Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2)

by Carolyn Weston

  SUSANNAH SCREAMING

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2015 Brash Books LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298508

  ISBN 13: 9781941298503

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Carolyn Weston

  Poor, Poor, Ophelia

  Rouse the Demon

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  “This is KCOP,” announced the gentle disembodied FM voice. “Kay-cop, your Santa Monica station.” Bringing the best in music. And five minutes of news. Every hour on the hour.

  What sounded like theme music floated from the hidden speakers. Yawning, leaning back against the pink-enameled Maytag which spun his meager wash, Rees tried to identify the melody, but he could not. The washer pulsed warmly against his buttocks. Felt good, he decided. My friend, the machine. Lovable laundromats for lonely hearts.

  “Four o’clock,” the radio was telling him portentously. Weather would be fine in Southern California this Monday morning, but with low coastal fog night and morning. The news was the usual collection of catastrophes. Then the music continued, bland as Muzak, almost as comforting as sleep. Insomniacs’ delight, Rees thought. Anything was better than silence at four in the morning, even this mindless burble of electronic sound which probably ran night and day here, along with the gas dryers, the rows of washers, the water heaters hissing and humming like benign monsters behind a pink-painted partition.

  His laundry had five minutes more on its cycle. Lighting a cigarette, he wandered down the long, narrow washing-machine-lined storefront and looked out the plate-glass display window at the dark street. Montana Avenue. He had noticed the name and this twenty-four-hour laundromat when he had passed by yesterday.

  At this hour the street was dark and deserted, a ghost-town thoroughfare. Across the way was a garden and florist shop. On this side, across the alley beside the laundromat, was the liquor store and market where he had shopped yesterday for the scotch and soda, the cheese and crackers, which were his version of a spinster’s tea and toast.

  On the dark pane, his own reflection peered back at him, dim and transparent, like a photo negative held up to bad light. No mistaking that image, he thought bleakly. The loner. Behind his eyes throbbed the slow ache of constant fatigue which had become chronic in the last eighteen months, for he had lost the habit of sleep. Even his bones were tired. Self-pity had become a fearful problem.

  But the face which looked back at him was not pitying. A sallow, dark-browed Celtic visage—the face of a fanatic, Ellen had once said. He had laughed at the time. But he’d been happy then.

  The washing machine clicked off behind him. Simultaneously the rumble of the hidden water heaters lessened, and as Rees dug his steamy heap of clothing out of the washer, he could hear a droning far off. A summer sound. Like bees in a garden. It grew louder and louder while he tossed his laundry into one of the dryers standing open like a flimsy old-fashioned safe, the somnolent hum becoming a mechanical roar—a motorcycle approaching at high speed. And now he could hear a car also, perhaps a block behind. A chase? he wondered. Cops and robbers. Diverted, Rees slammed the dryer shut. But he forgot the nickels which made it go.

  For sudden light flared across the front window of the laundromat. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the lunatic shadow crouched behind the single headlamp as the motorcycle screeched into the alley, booming by the building so violently that the front panes shivered. Christ, at that speed, the fool had to skid. Idiot, idiot. He heard the cycle reeling out of control and rushed for the back door of the laundromat which let into a parking area beside the alley. But he wasn’t quick enough. The clang and clatter of ripping metal and breaking glass resounded down the alley. But the vacuumlike moment of silence which follows wrecks was drowned out by the car which rocked diagonally, tires howling, across Montana and into the alley. Jumping back, Rees had a glimpse of a sedan, an impression of a driver, something glittering in the back seat. The wind of the big dark car’s passage swirled dust back into his face as he stopped in the middle of the alley—spectator, then participant, in another swift and terrible nightmare:

  The car hit the wrecked motorcycle, and in the sheeting glare of its headlights channeled up the fenced alley like light in a tunnel, he saw metallic debris flying, and behind that, at the dim edges of illumination, a hunched, crippled figure running. Then the car lights went out. Paralyzed, his mind rejecting what his senses perceived, Rees watched the shadowy vehicle swerve left, then right, then left again, hunting as impersonally as a missile on target. An instant later, he heard the impact, solid yet soft. The car stopped, then backed up. Howling “No” or “Stop”—he would never remember—Rees pounded up the alley. But the car went on, jolting as if it rode over an abandoned tire. And at the next street north it turned left, roaring away. Rees bent over the dark figure crumpled like a ragbag bundle. The motorcyclist was dead. Even in the dark there was no mistaking that life was crushed out of him.

