Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  So Candace trusted her perceptions, and as she lay face forward across the kitchen table in Morton Randall’s house, her ankles and wrists bound and tied to the four legs, naked as the day she was born … as she heard Digger Danziger muttering and mumbling to himself as he walked around behind her, as she felt him come up behind her and start massaging her inner thighs again, readying himself to stick it in her yet another time … as she tried to ignore the pain that she felt down there, the sure sensation that she was bleeding, she also understood that none of it really mattered anymore. The perception she had, and perhaps stronger than any before, was that this was the very last day of her life. She had been there for three hours, though after the first hour she’d lost any real awareness of time passing. She tried to think of something good. Anything at all. She tried to see Dan Forrest’s face, his smile, the way his eyes lit up when she smiled back. She could see only blackness. Perhaps that was best.

  After he’d raped her, she knew he was going to kill her. Perhaps because he never looked directly at her, perhaps because he never said her name, perhaps because he never touched her with anything but force and violence, or perhaps simply because of her perceptions. She knew she was going to die. It was just a matter of when. And how.

  She knew it was time when he appeared with two knives. They were the kind of knives you used to cut meat, the blades a good six inches long. He had one in each hand and he held them like they were extensions to his own arms.

  She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Once he was inside her, she heard the knife leave the table and she knew this was it. At the same moment that he thrust between her legs as hard as he could he plunged the knives into her sides. It was as if someone had switched a light on inside her head. Brilliant, brilliant whiteness. It wasn’t even pain. It was a sensation, yes, but not like any sensation she’d ever experienced before. She thought she made a sound, but she wasn’t sure. Everything started to blur, and then whiteness became yellow became green, and then it was a fierce turquoise, so fierce she didn’t know whether her eyes were open or closed. He tugged one of the knives out then started stabbing down into the small of her back, her shoulders, her neck, the side of her face, and he was screaming then, and the last thing she heard before she died was his voice. Mad, enraged, like something possessed, and he was shouting “Bitch! Bitch! Fucking dirty fucking bitch!” but she couldn’t be sure what he was saying because consciousness was deserting her, and the last thing she thought of before she died was the way that Danny Forrest used to call her Candy.

  After he was done Digger stood there for a while. He tugged the knives out and threw them into the sink.

  There was quite a lot of blood. More blood than he’d expected.

  He looked down at himself. Her blood was on his thighs. He felt sick. He grabbed a towel from the edge of the sink, turned on the faucet, and got it wet. He wiped the blood away, retching as he did so.

  He glanced back at the girl. Her eyes were open. Was she looking at him? Was she smiling?

  Digger reached out tentatively. He used the tip of his right index finger to close one eye, and then the other.

  He pulled up his pants. He walked back around her and looked at her from the side of the room.

  He closed his eyes.

  The nausea passed as quickly as it had come.

  This was a terrible thing. This was a powerfully terrible thing. He knew that. She was dead. He had fucked her and killed her at the same time.

  He had done this thing.

  He had done this thing. This powerfully terrible, mighty, wonderful thing.

  Not anyone else.

  Not Earl.

  Digger felt the rush in his chest. It was like finding God. He had found God. God was inside him. It was like being baptized. Maybe that’s what it was. A religious experience.

  Earl was there. Earl had always been there. Earl had guided him, shown him, talked to him, encouraged him, but now he was on his own.

  Digger was alone.

  Earl was here, here inside him, but it was not Earl, just the memory of Earl.

  Digger was hyperventilating. His whole body was varnished with a cold sweat.

  Oh, how alive he felt! How utterly and truly alive!

  He’d never felt such a thing in all his life, and there was only more to come. Good God, could it ever feel better than this?

  This is exactly what Earl had meant. The realest thing you could ever feel. A human being takes the life of another human being, and they own that life. It becomes theirs. They walk away with the life that they’ve stolen, and it is now their own. They have the power of two lives. And the more you take, well, the stronger you become.

  Digger stepped back and put his shoulders against the wall.

  He looked at Candace.

  She made him angry. He didn’t know why. She just did.

  Bitch.

