“I know I’m irresistible, but control yourself,” she said.
Maggie climbed out of the chair and stretched her muscles in a yoga pose. When she was done, she blew the bangs out of her eyes in a gesture that was casual and erotic. His partner was ageless. Her pretty Chinese face looked no different to Stride than it had ten years ago when she was thirty, but that was part of his problem. He’d always seen her as young. As a daughter or a friend, but not as a lover.
She stretched on tiptoes and kissed him the way it was supposed to be done. He felt himself respond with desire, but she broke it off.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Maggie put her hands on her hips and arched her eyebrows seductively. “You want Chinese?”
“I could do Chinese every night.”
“Really? I think you’d get sick of it after a while.”
“No way.”
“I think you already are.”
“Maggie,” he said.
“I’m talking about dinner. What are you talking about?”
Stride felt his face grow hot with embarrassment. “How about I order us a pizza?”
“Whatever you want.”
Stride’s phone rang. He was grateful for the interruption. “This is Stride,” he said.
Dead air stretched out on the line.
“Hello?” he said. “Who is this?”
Maggie caught his eye as she sensed there was something unusual about the call. He punched the speakerphone button so they could both listen.
“This is Lieutenant Stride,” he repeated. “What do you want?”
Someone finally spoke. “I have a question.”
It was a woman’s voice, so soft and broken that it was almost inaudible. He heard traffic noise in the background. Whoever she was, she was speaking from a phone outside.
“You’ll have to talk louder,” Stride said. “I can’t hear you.”
“I have a question about – about the Dead Red case.”
“What is it?”
“I was wondering if there were things about the case – about the victims – that you hadn’t told the press.”
Stride eased down into the chair by the fire. Maggie squatted next to him, listening.
“Why?” he asked.
He heard hesitation. Breathing. There was fear in her silence.
“Please, I need to know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“The victims. Their clothes. Anything you can tell me.”
Maggie mouthed to him: It’s her. Stride nodded.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I can’t say. Not yet.”
“If you have information about this case, you need to come in and talk to me,” Stride said.
“Please. I can’t do this unless I know for sure. I can’t be wrong.”
“About what?”
“Who did this.”
“If you think you know who’s responsible for these crimes, then tell me,” Stride said.
“You don’t understand. If I’m wrong – ”
“Three women have been murdered,” he interrupted her sharply. “You need to tell me what you know. Now. Tonight. We’ll protect you.”
“This was a mistake.”
He heard it in her voice. She was ready to run. To fly away.
“Don’t hang up,” he said.
“Just tell me if there’s something else,” she begged him. “Anything. If I’m going to do this, I have to be sure.”
“That’s not how this works. You tell me what you know. That’s what needs to happen.”
“I have to go.”
He was losing her. She was on the other end of a thin thread, pulling away. Maggie waved at him and tugged at the tag on the back of her shirt. He read her mind immediately. When they weren’t trying to be lovers, they were in perfect synch.
“Wait,” he said. “Tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Tell me what size you wear. Your blouses.”
He heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Oh, no.”
“They’re yours, aren’t they?” he asked.
Something strangled emerged from her throat, not words, but a choked gasp of panic. She didn’t say anything more.
“Hello?” Stride said again, but the line was dead. She was gone.
*
Scalding water cascaded over Alison’s body. Her skin grew pink. Her wet red hair clung to her neck as she combed it backward and tilted her face into the spray. She wished she could stay forever in a cocoon behind the glass door, but even in her bathroom oasis, the ants found her. Where the water dripped in rivulets into the hollow of her back, she felt them on her body. They fought for traction on her slick legs and followed the glistening white trails of soap between her breasts. She couldn’t escape them.
They’re yours, aren’t they?
The policeman, Lieutenant Stride, had confirmed her worst fears. She’d known it all along since she’d seen the first photograph in the newspaper. Her clothes were disappearing from her closet and showing up on the bodies of murdered women. Red-haired women, like her. She was the missing link. Even so, knowing the truth, she couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t admit it to Stride or to herself. She couldn’t say the word.
Michael.
Alison turned off the water and toweled herself dry. It was late, almost midnight. He hadn’t come home, and they hadn’t talked since their brief conversation in the early evening. Evan was sleeping, soundly and innocently the way he always did, but Alison couldn’t close her eyes. She was afraid of the ants. She was afraid of what would happen overnight while she slept.
What if another woman died while she fought with her conscience?
She was naked and still damp as she emerged from the bathroom. The bedroom was lit only by the lamp on her nightstand, and it was gray with shadows. Something was wrong; she felt the disruption in the room immediately. Her nervous eyes flicked to the hallway door, which had been closed, and she saw that it was open now, letting in a triangle of light. Her closet door was open, too. She saw the darkness move and become a silhouette.
