo.”
Closing her door, withdrawing the thirty-two pistol from her purse, and heading toward the house, Rachael did not — could not — answer.
The night was warm and dry. The vault of the clear desert sky was spangled with an incredibility of stars. The air was still, and all was silent but for crickets singing in the shrubbery.
Too much shrubbery. She looked around nervously at all the looming dark forms and black spaces beyond the glow of the Malibu lights. Lots of hiding places. She shivered.
The door was ajar, which seemed an ominous sign. She rang the bell, waited, rang again, waited, rang and rang, but no one responded.
At her side, Benny said, “It's probably your house now. You inherited it with everything else, so I don't think you need an invitation to go in.”
The door, ajar as it was, provided more invitation than she would have liked. It looked as if it were the open door on a trap. If she went inside in search of the bait, the trap might be sprung, and the door might slam behind her.
Rachael took a step back, kicked out with one foot, knocking the door inward. It swung back hard against the wall of the foyer with a shuddering crash.
“So you don't expect to be welcomed with open arms,” Benny said.
The exterior light above the door shed pale beams a few feet into the foyer, though not as far as she had hoped. She could see that no one lurked in the first six or eight feet, but beyond lay darkness that might shelter an assailant.
Because he didn't know everything she knew and therefore didn't appreciate the true extent of the danger, because he expected nothing worse than another Vincent Baresco with another revolver, Benny was bolder than Rachael. He stepped past her into the house, found the wall switch in the foyer, and snapped on the lights.
Rachael went inside and moved past him. “Damn it, Benny, don't be so quick to step through a doorway. Let's be slow and careful.”
“Believe it or not, I can handle just about any teenage girl who wants to throw a punch at me.”
“It's not the mistress I'm worried about,” she said sharply.
“Then who?”
Tight-lipped, holding her pistol at the ready, she led the way through the house, turning on lights as they went.
The uncluttered ultramodern decor — more futuristic than in any of Eric's other habitats — bordered on stark-ness and sterility. A highly polished terrazzo floor that look
ed as cold as ice, no carpet anywhere. Levolor metal blinds instead of drapes. Hard-looking chairs. Sofas that, if moved to the depths of a forest, might have passed for giant fungi. Everything was in pale gray, white, black, and taupe, with no color except for scattered accent pieces all in shades of orange.
The kitchen had been wrecked. The white-lacquered breakfast table and two chairs were overturned. The other two chairs had been hammered to pieces against everything else in sight. The refrigerator was badly dented and scraped; the tempered glass in the oven door was shattered; the counters and cabinets were gouged and scratched, edges splintered. Dishes and drinking glasses had been pulled from the cupboards and thrown against the walls, and the floor was prickled and glinting with thousands of sharp shards. Food had been swept off the shelves of the refrigerator onto the floor: Pickles, milk, macaroni salad, mustard, chocolate pudding, maraschino cherries, a chunk of ham, and several unidentifiable substances were congealing in a disgusting pool. Beside the sink, above the cutting board, all six knives had been removed from their rack and, with tremendous force, had been driven into the wall; some of the blades were buried up to half their lengths in the dry wall, while two had been driven in to their hilts.
“You think they were looking for something?” Benny asked.
“Maybe.”
“No,” he said, “I don't think so. It's got the same look as the bedroom in the Villa Park house. Weird. Creepy. This was done in a rage. Out of fierce hatred, in a frenzy, a fury. Or by someone who takes pure, unadulterated pleasure in destruction.”
Rachael could not take her eyes off the knives embedded in the wall. A deep sick quivering filled her stomach. Her chest and throat tightened with fear.
The gun in her hand felt different from the way it had felt just a moment ago. Too light. Too small. Almost like a toy. If she had to use it, would it be effective? Against this adversary?
They continued through the silent house with considerably greater caution. Even Benny had been shaken by the psychopathic violence that had been unleashed here. He no longer taunted her with his boldness, but stayed close at her side, warier than he had been.
In the large master bedroom, there was more destruction, though it was not as extensive or as indicative of insane fury as the damage in the kitchen. Beside the king-size bed of black-lacquered wood and burnished stainless steel, a torn pillow leaked feathers. The bedsheets were strewn across the floor, and a chair was overturned. One of the two black ceramic lamps had been knocked off a nightstand and broken, and the shade had been crushed. The shade on the other lamp was cocked, and the paintings hung askew on the walls.
Benny stooped and carefully lifted a section of one of the sheets to have a closer look at it. Small reddish spots and a single reddish smear shone with almost preternatural brilliance on the white cotton.
“Blood,” he said.
Rachael felt a cold sweat suddenly break out on her scalp and along the back of her neck.
“Not much,” Benny said, standing again, his gaze traveling over the tangled sheets. “Not much, but definitely blood.”
Rachael saw a bloody handprint on the wall beside the open door that led into the master bedroom. It was a man's print, and large — as if a butcher, exhausted from his hideous labors, had leaned there for a moment to catch his breath.
The lights were on in the large bathroom, the only chamber in the house that had not been dark when they'd reached it. Through the open door, Rachael could see virtually everything either directly or in the mirrors covering one wall: gray tile with a burnt-yellow border, big sunken tub, shower stall, toilet, one edge of the counter that held the sinks, bright brass towel racks and brass-rimmed recessed ceiling lamps. The bathroom appeared deserted. However, when she crossed the threshold, she heard someone's quick, panicked breathing, and her own heartbeat, already trotting, raced.
