Heartstopper

by Joy Fielding

  “Look, just tell me where my wife is and I’ll get out of your hair,” Cal offered, as if his visit were nothing more than a pesky intrusion.

  “How many times do we have to tell you we don’t know where she is?” Kerri said.

  “She knows,” Cal insisted, staring at the weapon in Delilah’s hand. “She was there today. My neighbor saw her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kerri glanced back at her daughter.

  “I was there,” Delilah confirmed. “I was there yesterday too. Just like I was supposed to be. I knocked. I rang the bell. Nobody answered.”

  “You’re a lying bitch.”

  “What have you done to her?” Delilah asked, her voice so low her words were barely audible.

  “What have I done to her?” Cal repeated incredulously, swaying from one foot to the other. “I haven’t done anything to her, you stupid cow. At least not yet.”

  “Don’t move,” Delilah warned. “I’ll shoot you if you take another step.” Several tears escaped her eyes to fall the length of her cheek.

  Could Delilah do it? Kerri wondered. Could her daughter actually shoot another human being?

  Cal’s abrupt laugh answered the question for her. “Who are you kidding, lard-ass? You’re not going to shoot anybody.” He pushed past Delilah and was down the stairs before the trembling girl had figured out how to remove the safety catch. The front door slammed shut behind him.

  “Oh, my God,” Kerri wailed, hearing his car squeal out of their driveway. “Give me that before you kill somebody.” She grabbed the gun from her daughter’s shaking hands. “Where did you get this thing?”

  “It’s mine,” Rose announced, suddenly appearing in the doorway, clutching her green chenille bathrobe to her chest. “Give it to me.”

  Her mother had a gun? What the hell was going on? “Since when have you had a gun?”

  “It was your father’s.”

  “Do you have a license for it?”

  “How do I know?” Rose asked impatiently.

  Kerri dropped the gun into her mother’s outstretched hand. What a night this was turning out to be. First Ian had canceled their date without explanation, then Cal Hamilton had shown up at her door and torn the house apart, then her daughter had turned into John Dillinger, and now her mother was making like Ma Barker. “You’d better hide it before the sheriff gets here.”

  “What difference does it make?” Rose said dismissively. “It’s not loaded.”

  “It’s not loaded?” Delilah asked.

  “Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Just put the damn thing away, will you?” Kerri watched Rose shuffle back to her room. It was amazing that after all these years her mother still had the ability to astound her.

  “Are you all right?” Delilah asked. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No. He’s not nearly as tough as your daddy was.” Kerri held out her arms. Delilah rushed into them, almost knocking her over. “Thank you, sweetie. You were very brave.” She kissed her daughter’s forehead, tasted the nervous perspiration that clung to her skin. Delilah’s arms snaked around her, tightening their grip with each breath. Kerri quickly extricated herself from her daughter’s painful grasp, began smoothing down the hair extensions that had become messed during the fracas.

  “He killed her,” Delilah whispered. “I know he did.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Kerri protested. “I mean, why would he come over here, tearing up the place looking for her, if he killed her?”

  “To throw us off the scent.”

  “Dear God. What an imagination you’ve got. You think he killed Liana too?” Kerri joked, trying to laugh. But the laugh died in her throat when she saw the look on her daughter’s face. “I think you’ve been watching too much television,” Kerri said. “You honestly think Cal Hamilton is a serial killer?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he killed Liana to make it look that way.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Your knight in shining armor has arrived,” her mother called out from across the hall.

  “Did you put the gun away?” Kerri asked as she walked past her room.

  “What gun?” Rose asked from her bed.

  “I could use a drink,” Kerri said.

  “Something you’re not telling me?” John asked as Kerri was walking him to his car some forty minutes later. They’d gone over the events of the evening several times in those forty minutes, and he’d questioned both her mother and daughter about what had happened. Nobody had mentioned the gun. Was that what he was referring to?

  “I’m pretty sure we told you everything.”