  She was a bitch, a fucking bitch, a fucking asshole motherfucking bitch!

  God, how she made him mad!

  “Fuck you!” he screamed at her. “Fuck you, Candy-Ass!”

  Then he started laughing.

  Digger stepped back until he felt the sink behind him. He reached to his right and took a skillet from the stove top.

  “This is for you, Earl,” he whispered. “For all you did for me. Loved you, man, but I’m on my own now. All on my own fucking lonesome.”

  Digger took a step forward. He raised the skillet, hesitated for just a moment, and then he beat Candace Munro in the head again and again and again until she was unrecognizable.

  He stood there with the bloody skillet in his hand, and he was sad for a moment because she was really dead now and she was just too much of a mess to fool around with anymore. He washed up, set the knives aside, cleaned his hands, and sluiced cold water on his face. He ate a couple more spoonfuls of cold pork and beans from the pan, and then he untied the girl and dragged her behind the kitchen. He leaned her against the wall right next to Morton Randall. Morton was on his side, and there was a good deal of dried blood and Digger skidded some, but he gained purchase and got the old boy sitting up again like he was waiting for lunch. They could have been father and daughter. Elliott went upstairs and fetched a bedsheet from the first room he came to. He draped it over the pair of them, careful to position the sheet so that it did not come into contact with any of the girl’s blood. From the kitchen you could just see the doorway, the shadows within, and nothing else. There was room in there for a good half dozen or so.

  The exertion had done him good. He felt alive. It had been a rush, and a good one at that, and he figured he would do it again. Maybe tomorrow.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Entrance to Frank Jacobs’s house was easy, as was often the case with homicide victims, especially those who possessed no immediate family. The back screen was open, the interior door unlocked, and Cassidy just walked on in there like he was coming home for the evening. It was a little after half-past five. Already it was darkening, and Cassidy had hoped he would be able to search the place without employing the electric lights. He’d brought a flashlight from the car, but the damn batteries were pretty much dead, and the light it issued was a weak distraction as opposed to a bright illumination.

  The first and most striking perception was the sheer lack of home comforts. The sitting room was nothing more than a couple of chairs, a low table centering the room, a lamp standard, a TV, and against the back wall—literally floor to ceiling—were stacked shoe boxes, three deep and fifteen high. Men’s, women’s, children’s, both leather and synthetic. Pumps, sandals, wingtips, loafers, brogues, oxfords, an endless variety. Cassidy could smell the leather inside the cardboard. It was a good smell. Seemed that Frank Jacobs’s life had been shoes. He wondered how long he’d been doing it, how long he expected to go on doing it. He wondered if selling shoes had been a stepping stone to something else, but the stepping stone had become the safe harbor in the river. Or maybe Frank Jacobs had always wanted to sell shoes. Maybe he wa
s a born shoe salesman, never wanting for anything, aspiring toward no other goal than the recommendation and purveyance of footwear to America’s working folk. Whatever the case, it was now Frank Jacobs’s history. A handful of minutes in the sitting room and Cassidy figured there was nothing to see. There was a small bookcase beneath the window—a half dozen dime novels, a few periodicals, a stack of shoe brochures from a company in Flagstaff. There was a wireless, the TV, a pair of battered slippers parked beneath the low table, a heavy amber-colored glass ashtray, the rug on the floor. This was where Frank Jacobs came to relax after a long day of driving and selling.

  Aside from the kitchen the only other downstairs room was the dining room, and perhaps would have been the dining room had Frank Jacobs possessed any reason to decorate it as such. Again more shoes, this time a good hundred or a hundred and fifty boxes. Cassidy didn’t need to count them. There was no significance to their presence. Upstairs in the bathroom was the medicine cabinet above the sink. Toothpaste, soap, a shaving brush, a razor, a stick of shaving soap, a styptic pencil, aspirin, mouthwash, toothpicks, some kind of compound tonic for When Your Get Up and Go Has Got Up and Gone! Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unusual.

