As she stood looking out the window, contemplating the problem, the sky lightened to old unpolished silver. The smell in the room—of his sweat, his blood, his agony—made her move from the window to pace the floor.
Finally she had to wake Charlene.
“I need your help,” she said, tiptoeing into the other woman's bedroom.
Charlene came awake suddenly, sitting up in the bed. She wore another old-fashioned nightgown, long and flowered, with a lace collar. “What is it? Who's here?”
“You saw the man I brought home?”
“Shadow? What's the matter? I stayed in my room, just as you said.”
Shadow was nodding in the dark. Charlene had the blinds closed. She reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. Mackie hissed where he lay at the foot of the bed. “Well, he's dead,” she said.
“What?”
“I killed him.”
“You what?”
“Murdered him. Poison. Rat poison.”
“Oh, hon, tell me it ain't so. You're just kidding, right? It's some kind of awful joke.” Charlene hurried from the bed and went to the doorway, peeking around the corner into the hall. “You didn't really do nothing, did you? You're just playing a trick on me, huh?”
Shadow led her by the hand down the dim early-morning hallway. They stood together staring at the inert body lying on the bed, staining the white sheets red.
Charlene bolted. She rushed down the winding stair to the living room. She was at the front door, trying to undo the deadbolt, very much like the boys must have done when imprisoned with the murdered former owner. But Shadow caught and stopped her.
“Hush, Charlene. It's just like before only this one didn't break into the house. He broke into my life. At the club. He wouldn't go away. He wanted to use me. He caught me outside, and hit me in the face. I couldn't make him leave me alone. And if I didn't let him come to the house, he would have hurt me again. A lot worse.
“Don't you see? They shouldn't go on living. They keep doing these things to women. They never stop. And no one else can stop them. Police can't and jail can't and shrinks can't. They keep on doing it, hurting people and forcing them to do things until someone has to end it . . .” She talked fast, her voice hardly above a whisper, the words tumbling and rushing, as out of control as a raging river.
Charlene shook her head and squeezed shut her eyes. “You're as sick as I am, Shadow. Kay . . . remember? Your name? What it was like in that place?” Charlene turned in Shadow's hands to confront her. “We're both sick. We ain't right in the head, honey. We're way over the deep end. We're living in a nightmare. I see ghosts and hear voices. I was counting on you to keep me sane. I needed you. But you can't kill people!”
“I'm not Kay anymore. I'm someone else. Kay Mandel had a home and a family. She had a life. She had little boys. Babies. Who ruined that for me, Charlene? Who?” Again that odd clicking sounded in her mind and she saw the boys, mutilated beyond repair, beyond identification. She shook herself, denying the memory a chance to linger.
“A man destroyed all that. And men keep after me, Charlene. They just keep after me.” Shadow turned away and crossed her arms over her chest. She had dressed again, after his last death rattle. She wore black slacks and a black turtleneck pullover. Working clothes. Night clothes. She didn't know how to make Charlene understand. She had to enlist her help. Without it she didn't know how she'd remove the body.
Charlene sighed. She touched Shadow's arm tentatively. “I'll help you,” she said. “Maybe I can help you, I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I guess we have to stick together no matter what.”
Together they rolled him into the sheet and liner, then hauled him onto the floor. They dragged him across the catwalk and down the back stairs, across the moon-splashed lawn, to the short pier. The entire time Charlene talked, but Shadow didn't listen. There was no dialogue in the world that was going to change what had been done.
“You can't do this,” Charlene said, wheezing from the exertion of getting the big naked man into the boat. “This ain't right. This is murder.”
Shadow still wasn't listening. She was hearing the man talk to her, answering those questions in all the wrong ways, answering with bravado and vulgarity and sometimes with cruelty.
He would lie at the bottom of the sea. And the world was a safer place because of it.
~*~
Son might have missed the report of the dead man had he not had the late television news on while he read over and edited the pages he had written earlier in the day.
“. . . man found floating . . . Kemah channel . . . cause of death unknown at this time . . .”
Another body dumped in the bay? The second one in a few weeks. He could feel his pulse rate increase because his heart fluttered in his chest.
He put away his manuscript and switched the channel to another local station to see if there were any further details. All the channels were into the weather report now.
Man. Dead in the water. Floating into land. Serial murder? It could be a trend, a pattern building. He must watch this very closely. Perhaps a game was underfoot. He couldn't let it happen without becoming a player.
The next morning he was up early, waiting for the paperboy to throw the paper onto the front lawn. As soon as he saw him cycling by, he opened the door and made his way down the front path. He had the paper in his hands seconds after it hit the dew-wet grass.
Inside, he stripped off the clear plastic bag and opened up the pages to the overnight crime-report section. Autopsy pending, it said. Cause of death unknown. But the man did not appear to be a fisherman. He was naked as the day he was born. He had not yet been identified. It was definitely murder.
