LOW PRESSURE

by BROWN SANDRA

  “You knew he had them?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course I couldn’t tell, because I couldn’t say how I knew. I was sure the police would find them, which would have clenched his guilt. But they didn’t. I can’t explain why Ray kept them all these years.”

  Bellamy couldn’t believe the calm and detached manner in which Olivia was relating all this. “Olivia, what happened out there in the woods?”

  Her chest rose and fell on a deep sigh. “I saw her leave the pavilion with that boy following her like she was in heat. She was, you know. Constantly. She gave off an animalistic . . . scent. Something. I don’t know. But it was unmistakable to men. Anyway, I followed them. I didn’t want her shenanigans to spoil our big day.

  “I heard them before I saw them. Disgusting noises. Like animals in rut. His heavy breathing, her moans. Susan’s back was against a tree. The top of her sundress was pulled down. He was at her breasts. His hands. Mouth. He seemed totally absorbed, but Susan looked bored. She was staring up at the sky.

  “She remarked that it looked funny, that it looked like a storm was coming. But either he didn’t hear her, or he ignored her. She said his name and gave him a slight push away from her. ‘I don’t want to get rained on,’ she said.

  “He laughed and said, ‘Then we’d better hurry.’ He undid his pants and jerked them down over his hips. She looked down at him and giggled. ‘Put that thing back.’ And he said, ‘Back isn’t where I’m gonna put it.’”

  Olivia gave a shudder. “I was disgusted to the point that I thought about turning around and leaving. I didn’t want to watch them. But then Susan slapped at his groping hand. ‘I mean it. I’m not going to stay out here and have my dress ruined.’

  “He tried to cajole her, playfully at first, and then more angrily. Finally, he called her names, yanked up his pants, and started walking away. Laughing, she told him not to go away mad.

  “Then I watched her take off her panties and shoot them at him, like they were a rubber band. She told him to use them while he pleasured himself, and to think of her while he was doing it.” Olivia closed her eyes for a moment. “Of course she used much cruder terminology.”

  She paused for a moment and drew a deep breath. “She straightened her clothing and fluffed her hair. As beautiful as she was, I was sickened by the sight of her. My expression must have conveyed it because when she saw me, she said, ‘What do you want?’ You know the inflection I’m talking about. She wasn’t embarrassed, or even curious to know how long I’d been there and what I’d seen. She just asked the question in that hateful tone.

  “I told her precisely what I was thinking, that she was a disgrace, that she was unspeakably vile and amoral. She sighed theatrically, pushed herself away from the tree, and said, ‘Spare me.’ When she sauntered past me, she pulled her skirt aside so it wouldn’t come into contact with me. That was the last straw.

  “Before I knew it, my hand had shot out, and I’d taken a tight grip on her arm. She told me to let go, but I only moved in closer. And that’s when . . . when . . . when I told her to leave Steven alone.”

  Bellamy gasped. “You knew about her and Steven?”

  “So did you, it seems.”

  “Not until this week. He told me when I went to Atlanta. You knew back then, when it was happening?”

  She turned her head away so that her cheek was resting on the pillow. “God help me.”

  Bellamy was more astounded by this than Olivia’s confession to killing Susan. “Why didn’t you do something to stop it?”

  “Susan knew why,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I told her that if she came near Steven again I was going to tell Howard. She laughed in my face. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding, Olivia?’ She knew I wouldn’t tell him because it would have shattered him, and our family.

  “She was Howard’s daughter. He would have felt an obligation to support her. My loyalty would have been with Steven. It would have torn us apart. Our marriage. Everything. I wouldn’t let that little tramp destroy us.”

  “But—”

  “I know, Bellamy. I know. She destroyed the family anyway. But on that day, I tried to make my threat believable. I told her again to leave Steven alone. She got right in my face and said, ‘Not as long as that broody little faggot can get it up.’”

  Olivia stared blankly at the opposite wall for a long, silent moment, then slowly brought her head back around to look at Bellamy. “She walked—sashayed—away, swinging the skirt of her sundress.

