Though I knew the threat in Malephar’s voice was real, part of me relished his anger.
I’m just going to tail him, I countered. I never said I wouldn’t do that.
You promised not to impede his efforts—
And following him is not the same as stopping him.
If you so much as make yourself seen—
We’ll worry about that when we get there, shall we?
A long silence, then: You are meddling with a power beyond your comprehension, craven one.
I didn’t answer. But I did jog to my car and motor back to the convenience store, where I waited for Danny to leave the crime scene.
When he did, I followed.
Chapter Ten
My fears proved baseless, however. Despite his threats, Danny didn’t go prowling for victims. He simply returned to his apartment around midnight, and though I waited until well past three AM, he never went out. It rained all night. I sat in the Civic, my head throbbing from the relentless drum of the raindrops, and watched Danny’s apartment.
Finally, I returned home exhausted and slept until midmorning.
The staff members at St. Matthew’s knew all about the 7-11 incident and proved surprisingly supportive. Many congratulated me for, in one secretary’s words, “defending the innocent.” I didn’t encounter Father Patterson, which was a blessing. Sister Rebecca offered a muted smile when we crossed paths at the coffee station in the main office.
“Are you in much pain?” she asked.
I fingered the temple wound that had almost entirely healed. Feigned discomfort. “Pretty sore. I should have let them take me to the hospital.”
“And the hand?”
I’m afraid I almost dropped the steaming cup of coffee I’d just poured. In truth, I’d forgotten about the back of my hand, had even forgotten to dress the non-existent wound this morning after showering.
Had she noticed?
“Much better,” I said. “I still feel a twinge now and then, but the painkillers seem to be doing the trick.”
Sister Rebecca studied me for an unbearably long moment, then nodded and filled her mug. “If you need anything, you know where I am.” She turned to go, then paused and looked back at me. “The newspaper said the gun was fired less than a foot away from your ear. How severe is the damage?”
I gave a slight shrug. “Sounds are a little muffled. And there’s a… um… ringing. I think I’ll recover though.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said, going, “if it heals as swiftly as your hand did.”
I gaped after her, feeling both exposed and impressed with her mental acumen. If I weren’t so entranced by Liz…
Strike that from your mind, my conscience demanded. If you care about either woman, you’ll stay far away from them.
That, however, proved difficult. For the moment I returned to my office, thinking only of holing up for the day and avoiding human interaction, my phone rang.
“Jason?” a voice I knew too well asked.
My pulse quickened. “Hello, Liz. Everything okay?”
“Is everything okay? Jason, why didn’t you call me last night?”
“I guess I—”
“I’ve been trying to reach you at your cottage all morning. I even drove over there, but you’d gone to work.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She added, “I almost showed up at the cathedral, but I thought it might not be… you know…”
I did know. And the implications of her reticence made me deliriously happy. She was one of my parishioners, but she was becoming something much more. That she was mindful of how it might appear if she, a still-married woman, showed up at my office looking distraught about my well-being, made me very happy indeed. I knew my feelings for her were powerful, yet hearing her express a similar regard, no matter how indirectly, filled me with bliss.
“I appreciate your concern, Liz, but I’m—”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a stranger,” she snapped. “Dammit, I’m worried about you. You could have been killed.”
I closed my mouth, touched and chastened. I couldn’t recall the last time a woman had shown so much genuine emotion toward me. Maybe never.
She pitched a weary sigh. “Just tell me when I can see you.”
Goosebumps rippled my flesh. “I…I don’t know.”
Something new came into her voice. “Can you take a break? I can be at your cottage in twenty minutes.”
I fought off a sweep of wooziness. “That would be fine. I—”
I jolted, remembering the blood I’d never cleaned up in my living room.
“Maybe it would be better if I came to your house, Liz.”
“Casey and Carolyn are both at school,” she said.
I couldn’t speak.
“Will you?” she asked.
“Twenty minutes,” I croaked.
“Sooner, if you can.”
¨¨¨
I completed the trip in sixteen minutes, including the time it took for me to stop by my cottage to brush my teeth and comb my hair. My breath smelled fresh when I reentered the Civic, but my hair looked little better. Like some barn swallow’s straw nest, my blond hair kept popping up where I wanted it to lie flat and remaining limp where I attempted to add a roguish spike or two.
After twenty-nine years of celibacy, I was overflowing with lust, but even more powerful was my regard for Liz, my desire to express my growing love for her. I pushed the Civic past the speed limit the entire way and navigated turns with a recklessness I’d never exhibited.
But when Liz opened the door, I knew instantly that something terrible had happened.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Come in,” she said, casting a nervous glance toward the road.
I entered, saying, “If you’re worried about my being here in the daylight, I could—”
“It isn’t that,” she said and led me to the living room. She was attired in a simple beige sundress, yet on her the garment was alluring, sultry even. It clung to her hips and buttocks in a way that augmented my attraction to her, and when she sat on the couch and beckoned for me to join her, the sight of her curvy bosom made me dizzy with desire.