  He nodded, although the expression on his face said he wasn’t sure he believed her. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Even in the dark, Kerri was aware of the sheriff’s eyes on her body as she moved, and she casually increased the already exaggerated sway of her hips. She knew how John Weber felt about her, that he’d been lusting after her since the sixth grade, even before she had hips, for God’s sake. Certainly before she had breasts, she thought, pulling her shoulders back and pushing her twice-augmented bosom forward.

  She didn’t even remember what her own breasts looked like anymore. She just remembered her mother’s scalding assessment of their inadequacies. “Flat as a pancake,” her mother had repeatedly pronounced. “You better find a guy who likes pancakes.” There were the constant put-downs, the continual comparisons to her sisters that all but guaranteed their future estrangement. “Ruthie has such lovely breasts,” her mother often said. “She gets them from me. Unfortunately, you and Lorraine take after your father’s side of the family, although at least Lorraine has nice legs.”

  Kerri ran her hands along her once-heavy thighs. A lot of lunges and a little liposuction had leveled the playing field rather nicely, although the principal players had long since left the field. Both of Kerri’s sisters had managed to escape their mother: Ruthie had moved to California a decade ago, calling only when she needed money for another stint in rehab. Lorraine had taken the easy way out and died.

  Kerri glanced back at the house, saw her mother watching her from her bedroom window. She’s just waiting for us all to die and then she can die happy, she thought.

  “I’ll station someone out front,” John offered as they reached his cruiser. “Until I get Cal into custody.”

  “I appreciate that.” Kerri listened as John phoned in his request for a deputy. He’d always taken such good care of her, she was thinking as he returned his cell phone to the pocket of his pants. He’d liked her in all her various incarnations: flat or busty, thin or lush-lipped, chunky-thighed or chiseled. And he was a good, surprisingly agile lover. Too bad their timing had always been slightly off, that she’d married three losers, two of them named Danny, that he’d married that witch Pauline. And while Kerri had eventually turfed all her husbands out on their ears, she knew John Weber, for all his ostensible bravado, would never work up the courage to leave his wife.

  Why was she even thinking such thoughts? She and John Weber hadn’t been lovers for years. She hadn’t even thought of him in those terms since the night she’d turned on her computer and found herself engaged in suggestively witty banter with a successful, if disenchanted, doctor from upstate New York. Pretty soon they were exchanging photos and phone numbers, then actually meeting in Miami for the first of several trysts. During their second rendezvous, he’d confessed what her mother already suspected: he was married. But her mother, far from chewing her out about the futility of carrying on another dead-end relationship with a married man, was suddenly advising her on how best to get her false nails hooked even deeper inside the doctor’s pliant flesh. “Give him the blow job of his dreams,” she’d pronounced in most unmotherly terms. After their next passionate encounter, the good doctor had announced his intention to relocate to Torrance. Five months after he’d set up his new practice, Rose had told her daughter to pull the plug on their relationship. “One mo
re blow, then out you go,” she’d rhymed with a cold smile, as if she were Johnnie Cochran delivering his final summation to the jury in the O. J. Simpson trial. If the glove doesn’t fit … Kerri’s swollen lips had worked one last miracle, then she’d tearfully bid the man of her mother’s dreams adieu. And waited. Six weeks later, Ian Crosbie had walked out on his wife and family. Rose had assured her it was only a matter of time until he proposed.

  “You’re not seeing Dr. Crosbie tonight?” John asked, as if reading at least part of her thoughts.

  “Not tonight,” Kerri said, thinking she detected a hint of something in John’s tired eyes, as if he knew something she didn’t. “We’re not joined at the hip, you know.” Where was Ian tonight anyway? she wondered. He hadn’t offered any reason for breaking their date, other than that he’d had a hard day and wanted to get to bed early. Kerri had thought of paying him a surprise visit, but she’d always hated surprises herself. They had a nasty way of backfiring. “So what’s the next step?” she asked, blaming the incident with Cal for her growing sense of unease.