  It was in the bedroom that Cassidy believed he’d hit pay dirt. Pictures of a girl. Five of them. One in a small frame on the night-stand, another framed on the windowsill, three more in an envelope on the shelf of Frank’s wardrobe. The last one was of the girl and Frank together, and there was no mistaking the similarity. His daughter? And the envelope bore a name, printed carefully in pencil. Bailey. Her first name, or her second? More than likely her first. Bailey Jacobs? Was that who this girl was?

  Cassidy felt a rush of something in his chest. Had she been with him at Marana? Had she been in the store but somehow survived the attack? And if so, where was she now? Had this Clarence Luckman—or whoever the hell he might be—kidnapped her, taken her hostage, and was even now traveling the country with her? Or had he killed her and dumped her body somewhere, as yet undiscovered? Cassidy remembered what Nixon and Koenig had told him in the hotel room in El Paso. That the discovery of the crashed car had been reported by two people, one of them a girl. That’s where Harvey Warren’s gun had been found, and that gun had come from Marana. He tugged out his notebook, leafed through the few scribbled notes he’d made when he left the hotel room after his discussion with Nixon and Koenig. Clark Regan in Deming. That was who he needed to find. That was who he needed to show one of these pictures to. Was this the girl that came that day, Mr. Regan? Was this the girl who told you about the overturned car with the two dead men inside?

  Cassidy went through the pictures, chose one from the envelope on the wardrobe shelf. It was perhaps not the most flattering, despite the fact that she was a pretty girl, but it showed her looking directly at the camera, a slight smile on her lips, her hair tucked back behind her ears. A clear and unobstructed view of her face. This is what Bailey looked like. From this he hoped that she could be identified by someone.

  He looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. Deming was—what?—a good two hundred miles on the other side of Tucson? That wouldn’t work—not tonight. And showing up there at nine or ten o’clock, finding the gas station closed, trying to track down this Clark Regan by knocking on random doors? Cassidy didn’t think so. No, he would drive home tonight, have Alice call him in sick again tomorrow, and he would drive out to Deming first thing and find this Regan character. He held the picture of the girl in his hand, and in the dim light of a dead man’s bedroom he looked at the face of a teenager that could be alive, could be dead, could be nothing at all to do with this. But he felt something. He really felt something. In his own mind he couldn’t resolve the mystery surrounding Clarence Luckman. How could a boy—never in trouble, never anything other than an orphan, an unfortunate social outcast—suddenly become a homicidal maniac? And again, clearer than ever, Alice’s words were there. When they are two people.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Why there were fireworks they did not know, but there were fireworks.

  Clay lay silently, could hear nothing but the sound of Bailey’s breathing beside him, and then it was there in the distance—crack! crack! fffssstttt!—and he started upright, and sat there for a moment wondering if he hadn’t been dreaming.

  “What is it?” Bailey slurred, roused from her sleep.

  “Ssshhh,” he whispered. “Listen …”

  There is was again—crack! crack! fffssstttt! CRACK!

  “Fireworks?” she asked.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  They gathered their shoes up and put them on. They went like scared children to the doorway of the barn, and peered out into the darkness.

  “There’s a lake,” Bailey said.

  Clay could see it in the distance—perhaps half a mile or so. Beyond it the arc and flare of fireworks reflected in the surface of the water.

  “Come on!” she urged. “Let’s go watch!”

  Clay—thinking now that he was only one sly smile shy of true love, the kind of love that means suicide if you don’t get it—went with her, dragged along by her enthusiasm, his hand in hers, the feeling of her fingers around his own, and watching as the ground rushed beneath his feet, leaping stones and rocks, skirting outcrops of tough Texan scrub, and all the while the ever-approaching promise of magic as another firework exploded and lit the sky.

  They reached the edge of the lake, and the surface of the water and the base of the sky had no seam between them, and for a moment they were one, and it appeared as if the ground beneath their feet was somehow suspended in infinite space, and there was no beginning and no end to anything.

  And then the sound again—the sudden rush as a streak of color lit the sky, and then it was if the heavens themselves exploded. Pinwheeling, pirouetting, fishtailing. A sudden flower of light, the smell of sulfur, glycerin, cordite, hot metal. A thousand instant flares in the sky like pepper sprinkled over a flame. Sparks like an ax blade against a grindstone.

