Decent was the last thing Jordan felt like. He wanted to smash windows, run through Beth’s store, her house, fling open drawers, search closets, turn over furniture, look for any clue that might tell him where she was. He wanted to scream her name.
When he arrived home and locked his door, he did exactly that.
55
Bleeding to death.
Beth wondered how long it would take. Her physician had never told her, and why would he? Beth was always careful, took her medication faithfully, refrained from contact sports, ate the proper food. Neither she nor her doctor would assume the worst. But the worst had happened, and so Beth thought about dying.
The cut would sting, maybe burn a little, then what? Would she just fall asleep, peacefully, like some 1940s movie heroine, or would she struggle for breath, choke on her own bloody vomit …
The need to urinate had disappeared. Her back ached, and there was pain in her joints that had nothing to do with her physical confinement. When she glanced down, she saw that her flesh was tinged yellow. Her symptoms were worsening.
So what? She was going to die anyway. If she could control nothing else, at least she could be master of her own fate. She would do it to herself before he could do it to her.
The massage table was lightweight, perhaps on wheels like the one in her masseur’s office. She could probably topple the table by rocking from side to side until it flipped over. The fall might kill her.
She jerked her neck upward and jackknifed her body, her ribcage straining against the heavy tape beneath her breasts. She rocked laterally, slapping left shoulder, then right, against the vinyl of the massage table. It didn’t budge.
He had bolted it to the floor.
Weary and aching, she collapsed. She would not be able to kill herself by falling.
She placed her tongue between her molars and began to press. Would it hurt, she wondered, when her teeth clamped down hard on her own flesh? Only for a moment, she rationalized, and by then, she would be past caring. She hoped that when the time came, she would have enough strength left to spit a mouthful of her own blood in Brad’s face.
All at once, she hated herself. She had spent her entire life running, fleeing her hometown to escape memories of a con man, jumping from date to meaningless date. Now, faced with the malevolence of Brad Petersen, she was opting for escape again, planning her own death. She hadn’t bothered to consider the alternative of living.
She remained a prisoner, held to a table by yards of tape. Grappling with her bonds guaranteed a hemorrhage. If she was to survive, she couldn’t risk the tiniest bruise. There was only one solution. Brad had to free her.
He came back into the room carrying a stack of videos. “Since you’re going to be here awhile, I thought you would appreciate some entertainment. No fair me having all the fun.” He set the cassettes on the table beside her left hip. “I’ve got quite an assortment. What kind of movies do you like?”
Beth had prepared herself to appear fearless in the face of any cruelty he would inflict, but she could not have foreseen this. She didn’t know how to respond.
“Please,” he said, his voice adopting a maddening lilt, “you’re the guest. Are you a dance fan? I’ve got Top Hat.”
This couldn’t be happening. No one knew how the Spiderman’s victims spent their final days, but watching an Astaire classic? It had to be a ruse, something designed to keep her off-balance. But why? Until he cut her loose, she wasn’t going anywhere.
Brad removed a video cassette from the pile and set the rest on the floor. Beth watched as Brad wheeled the television set closer, then turned his chair to face the screen.
“There. All set? Good. Now just lie there and enjoy the show.”
The cassette disappeared into the slot.
56
Fred Astaire did not dance in the Spiderman’s version of Top Hat. Beth watched the events unfold on screen with revulsion as another dancer, Carole Van Horne, pleaded for her life. The woman had undergone a metamorphosis in the video, whimpering quietly at first, then hurling obscenity after obscenity at her captor. Near the end, she was reduced to garbled begging and proclamations of dreams not yet realized. She recited the names of people who loved her. Carole’s final line was a gut-wrenching scream as she watched a fountain of blood spurt from her wrist.
Brad played his role without flinching, his face on screen the same as it was now — detached, bored, as though he had entered some kind of fugue state. The films no longer satisfied his hunger, Beth knew. He needed the real thing, and more often.
Beth lay paralyzed, encircled by tentacles of fear. Carole’s scream made her own heart race. In spite of the relentless clamour in her head, she harnessed her emotions and forced slow, even breaths from her lungs.
On screen, Carole Van Horne died, and Beth did not turn away.
Brad cast a curious glance in her direction but said nothing. He pressed his thumb on the remote, and the film rewound. The entire video had lasted only fifteen minutes. How long had dying seemed to Carole?
Beth waited for the whirring of the machine to stop, then in a voice completely foreign, she said, “It must be frustrating for you, Brad, able only to be in one place at a time.”
He arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you need to be near the women at the time of their deaths, which necessitates mounting the video camera on a tripod. I’m no film expert, but it seems that in order to capture the true essence of what’s happening, some variety would be in order. Close-ups, different angles, I don’t know. As it stands, the film is — well, flat. You fare much better as a still photographer.”
“That is my specialty, of course,” he replied nonplussed. “Still, maybe another film might be more to your liking.”
Calmly, she said, “Let me look at the titles again.”
She caught a flicker of surprise in his eyes.