“Can I help?” I asked, sitting next to her, our knees almost touching.
“Ron called,” she said.
Wrecking things again, I thought. A dozen possibilities raced through my head, none of them pleasant: Ron had persuaded her to reconcile. Ron had decided to contest the divorce, thus drawing the process out. Ron had implicated me in an adultery accusation, and I would be publicly disgraced. Or worse, Ron had told Liz about what I’d done last night, had provided an unvarnished account of my savagery.
She said, “It happened again.”
I stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
“The Sweet Sixteen,” she explained. “He struck again last night.”
Impossible! I almost shouted. “Liz, he can’t have… he only killed the Howell girl a few days ago.”
“It’s the pattern. A serial killer’s appetites get stronger, the murders more frequent.” There were tears in her eyes. “It’s on the news right now. Look if you don’t believe me.”
I sat there thunderstruck. Had Danny somehow slipped out of his apartment building to commit the atrocity without my knowledge?
Liz made a fist, tapped her knee. “They say it happened at around nine o’clock last night.”
Another shock. Danny was at the convenience store from eight to ten. The authorities must have their times wrong, I reasoned. It was the only explanation.
I had to be careful. If I revealed too much, Malephar might murder me. Or worse, he might compel me to attack Liz. “Who was the victim?” I asked.
“Her name was Julia Deveroux. She was walking home from the private school over there, Saint Anthony’s. Her play practice ran a little late. Her house is only a few blocks from the school, so her parents assumed she’d be—” Liz broke off, looked at me imploringly. “Father,
why is this happening?”
Aware we’d fallen back into our former roles of parishioner and priest, I put a hand over hers, said, “We live in a fallen world, Liz.”
She jerked her hand away. “Don’t give me that crap. Don’t tell me it’s our fault or Eve’s fault. Is that why my son was victimized by a demon?”
“I didn’t—”
“Those girls should still be alive, goddammit.”
“Of course they should.”
“And Casey didn’t deserve any of this! Don’t you dare tell me he did!”
“I’m not saying Casey was at fault—”
She was on her feet, backing away from me. “Or Father Sutherland’s theory? That a terrible sin brought this judgment upon our son. You still think Ron is the Sweet Sixteen Killer? That I was so stupid that I wouldn’t have noticed something like that?”
“I don’t think Ron’s the killer.”
“And what if he is, Jason? What if he is? Just what kind of a God does that to an innocent child? What kind of a God punishes a sweet, caring boy—”
“Casey is a good person, Liz. He’s just going through a rough—”
“—for the sins of someone else? Are you going to throw scripture at me? ‘The sins of the father’? Well that’s bullshit, Jason!”
I rose, endeavored to close the distance between us. “The God described in the Old Testament can seem vengeful. Capricious even.”
“Try bloodthirsty and sadistic.”
I brought up my hands in a placating gesture. “Which is why I believe—as Father Sutherland believed—that we need to interact with the text, to examine it critically. To examine the sources so we can decipher the true will—”
“Follow me,” she interrupted, starting past me.
“Where—”
“Just come on.”
Bemused, I hurried after her. She led me through the living room, along a hallway, then down the basement steps. I detected an undercurrent of must and recalled the night of the exorcism, the torrential rains that accompanied the horror. Though the house was straight out of a magazine spread, it didn’t surprise me that the basement would take on moisture in a storm. It was very old.
Liz hadn’t bothered to illuminate the stygian corridor in which I now found myself. I extended my arms, going by feel and sound. I was about to call to Liz, my male pride be damned, when ahead a doorway lit up and Liz passed inside. I hustled after her, grateful for the light, even more thankful for the company. Being stranded in that lonely stretch of basement had been too much like being alone in my cottage with the Sweet Sixteen Killer.
When I burst through the doorway, I found Liz leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. The painted drywall against which she leaned was one of the few sections of the small room not festooned with corkboard bulletin boards. Of course, very little of the cork was visible because the boards were plastered with newspaper clippings, enlarged pictures. A Mac with a huge monitor sat atop a stylish desk with a light wood surface and spidery black legs.
“Well?” she asked.
I blinked at her, my eyes struggling to adjust to my new surroundings. The brilliant canned lights overhead were already making me sweat, though my anxiety and frightened dash through the basement might have played a role in that as well. “Well, what?”
She gave me an incredulous smile and flourished a hand at the bulletin board to her right. “This.”
I followed her gesture and at first felt nothing but puzzlement. There were large blocks of text, but no headlines. I moved closer to the bulletin board, squinting to read the tiny print. Different passages in the articles had been highlighted, though the colors varied. Pink, blue, orange, yellow.
Highlighted in pink, I saw…
“…taken Howell to a secluded spot in the park to sexually assault her.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickled. My eyes flicked to a chunk of text highlighted in green: “Authorities initially suspected Panagopoulis’s former boyfriend, until it was found that he was visiting relatives in Milwaukee on the night of her murder.”
My heart dropped as the brutality of Ashley Panagopoulis’s death arose in my memory.
