Moving on to the bedroom, Anne pulled a hatbox from underneath the bed that contained her collection of wigs. What little furniture there was in the house was junk. She made a note to call the Salvation Army on Monday and have them pick it up. She now had three partially full garbage bags, so she dropped a wig in each one.
Deciding it would be the first to go, she called the Realtor who had sold her the house in Seattle and instructed her to put it back on the market. She hadn’t used it as a kill site for a number of years, and since she’d already given thought to leasing it, it was ready to go. The weather was lousy in Seattle, and real estate prices were declining.
The cleaning service she had stumbled across on the Internet specialized in cleaning crime scenes, and the irony alone was worth the risk. No one suspected a woman, one of the reasons Anne had slipped under the police’s radar. The previous owner had died inside the Seattle place, so she told the cleaning service she had inherited it from her uncle and wanted it decontaminated because he’d recently spent time in the Congo.
Since he had resided in Denver, Seattle had long since forgotten Russell Madison. The Denver police were probably still getting pressure from the family, but the police in Seattle were already classifying it as a cold case. As far as she knew, they didn’t have one lead.
Before she’d called in the crime scene cleaners, Anne had scrubbed the Seattle house from floor to ceiling, but evidence was hard to find. She kept a variety of products such as Luminol, used to detect bloodstains, at every kill site. The stuff came from Web sites that allegedly supplied forensic labs, but no one cared who you were as long as you had a credit card. Some of the sites were scams, though, set up to plug online schools for people who watched shows like CSI and thought they could become forensic technicians. Several of them had grabbed people’s money and disappeared. The Internet was like a black hole.
The boat she’d dumped Madison’s remains on had been described in the newspaper accounts as abandoned, which wasn’t true. She had actually purchased the boat under one of her fictitious identities, then never changed the registration. Greed solved a lot of problems. The boat was a 1967 Chris-Craft, and the ad read fifteen hundred or best offer, which meant the owner was basically trying to unload it to anyone who would take it off his hands. When she’d handed the guy three grand in cash, acting as if she’d never seen the ad, he hadn’t so much as blinked. He was stooped over with arthritis and didn’t look like he could chop off the head of a chicken, let alone a man.
Anne assumed the police had shown up on the owner’s doorstep after the body was found, but the old geezer deserved it for trying to take advantage of a woman. She knew the cops wouldn’t consider him a viable suspect. Like stealing from her victims, which Anne felt was morally wrong, she did her best to make certain an innocent person didn’t take a fall for her.
The plan she’d come up with to cover her tracks with Lily’s husband had been brilliant. Since she’d been seen by so many people in Las Vegas, even a police officer, how could she have followed through on her plan to kill him? She’d been elated when the bastard had popped up alive.
Because of the Versed, Bryce didn’t know she had drugged him. For all she knew, the idiot believed he had tried to rape her. Snatching a person’s memory away left him wide open to any number of false accusations, one of the reasons Anne loved this particular drug.
Still, she had never dreamed her plan would turn out as spectacularly as it had. Bryce had been forever tainted in Lily’s mind, and she’d created a direct path into the judge’s life. Regardless of the situation, she and Lily were perfect for each other. Both of them were victims of violent and disgusting men. After Anne told Lily what Bryce had done, she probably never want to be with a man again.
The kiss had been an integral part of the plan. The only purpose was to eliminate any chance that Lily would believe Bryce’s story. When Lily unexpectedly embraced her and kissed her back, Anne’s mind had shifted from black to white. Even now her heart was beating so fast, she felt like she’d just snorted ten lines of cocaine. Becoming Lily’s friend and confidante would have been a significant accomplishment, but being her lover was heaven. Doors had flown open that she hadn’t even been aware existed. She had driven home and fallen into a blissful sleep, then awoke this morning with a feeling most people took for granted—happiness.
Lily had looked her straight in the eye and told her she was the kindest person she had ever met. She had turned herself into a cold-blooded killer, so why couldn’t she become the person Lily thought she already was?
Anne threw two large suitcases on the moth-eaten mattress and headed to the closet. Why had she ever felt the need to kill men? Her father had been a cruel, worthless man, but then his father had been no better. She recalled the scars he had shown her from where his father had beat him.
But her father was the only person she had a justifiable reason to kill. When she’d questioned herself throughout the years as to why she hadn’t tracked him down and sought revenge, she’d always tricked herself into believing various excuses, such as he wasn’t worth her time, or it was too big of a risk.
The truth was, even after all these years, Anne was still terrified of her father. If you managed to escape the devil, you didn’t go back. You ran. And that’s exactly what she had done.
But the devil always won in the long run.
Had God finally intervened and decided to give her a life? Probably not, as she had damned herself the day she had put that wire around Blue’s neck and ended his life. The man’s liver was gone, though, and he would have died within months. In reality, she did the guy a favor. She’d seen people die on the streets and it was far from pleasant.