Brad retrieved the videos from the floor and held the stack over her. One of his knuckles grazed her breast. She quelled a shudder and raised her head off the table. There were a dozen videos, all neatly labelled. The Spiderman was being held accountable for six murders in San Francisco. This collection was proof the police were just scratching the surface. Who knew how many murders he was actually responsible for?
Beth examined the titles. An American in Paris. Funeral in Berlin. Jewel of the Nile. Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter. Kathy Smith’s Low-Impact Aerobics.
“Third from the bottom,” Beth said.
She steeled herself for more real-life horror, knowing she was using others’ tragedies to buy herself precious time. Still, the films removed the Spiderman’s focus from her. More importantly, her reaction to the events on screen, or apparent lack of one, had thrown Brad a curve ball. The films were meant to shock, to frighten, and she’d given him none of it. Some instinct told her this shift in equilibrium was important.
Where had her instincts been the night of the party, when Brad had spoken to her, when he had stood too close, his smile too friendly? He had been a predator that night, searching for his next victim. The discomfort she’d felt at his proximity was the first ripple of fear, but she hadn’t recognized it.
She had to pay attention now. Every nuance of Brad’s actions, every phrase uttered on screen might provide her with the clue she needed to pull the rug out from under him.
The VCR inhaled the cassette. Seconds later, Beth choked back a sob. Too late, she realized the significance of the film’s title. Around the World in Eighty Days, now humming in the machine, depicted the final hours of Anne Spalding.
57
When Kearns removed his grinding fists from his fatigue-scorched eyes, he saw Inspector Anscombe coming toward him, her face jubilant.
“We got another bingo, L.T.,” she said, perching herself on the edge of the desk. “The watch. It’s Lydia Price’s.”
The Cartier, the one trophy Nora Prescott had been reluctant to part with. He damn near had to pry it off her arm.
“Helluva job,” Kearns managed to say, trying to muster some sincerity past the tennis-ball lump in his throat.
“The Prices didn’t recognize the guy in the picture though. But we’re a little closer,” Anscombe said. “At least, we have an idea who he is now, right?”
Kearns nodded. The tennis ball had worked its way down Kearns’s esophagus and was now lodged in his upper abdomen. En route, it had become encased in lead. He winced, his physical agony now matching his mental exhaustion.
“Sharon, you don’t need much sleep, true?”
Anscombe grinned. “What do you want me to do?”
“Check all the major hotels in town, starting with the most expensive. It’s time to find Nora Prescott and bring her back in for questioning. She’s got to have some clue to where her son is. Use some of those persuasive people skills of yours.”
The grin widened. “My pleasure. “I’ll grind the shit out of her.”
“Good,” Kearns replied. “It’s time her life got fucked up a little.”
Anscombe turned to leave, then paused. Over her shoulder, she said, “Say, L.T., you did get back to that friend of yours who was talking to Weems, didn’t you?
Kearns looked blank.
“You did get that message?”
58
As though she was Siskel to his Ebert, Brad asked her opinion of the film.
The lullaby quiet of his voice crawled over his skin. She wanted to claw at his eyes, make them run like rivers, do to him what he’d done to the others. She wanted to shatter the tomb of silence he created, yank the photos from his gallery of death, drive shards of glass through his perfect skin.
She realized then, that there were two monsters in the room.
Beth paused, made it appear she was gathering her thoughts to form an educated reply. She swallowed bile and forced the tortured image of Anne Spalding from her mind.
When Beth was certain she could respond without her voice betraying her emotions, she said, “I maintain your best work is done with a 35mm, not a video camera. That shot there, for instance” — she pointed to the photograph of her former roommate, really six overlapping Annes, one after the other, blood flowing from six slashed wrists — “there’s no comparison between the artistic merit of that photograph versus the video. How was that done?”
“I used a multi-faceted lens,” Brad explained with a measure of pride. “I worried the effect might be too gimmicky, but I think it came out rather well. Of course, I wouldn’t ever use the same technique twice. Special lenses and filters are no substitute for imagination.”
“I think that’s why the stills are better than the videos,” Beth told him. “The viewer can wonder ‘why all the blood? Why is this happening?’ The fear is more real when the imagination is allowed to run amok. The videos, on the other hand, reveal too much. There’s no mystery, no room for the viewer’s own intelligence.”
Brad, the artiste, seemed to appreciate this insight. “You’re right, of course. However, the market is more lucrative for video. Sometimes we creative types have to forego craft for finance.”
“You don’t seem to be suffering in that department. Your home, your car, all this equipment —”
“I’m an only child,” Brad said. “My mother dotes on me.”
Beth gulped. From the moment she’d awakened in Brad’s basement, she had objectified him as much as he had her. He was the shadowy figure from all childhood nightmares. Now he was speaking about a mother. He was a member of someone’s family. A chill coursed through her.
Brad laughed. “You’re wondering about my mother, how she can love someone like me, what she really sees when she looks at me.”