“Are they color-coded by victims?” I asked.
“Theories,” she said.
I glanced at her.
“So far I’ve got six possible explanations for the killings,” she said. “The yellow highlighter suggests it’s a homeless person committing the crimes. The light green one supports the notion the killer is a policeman.”
With an effort, I kept my mouth shut.
“Two possibilities make no sense,” she went on, “but the evidence is strongest for those theories.”
“What are they?”
“Not yet. I want to hear what you think first.”
I reached out, fingered the top of an article. I realized the headline hadn’t been excised, but had rather been folded under and thusly obscured from view.
“I hate the headlines,” she explained. “They’re too lurid, particularly the Sun-Times. The article about Makayla Howell made me want to hurt someone.” She gave me a half-hearted smile. “Poor choice of words, I suppose.”
I scanned the bulletin board all the way to the next wall. More articles here, these from the first three murders. “Why the sudden interest in these crimes?”
“Who says it’s sudden? I’ve been studying the case for months.”
“But why?”
“The first victim was one of my son’s classmates. Or have you forgotten, Father Crowder?”
The way she uttered my name sent a wave of desolation through me. I had driven over here believing my life as a celibate anchorite might finally be coming to an end; now the gulf between us yawned wider than ever. “I guess I forgot about the connection,” I said in a small voice.
“Secondly,” she went on, “do I need to tell you why I want to solve this case, Father? Why everyone should want to bring that monster to justice? I would think you, as a supposed man of God, would understand better than anyone.”
Supposed man of God?
“Liz, I want these murders to end as much as you do.”
For once I was telling the absolute truth.
She studied my face a long moment. Then, some of her ire seemed to bleed away. “I do have another motive,” she said. “A couple more, actually. Since Ron was implicated in the killings the other night, I guess I’ve grown obsessed. All this,” she made a sweeping gesture encompassing the entire room, “has gone up in the last forty-eight hours.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “This is what you’ve been doing all day?”
“Would you rather I sit around and fret?”
I had to admit it made sense. If I were Liz, and my soon-to-be-ex-husband were implicated in a series of horrific crimes, I’d take a greater interest in the situation too. Despite the restraining order, their lives were inextricably linked. He’d fathered their children. He’d bought this house. Even now, his influence stained every room.
I perused the walls. “This is awfully thorough.”
She gave me a rueful look. “I have a brain, you know.”
“I know you do. It’s one of the most attractive things about you.”
Her eyes narrowed, but I could tell she was pleased. She looked back at the bulletin board. “What baffles me most about last night’s killing is how the M.O. seems to have changed.”
She reached toward a laser printer, came away with about a dozen sheets of printed paper. Studying the top sheet—the headline read SWEET SIXTEEN STRIKES AGAIN, the subtitle DEATH TOLL AT EIGHT AFTER LATEST ATROCITY—she said, “People are already calling last night’s murder a copycat.”
“They’re saying it was a different killer?” I asked, though I was already convinced of this myself. I had no idea how the police had so firmly established the time of death, but if they were positive the crime was committed at around nine PM, it was impossible that Danny had killed Julia Deveroux.
A copycat crime was
the only explanation.
“The first seven murders,” Liz said, “kept increasing in intensity. The killer whipped himself—or herself—into a wilder frenzy with each successive crime.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Herself?”
She nodded at the bulletin board. “You’ll notice there isn’t much highlighted in orange. That theory posits that there are two killers—a male-female couple, most likely. That would still explain why there was semen found in the bodies.”
I kept my doubts to myself. She’d obviously invested a great deal of time in this investigation, and I had no desire for her to group me with Ron, who’d treated her with nothing but condescension. “You were saying last night was different?”
She nodded. “Last night’s crime… it seems almost shy by comparison.”
“Can’t they test the killer’s, um—”
“Semen?” she supplied.
I nodded.
“Oh, they’ll perform DNA tests. But those take time.”
“But in a case this important…”
“They’ll put a rush on it, I’m sure. If it does come back different than the main perpetrator’s, we’ll know that the orange theory is possible—” She nodded at the bulletin board, “—or that the killing was a Sweet Sixteen wannabe.”
The notion sent chills down my spine. That anyone would aspire to such depravity…
A thought occurred to me. “Why would a man and woman kill together? Or for that matter, why would two men?”
“Sexual thrills,” she answered. “The man and woman like to watch each other sexually violate the girls. Or the men like to watch each other do it. In either scenario, there’s the element of voyeurism. The fulfillment of forbidden desires.”
I grew nauseated at the notion. “I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with this. Isn’t the fact of them bad enough? Why do you need to surround yourself this way?”
“Because I’m getting close, Jason. I think I can solve the mystery.”
“But the police—”
“—aren’t doing enough,” she snapped. “Listen, it was the Alspaugh murder that changed things. Widened the net of possible suspects, so to speak. There were too many witnesses near the crime scene for the killer to have simply walked away. Security cameras everywhere. The killer had to have some secret way in and out to avoid being seen.”
Exorcist Falls Page 22