  Later, he found out that a neighbor had heard the crash, his shouting, and instead of investigating, had called the police. Rees was still crouched by the body when he heard the siren. A prowl car turned up the alley off Montana. And as the police car pulled up, back gates in the tall fencing began to open. Rees was surrounded suddenly by robed and slippered spectators whose avid faces, pasty in the headlights, seemed ghostly counterparts of those others…Hovering over him like merciless masks as he held Ellen. Hovering while he watched her die…

  The patrolmen moved in. And as they bent over the body, Rees moved back, leaning shakily against the fence. He could hardly breathe as he told them. He knew he sounded hysterical, but it did not occur to him that they might not believe him until he heard the one who radioed for an ambulance calling what happened “a hit-and-run.” The other kept talking to the spectators about “the accident.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Rees kept saying hoarsely. “Don’t you und
erstand what I’ve been saying?”

  “Take it easy, mister,” the policeman who had been radioing said soothingly.

  “It wasn’t hit-and-run. That car chased him—”

  “We’ll take down your statement in a minute, mister. Just take it easy.” The policeman glanced around the crowd, professionally calm and rational. “Anybody else see or hear this car?”

  “All I heard was a crash and him yelling, Officer.” Tubby in his bathrobe, his bald head gleaming, one of the neighbors peered curiously at Rees. “Yelling something, I don’t know what it was. Then I heard the siren, so I come out to have a look—”

  “You’re the one who called in, then?”

  “That’s right, Officer.” He pursed his lips self-importantly. “Another time, I might of come out first, see if I could help any. But not these days. You got to—”

  “I saw the car,” a soft female voice beyond the light interrupted him. Separating like a stage crowd, the bystanders let her through—a young woman wearing a trench coat many sizes too large for her. She was smiling nervously and kept her head turned away to avoid seeing the body. “At the other end of the alley.” She was pointing north where the car had disappeared. “It turned into the street just as I came around the corner.”

  “What kind of a car, miss?”

  She blinked at the policeman and he smiled encouragingly. She was a very pretty girl in her early twenties, tallish, obviously slender under the too-large coat. “Well, a sedan, I think. But it was going so fast—”

  “You notice the color, or what make it was?”

  “Green, I think. Dark green.”

  “It was black,” Rees said. “A black Mercedes.”

  “You see a Mercedes too, miss?”

  “Well, no, actually.” She glanced at Rees, then away again. “Didn’t look like an import to me.”

  “All right,” the patrolman said before Rees could protest, “we’ll get both your statements later. Miss, if you’d like to sit in the car over here,” and he led her away.

  Rees realized the policeman meant to separate them. But from the girl’s pleased, half-flirtatious attitude, it was obvious she thought it was courtesy. Why had she claimed the car was green? he wondered. And she hadn’t said whether she had been driving or walking when she saw it. Doubt filled him suddenly, a dizzy aftermath of his blinding shock. At the center of his mind, Ellen’s face burned incandescent…Eyes closed. Chalky white. They marked DOA on her pale forehead…Sickening, Rees leaned against the fence again. Maybe the car had been green after all.

  Another patrol car arrived, then another. After what seemed an eternity, an ambulance rolled up the alley, its siren a dying moan. Then a pale-colored Mustang pulled up, and two men got out. One of the patrolmen pointed to Rees and they made a beeline for him—detectives, they told him. The older of the two said, “You’re the eyewitness, right?”

  Rees nodded, stumbling slightly when the older one took his arm, leading him over to the Mustang.

  “Patrolman who called in said you’re claiming this wasn’t an accident.”

  “Look, I know what I saw!” Trembling, Rees leaned against the Mustang. “That car chased him, and caught him—”

  “All right, mister, we’re not arguing with you. Just trying to find out what happened.”

  The young one opened one of the Mustang’s two doors, pulling the seat forward. “How about sitting inside while we talk,” he suggested mildly. “Be more comfortable for you.”

  Rees climbed shakily into the back seat. Both detectives sat in the front with their legs out the open doors. Suddenly aware of the dome light shining on his face, of the fact that he couldn’t get out now unless they let him, Rees felt a clutch of remembered terror. The older one was asking for identification, and fumbling, Rees pulled his driver’s license out of his wallet, handing it over the back of the front seat.

  “Paul Joseph Rees, hah? San Francisco.” The older one’s weatherbeaten face creased into a smile, but his eyes looked hard as marbles, cold and watchful. “You still live at this address in Frisco, Mr. Rees?”

  “Not any longer. I don’t have a permanent address as yet.”

  “Sounds like you’re planning on locating down here.” The young one was smiling, too. A real smile. “Welcome to Southern California.”

  Relaxing slightly, Rees fixed his attention on the pleasant unlined face. What had he said his name was? Detective Somebody. About twenty-five, deeply tanned, a real Southern California type, with his big shoulders and sun-bleached brown hair—one of the sun worshipers. The other one’s name was Krug, and it suited him. A sergeant. And a bastard, Rees thought. “How about—” He was croaking, he realized, and cleared his throat. “How about some coffee? There’s a vending machine in the laundromat. Don’t know about you, but I could use a lift.”