  “I didn’t plan it. I just reacted with rage. I bent down and grabbed a broken tree limb that was lying on the ground, and hit her in the back of the head with all my might. She fell facedown. I untied the bow at my neck and took it off.” She raised her shoulders in a slight shrug. “It was like watching someone else. It was remarkably easy. When I realized that she was dead, I insulted her by flipping up her skirt.”

  Neither said anything for a while. Bellamy stared at Olivia’s composed face. Olivia stared at the ceiling.

  Bellamy stirred. “I must ask. Did Daddy know? Or have so much as an inkling?”

  Olivia’s face crumpled. “No, no.” Then in a mournful tone, she added, “Sometimes I would catch him watching me. Thoughtfully. Frowning. And it caused me to wonder . . .”

  “He never asked?”

  “No.”

  Bellamy wondered if perhaps he hadn’t asked because he didn’t want to know. Maybe he had commissioned her to get to the truth in order to vindicate not Allen Strickland, but Olivia. He hadn’t wanted to die with even a smidgen of suspicion that his beloved wife had taken his daughter’s life.

  They would never know his mind, and Bellamy was actually relieved that they wouldn’t.

  “Does Steven know?” she asked quietly. “He told me himself that he was glad Susan was dead.”

  “No. But I let it slip today that I knew what she was doing to him. That’s why he left.”

  Bellamy’s heart sank as Olivia described the scene. “I begged his forgiveness, but he refused to listen. He locked me out of their room and when he opened the door, their bags were packed, and a taxi was waiting to take them to the airport. I pleaded with him to stay and talk it out, but he wouldn’t even look at me. Which is the worst possible punishment for what I did.”

  She took a moment as though collecting her thoughts, then said, “I deceived myself into thinking that Allen Strickland’s conviction was a sign from God that he was granting me a second chance.

  “Steven suffered, and so did you to some extent, but Howard and I had almost two decades of happiness. I made myself believe that killing Susan was justified, and that’s why I’d gotten away with it.” She sighed. “But things don’t work that way, do they?”

  “No they don’t,” Bellamy said softly. “Because you have to tell the authorities, Olivia. Allen Strickland deserves to be exonerated. So does Dent, Steven, anyone who came under suspicion. You must clear them.”

  Olivia nodded. “I’m not afraid anymore. I’ve lost Howard. Now Steven. Nothing worse can happen to me.”

  Bellamy suddenly realized that, except for her head, Olivia hadn’t moved. Her face was wet with tears, yet she hadn’t pulled a tissue from the box on the bedside table.

  “Olivia?”

  Her eyes had closed, and she didn’t respond.

  “Olivia!”

  Bellamy whipped back the covers, and, although she’d never been a screamer, she screamed now. Olivia was drenched in blood. Both wrists had been slashed.

  Bellamy frantically slapped her cheeks, but her only responses were faint murmurs of protest.

  Bellamy snatched the cordless phone from its charger on the nightstand, punched in 911, and began babbling as soon as the operator answered. She shouted the address. “She’s bleeding to death! Send an ambulance. Hurry, hurry!”

  The operator launched into a series of questions, but when Bellamy saw headlights cut an arc across the ceiling she dropped the phone, rushed to the window, and flung back the curtain
s.

  Despite the downpour, she recognized the Vette’s low profile as it came speeding through the open gate. She cried out in relief.

  She returned to the bed, touched Olivia’s cheek, and was startled by how cool it was. “Don’t die,” she whispered fiercely, then left the room at a run.

  The hall was darker than before, but she didn’t slow down even when she reached the stairs. She practically flew down them, tripping on the last tread and barely catching herself on the newel post before she fell.

  She reached the front door just as the Corvette rolled to a stop. “Dent! Help me!”

  Heedless of the downpour and the lightning that filled the sky with a blue-white glare, she ran across the porch and down the steps. She rounded the hood of the car just as he was alighting.

  She launched herself at him. “Dent, thank God! It’s Olivia. She’s—”

  Strong arms went around her, but they weren’t Dent’s.

