If Looks Could Kill (26 page)

Chris saw him drag in an uneven breath. She heard her own pulse begin to thud in dread and realized that she was seeing it again.

Suddenly Chris saw all the way down to that final layer Mac protected with his starched shirts and measured speech. She realized just how terrible that wound he'd suffered had been. Farther down than pride, deeper than self-esteem. As devastating an injury as a man could suffer and still force himself awake in the morning. And yet, Mac did.

He edged her around behind him with his hand, and took another careful breath. Crouching down, so that his head was about half the height it should have been, he pushed the door open. Chris waited, watched. Held her breath with his as he moved and wished like hell she could somehow make it easier for him.

Mac paused, straightened, eased on into the house. Catching the screen door with her own backside, Chris followed.

She felt it the minute she stepped inside. A shiver of prescience, a whisper of dread. She almost came to a dead stop right there in the doorway. There was something in her house.

"Oh, shit," she whispered, and sensed Mac's head coming around, his hand already on the light switch.

Again he hesitated, terrible seconds of indecision that pushed Chris back against the wall. When the lights suddenly flipped on, she squinted in surprise.

"What the hell..." Mac sputtered, coiling back into a shooter's crouch, the gun swinging up in his hands.

"I knew you'd have to come home soon, Chris Jackson. I knew it."

Chris was stunned into silence by the woman rising from her sofa.

"Mrs. Axminster?"

Mac stepped in past Chris and scanned the room, his gun still held out before him. Chris couldn't seem to move, her attention on the small, plump, motherly looking woman in the stained housedress who stood before her. In her house. Right in the middle of her living room, as if it were the bus station.

"How did you get in here?" she finally demanded.

That brought Mrs. Axminster up short, her expression hovering between guilt and defiance, like a teenager caught out after curfew. Another woman with misery piled on her head. A self-perpetuating victim who'd never once considered leaving the judge, even to save her children. Chris wondered how she'd react if they'd brought her the news that her husband was dead.

"The door was open when I got here," she said, settling on defiance and advancing, not even noticing the man to her left who had his gun trained on her.

"Not the front door."

"The kitchen door. You think I want everybody knowing my business? You think the judge is happy the whole town already knows about Shelly?"

Her features had been pretty once. Over the years they'd been deadened, the careful lack of emotion meant to protect her from retribution stealing the individuality from mouth and cheeks and eyes. The colors had bled from the painting, leaving nothing but indistinguishable grays. Chris could have felt sorry for the judge's wife if she hadn't consigned her own daughter to her same fate.

She still couldn't believe it. She'd expected Shelly to explode. She'd never even considered that her mother might do it.

"Who do you think you are?" the little woman demanded suddenly, as if resuming some conversation interrupted only a moment ago, her voice shrill and almost otherworldly. "God? You think you got the right to just meddle in other people's lives if you want?"

Mac had circled behind the woman and watched her with his police eyes, his balance on the balls of his feet so he could move fast. Chris saw him at the corner of her own field of vision and felt better for his presence. She'd never seen Mrs. Axminster like this before. She'd never once heard anything but courtesies from her at all.

"My life has been hell since you've moved to this town," Mrs. Axminster persisted, a bit of spittle flying with her words, her eyes hot. Chris held perfectly still before her. "You come into my house and think you know everything... know..." Tears welled, old, thick tears that traced familiar pathways. Mrs. Axminster didn't even notice them. "That girl's nothin' but trash, no matter what we've tried to do for her, and you're pushing her into it.
Pushing
her... and her daddy..."

"What do you want me to do?" Chris asked as gently as she could, knowing there was no answer that would be acceptable. "I couldn't let her run away. That's where she was headed."

But Mrs. Axminster wasn't listening anymore. She was staring, the spittle still caught on the corner of her lower lip, her eyes betraying her. "We tried to tell the girl you were no good, but she wouldn't listen," she said. "No, no she wouldn't. She has to now. Your judgment's on you, and it's your fault. It's been your fault every time... the reverend's right. He's always been right about you... about me..."

"Do you want me to take you home, Mrs. Axminster?" Chris asked, the acid in her chest suddenly suffocating her.

Mac finally straightened, holstering his gun with a shaking hand. "I think I'd rather do that," he said.

Those tormented brown eyes flickered with recognition. "He'll be mad."

Chris knew which he she was referring to. "No, he won't. The chief'll think of something, won't you, Chief?"

Mac's expression was enigmatic as he stepped quietly forward. "Yes, ma'am. Now, come on."

His hand was gentle on the woman's arm, just enough pressure to get her into motion. Mrs. Axminster didn't acknowledge him or so much as look at Chris again as they walked together back into the night.

"And lock all the doors this time," Mac suggested dryly as Chris helped him settle the little woman into his front seat.

"I did," she said. When his gaze flicked back at her in alarm, she admitted the truth. "I think."

She did for certain this time, though, checking every lock, every window, wondering how she could have forgotten last time. And then, the exhaustion overtaking her, she sank onto her couch and let her home soothe her.

Just like chanting a mantra, Chris catalogued her small collection of securities, overstuffed furniture and wind chimes, music and sculptures. Teapots and teddy bears. Not people. Not yet, although she'd been hoping to finally graduate to that. Artificial life, handpicked and nurtured like inanimate children. As carefully arranged as standing stones at a holy site. Settling and safe, with no psychoses to impose on her, no traumas that she couldn't ease, or demands she couldn't meet. No demands at all.

Tonight, though, her things were different. Disturbed by Mrs. Axminster's intrusion. Infinitesimally changed, so that it was like looking at a familiar picture through a different lens.