  “Good idea,” Detective Somebody agreed.

  But the older one couldn’t be had that easily. “Your company transfer you, something like that, Mr. Rees?”

  “I don’t have a company.”

  “That mean you’re unemployed?”

  “That’s right.” Rees swallowed dryness. “Look, I don’t quite see what this has to do with my being a witness here—”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Rees, we’re just doing our job like always.” Krug eyed him calmly. “What’s your line of work?”

  “I’m a chemist.”

  “Sounds good.” Krug sucked his teeth. “You been out of work long?”

  The lie came facilely: “Only a couple of weeks. I decided to take a vacation, then relocate down here.”

  “Where you staying, Mr. Rees?”

  “At the Pelican Motel. It’s on the oceanfront.”

  “Couple hundred feet above it, you mean.” Krug grinned. “Top of the palisades. Ocean Avenue, right?” Without waiting for corroboration, he went on: “So you been in town—what?—a week or so?”

  “No, only since Friday.”

  “Friday. Un-hunh. Okay, Mr. Rees, let’s hear your story.”

  He told it again, but this time the words seemed stale, exaggerated. Some element was missing, he realized. Lying had somehow destroyed his certainty.

  The young one kept writing in a notebook, but the older one simply sat there staring at Rees until he had finished talking. Then after a reflective silence he said, “That all of it?”

  Bastard cop. “Yes, I think that’s everything.”

  Krug sighed gustily. “No details then, I guess. Like a license number. What the driver looked like.”

  “Sorry. It all happened so fast, you see. But maybe that girl—”

  “Sure.” Krug cut him off. “Okay, Mr. Rees.” He slid off the seat, and, standing outside the car, bent to look in. “Better be sure,” he advised quietly. “Know what I mean? What you’re talking about here is homicide.”

  “Yes, I realize—”

  “Okay. All I meant was, you sign a statement, it’s official, get me?” Then he walked away.

  “What the hell is he trying to do?”

  “Easy, Mr. Rees, it’s all part of our job.” The young detective was smiling again. “We only want to make sure you know what you’re saying.” He snapped his notebook shut and glanced at his watch. “We’ll probably be here awhile. Why don’t you go get that cup of coffee you were talking about? Then we’ll be ready to write up a witness statement for your signature.”

  No wonder people don’t cooperate with the police. “Do I have any choice?” Rees asked.

  “Afraid not,” the young detective said cheerfully. “See you later, okay?” And he followed his partner up the alley.

  Rees wandered back into the laundromat and, warmed by a Styrofoam cup of vending-machine coffee, broodingly watched his laundry tumbling inside the barrel of the dryer. He wished now he had never got involved. Much later it occurred to him that the driver of that Mercedes must be wishing the same.

  TWO

  “Nice pair of night crawlers we got for witnesses,” Al Krug commented sourly wh
en they had finished with the girl. “I’ll believe that guy’s a chemist when I see his diploma. As for her—” He made a flatulent sound with his lips. “All that crap about insomnia. For my dough, she was probably hoofing it home from her last trick.”

  Her name was Susannah Roche, the girl had told them, and she lived in one of the high-rise apartment buildings on Ocean Avenue. “I’m an actress,” she had added brightly, snuggling down into the trench coat. “And no cracks, please. Because I really am. Call the Guild if you don’t believe me…”

  The uniformed patrolman sitting in the front seat of the squad car grinned appreciatively, and she beamed at him. Then catching Krug’s look, she assumed an exaggeratedly serious expression. “Couldn’t sleep,” she went on, “and I get buggy trying to count sheep. So I took myself a walk, same as I do lots of nights. Or did till tonight. Now that I realize people get murdered—” She shivered theatrically. “Probably have nightmares for weeks.” She turned to Krug. “Was he really run down on purpose? I mean, it seems such a crazy way to kill somebody! Like a schlock movie or something.” She hesitated. “Couldn’t that man—” Then she stopped herself. “Forget I said that. Let’s face it, who’d tell a nut story like that if it wasn’t true? You’d have to be freaking out—”

  “You let us worry about that.” Impatiently, Krug blew out his breath. “Go on, Miss Roche, let’s try to get this thing moving.”

  “Well, I was walking up Fourteenth Street, and when I was almost at the corner, I heard this noise. Like a crash or something. So, instead of heading home, I turned right. What is it—east? Anyway, I turn the corner on Alta, and this car comes—varoom!—out of the alley.”

  “You see the driver?”

  “Not really. But it was a man, I think.”

  “Anybody else in the car?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “And the car was a dark-green sedan, you think?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not a Mercedes.”

  She hesitated again. “Well—you dig—I’m very visual. Most theater people are. We develop this sense of—”