“You want to see if we can find a place to buy some new clothes? Also I need to buy a cheap laptop so I can do my work.”
Julissa hesitated, then said, “Yeah, I’d like that. But, Chris—I don’t have any money.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“You don’t have to.”
They locked her room and walked into the rain. The wind was warm but the rain drops, now as big as dimes, were cold. They walked to the empty lobby and asked the girls at the reception desk where to go shopping.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Westfield just wanted to drive home to his own house. He had a glassed-in back porch overlooking Puget Sound. He liked to drink his coffee there in the mornings, reading the papers. He could watch ships making their way south to Seattle and Tacoma and could see submarines running on the surface to the base at the end of the Hood Canal. What little he’d patched together to call a life was in the house. Instead, he was at a motel on the edge of the desert outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, watching the window-unit air conditioner drip water down the rotten plaster wall. The carpet smelled of mildew and the brown wallpaper in the bathroom was coming unglued. He’d stopped at a Bank of America in Midland, Texas, and had then paid cash for a new laptop at a Radio Shack. Then he’d driven without stopping again until seeing the motel. The motel had exactly one thing going for it: the sign on the highway said, Free Wi-Fi.
He spent two hours in the filthy bathroom, washing the wound on his knee and re-bandaging it with fresh gauze and antibiotic cream. He took three aspirin and considered driving to the liquor store on the highway and buying a bottle of whiskey. He was out of the habit of drinking but he’d never be out of the habit of thinking about drinking. That first glass of whiskey in the morning, when he was drinking more or less professionally after getting out of the Navy, that glass was his sacrament in the Church of Sour Mash. He used to pour it into whatever cup he could find, and stand in the window of whatever motel room he was then occupying, and drink it slowly while watching the sunrise. He’d add a handful of ice, if he had it. If he didn’t have ice, he’d drink it straight, letting it sit on his tongue before swallowing, then feeling it burn all the way down. Years later he would realize being an alcoholic was a lot like being religious. It took faith to believe if you kept doing the same thing over and over, things would eventually get better, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now he had stopped drinking and he didn’t think it was possible to make things better. But evening the score was about spreading pain, not erasing it. So he was a realist.
He sat on the bed in his undershorts and unpacked his new computer. Maybe if he had been less tired and in less pain he would have done what Chris had done. Maybe if he scrolled through his email all the way to the top, he would have seen Julissa’s email warning him, and he would have stopped. But he didn’t see Julissa’s email and he clicked on the other message. How could he not? The subject line called up all his rage and refused calm reflection.
I ATE TARA WESTFIELD
He clicked the email and watched the photograph slowly fill the screen. A million pixels of horror. He stared at the bloody message on the wall behind the poor girls. For a second, he could have gone either way. He could have stood, taken his keys from the end of the bed, driven down to the liquor store, and bought the biggest goddamned bottle of Jack Daniel’s they sold. He felt so alone and so empty, it wouldn’t have mattered if he kept on fighting or just fell flat on his back in his shithole room and drank until he blacked out. In desperation, he put his hand over his right knee and jammed his thumb into the bullet wound, digging through the gauze until his fingernail squeezed into the hole. The pain was as bright as noonday sun reflecting off broken glass. He closed his eyes and went with the pain, and when he opened them again, he stared at the picture for another five minutes. He closed the window, and the next email he saw was Julissa’s warning.
Westfield sat in the plastic chair outside his hotel room door and watched dust devils in the desert on the other side of the highway. Already, by using the bank in Midland, he’d let them know his general whereabouts. Now, he’d probably turned his computer into a homing device for the killer’s men. He’d turned it off and for good measure had taken out the battery. He sat in the heat, where at least the air didn’t reek of mildew and decaying wallpaper, and considered his options. He could pack his things back into the van, leave the new computer in the trash, and run. But to what end? He was trying to find the killer, not run away from him. Which left the second option: he could wait, and be ready. He’d been caught entirely by surprise in Galveston, but made out all right. They would be expecting to surprise him, not to walk into an ambush. Maybe he could find out more about them. If not, he could kill another one of the thing’s employees. Either option sounded better than just running blind. He limped back into the room, and got the Carlsbad phone book from the bedside table.
He still had twenty-five hundred in cash from his stop at the bank. That wouldn’t buy an arsenal in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but he suspected it would be enough to induce serious second thoughts about coming into his motel room.
He wondered how long he had. The nearest airport with commercial flights was hours away, in El Paso. By now they probably knew exactly where he was, but it would still take time to get here. Even if they came by jet, they would have to rent a car and drive the rest of the way. Unless they chartered a small plane and landed on a strip nearby, in which case they could be on top of him in half a day. He had his service side arm, the silenced .22 and switchblade he’d taken from the man he’d killed in Galveston, and his stun gun. But he wanted something with more reach. After what happened in Galveston, they wouldn’t bother knocking.
He limped back to the chair outside his door and looked at the desert on the other side of the highway. There was a low, boulder-strewn hill. Creosote and prickly pears and tufts of brown grass grew between the rocks. At the top, there was a stand of yucca with high flowering stems. Some of the boulders were as big as cars. The range wasn’t bad. Maybe a hundred yards from the top of the hill to his doorstep, the highway in between. The wind would probably be coming east to west, down the highway. He’d have to account for that.