  “Think I’ll go pay Cal Hamilton a little visit.”

  “You think he went home?”

  John shrugged. “Wherever he is, I’ll find him.”

  “What do you suppose happened to his wife?”

  “Too early to say.”

  “You think she ran off?”

  “Maybe.”

  Kerri shook her head in mounting frustration. When had John Weber become so damned circumspect? One of the things she’d always liked about him was that he was so uncomplicated. “Do you think Delilah could be right about him?” she ventured, reluctant to see him leave.

  “Do I think Cal’s a serial killer?”

  “Do you?”

  “Guess I’ll have to find out.” He opened the cruiser door, climbed into the front seat, and turned on the car’s engine.

  “John …”

  The car window lowered with a push of a button. “An officer will be here any minute. You sure you don’t want me to drive you to a hospital?”

  “No, I’m okay. I know a good doctor.”

  John threw the car into gear. “Get back in the house and lock the door,” he directed. “Don’t open it for anybody until you hear from me.”

  “What if you don’t find him?”

  “Go on inside,” John said again, pointing toward the upstairs bedroom. “You don’t want to give your mother heart palpitations.”

  Kerri sighed, a sigh that said, Don’t be so sure, and John smiled, which made Kerri want to reach in and kiss him, but she didn’t. Rose was obviously watching their every move, and the last thing Kerri wanted was to reactivate her mother’s venomous tongue. Rose had been much less critical of her since she’d started seeing Ian. True, she’d transferred some of that poison to Delilah, but Delilah was somehow able to slough off her unkind remarks in a way that Kerri had never been able to do. Besides, maybe her mother’s harsh barbs were what Delilah needed to spur her on, get her thinking about her weight, her hair, her everything, Kerri thought, returning to the house. Didn’t the girl ever want to go out on a date? Didn’t she want a boyfriend? Didn’t she want to have sex? Kerri shuddered. The last thing she needed to be thinking about right now was her daughter having sex.

  “What’d the sheriff say?” Delilah asked as soon as Kerri stepped inside.

  “He’s gonna station a man outside the house until he finds Cal.” Kerri closed the door behind her, then locked it. “Bring me a chair from the kitchen, will you?” she instructed her daughter, who promptly did as she was told. Kerri secured the back of the chair under the door handle. “Just in case,” she said, although she doubted such meager precautions would be sufficient to keep an enraged Cal Hamilton out.

  “I like Sheriff Weber, don’t you?” Delilah said.

  “’Course I like him.”

  “But his daughter’s a real pill.”

  “Takes after her mother.” Kerri walked into the living room, began retrieving some of the doilies Cal had tossed to the floor.

  “I’ll straighten up. You sit down.” Delilah quickly gathered up the remaining doilies, returned each to its former position. “Are you going to call Dr. Crosbie?”

  Kerri sank into the sofa and checked her watch. “It’s kind of late. I don’t want to wake him.”

  “It’s not that late, and I’m sure he’d want to know what happened.”

  “I don’t know. He said he was going to bed early.”

  “Mom, for Pete’s sake. He loves you, doesn’t he?”

  Does he? Kerri wondered.

  “Well, I think you should call him. Tell him what happened.” Delilah handed her mother her cell phone.

  Kerri hesitated. What was she so afraid of? “You’re not going to stand here and listen, are you?”

  “Oh. Oh, no. No, of course not.” Delilah quickly retreated into the kitchen.

  Kerri took a deep breath, then pressed in Ian’s number. Of course he’d want to know what had happened here tonight. And he’d undoubtedly be so concerned, he’d hop in his car and come right over, she was telling herself as the phone rang once, twice, three times, before being picked up.

  “This is Ian Crosbie,” came the familiar, recorded message. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, number, and a short message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

  Kerri clicked off before the beep, lowered the phone to the cushion beside her, assuring herself that Ian’s not picking up didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t home. It just meant that he’d gone to bed early, exactly as advertised. So why the concern? Why was she feeling so tentative?

