THE MAN IN THE BLUE CAR PARKED IN THE SHADOWS DOWN THE ROAD WAS SPYING ON THE WOMAN HE PLANNED TO EXECUTE. HIS MORTALLY INJURED WIFE HAD DESCRIBED HER —YOUNG, WITH SHORT FAIR HAIR THAT CUPPED HER HEAD IN A RUFFLE—THIS WOMAN WHO HAD LOCKED THE DOOR IN HER FACE, REFUSING HER SANCTUARY FROM HER KILLER-RAPIST. AFTER HIS WIFE HAD DIED IN SURGERY, THE MAN IDENTIFIED HIS ENEMY AS MARY VAUGHAN. HE WAS WRONG. MARY HAD NOT EVEN HEARD OF THE TRAGEDY, AND SHE WAS NOT FLEEING FROM HIS REVENGE. SHE WAS TAKING HER EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD COUSIN JENNY ACTON TO JUAREZ FOR A FEW DAYS TO AVOID A POSSIBLE CONFRONTATION WITH JENNY’S UNSUITABLE AND VERY RESENTFUL FORMER FIANCE. UNFORTUNATELY WORD HAD BEEN LEAKED TO HIM THAT THE ACTONS HAD SENT THEIR DAUGHTER TO SANTA FE WHERE SHE WOULD BE WELL OUT OF HIS REACH. NOW JENNY’S MOTHER TELEPHONED FROM NEW YORK THAT THE HOT-TEMPERED EX-FIANCE MIGHT SUDDENLY DESCEND ON THEM.
ONCE ON THEIR WAY TO MEXICO, MARY WAS LIGHT-HEARTED WITH RELIEF. ALTHOUGH JENNY POINTED OUT THAT A BLUE CAR HAD BEEN FOLLOWING THEM FOR A LONG TIME, SHE WAS NOT WORRIED. IT WAS ONLY WHEN THEY REACHED THE HOTEL IN JUAREZ THAT ODD LITTLE HAPPENINGS AROUSED HER FEARS. SOON REAL DANGER FOLLOWED THESE CHILLING PORTENTS.
HERE IS AN ABSORBING NOVEL ABOUT A BEWILDERED WOMAN WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO IS THREATENING HER LIFE OR WHY.
IN
COLD
PURSUIT
A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE
by Ursula Curtiss
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY ∙ New York
Copyright © 1977 by Ursula Curtiss
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Curtiss, Ursula Reilly.
In cold pursuit.
I. Title.
PZ3.C94875In [PS3503.U915] 813’.5’4 77-22447
ISBN 0-396-07466-9
1
SHE had named the stray cat Dietrich when she adopted him—one of the few things she had ever done over her husband’s objections—because of his long and shapely legs with their beautiful markings.
He did not look like an instrument of disaster, except possibly his own. He had none of the brooding mystery or even the coordination of other cats. He bumped into the furniture occasionally, recoiling in terror at his own clumsiness, and got readily marooned in trees although he was no longer a kitten. Dripping water fascinated him: he could often be found sitting in the sink, staring hopefully at the faucet. At times it seemed conceivable that he was another kind of creature entirely, dressed up, for purposes of acquiring a home, in a four-legged suit of tiger-striped fur.
But a gentle creature, not a decoy.
When he was not back from one of his undoubtedly problem-ridden patrols by after seven o’clock on that May evening, his mistress finished a row of knitting, put down the mass of yellow wool, and went to the door to call him. This was the one night a week when her husband worked late, and although he tolerated Dietrich he was not fond of having his long-awaited cocktail and dinner to the accompaniment of frequent cat-summonings. Moreover, the weather forecast said rain, and in this as in so many other respects Dietrich was lacking; he would not discover what was going on until he was soaked and shivering. It followed as the night the day that he was prone to bronchitis.
“Dietrich?” The outside light showed her briefly before she moved out of its circle on her way to becoming a statistic: a tallish woman in her early thirties, slender in jeans and shirt, with cropped dark hair lying in points around an amiable, open-featured face. “Dietrich?”