Alison screamed.
It was Michael. He was inside her closet. Her closet, which had been raided for clothes to dress his victims.
“For God’s sake, Ali,” her husband said, raising his hands to calm her. “Settle down, it’s just me.”
She was exposed and felt an urge to cover herself. This man had slept with her for more than a decade and knew the intimacies of her body better than she did herself. Even so, she swept her arms across the globes of her breasts and tightened her legs to protect her mound. He noticed immediately. His lips flattened into a scowl.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What are you doing in my closet?” she hissed, her voice strangled. She found she could hardly breathe.
Michael came closer to her. He was still dressed for work, but his clothes were wrinkled, and his face was pale and tired. She retreated until her back was against the wall. She wanted to tell him to get away, to leave her alone; she wanted to admit that she was afraid of him.
“The squirrels are back,” he said. “I heard them on the roof. Take it easy, will you? I wasn’t trying to startle you.”
“I think you should go.”
Michael sat down on the end of their bed and ran his hand back through his hair in frustration. “We need to talk, Alison.”
“Not now.”
“Then when? This can’t go on. I’m not going to live my life on the other side of a door from my own wife. Don’t you see that? Sooner or later, there’s no coming back from this. I love you, but you’re driving me away.”
“I love you, too.”
The words escaped her lips before she realized she was saying them. It was true. That was the root of her terror and her hesitation. She loved Michael, and she didn’t want to lose him. She didn’t want to believe that what she suspected about him could rea
lly be true. Not him. Not her husband. Not a man who had slept beside her and made love to her thousands of times. Whatever she thought was happening, she was wrong.
She wanted him to convince her. She needed everything to be the way it was before.
Her arms fell down to her side, unveiling her body. He saw the opening she was giving him. Her husband crossed the short open space between them in a single stride and wrapped her up in his arms. She felt the easy grace as he held her, his hands roaming her back, his mouth on her lips, on her neck, and on the swell of her chest. He was tall and strong. She could feel his arousal, and she was aroused, too, like a swollen river pushing over a dam. She threw aside her doubts, and in the rush of passion, her suspicions seemed like crazy thoughts. They couldn’t be real; they were hallucinations. Like the ants.
Holding him, she buried her face in his hair to inhale his scent, but it wasn’t the musk of his body that she smelled. It was a woman’s perfume, wafting from him like sweat. Not her perfume. A stranger’s.
Alison stiffened and shoved him away, nearly making him fall. She felt like a fool to have trusted him. “What the hell did you do?”
He stared at her, hungry with desire. “I don’t understand.” And then, with his eyes cast downward at his clothes, as if he could smell the other woman in the room with them: “Listen, nothing happened.”
“Get out.”
“I told her no. I was vulnerable, but I wanted you. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“You bastard. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”
Alison ran into the bathroom and locked herself inside. He followed, pounding at the door. She felt the angry vibrations on the wood pulsing through her body. He shouted at her, and she shut her hands over her ears, not wanting to hear his voice. She wouldn’t be weak anymore. She wouldn’t let herself be dazzled by his lies.
She finally faced the truth. He was a monster.
Monsters had to be destroyed.
*
Alison parked exactly where she had the night before, near a convenience store in the industrial section of the harbor, close enough to the water to hear the great boats loading and offloading iron ore. She stared at the pay phone on the graffiti-covered wall near the broken door of the men’s toilet. Whoever had used it last had left the phone off the hook, and the receiver dangled on the end of its metal coil, swaying as the wind blew. The phone was ground zero for addicts looking to score drugs and hookers collecting hotel room numbers for tourists.
She didn’t want to use a phone anywhere near her downtown office where she might be seen. She wanted no way for the police to trace the call back to her. If she was going to betray her husband, she would do it anonymously. Sooner or later, the truth would come out, but not now. All she wanted was to hand them the name and retreat back into the shadows.
Michael Malville.
She studied the people haunting the parking lot, and her anxiety soared. Three twenty-something boys clustered by the neon lights of the store window, smoking and swearing as they shoved each other. A dockworker with his belly over his belt sauntered out of the open door of the toilet. He was unzipped, flashing his white underwear. An Asian hooker in a pink mini-skirt and faux fur coat cased the men at the gas pumps.
Alison didn’t belong here. Her perfect home, her perfect life, was miles away, up on the hill, in the woods, by the lake.
She took a ragged breath as she got out of the car and lit a cigarette to calm her nerves. She felt leering eyes on her. She straightened her back and walked deliberately toward the phone, ignoring the loud whispers of the boys sizing up her body. The hooker winked at her and chewed gum and listened to her cell phone. Alison took the pay phone receiver in her hand; the plastic was sticky and crusted with dirt. She squirted disinfectant on a tissue and wiped it down, and she did the same with the keypad.