  “ ’Bout time we met.”

  She looked up through the rain into Ray Strickland’s leering face.

  Chapter 30

  When Dent reached the parking space where he’d left his Corvette and found it empty, he made a three-sixty turn, thinking that the cloudburst had thrown him off and that he’d gone to the wrong space. And then for several seconds more he stood there, confounded, while rain beat down on him.

  The possibility that his car had been stolen from the parking lot made him gnash his teeth. But then his heart stuttered when it occurred to him who the thief might be. Could it be a coincidence that his car had been stolen while Ray Strickland was at large? Strickland was a mechanic. He would know how to break in, hot-wire, and do anything else necessary to steal any vehicle.

  All this ran through Dent’s mind in a millisecond, and he acted on his fear instantly. Ducking beneath the narrow overhang of the building, he pulled out his phone to call Bellamy and warn her. He punched in her number before remembering that Nagle and Abbott had confiscated her phone to hold as evidence in Moody’s murder. No one answered it.

  Dent burst into the Starbucks looking like a man deranged, startling the customers and staff. Heedless of the fact that he was soaked to the skin, that his hair was plastered flat to his head, and that his eyes looked feral, he shouted, “Gall, your truck. Where’s it parked?”

  Gall, who was still in conversation with the senator, gaped at Dent. “Where’s your car?”

  “Not where I left it. Give me the keys to your truck. Call nine-one-one and tell them to send police to the Lystons’ house. The cops at the gate need to be alerted that Ray Strickland may try to get onto the property by driving my car. Bellamy hasn’t got her phone, so I can’t call her directly, and I don’t know the land line number. Now for godsake, pitch me your keys.”

  Gall did as told, and Dent snatched them from the air. “West side of the building,” Gall yelled at Dent’s back as he plunged back into the thunderstorm.

  He ran to the parking lot and spotted Gall’s relic of a pickup. He climbed into the cab and cranked it on, then, pushing it as fast as it would go, jumped a curb and bounced into the street.

  As he drove with one hand, he dialed 911 with his other. By now Gall would have called the emergency number, but it wouldn’t hurt to put in a second call.

  He gave the answering operator his name and the address of the Lystons’ house. “Bellamy Lyston Price is in danger of her life.”

  “What’s the nature of the problem, sir?”

  “Too long to tell. But there are a pair of cops stationed at her front gate. They should be notified to be on the lookout for a red Corvette. They shouldn’t open the gate because Ray Strickland might be driving it. And call Nagle and Abbott. They’re homicide detectives. They’ll know what this is about.” He was out of breath by the time he finished.

  “Your name again, sir?”

  “What?”

  “Your name again?”

  “Are you fucking kidding?”

  With infuriating calm, she began again with the question about his name. Cursing, he tossed his phone onto the seat of the pickup so he could use both hands to steer around a slow-moving minivan. He blasted through a red light, blaring the pickup’s horn.

  Ray’s luck had changed, and it was on account of him killing Moody.

  There had to be a correlation, because that was when things had started going good for him.

  First, he’d escaped the two cops who’d showed up at his place. One’s blood was still on his clothes, along with the splotches Moody had sprayed on him. He didn’t think he’d killed the cop, but he hadn’t hung around to find out.

  Dodging the second cop’s bullet—another stroke of luck—he’d barreled his way through his duplex and out the back even as other squad cars were squealing to a halt in front.

  He’d lived in the neighborhood for a long time, so he knew the twisty streets well, knew which ones were dead ends and which provided a quick way out of the maze, even for someone traveling on foot.

  Yes sirree. Luck had definitely been on his side. Running between houses and going over fences, he’d made it to the back of a strip center where there was a doc-in-the-box.

  Knowing that the staffs of these minor emergency clinics usually worked long shifts and figuring that this early in the morning one would be starting, he deduced that a stolen car wouldn’t be missed for hours. He’d waited behind a Dumpster until a young woman dressed in scrubs parked in the employee lot and entered through a back door. Breaking into her car had been a piece of cake.