There was nothing to indicate another presence in the tree-lined driveway, nothing to suggest that the house had been watched last week and the week before—in fact, since shortly after they moved in— and an increasingly interested note made that on this particular evening the carport stayed empty much later than usual. And that there was a woman alone here.
“Diet—”
The hand clapping over her mouth from behind almost stopped her heart as well as her breath. She knew what this was even before the tightening of the wiry arm across her chest and the warning as to the consequences of screaming. She wrenched her head around and screamed anyway, into the light rustle of wind and the sound-absorbing trees, because noise was supposed to be the best deterrent.
It was an interrupted scream, because he hit her hard and she went sprawling backwards, her head driving against something sharp. For a few seconds the astonishing pain took up all her consciousness, and then she was aware of a pointed face close to hers —he had followed her down like a flash—and his rough, single-intentioned hands.
The familiar admonitions crackled through her brain like sparks of light. Every woman’s handbag contains an impromptu weapon. She had no handbag. Stamp on the assailant’s instep with a high heel, or kick sharply backward at the shins. She was wearing Indian moccasins, and she was in no position to kick. She got her wounded head up, seized one of the hands, bit down on the thumb as hard as she could.
Instantly, furiously, a knife appeared, calling to itself a dull dangerous shine even in the obscurity under the trees, but in order to get at it he had had to shift fractionally and she rolled away, caught at bark, staggered upright. Now she could kick, something warning her as she did so that she could not really hurt him but only enrage him further.
The warning was accurate. In the space between one second and the next she was fighting not against being raped but against being killed. She was strong and her reflexes were fast, but she was powerless against a knife, and in her terrified recognition that this was happening and could have only one outcome no matter how she fought, she felt the homing point of the blade in her chest scarcely more than the flashing stings around her head and face.
Into a world limited to the sound of their breathing, hers straining through sobs, his savage, shot a new sound, rocketing, two-noted. An emergency vehicle. Unlikely as it seemed, someone had heard her cut-off scream and called the police.
It froze the boy—somehow her senses defined him as that—for the seconds that counted. She ran for the end of the driveway, or thought in her stumbling process that she ran, and only realized when she reached it that the police car or ambulance or whatever it was had shot by the mouth of the street and had nothing to do with her at all.
She looked wildly over her shoulder. The front door of the house was closed—had the wind blown it shut? Had she left it on the latch? Was he in there, waiting for her to come back and telephone for help? She couldn’t think clearly; she couldn’t even see clearly. She raced a bent wrist across one eye and then the other, and it came away sticky. Then, knowing that he was not in front of her, she began her effort at running again.
2
AUTOMATICALLY, because she had grown up among people so optimistic that they expected to win national contests and thought the police would forget all about that parking ticket, Mary Vaughan felt a little jump of alarm at the keening warble that began to swell in the night when she was a mile from home.
She reassured herself at once, a process she had to go through so often that the proper arguments unfolded neatly in her mind. Jenny didn’t smoke, so it could scarcely be fire, and heart attacks or other seizures were rare among eighteen-year-olds.
There had been an armed robbery in the neighborhood a month ago, when a nice-looking couple pleading a need for a telephone because they had just passed an inert body by the roadside had suddenly produced a gun, tied up the elderly woman who had let them in, and gone methodically through her house. Mary had told her cousin about that, pointedly, because Jenny seemed to feel that after New York, Santa Fe was a harmless backwater.
The warble was on top of her now, along with flashing lights, and it was a coronary unit, hospital-bound. Still, Mary could have sworn at herself for forgetting, once more, that she could not reach her house by the usual route; a whole stret
ch of road was being disembowelled. She found a shoulder wide enough for turning, drove a half-mile back, was momentarily confused at a crossroads which looked different at night in a beginning rain, was finally home.
“Jenny?” She needn’t have bothered to call reassuringly as she used her key; the living room was shadowy and untenanted, and the shower rushed obliviously. An odd scent wafting from behind the bathroom door suggested that her cousin had been doing something exotic in the way of face-creaming first.
In her bedroom, Mary changed out of her dinner clothes and into a housecoat. She had already decided against—the point of the dinner—throwing in her lot with the art director who had left the advertising agency at the same time as she, in the course of a reorganization, and the man who would be putting up most of the money for a new agency. She knew Al Trecino only by rumor and reputation; in the flesh, cold and larcenous under the easy-going charm he wore like the fisherman’s sweater which was his trademark, he gave her the shivers.