This was as good a spot as he could ask for to make a stand.
At the moment, anyway, there was no one else staying in the motel. The clerk was an old man with hearing aids in both ears who sat in the room behind the counter watching a small television at full volume. The hill on the other side of the highway would have a view of both sides of the road for more than two miles. If he missed the men at his hotel room door, he could shoot at their car for two minutes, which ever direction they chose to run.
He went to his bed and put the battery back into his computer, then turned it on and let it automatically log itself onto the Internet.
The program he’d accidentally installed would take care of itself.
The gun shop was just outside what passed for downtown Carlsbad. Across the street was a gas station and a liquor store. The store stood alone in an asphalt parking lot crumbling back to gravel. It was built of sun-baked adobe bricks and had bars on the windows. Westfield parked in front and walked in just as the shop owner was reaching to flip the sign from Open to Closed.
“You stay open fifteen more minutes, I’ll make it worthwhile,” Westfield said.
The man nodded and held the door open. Westfield went to the back of the shop and looked at the rifles standing in the racks behind the counter. He leaned on the glass over the six shooters and automatic pistols and studied the rifles. As a boy he’d had a Winchester model .270 with a walnut stock. He and his father hunted in the dry hills of eastern Washington. Then, at the Naval Academy, he’d qualified with a Garand M-1 and had been the third best in his class.
“Looking for something in particular?”
“I’m gonna get a good long-distance piece. Get ready for antelope, come November.”
“What cali
ber you into?”
Westfield didn’t really care.
“In in the service, I learned with a .30-06. But what we mostly used was fifty caliber BMG.”
“Fifty caliber would just about blow an antelope to pieces.”
“Something smaller’s okay, long as it’s got the distance and some punch.”
“Bolt action or auto?”
“Auto.”
The man pulled a rifle off the rack. It had a black carbon fiber stock and a flat black barrel, and when he took it from the store owner and felt its weight, he could tell it was well made. He ejected the clip and turned the rifle upside down to look into the firing chamber. It was a .30-06 semiautomatic, made in Italy. He held it to his shoulder and sighted along the counter at the wall on the far end of the store. The rifle was heavy but had good balance; the barrel carried its width all the way to the muzzle. He would probably have it propped on a rock when he was shooting, so the weight wouldn’t be a problem. The clip held five rounds, but he could buy a couple of extra clips, just in case. It had the natural pointing, good feel of a rifle that shot in tight groups at long range.
“This’ll work. How about a scope?”
“Over here.”
Westfield picked out a low-light scope, the biggest one in the case. Its objective lens was fifty millimeters across to gather light. He also picked out a laser sight that mounted to the side of the scope, and two boxes of match-grade ammunition.
Everything totaled just over two thousand dollars. Westfield counted it onto the counter in new hundred-dollar bills, fanning them across the glass top above faded Polaroid photographs of dead ten-point bucks and mountain lions, while the dealer stood on the phone, on hold with the FBI’s instant background check hotline. Westfield looked at the pictures and kept his eyes down. The dealer hung up the phone.
“You’re good to go.”
He limped back to the van, put his purchases into the passenger seat and took a bottle of Excedrin from the glove compartment. He dry swallowed a couple of the pills, worked his throat to get them all the way down, and then started the van.
There was an hour of light left. Enough to find a quiet spot and take thirty shots at a boulder from a hundred yards, adjusting the scope after each round. It would be better if he could bench mount it and practice with it in an indoor range. But he had been making do with what life dealt him since 1978.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chris sat on the porch of his bungalow with his new computer on his lap. It had not taken long to get some semblance of Mike’s old program running, searching the back alleys of the Internet for news of a killing. There had been plenty of mayhem in the world since he’d last checked, but there was no sign of another redhead murder. Let alone a double murder. He and Julissa read the stories together over lunch and eliminated them one by one. If the killer emailed them the photograph on the morning after the killing, then perhaps there was nothing in the news because the girls hadn’t been found yet. They had no idea where the girls might be, rotting away on the bed in their final pose. They could be in any city in the world, closed up behind a locked door, missed by their friends and family but not yet missing in the official sense. So Chris turned to the photograph.
He sat with his back against the wall of the bungalow and studied the picture. Zoomed to a nearly microscopic level, he could stand to look hours at a time. On the other hand, looking at the scene in its entirety was a mistake. The monstrosity of it was more than he could bear. And he thought the word was apt: they were on the trail of a monster. Chevalier had been right. The thing was inhuman.
He was looking at the upper left corner of the photograph. At this level of zoom, the picture would probably be bigger than his bungalow. He couldn’t see the girls at all, though there were two spots of blood in this section of the photograph. One was high on the wall and the other was on a ceiling beam, a droplet that was pregnant with weight and about to fall.