  Was he one lucky bastard, or what? Within minutes of leaving his duplex, he’d been miles away from it. Pumped. Exhilarated. Wanting to spill more blood. Bellamy Price’s blood.

  Ever since her old man’s death, she’d been staying with her stepmother in the family mansion. Ray made that his destination, reasoning that she would eventually turn up there. Driving past it throughout the day also gave him an opportunity to plan how he might get through the gate and onto the property.

  It was going to be doubly difficult now that a patrol car was posted outside the gate.

  But, again, luck smiled on him.

  He just happened to be on one of his reconnaissance drive-bys when he saw Dent’s red Corvette leaving through the gate. He was alone, meaning that Bellamy was inside and, for the time being, inaccessible.

  Ray decided to follow Dent. And when he parked his car and went into a Starbucks, Ray realized that he wasn’t just lucky, he was brilliant, because he saw the answer to the problem of how to get past that damn gate.

  He left the car he’d stolen earlier in an adjacent parking lot and helped himself to Dent Carter’s sweet ride. And, as if good fortune wasn’t already with him, it began to rain buckets, which would make it difficult for the policemen at the gate to see who was behind the wheel of the Vette. To make it even more difficult for them to see into the car, Ray turned the headlights on high beam.

  It was so easy he’d wanted to laugh. The two cops who’d waved to Dent when he drove out waved to Ray when he pulled up to the gate, which opened even before he came to a full stop. Abraca-fucking-dabra. He figured the cops had been given a transmitter so they could control who went in and out.

  Getting inside the house posed no problem. Bellamy herself ran out to greet him. He had her in an inescapable bear hug before she realized he wasn’t Dent.

  She seemed too shocked even to scream, which was good. It saved him from having to hit her. He didn’t want her unconscious. He wanted her awake and terrified.

  But as he lifted her off her feet and started up the front steps with her, she began to struggle. “No, please, my stepmother is upstairs.”

  “I’ll get to her. Two for the price of one. But you first.”

  She doubled her efforts to wiggle out of his grip and kicked him solidly in the shin. It hurt so bad that as soon as they were across the threshold and he’d pushed the front door closed, he thrust her from him so hard she went hurtling forward and landed on the stone-tile floor
.

  Splintering pain shot from Bellamy’s shoulder and hip, which had sustained most of the impact. But she had no time to dwell on the pain because Ray was whipping a knife from its scabbard.

  He brandished it at her, and she saw that the blade was already streaked with dried blood. Moody’s? Bile filled the back of her throat as the image of his open neck flashed into her mind. That was what Ray would do to her if she didn’t prevent it.

  He grinned down at her and took two lumbering steps forward.

  She put a hand up. “Listen, Ray, you don’t want to do this.”

  “Hell I don’t. You killed Susan and let . . .”

  “No. No I didn’t.”

  “I heard you. I was hiding in your closet when you admitted it. I should’ve killed you then.”

  Hiding in her closet? She didn’t take time to sort that out. Stammering, she said, “I didn’t kill my sister, but I also know that your brother didn’t, either. He was innocent. I’m going to tell everyone that he was innocent.”

  “Too late for that.”

  “I know,” she said wetting her lips. “There’s nothing anyone can do about what happened to him. But I want people to know that he was unjustly sent to prison. You were wronged, too. I want to tell about it. But I won’t be able to do that if you kill me.”

  “I’m gonna kill you.” He reached down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and pulled her up by it. She cried out in pain, and did the only thing she knew to do. She kneed him hard in the groin. It wasn’t a direct hit, but his grip on her hair relaxed slightly, enough for her to jerk herself free.

  She ran for the staircase. If she could lock herself inside Olivia’s room only long enough for the 911 responders to arrive, there was a chance that both of them could survive.

  But she was still a long way from the second floor when Ray’s arm hooked her around the waist. He pushed her face first onto the stairs and landed hard on top of her, knocking the breath out of her. Slapping his hand over her forehead, he pulled her head back against his shoulder. She felt the blade of his knife against the soft area beneath her jawbone.