It was not until two days later that Son found out the cause of death. In a small column the dead man was identified as Gregory Corgi, twice-convicted felon, on parole for extortion. He had been murdered with an anticoagulant generally found in retail rat-poison products.
Son could hardly control his elation. There wasn't a real pattern yet, but he had a feeling in his gut that this was the work of a serial killer. He couldn't be certain, any more than the police could—not with only two similar murders—and it was true one man had been stabbed to death and the next poisoned —and two MOs wouldn't usually point to a serial murderer—but Son had a feeling about it anyway. The victims were both male. Both found floating around the Kemah/Seabrook area of the bay.
Something was going on. The cops wouldn't pick up on it yet, but there was definitely a possibility of a killer working the area. Some kind of killer. It might just be a few kill-offs of the Mafia persuasion, but for some reason Son doubted that. They didn't much like their handiwork showing up so easily. The mob got rid of a guy, the guy disappeared. Unless the death was meant as a warning to someone or some group. And this just didn't smell like mob work. Why dump them in the bay, for instance? Why not on the doorstep of the party to be warned?
“Just one more,” Son whispered. “Come on, one more, and we've got a ball game.”
He sat back in his desk chair and contemplated the ceiling. Male victims almost always indicated some aspect of homosexuality in the killer. John Wayne Gacy and his young men. Dean Corrl and his young men. But the two victims so far hadn't been young. They were in their forties.
It was a true puzzle. And why stab one, poison the other?
He shrugged. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn't serial killings. Just a coincidence of two murders washing up the channel.
It would take three victims to make this worth his investigation.
Son prayed for that one more victim. That he be dispatched soon. And that his remains be found in the waters off the coast of the Seabrook area.
He had been idle too long. His skills unused. His taste for violent action too long postponed.
There must be one more death. He knew it would happen because he wanted it so.
Nineteen
Mitchell found himself in an emotional bottleneck—his head stuc
k up above the rim, arms pressed tight to his sides, feet dangling.
Big Mac might die with pneumonia and, for worried moments, while she tried in a dry raspy voice to answer the questions put to her about the murder in Montrose, Mitchell mentally reasoned with himself over that fact.
Face it, he told himself. She's old, she's undernourished, she's depleted. And did that mean she should die in the county hospital? No. No one deserved an end in a charitable ward without a soul to care.
She's just an old homeless hag, what's wrong with you? What was wrong with him had nothing to do with Big Mac's economic status. It had to do with how much he'd invested in the gaunt, liver-spotted woman, an investment he didn't know, until now, had been so significant.
She had looked through the yearbooks from Woodlands High School and picked out, without hesitation, the five boys responsible for the bashing and murder of the gay banker killed in the alleyway. While doing so, Mitchell caught his lieutenant's eye watching him with a sad she's-not-gonna-make-it-to-testify look.
Anyone looking at Mac could see she was on her last legs. Her color was high, the blush in her cheeks not the charm of roses, but the searing scald of scarlet banners. Mitchell thought she must have a high fever that was burning her up. While checking the yearbook, she had slowly removed two outer layers of jackets as sweat beaded and slipped from her brow into gray-ringed sunken eyes.
Only one other time in his life had Mitchell seen someone as deathly ill as Mac. His own mother on her deathbed, dying of the cancer rampaging through her body, had looked this way. Death stamped a footprint on fatally ill people nearing the chasm, and it was apparently crushing the life force from Mac even as she sat, scarecrow thin and trembly, in Epstein's office.
She's not your mother.
Hell no, she wasn't his mother, she probably wasn't anyone's mother, but she was his friend. And he cared about her. She was a goddamn decent human being. She had to survive.
“You want a glass of water, Mac?” He moved toward the door thinking he had to leave the room before he did something really stupid like call 911, swoop her up into his arms, and rush her through the bullpen, the outer offices, and down to a waiting ambulance.
She looked up at him, eyes faded and rheumy. Why was it when people got old the color of their eyes washed out, he wondered? Did age drain the color, leaving watery husks behind? Noticing how the elderly's eyes faded was sadder to him than any number of wrinkles or the whitest of hair.
She gazed at him a full ten seconds, as if she were having trouble placing his name, and then a spark lit within the depths of her eyes, and she smiled a little, licked dry lips, nodded. “That would be nice, Samson.”
He hurried away, breathing easy again. At the water cooler he drank two paper cups of water before getting a fresh cup and filling it for her. He shook his head, worrying, worrying.
All right. As soon as she had identified the teenage killers, he'd whisk her to the emergency room. He'd make them save her, by God. They had fucking miracle drugs, didn't they? Not for cancer sometimes. They could save anybody from anything. Except your mother. Let them work some magic on this one old woman and he'd forgive the medical community anything from now on.
Back in Epstein's office, he handed over the water cup. Again Mac smiled at him, but it was a slow, sad, sick thing playing on her lips, threatening to disappear into a painful grimace at any second. She'd been coughing—hacking, belly-shaking, body-rending coughs that turned her blushing cheeks blue, the pain of the ordeal crinkling her eyes shut. She had the cough under control now, but it could come back; it would come back, he knew that.