Jenny stayed in the shower. Mary dismissed a few thoughts about her water bill, and in the kitchen— she felt like a hospital dietician—inspected the quiche lorraine she had made for her cousin’s dinner.
A very small wedge had been cut out and the rest sealed neatly under foil. The lettuce left washed and ready had evidently been consumed, but not, according to the testimony of a squeezed half-lemon, with salad dressing.
Mary reminded herself to take this philosophically and returned to the living room, furnished in stone-blue and rose-brown against its white walls, and switched on more lamps. Somewhere during the past few minutes she had recorded the sound of another siren—had the warning flares on that disrupted section of road been extinguished by the rain, and an unwary motorist plunged in?—but she had spent all her personal concern earlier. She was home, Jenny was safe, someone else was clearly in charge out there.
“Hi.” Jenny arrived in the doorway, wearing a long high-necked challis robe with a ruffle at the yoke, long black hair straying about her shoulders. “How was your dinner?”
“Orange duck,” said Mary, pithily as concerned that particular restaurant. “If God had intended . . .” It was as foolish not to show a faint reproach as it would be to exhibit anxiety. “You don’t seem to have eaten much of yours.”
“It’s awfully rich,” said Jenny defensively. She was eyeing the television set. “There’s supposed to be a weird old movie on. Would it bother you . . . ?
“Not at all.” Even after a week it was possible at odd moments—as now, when she subsided onto the floor and clasped her arms around her drawn-up knees—to be shocked at Jenny’s emaciation. She was probably five-feet-seven; she weighed eighty-odd pounds. The robe seemed in some perverse way to delineate her boniness rather than conceal it, like generous folds slung over a skeleton.
The telephone rang while a list of credits was rolling over the screen to the accompaniment of a sagging sound-track, and Jenny turned an alert face. Mary answered: it was the art director, and as she could tell from his overly hearty tone that he was not alone, she was circumspect in her refusal.
“That’s a real disappointment. . . . Well, it was a nice evening anyway, wasn’t it? Wonderful dinner.”
Obligingly, because Ben was married and had two children and could not afford to be scrupulous about the source of Al Trecino’s money or his way with any women in his path, Mary carried out her end of the pretense.
That was at a quarter of ten. The other call came at eleven.
Because of the hour at which she had been advised of her parents’ death in the sinking of a cruise ship, Mary had an instinctive distrust of late telephone calls which subsequent years had done little to dispel. Good news, generally speaking, came by day. Late ringings signalled critical illnesses, bare acquaintances wanting to be picked up at the airport, an occasional inebriated friend who thought this would be a good time to come around for a drink.
After she had identified herself to a long-distance operator, her aunt’s voice spilled over the wire, low, tense, tumbling. “Mary. Don’t let Jenny know I’m calling—she is there, isn’t she?”
It was one o’clock in New York. “Yes,” said Mary, sounding only cordial and interested in case her cousin’s attention had been diverted from the movie. “How are you?”
“He knows where she is,” said Henrietta Acton.
Just “he,” as if to invoke Brian Beardsley’s name would be to give him some occult power. The pace of Mary’s heart quickened contagiously: had she locked the door after her when she came in? But that was ridiculous. No matter how furious he was, no thwarted suitor would hope to improve his case by storming the house of someone he had never even met—would he? In Brian Beardsley’s case, impossible to tell.
Henrietta was saying distractedly that a friend of Jenny’s—“Myrna, Mona, something like that”—had telephoned her earlier, apparently in a fit of remorse, to say that she had allowed Jenny’s whereabouts to be coaxed from her. The inference to be drawn was that if Beardsley wasn’t already in Santa Fe he was on his way there.
“. . . and then some people came in, and I had to wait for Gerald to go to bed because I’m honestly terrified of what this would do to his blood pressure. I’d suggest shipping Jenny home at once, but—well, you know the situation here, and I don’t entirely trust this friend anyway. What if it’s some kind of trick?”