  Bailey gasped with each one, a breath captured for a second in her chest. She tugged his arm excitedly, and it was all he could do not to grab her and kiss her. He stood behind her, his chin on her shoulder, and as he held her he could feel her heart beating frantically just inches from his own. The skin and muscle and bone that separated them was as nothing.

  There were tears in his eyes, but they were not tears of sadness or loss. They were tears for something else that he did not understand.

  Soon it was over. Bailey was flushed with excitement. She sat down on the ground and couldn’t speak for a while.

  Eventually she said, “Wow!” and then she started laughing.

  Clay helped her up. They walked back to the barn hand in hand.

  Lights had come on in nearby houses. Houses they had not seen before. Distant windows stared back at them with their bright square eyes.

  Lying down once more, beyond the barn door the murmuring darkness more alive than any night, Clay knew he would not now sleep, whereas Bailey—before he had even registered how closely she lay beside him—was gone.

  The night grew bitterly cold. The air was dry and the heavens were cloudless, and somewhere beyond the flat horizon the flicker of lightning identified the presence of a storm he could not hear. And then he was really afraid for the first time. Afraid of the present, the uncertain future, more afraid of the past, for the past he could not change and everything from this point forward could have been predetermined by circumstances beyond his control. Perhaps fate, destiny, astrology. Perhaps Bailey Redman was destined never to see her next birthday, and by mere association he was also doomed. The star beneath which he had been born was dark, but hers was darker still. Perhaps their shadows were doubled, now feeding off one another and doubling again.

  As unavoidable as weather, or time, or rust, or death.

  He was scared to be feeling what he was feeling. He was scared to love this girl. What had she said? If l
ove is so great, how come it breaks so many hearts?

  And what of Elliott? What of the love that they’d had for each other, the years they had spent together with no one but each other to protect them against the vagaries of a cruel and desperate world? Where had that love gone?

  Clay closed his eyes. He willed himself to sleep but he could not.

  Not tonight.

  Perhaps not ever.

  DAY EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  The press had blood on their teeth. And they would not rest until their bellies were full. Unsubstantiated reports found their way into the newspapers. The local journals and rags picked up on it, and would be followed by squibs in the nationals within a day or so. The FBI and the sheriffs’ departments had known it would merely be a matter of time. Once they started disseminating pictures, once the radio broadcasts reached the wider world, well, the world would start to look in their direction. There had been a bloodbath someplace in Texas. El Paso, according to initial word. A family had been killed. It was just like that case in Holcomb, Kansas, a few years back. Cassidy caught word of it on the radio when he woke on Friday morning. As if fate conspired to keep them ignorant, neither Clay Luckman, Bailey Redman, nor—most importantly—Elliott Danziger, had been exposed to radio or TV broadcasts; not in cars, nor in diners, stores, or motels, and thus they were oblivious to the world’s awareness of what was happening. The press now knew some names—Clarence Luckman, Garth Nixon, and Ronald Koenig—and reporters were dispatched from numerous offices to track the latter two in their hotel in El Paso. By the time the enclave of journalists arrived both Nixon and Koenig had departed, first to the Eckhart–McGovern crime scene to seal it completely, to put a barricade of sawhorses and uniforms around it and close it off from the rest of the world, secondly to Las Cruces, the nearest town that could provide them with an adequate telephone service, an acceptable hotel, and a handful of county officers who could be assigned the more mundane tasks associated with such a case. Time was now against them. Once a case reached the national headlines it would then run against the clock. The federal authorities and the respective representatives of each of the involved county sheriffs’ departments would be clamoring to get it out of print and off the television. The appearance of reporters, the fact that the locals were aware of national media interest, made it all the more difficult to keep the investigation discreet. Some folks, understandably, became very wary of speaking to the federal or county officials. They did not want to see their names in the press. To be considered instrumental in the progress of a homicidal maniac’s arrest … well, enough said. A homicidal maniac was not going to take too kindly to that kind of interference in his business.