“Thanks.” She took the water gratefully and sipped the way a connoisseur might sip expensive cognac.
“Well . . .” The lieutenant cleared his throat and shifted in his chair behind the desk. “I think that'll do it, Mac. We'll have you sign a few forms and a statement against these particular boys, then you're free to . . . uh . . . go.”
Mitchell said, “I'll be unavailable for a couple of hours. I'll call in.”
Epstein lifted his eyebrows in question and Mitchell shifted his gaze toward Mac to indicate he had to take care of this. Right now. Before it was too late.
“Uh . . . sure. That's fine. You want me to send out a car to pick these kids up or wait for you?”
“Wait on it. They're not going anywhere. I want to bring ‘em in.”
Mac rose, gathering her frayed and weathered garments into her arms. “Put the boys away, gents,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “They're stone killers if I ever saw one.”
Mitchell took her arm and led her into the squad room where the stenographer's notes had been typed up. Mac signed everything she was supposed to, then turned to go.
“Wait,” Mitchell said. “I'm taking you some place.”
“What place?” Her voice was a croak. Cocking her head in a way that made her look like a crane on long skinny legs watching the skies for a sign to fly away.
Mitchell hustled her from the room with as much gentleness as he could muster. He had her down the hall before he answered. “To a hospital.”
“Look, that ain't necessary . . .”
“It sure as hell is necessary! You won't make it through the night without some penicillin in you.”
“Crock of shit.”
“I'm not arguing about this, Mac. We're going to find you a doctor and that's that.”
She relented, mostly he figured because she couldn't fight him over this or anything else. She could hardly walk, how was she going to stop him? And it was then the wracking cough came back and he had to support her, standing there on the steps of the station, until she could draw a breath again.
“Okay,” she sounded exhausted. “Okay, if you say so. If you'll stay with me.”
“I wouldn't think of leaving you alone, don't worry.” He got her to his car and drove like some kind of Hollywood-stuntman maniac through the clogged city streets to Ben Taub's emergency entrance. They thought they'd make him wait, have the old woman sit in the waiting room for her turn, but he took out his shield, brandishing it like a sword, and his voice dropped a register and grew hard. They took Mac straight through the back to an examining room. Mitchell trailed behind, hands in his pockets so he could keep them still.
A nurse came in, made a moue of disgust upon seeing Mac in her old layers of cheap, torn clothes sitting upon the examining table. Ben Taub had to take the indigent and those without insurance, but most of the poor who came in through the waiting room wore clean clothes. And not so many of them layered thick as a quilt.
“You'll have to get out of those things. Sir, would you mind stepping out?”
Mitchell stood just outside the closed door, chewing the inside of his cheek. The hallway was strangely empty. He could hear a child whimpering somewhere, a hydraulic door hissing shut, a telephone ringing, and the intercom voice calling for a “Dr Hajune,” but there wasn't a soul in sight. Where was the doctor?
Where were all the goddamn doctors when you needed them?
Then he laughed to himself. It was what they said about cops. And for both professions it was true. You needed help, you couldn't find it to save your life. The more you needed it, the longer it took to reach you.
He saw a man in a lab coat swinging down the hall, head lowered, scanning a medical record.
Maybe that was the doctor. It better be the doctor.
The man came right up to Mitchell before taking his eyes from the clipboard. Then he looked him in the eye. “What have we got here?”
Mitchell jerked his head at the closed door. “My friend's got the flu or pneumonia, I think. Something with her lungs. It's pretty bad.”
The doctor nodded and pushed through the door. Mitchell followed. The nurse glanced over her shoulder at them. She took a thermometer from Mac's mouth, read the digital numbers, and jotted them on a pink sheet attached to a clipboard before handing it to the doctor. He set it atop the other he carried, reading over Mac's vital signs.
/> “So! Feeling sickly, are we?”
Mac rolled her eyes at Mitchell. “You may not feel sick, but I feel like hell came to visit and decided to stay.” Saying this much threw her into a paroxysm of coughing. The doctor waited patiently for it to end before pressing his stethoscope to her scrawny chest.
“How long you had this cough?”
Mac shrugged her shoulders.
“Week? Two weeks?” He prodded her diaphragm, tapping at it with two fingers.
“Three, maybe four,” she said. “It's been getting worse.”
The doctor moved behind her and listened again with the stethoscope; lifting it, settling it in a new spot, lifting again, listening.
We need to do some blood work, but I think I can tell you right now this is a serious case of pneumonia. Double pneumonia, actually. Both your lungs are involved. Your temperature is elevated . . .”
“How high?” Mitchell interrupted, stepping forward, his heart a regular trip hammer. He knew she was sick, knew she was in really bad shape, but it was one thing to think it and another to hear a doctor say it.
“Hundred and three.”
WIDOW Page 18