She shoved the suitcases aside and sat on the edge of the bed to remove the prosthesis that allowed her to walk normally. She sniffed back tears, fearing Lily would be repulsed when she saw her feet. But Lily was a compassionate woman. She would love her even more because of her deformity. And Anne would tell her everything. Not about the murders, of course, but about what her father had done to her, and the life she had been forced to live.
As of today, Anne no longer cared if married men fucked around on their wives. Her new motto was it wasn’t her problem. She would be like the people who saw starving children on television and headed to the kitchen to make themselves another bag of microwave popcorn. The suffering of the world was entertainment.
Anne yanked down the blackout drapes covering the windows, letting the light wash over her. She then went outside and jumped into her Nissan, going through the drive-through at KFC down the street. Driving off with a bucket of extra crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, and biscuits, she decided to celebrate.
When she returned to the house, she sat in the backyard on the grass and ate her lunch. For the first time in years she felt full, really full. She didn’t need to be rail-thin anymore. All that was over.
There were a few challenges ahead of her, but nothing she couldn’t handle. She would contact the district attorney’s office in Las Vegas and convince them to drop the charges against Bryce. She might not be able to accomplish that over the phone, though. If the state felt certain a crime had been committed, they could move forward with the case without her consent. On the other hand, it was hard to win a case with a hostile witness.
If the Las Vegas authorities subpoenaed her, she would vow not to show up and and would chastise them for wasting the taxpayers’ money. That would create another problem, however, as the court would issue a warrant for failure to appear, which meant she would have to stop using the Anne Bradley identity. Without the Bradley identity, she would lose Lily. She didn’t worry; she was prepared.
The charges weren’t as serious as they sounded. In Las Vegas, attempted rape must be a common offense. And not all of the claims were legitimate. A man would have sex with a prostitute and then refuse to pay, and the woman would go to the police and say she was raped. These type of cases didn’t fly, but the john ended up
giving the prostitute her money.
As a last resort, Anne would tell them this was what happened with Bryce. Under no circumstances could she allow the case to continue, even if she had to tell them she was a prostitute. Bryce had probably already hired a first-rate attorney. When the police had asked her for her driver’s license, she had given them a California license in the name of Anne Bradley. Anne Bradley had been reported missing in New York, but it was a common name and she’d used a different date of birth when she’d obtained a California license.
The other thing that could potentially hurt her was the fact that she’d told Bryce her name was Anne Hall, not Anne Bradley. Once she formulated her plan, she’d decided to give the police the Bradley identity, as this was the name Lily knew her by. At the time of Bryce’s arrest, he was too out of it to know the difference, but his memory might return once he sobered up, and the discrepancy could become a factor in his defense if the case continued.
Although women frequently gave men false names these days, the fact that she had lied could support Bryce’s story. No matter how it went down, she was a murderer. The only time she would appear in a courtroom was if the police apprehended her.
The good thing was that a woman named Anne Bradley had practiced navigational law in Manhattan, and then suddenly disappeared without a trace. The law firm Wharton, Cannon, and Byerman had told Stan Waverly that Bradley had became disgruntled because they’d made her handle the client who was throwing sex parties on his yacht. But after Bradley had quit her job, she’d never returned to her apartment, even to claim her clothing and personal effects. According to what Stan had told her, the woman’s parents suspected foul play, but NYPD had only conducted a cursory investigation.
Most individuals would be shocked if they knew how many people simply dropped off the face of the earth. Anne Bradley was one of the women Stan Waverly had bragged about sleeping with, and he’d commented that Anne could be her double. Bradley was twenty-seven, which worked well. She’d been intrigued by the type of law the woman had practiced. After she’d killed Waverly, she had spent her cooling-down time studying navigation law.
Anne wasn’t certain of her real birth date, as her parents had never told her, but she was fairly certain she was between twenty-five and twenty-six. The authorities had searched for her birth records, but had failed to find them. She remembered her mother telling her she had given birth in her grandfather’s barn, then taken her baby and ran away. Her parents must have failed to register her birth, probably because of her father’s warrants or her mother’s drug addiction. She wasn’t even certain her mother and father were legally married, or that the man her mother lived with was her biological father.
Why hadn’t her mother just left her at her grandparents’ farm? Anne couldn’t fathom why women on heroin, crack, and other hardcore narcotics thought they could raise a baby. She remembered Blue telling her a lot of them did it for the welfare money. Although many people didn’t realize it, the only way a woman could qualify for public assistance was if she had children. Adults didn’t get welfare unless they were disabled.