Just looking at the spot where the ceiling beams came up against the wall, he could draw some conclusions. The building which held the dead girls was old, probably several centuries old. Chris was neither an historian nor an architect, but he was used to paying attention to small details. The wooden beam was hand hewn. A modern beam would have the lightly curved marks left by a sawmill’s circular blade. An older beam would have been cut with a cross-cut saw wielded by two men, and would have diagonal marks. This beam bore the chips and pockets of an adze and didn’t have a saw mark on it. Then there was the wall itself. It was built of handmade bricks, each one slightly more than an inch thick and ten inches long. The kind of bricks the Romans made by the millions and stacked across their empire. The bricks were covered with plaster that had fallen away in a few patches near the ceiling. At the highest level of zoom, Chris could see small brown hairs coming from the broken edges of the plaster. He would have been willing to bet almost anything it was horse hair. Medieval plaster was made of horse hair, lime and bone ash. That would narrow their search down to, roughly speaking, the borders of the old Roman Empire, and helped about as much as saying they could forget about anywhere but Europe, the British Isles, North Africa and the Middle East.
He scrolled through the photo, purposely averting his eyes from the girls’ faces as he passed them, and then refocused his attention to the shadows beneath the bed. He had started by looking under the bed, but hadn’t been able to make out much because of the shadows. In the last several hours, though, he’d learned a lot about how to see into this photograph. He opened a control window and used it to adjust the lighting. Because of the photograph’s file format, he could manipulate it endlessly, almost as though he held the camera and could retake it from the same angle, but with any camera setting he wanted. He played with the lighting until the shadows beneath the bed receded. There was less light under the bed, so objects there were grainy at high levels of zoom. There was a violin case under the bed, and on its handle was a leather luggage tag. It was facing away from him. No amount of toggling would turn it around. There was a glint of reflection from the brass clasps on the violin case and he guessed the picture was taken with a flash.
To have a view under the bed like this, the room must have been either very wide, so the killer was standing far back when he took the picture, or he had been sitting on the floor. Chris guessed the killer was sitting on the floor. If the ceiling was five hundred years old and supported by wooden beams, it had to be a narrow room. He didn’t think that knowledge was going to do him a bit of good. Maybe, after eating half of two girls, the killer had to sit down to rest a moment.
There was another shadow under the bed, to the right of the violin case. Chris scrolled the picture over and brightened the area. A corner of bloody bed sheet hung down from the mattress, and though it did not directly block the thing next to the violin case, it cast an additional shadow under the bed. Also, whatever it was, it was farther under the bed.
Chris played with the light and then sat back when he finally had it.
A book.
It was a hardcover college textbook, three inches thick; its spine was facing towards the room. The lettering on the spine was nearly the same color as the glossy binding. He turned his head and tried to make it out. It was like trying to read the headline on a newspaper drifting beneath the surface of a river at night. He closed his eyes and let them rest awhile, then opened them again. He used the mouse to select the area around the book, then flipped that section on its side so that the book appeared to be standing on its end. He stared at the words. Fondamenti di Chimica. Then, in smaller print that was almost impossible to read, he made out one other word: Bianchi. The wooden floor under the bed was dusty, but there was a long clean streak leading from the edge of the bed to the book.
He thought about that. The book had been sitting on the floor but had been kicked under the bed. Recently. Perhaps it had been kicked during the struggle.
One of them had been using the book, probably on the day she died.
He
went to Google to see what he could find about the book and the author. The first three links were Italian websites selling college text books. The fourth was the American site of Amazon.com. The fifth link, in Italian, was a .pdf file. He clicked on it and found himself looking at the current syllabus for a summer semester chemistry lab at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. The professor was teaching from Bianchi’s book, the book underneath the dead girls’ bed. He looked again at the name, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. He thought that was probably the University of Naples, and when he checked it on the Internet, he saw he was right.
He pulled up a map of Naples and looked at the university, which was less than a quarter mile from the ocean in the heart of the old city. In the satellite photograph, he could see cranes unloading a cargo ship and a nest of warehouses in the port district not far from downtown. It was the same story he’d seen roughly three-dozen times before.
He went back to the photograph, resized it to fill the computer screen, and then just looked at it. Maybe ten minutes passed before it hit him. The floor was made of heavy wooden planks, likely supported from beneath by hewn beams like the ones in the ceiling. The bed was framed in wood. Counting the furniture, the room probably had three tons of wood in it. The creature could disable security systems; it would have no trouble taking out any other kind of alarm. The wood in the building would have been ancient heartwood, heavy and hot burning.
Chris went back to the Internet and began searching Italian news sites. It didn’t take long.
When he found it, he used a web-translator to convert the page into English. The story was ten hours old; the fire started at 4:45 a.m. in a girls’ dormitory at the University of Naples. The journalist speculated it may have begun in the basement, where there was a boiler. But there was no room to speculate the fire was a freak accident. Someone had locked the front entrance and the back exit from the inside with chains. The doors were made of cast bronze and would have been impossible to break down without a medieval battering ram. People on the street had been able to do nothing except stand and listen to the girls scream. The fire was well underway by the time anyone outside noticed it; all the electrical and telephone lines to the building had been cut, and the main fire control system had been disabled not from inside the building, but from the central circuit breaker in a utility duct under the street in front of the building. Twenty-five girls were unaccounted for. The death toll would be even higher if any of them had boyfriends sleeping over.
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