  “Kerri,” her mother called from upstairs. “Kerri, what’s happening?”

  Kerri pushed her platinum hair extensions away from her unlined face, rubbed her lifted brow, and closed her “done” eyes, a deep sigh leaving her enhanced bosom to escape her swollen lips. “I have no idea.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  John sped away from Kerri’s house at more than twenty miles over the limit. He wasn’t worried about pedestrians. Since Liana’s body had been discovered, no one went for a casual stroll after dark anymore. Besides, he had to put some space between himself and Kerri before he did something stupid. Just the smell of her had been so damned intoxicating, and the way she’d leaned inside the car, displaying her breasts as if they were pots of bright flowers sitting on a windowsill, offering them to him like fancy canapés on a silver platter. For a moment, he’d actually thought she might be trying to seduce him, but then she’d mentioned that asshole Dr. Crosbie, and the name had flooded through his veins like ice water. I know a good doctor, she’d said.

  He’d been tempted at that moment to tell her everything he’d discovered about the “good doctor,” but instead he’d pressed his foot to the pedal and taken off into the night. Kerri Franklin’s love life was none of his business. His business was to apprehend lawbreakers, and Cal Hamilton’s behavior tonight had definitely crossed the line from the merely objectionable into the downright criminal. You didn’t tear up a woman’s house and terrorize her family, you didn’t slap her around, demanding answers she didn’t have, just because your wife had finally awakened from her stupor, come to her senses, and run the hell away.

  Which was his assessment of what had probably happened regarding Fiona Hamilton.

  And now he was only minutes from the Hamilton house, and he prayed that Cal would be there and he wouldn’t have to have his deputies spend half the night driving around looking for him. He also hoped Cal had calmed down enough to take stock of his situation and was even now preparing to turn himself in without any further unpleasantness. A night in jail would undoubtedly sober him up. And as mad as Kerri was, chances were good she wouldn’t press charges if Cal apologized and promised never to do it again.

  Unless Delilah’s suspicions proved to be true and Cal Hamilton had slaughtered not only his wife but Liana Martin too—and possibly even Candy Abbot?—John thought, t
he dull buzz of a headache beginning to circle his eyes like a dying fly, which meant the man was either a deranged serial killer or a cold, calculating murderer.

  Somehow neither description fit.

  Cal might be an arrogant jerk, but he wasn’t crazy. Nor was he very bright. While John found it entirely plausible that Cal was indeed capable of killing his wife, especially if he’d been angry or drunk or, more likely, both, John didn’t think Cal had the brains to try to disguise what he’d done by showing up at Kerri’s door sometime later, demanding to know her whereabouts. And while he might be heartless enough to kill a succession of innocent young women in order to divert suspicion from himself in the death of his wife, John didn’t think he was clever enough by half to have concocted such a scheme. Such premeditation required an active intelligence, an imagination Cal Hamilton sorely lacked.

  John had been dealing with the criminal mind for a long time, and while he’d never personally overseen a case involving a serial killer, he knew two things for sure: one, most criminals weren’t very smart, and two, none of them ever thought they were going to get caught.

  He also knew that predators were notoriously good at hiding their sick cravings from the community in which they lived. How many reports had he read, how many cases had he followed, how many newscasts had he seen, wherein clearly shattered friends and neighbors lined up to voice their shock and disbelief when a psychopath was uncovered in their midst? How similar were the statements they gave to the police and the press? He was so quiet, so unassuming. We never had the slightest idea he could do something like this.

  Cal Hamilton was anything but unassuming and quiet. Furthermore, he looked as if he had something to hide, and as a result you suspected him of anything and everything. And while it was true that the most obvious suspect was often the right one when it came to solving homicides, John couldn’t believe this would prove to be true in the brutal slaying of Liana Martin. It was too easy, and nothing in John’s life had ever come easy. Although it would make for a pleasant change, he thought as he rounded the corner of Old Country Road and pulled to a stop in front of Cal Hamilton’s bungalow.