Close behind her, Benny said, “What's wrong?”
She pointed to the opaque shower stall. The glass was so heavily frosted that nothing could be seen of the person on the other side, not even a tenebrous form. “Somebody' s in there.”
Benny leaned forward, listening.
Rachael had backed against the wall, the muzzle of the thirty-two aimed at the shower door.
“Better come out of there,” Benny said to the person in the stall.
No answer. Just quick, thin wheezing.
“Better come out right now,” Benny said.
“Come out, damn you!” Rachael said, her raised voice echoing harshly off the gray tile and the bright mirrors.
From the stall came an unexpectedly woeful mewling that was the very essence of terror. It sounded like a child.
Shocked, concerned, but still wary, Rachael edged toward the frosted glass.
Benny stepped past her, took hold of the brass handle, and pulled the door open. “Oh, my God.”
Rachael saw a nude girl huddled pathetically on the tile floor of the shadowy stall, her back pressed into the corner. She looked no older than fifteen or sixteen and must be the current mistress in residence, the latest — and last — of Eric's pitiable “conquests.” Her slender arms were crossed over her breasts more in fear and self-defense than in modesty. She was trembling uncontrollably, and her eyes were wide with terror, and her face was pale, sickly, waxen.
She was probably quite pretty, but it was difficult to tell for sure, not because of the gloominess of the enclosed shower stall but because she had been badly beaten. Her right eye was blackened and beginning to swell. Another ugly bruise was forming on her right cheek, from the corner of the eye all the way down to the jaw. Her upper lip had been split; blood still oozed from it, and blood covered her chin. There were bruises on her arms as well, and a big one on her left thigh.
Benny turned away, clearly as embarrassed for the girl as he was alarmed by her condition.
Lowering her pistol, stooping at the shower door, Rachael said, “Who did this to you, honey? Who did this?” She already knew what the answer must be, dreaded hearing it, but was morbidly compelled to ask the question.
The girl could not respond. Her bleeding lips moved, and she tried to form words, but all that came out was that thin grievous whining, broken into chords by an especially violent siege of the shivers. Even if she had spoken, she would most likely not have answered the question, for she was obviously in shock and to some degree disassociated from reality. She seemed only partially aware of Rachael and Benny, with the larger part of her attention focused on some private horror. She met Rachael's eyes but didn't really seem to see her.
Rachael reached into the stall with one hand. “Honey, it's all right. Everything's all right. No one's going to hurt you anymore. You can come out now. We won't let anyone hurt you anymore.”
The girl stared through Rachael, murmuring softly but urgently to herself, shaken by a wind of fear that blew through some grim inner landscape in which she seemed trapped.
Rachael handed her gun to Benny. She stepped into the big shower stall and knelt beside the girl, speaking softly and reassuringly to her, touching her gently on the face and arms, smoothing her tangled blond hair. At the first few touches, the girl flinched as if she'd been struck, though the contact briefly broke her trance. She looked at Rachael for a moment instead of through her, and she allowed herself to be coaxed to her feet and out of the shadowy stall, though by the time she crossed the sill of the shower into the bathroom, she was already retreating once more into her semicatatonic state, unable to answer questions or even to respond with a nod when spoken to, unable to meet Rachael's eyes.
“We've got to get her to a hospital,” Rachael said, wincing when she got a better look at the poor child's injuries in the brighter light of the bathroom. Two fingernails on the girl's right hand had been broken back almost to the cuticle and were bleeding; one finger appeared to be broken.
Rachael sat with her on the edge of the bed while Benny went through the closets and various dresser drawers, looking for clothes.
She
listened for strange noises elsewhere in the house.
She heard none.
Still, she listened attentively.
In addition to panties, faded blue jeans, a blue-checkered blouse, peds, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, Benny found a trove of illegal drugs. The bottom drawer of one of the nightstands contained fifty or sixty hand-rolled joints, a plastic bag full of unidentified brightly colored capsules, and another plastic bag containing about two ounces of white powder. “Probably cocaine,” Benny said.
Eric had not used drugs; he had disdained them. He had always said that drugs were for the weak, for the losers who could not cope with life on its own terms. But obviously he had not been averse to supplying all sorts of illicit substances to the young girls he kept, ensuring their docility and compliance at the expense of further corrupting them. Rachael had never loathed him as much as she did at that moment.
She found it necessary to dress the naked girl as she would have had to dress a very small child, although the teenager's helpless daze — marked by spells of shivers and occasional whimpering — was caused by shock and terror rather than by the illegal chemicals that Benny had found in the nightstand.
As Rachael quickly dressed the girl, chivalrous Benny kept his eyes discreetly averted. Having found her purse while searching for her clothes, he now went through it, seeking identification. “Her name's Sarah Kiel, and she turned sixteen just two months ago. Looks like she's come west from… Coffeyville, Kansas.”
Another runaway, Rachael thought. Maybe fleeing an intolerable home life. Maybe just a rebellious type who chafed at discipline and entertained the illusion that life on her own, without restrictions, would be pure bliss. Off to L.A., the Big Orange, to take a shot at the movie business, dreaming of stardom. Or maybe just seeking some excitement, an escape from the boredom of the vast and slumbering Kansas plains.
Shadowfires Page 10