She tied up the garbage bag and went to the other room to get the other bags. Stealing Anne Bradley’s identity had taken all of six hours. The only problem was she couldn’t use Bradley’s driver’s license or credit cards because the woman had been reported missing. The credit cards didn’t matter, as she always paid cash, and she had legitimate credit cards under her other fictional identities. When she needed a credit card for things such as renting a car or a hotel room or purchasing an airline ticket, she paid the bill as soon as she received it. All her fictional identities had excellent credit.
Anne turned her thoughts to the other properties she wanted to liquidate. The alibi clubs were a pain in the ass, primarily because she couldn’t find trustworthy employees. In addition to the money she had in various savings accounts, she would have more than enough once all the properties sold. If she ran out of money in the future, she would just get a job. Of course, by then, she fantasized, she would be sharing her life with Lily.
After placing the trash bags by the front door so she could just jump out of her car and grab them to take to the dump, she began packing, neatly folding the clothes and other items she was taking to the apartment and placing them in the open suitcases. She checked the house again to make certain she had everything she wanted. Picking up the suitcases, she lugged them out to the car, then came back to the house to do more cleaning. Although she’d never used this particular place as a kill site, she wanted to wipe down the walls and scrub the floors so it would be nice for the new tenants. During the occasions when she came to the house at night, she used gas lanterns. She would have to return later to pick up the garbage bags, as the Nissan was a sports car and the suitcases were bulky.
When she picked up one of the garbage bags to place at the door, she peered inside and suddenly jumped back, seeing severed limbs and bloody torsos. The chances of her living a normal life were the same as a skeleton climbing out of a coffin and hitching a ride. She had danced with the devil far too long. The devil owned her now, and no matter how fast she ran, or how cleverly she hid, he would find her.
For Katie Collins, though, the little girl whose father had left her to freeze to death on the interstate, it had been a good day. In a life that had been filled with unspeakable misery, one good day could go a long way.
TWENTY-SEVEN
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1
VENTURA, CALIFORNIA
Christopher Rendell got out of bed, dressed, then bent down to kiss Lily goodbye. “Please don’t go,” she said, stroking his hair back from his forehead. “Spend the night with me. I can sleep when you’re here. I’ve never felt so rested.”
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment or a complaint.”
Lily propped herself up on her elbows. “It’s a compliment, Chris. It’s hard for me to fall asleep. I deal with it by working until I collapse. I certainly wasn’t referring to your performance in bed. You’re a wonderful lover.”
“Relationships have to be built over a long period of time, Lily. You and your husband only recently decided you wanted to break up.” He saw the disappointment etched on her face. “It isn’t that I don’t want to stay here with you because I do. We just have to handle this the right way.”
“I’ll stay at your place, then,” Lily told him. “You’re just worried that Bryce is going to walk in and find you here. He can’t make bail until Monday. He even had the gall to blame me because I wouldn’t fly to Vegas and take care of it. He believes I can use my connections to get him off.”
Chris bent down and kissed her again, cupping one side of her cheek in his hand. “It isn’t right for us to . . . you know . . . make love. Not until you’re divorced. I shouldn’t have pushed things today. It’s my fault, not yours. I got carried away.”
“But it will take six months for my divorce to be final.” According to his moral principles, he had committed a serious sin. Lily didn’t care because she wanted to be with him. When a spouse made a mockery of his marriage vows, the way Bryce had, she believed the other party was morally free to do whatever she wanted. It certainly went against her Catholic upbringing, as the church didn’t even recognize her marriage to Bryce due to his former marriage. She was okay since John was dead, but the church still felt she was committing adultery by sleeping with Bryce, regardless of the fact that they were legally married. Mormons must have similar rules, probably more strict than Catholics. The irony was she could marry Chris in the church since his wife was dead. These were the kind of convoluted rules that made people sour on certain religions.
“Why can’t we be together now?” Lily hoped she could convince him to let it go. He’d told her he wasn’t actively involved in the church anymore. Of course, that didn’t mean he didn’t still believe. “I’m not going to reconcile with Bryce, if that’s what you’re thinking. You know about my past. For God’s sake, Bryce is a sex offender. I can’t live with a man like
that. I was going to leave him if he didn’t stop drinking, anyway.”
“I’m not saying we can’t spent time together,” Chris told her. “We can see each other as much as you want. It’s just that sleeping with you right now is wrong. You’re still another man’s wife.”
“There doesn’t have to be sex involved.” Lily was willing to accept any terms he offered, and although she’d enjoyed being with him, sex wasn’t that important. “I understand your religious beliefs. As long as we can still see each other, it’s fine.”
Lily got out of bed to get dressed. He reached out and grabbed her hand, then quickly dropped it, turning his head away. “This isn’t going to work if you walk around naked. I’m a man, Lily.”
She grabbed the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around her. “Can I make a suggestion? I’ll get dressed and we’ll go to your place. Maybe one night next week, we can drive to the children’s hospital in L.A. and distribute Emily’s toys to the sick kids. They’re not making anyone happy now, even you. What do you think?”
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