Unsettled by the thought, Chris got back to her feet. Suddenly she needed to make sure everything was still untouched.

She ran upstairs, to where her desk sat in front of the great expanse of greenhouse glass, and checked her papers. Files and notes and lists of things to research. Personal memos that weren't supposed to be shared with anyone else.

She swung around for her bedroom to find the covers just as rumpled as when she'd left, the pillow limp and misshapen on the floor as if it had suffered a great injury. Nothing had been moved. Nothing affected in a tangible way that Chris could put a finger on. Even so... different.

Or was it just her? Was she imagining Mrs. Axminster running her stubby fingers over her secrets and leaving behind traces of stale madness? Did she envision the resulting guilt sitting on all of her possessions as solidly as it sat on her shoulders?

Slowly Chris sank onto her bed beneath the skylight and the stars. She willed the quiet of her high, open walls to surround her. Shoved and pushed and grunted with every ounce of mental energy to close the door on Shelly's family and Mac's history, at least for a minute. Tried to relax enough to maybe get some rest.

But for the first time in the years she'd lived here, it wasn't enough. Her world had shifted imperceptibly. Her security, built up step by step, minute by minute, had been breached. Her certainty, so hard won, was threatened.

Her haven, where she could be safe, wasn't safe anymore.

This time when she left, Chris made sure she locked the doors behind her. She knew she couldn't stay in the house right now. She might as well make use of the time she had before Mac could start the wheels rolling and call New York. She had some home numbers in case of emergency. And if this wasn't an emergency, she didn't know what was.

* * *

Mac didn't need to come up with an explanation after all. The judge was out when he showed up at the house with Mrs. Axminster, and her two other girls took her in like a dirty secret. Mac lingered a minute on the front porch of the solid, square brick house with its lawn ornaments and miniature windmill, figuring he should do more. Certain the judge's wife needed it.

There was all kinds of trouble in this household. Mac had the feeling he was going to get a call here one day real soon, and he couldn't think of a single way to prevent it. One of the nicer things about being a detective. Preventive medicine in law enforcement was virtually nonexistent anymore. Watching the inevitable happen ate away at you after awhile, the frustrations collecting like sins until everything was stained. But if you were a detective, you just saw the broken shards. You never got a chance to see the whole and miss it.

Mac climbed wearily into his car and made it all the way back to the station. The doors were locked, the lights off. Curtis was on, which meant he was taking his turn on the drag. Mac opened the door to his office, threw his hat to the coatrack, slipped off his gun, and pulled off his uniform shirt, which was beginning to smell like sour sweat. Then he walked into the bathroom and vomited up every bite of food he'd taken all day long.

Even with the help of B.B.King and J&B, it took twenty minutes in the john and another ninety in his dark, locked office, for the shakes to settle.

It had been as bad as he'd expected. Worse. Every inch of the way, all day long whenever he'd walked into a strange room, whenever he'd had to pull his gun, he'd seen it. Double barrel, black as death. Pointed straight at his face. A vision that just wouldn't give a man enough room to handle the streets of Chicago.

By the time the B. B. King tape ran out Mac could at least function well enough to get back to business. Flipping on the lights, he doused himself with water and shrugged into another T-shirt. It was time to call St. Louis. He had as much as he needed to make Lawson a happy woman. In exchange, she was going to coordinate real information instead of copies.

"What do you mean she's gone?" Mac demanded ten minutes later when he finally got a detective named Garavaglia instead of a half-asleep dispatcher.

"She's been suspended for a couple of weeks," he said in a very satisfied voice. Lawson must have been an absolute joy to work with. "Of course, if you see her, you might want to give her a little warning. The brass up here is pissin' fire. Seems she and couple of open homicide files left the department right after the lieutenant gave her the good news Wednesday."

"She was here Thursday working on a case."

"That crap again? Goddamn, she just doesn't give up, does she?"

"What was she suspended for?"

He got a bark of laughter, and pictured a guy like his old partner, beefy and sanguine. A player. "Not understanding chain of command."

Mac almost winced. He could just see it. Impatient, self-righteous Sergeant Lawson, so convinced that her superiors couldn't see the shit on their own noses that she jumped a few levels in the food chain. Probably made her case like the Nazi SS at Nuremberg, too. It would not have been a pretty sight.

"Well, Garavaglia, I hate to tell you this," Mac said dolefully, "but I have bad news."

"She's screwing the county supervisor and just got herself promoted to captain?"

"She was right."

Garavaglia would have been happier with the first answer. "What?"

"That far-out, ridiculous theory she had about some wacko playing
'Me and My Shadow
with C. J. Turner? She nailed it in one."

"Bullshit."

"We had a murder down here today that the author herself identifies as an admirable copy of her work. Work, by the way, that has yet to be seen by the public eye. She also identified pictures of the other murders with the same amazement. The wacko, evidently, has an eye for detail. I'm surprised Lawson hasn't been up to gloat about it. I sure thought that was where she was going when she left."

Silence. Mac could hear his counterpart struggling to come to grips with the inconceivable, that pain in the royal ass Lawson could possibly have one right.

"Son of a duck-fucking bitch," he finally breathed.

And Mac, who had been too long away from the smell of fifty-year-old linoleum, eighty-year-old dust, and age-old sin, smiled. "Exactly."

* * *

At two a.m. the next morning, Chris woke shaking and sweating. Her heart hammered. Her T-shirt was soaked with sweat. The lights flickered briefly, and it seemed a dim shadow drifted across the room.

But that wasn't what terrified her into dry sobs or sent her stumbling down the stairs. It wasn't even the nightmare. She'd been awakened by the sound of a baby crying.