She wondered: could she do this?
Alison dialed.
“This is Stride,” he answered immediately, as if he was expecting his phone to ring.
She hesitated again, feeling her courage flinch at the reality of what it meant to make this call. She didn’t know if she could speak.
“I know it’s you,” Stride said into the silence. “Are you ready to tell me who you are?”
“You have to understand how hard this is for me,” she said.
“Three women are dead. It was hard for them.”
Alison felt as if he had slapped her, but he was right. She also knew there could be no anonymity for her. She couldn’t hide from what she was doing or keep her identity secret. She had to tell him everything. “The blouses you found on the victims,” she said.
“Yes?”
“They’re mine.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I had those same tops. All of them. Now they’re missing from my closet.”
“Who could have taken them? Who has access to your closet?”
Alison put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t say it.
“Are you there?” he went on. “Who could have taken them?”
“Only one man,” she said.
“Who is he?”
She closed her eyes. “My husband.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. It was as if, hearing those words, Stride understood what it meant for her to say them. He recognized the terrible line she had crossed.
“You think your husband is guilty of these murders?” he asked.
Alison realized she was silently crying. Her breath could barely form the word. “Yes.”
“Do you have any other evidence to prove it?”
“There’s a knife missing in our kitchen,” she went on. “I noticed it was gone around the time of the first murder. I haven’t seen it since then.”
“Anything else?”
“His car,” she said. “It was driven thirty miles the night before last. The night that the third girl died. I checked the mileage before I went to bed and again in the morning.”
“So you already suspected him at that point?”
She could hear the accusation in his voice. And yet you said nothing. A woman was killed because of your silence.
“I didn’t know what to think,” she said.
“Is it just you and your husband at home?” Stride asked.
“Our son lives with us. He’s ten.”
“Does anyone else have a key to your house?”
“No.”
“This is a hard question,” Stride told her, “but do you have any idea why. Why would your husband do something like this? Is there anything in his past to suggest a violent personality?”
“Nothing,” Alison insisted, and it wasn’t a lie. Michael was no smooth pearl – he could swear, and he had a raw temper – but she’d never seen him as anything but a lover, father, and provider. They’d been happy.
“Then why?” Stride repeated.
It was the question she’d asked herself over and over for weeks. “I guess it’s me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve pushed him away. I’ve been having problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Psychological problems.” Every night, I dream the ants are watching me from the ceiling.
“You did the right thing by calling.”
“That’s not how it feels,” she said.
Life would never be the same. Going forward, everything would be different. Everything would be worse.
Alison added, “I suppose you need my name.”
“That actually isn’t necessary, Mrs. Malville.”
“How do you know who I am?” Then in the silence that followed, she murmured: “Oh, my God, what did I do?”
Alison slammed the phone down onto the hook. She spun around in panic, but she had no chance to run. She found the Asian hooker and the man with the unzipped pants waiting for her. They had police shields in their hands. The three boys – not boys, but young cops – guarded her car.
&n
bsp; There was nowhere to go.
“My name is Sergeant Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police,” the hooker told her. “Please come with us, Mrs. Malville.”
*
Michael Malville slapped his palms on the wooden table and cursed. “This is fucking insane. Do you hear me? It’s crazy. I want to talk to Alison.”
Stride and Maggie sat opposite Malville in the interview room in City Hall. Fluorescent light bathed the hard lines on the man’s face, giving shadows to his cheekbones and making his sweat glisten. He was an athletic, good-looking man, tall and strong.
Killers came in all shapes and sizes.
“That’s not possible right now,” Stride told him.
“There is no way Alison said I did this. No way.”
Stride was silent. He wanted Malville’s brain focused on his wife’s betrayal. The man had listened to his rights in stunned silence and, so far, he hadn’t followed the traditional suspect path of shutting up and calling a lawyer. Stride wanted to keep him talking as long as possible.
“If this is all a misunderstanding, we want to find that out as soon as possible,” Stride told him.
“It is.”
“Well, let’s go back to the dates of the three crimes. They all happened overnight. Can you tell us where you were on those nights?”
Malville rocked back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. He shook his head in disbelief. “I was home,” he said quietly.
“Was your wife home, too?”
“Yes.”
“Do you sleep in the same bedroom?”
Malville hesitated before answering. “Not lately.”
“Why is that?”
“Alison has been struggling. Something’s wrong with her.”
“Something?”
“She’s been having nightmares.”
Stride nodded. “So she doesn’t know whether you left the house or not on those nights.”
“I didn’t leave the house,” he insisted. “I slept in my office.”
Following a glance from Stride, Maggie slipped three photographs out of a large manila envelope. She pushed them across the table to Malville, who winced as he saw them.
Spitting Devil Page 3