“. . . I see.” Mary’s mind sped, looking at and discarding possibilities. Try and house Jenny elsewhere for a few days? The only person she felt she could ask that favor of, under the circumstances, was in Europe. Whisk her off to a motel? Any attempt at sequestration would make her suspicious at once, and if Brian Beardsley was really determined to find her, in a city the size of Santa Fe, he could. Jenny was unforgettable to even a casual eye.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not going to be home for the next couple of days,” said Mary over the miles, thinking that this was certainly a difficult way to conduct a plot. “I have a cousin visiting me and we’re going down to Juarez, just over the Mexican border. Give me a little warning next time, won’t you, so that I’ll be free?”
“Mary, I’m eternally grateful. Take care.”
It wasn’t, this time, a casual and empty admonition. “We will, thanks. You too . . .”
Jenny was absorbed in her movie, to all appearances, but the sound was turned low and the telephone was within earshot, and it would have been only natural for her to prick up her ears at the mention of herself. “Did you hear any of that?” asked Mary lightly. “I just put off a visiting acquaintance with a tale about going to Juarez—Cuidad Juarez, officially—and it suddenly struck me that it might be fun.”
There was a faint flicker of animation on the narrow face between its curtains of long black hair. “Where’s Juarez?”
Mary explained. “It’s been dull for you here, and I could use a change myself—I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I’ve seen a lot of ads for a new motel with a beautiful pool. Why don’t you pack, while I see if I can get reservations, because we’ll have to leave fairly early in the morning?”
Jenny rose and started out of the room at her dangly marionette gait, saying dubiously, “Mexican food?”
“It can be very good, and the black bass is marvelous and so is the shrimp. You won’t starve,” said Mary, a trifle ironic.
Jenny gave her a brief, aware, over-the-shoulder smile, something she did so seldom that it had the effect of transforming her. The smile widened and brought to life her brooding blue-gray eyes, equipped with the kind of out-spraying lashes generally granted only to horses. She looked like an eighteen-year-old then, instead of an unhappy creature suspended between a scorned childhood and an adult world she had learned to distrust.
In bed, having negotiated successfully with the Casa de Flores, Mary examined a small but puzzling detail. Jenny had reacted sharply both times the telephone had rung, although she had spoken to her parents two nights earlier and they had said they would call next
week at the same time. For the first time since her arrival she had been alone for a good part of the evening. Was it possible that the informing Mona or Myrna, covering herself in all directions, had telephoned to let her know that Brian Beardsley was either in or on his way to Santa Fe? Or that Beardsley himself had called?
No, thought Mary to the last. Jenny hadn’t been registering anticipation or excitement but something closer to alarm. And, far from placing any obstacles in the way of the projected trip to Mexico, she had looked as pleased as she was currently allowing herself to look about anything.
Besides, was it conceivable that she would want anything further to do with Brian Beardsley?
With whom, three months earlier, her stunned parents had discovered her to be having an affair. Apart from the fact that he was twenty-eight to Jenny’s eighteen, they knew nothing whatever about him, and upon Jenny’s announced intention of marrying him had decided to remedy this situation by quietly hiring a detective service.
Beardsley was not twenty-eight but thirty-two. He had declared himself to be unencumbered, and technically he was, his wife, mother of their two children, having divorced him on the grounds of abandonment. He was a known user of drugs. He had also served a prison term for aggravated assault.
The Actons knew that their only child had a formidable will, but they had assumed that the shock of discovery would offset Jenny’s rage at an action she regarded as unforgivable. They were wrong. Beardsley removed himself from the scene, or appeared to, and Jenny virtually stopped eating. Again, her parents regarded this as being as self-correcting as a child’s vengefully held breath, and again they were mistaken. While they watched helplessly, her body accustomed itself to a glass of orange juice for breakfast, a half-grapefruit for lunch, a thin slice of meat for dinner.
When she had lost seventeen pounds and her elbows were the widest part of her arms, she went docilely enough to a doctor, who recommended psychiatry. Jenny refused; from the mere fact of diet drinks when she was thirsty, it seemed evident that she had now embarked on a dangerous love affair with her own gauntness.
In Cold Pursuit Page 1