“No, I —”
“She’s always known about me,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Oh, she tried to close her eyes to who I was, tried to make me invisible, but I think she realizes now she can never escape. Just like you.”
Beth forced the last sentence to some dark recess in her mind. Keep the focus away from you, her internal voice warned. “She knows about —”
“The women? She does now. Mother’s been so generous, this grateful son feels compelled to shower her with tokens of affection.” The scorn in his voice was unmistakable.
The souvenirs. The articles Kearns told her were taken from the victims. Given to Brad’s mother.
Beth saw the anger in Brad’s eyes and knew this was forbidden territory. She couldn’t risk tipping his emotional scale in that direction. Not yet.
Better to stroke his ego, she thought, and cast her glance toward another one of Brad’s framed photos. “How did you manage that shot?”
He followed her gaze toward an artsy picture of one of his victims. The camera must have been positioned somewhere behind the table. The woman’s head dangled over the edge, her breasts thrust desperately upward, her heart still beating beneath. Her naked skin was covered with images of multi-hued bottles of nail polish. The esthetician. Monica Turner.
“I took a slide of a nail polish display in a department store, then projected the slide onto her skin, keeping the background black so the images wouldn’t appear anywhere else.”
As best as she could, Beth glanced around the room. “I don’t see a slide projector. Or any of your lenses. Do you keep them back there?” She directed her gaze toward the door on the opposite wall.
Brad nodded. “In the darkroom.”
Where there might be a way out. Or a weapon. She had to get in there, but she couldn’t appear too eager. “All that equipment must cost a fortune. I really don’t know much about photography —”
“And I’m sure you don’t give a damn.” Though his voice carried the kindergarten singsong lilt, it had taken on an edge. “This chat has been fun, a pleasant change from the usual snivelling and pleading, but you don’t think this glibness will change anything, do you?”
What was left of her heart plunged into the abyss, and with it her last flimsy vestige of hope. Had she really believed she could pull this off, when at least a dozen others had failed?
At length she said, “No, Brad. I know I’m going to die here. You control when that will happen. But I refuse to worsen my situation by expending my remaining energy on bursts of hysteria.” She remembered Carole Van Horne, the obscene ravings of a woman gone mad with fear.
He shot her a curious look. “This is either an Oscar-winning performance, or you’re an ice woman.”
“Neither,” she answered. “But the Serenity Prayer works for me. ‘Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change —’”
“Philosophy bores me,” he cut in. “Especially the trite kind that’s printed on posters and bookmarks.” He looked at his watch and yawned.
Beth held her tongue. Whatever avenue she chose still moved her closer to the end. She had been here a little over one day, and already Brad was tiring of her, his boredom escalating too quickly. Her effort to be different from his other victims had been for nothing. Much as Brad claimed to disdain hysteria, he had probably been amused by it, perhaps empowered by it. Nothing Beth did now would make any difference. Perhaps she should accept what she couldn’t change. She was going to die. And soon. Her nose was bleeding.
Brad produced a stark white handkerchief from his pants’ pocket and dabbed at her nose. Then his thumb and forefinger pinched her nostrils together and she couldn’t breathe. She jerked her head upward, opened her mouth and gasped, swallowing gulps of precious air. Blood escaped down her throat, and she coughed. Brad pulled his hand away. The bleeding slowed, a trickle oozing down her upper lip. He wiped the area c
lean. “There, there. It’s all right. All better.”
Then suddenly, as though nothing life-threatening had occurred, he asked, “How about another film? I could show you my latest release. That aerobics instructor was down here the night of my party. The night you and I met. You can faintly hear the music in the background.”
Patricia Mowatt. Held captive in this tomb while upstairs scores of partygoers ate, drank, and danced. She would have heard their laughter, felt the rhythm of their celebration. Ginny, Jordan, Beth, and nearly a hundred others. And not one had saved her.
“I’d rather see your darkroom,” she replied.
He leaned closer. “Why this obsession with what’s behind the door?”
“No obsession. Just curiosity. For one, my neck is getting stiff. For another, I’m as vain as they come. If you’re going to take my picture, I think I should have some say about how I’d like to be portrayed.”
She had no idea where that had come from. She only knew that remaining confined to this table spelled hopelessness.
He appeared surprised by her statement. A victim’s participation in her own death — a team effort — maybe this was the new experience Brad craved. A fresh twist to what seemed to be a tiresome ritual.
“I’ll think about it,” he said nonchalantly, then rose to his feet and strode across the room. The wooden door closed with a thunk.
59
The kid’s complexion looked like it had been doused with bleach. Ted Weems struggled for composure, but despite his discomfort, Kearns wasn’t done with him.
“Goddammit, Kid. What the hell happened?”
“The message was in my pants’ pocket, L.T. I guess I forgot about it.”
“Jesus. Women’s bodies all over the place, my friend is missing, and you forgot. Explain how a conversation like that could slip your mind.”
“I don’t know, L.T. I screwed up. I wasn’t thinking straight. But your friend hasn’t been gone that long.”
Every Wickedness Page 25
