If Looks Could Kill (39 page)

* * *

She must have fallen asleep. Chris woke in the corner, curled against the wall by her desk. Her T-shirt was soaking wet and her limbs were shaking. It was morning.

"Oh, damn..." She lifted a hand to swipe at her hair. She hoped to God she hadn't made any noise last night. "Dinah?"

Her voice was tentative. Afraid. She prayed she hadn't been found out. She wished she could remember what happened.

The last thing she remembered had been writing. Funneling the terror and pain and fury she'd discovered in those crumpled old papers into fiction, just as she'd done all these years. She must have finally given into the sleeplessness and dropped off over the computer.

"Dinah!" she yelled a little louder, climbing unsteadily to her feet. Still in her lurid scarlet and black. Stale and sweaty and shaking. Ashamed. Frightened.

It had been the pages. The terrible images churned up by those haphazard words. The trauma of going back and then comparing it to the present. Chris would have to take it all to Mac this morning. She'd have to explain and hope he understood. She'd have to pray there was another explanation for what was happening.

Still shaking and unsteady, Chris turned to climb down the stairs. "Damn it, Dinah, are you up?"

Another problem to handle. Deftly sidetracked the night before between Ellen's party—at which Dinah had behaved admirably and Chris had barely survived—and a one -person toast with champagne to the new contracts. Dinah had finally dozed off before Chris had worked up the nerve to confront her, and Chris had escaped upstairs.

Escaped.

She laughed bitterly. Not exactly the word she'd use.

"Dinah?"

She reached the bottom of the stairs. Looked first in the kitchen to find it empty, the blinds still closed. Which meant Dinah was still out. Dinah despised having the blinds closed. Or coffee not constantly percolating, the sound as soothing to her as a mother's bruit to a fetus.

Chris turned into the main room. The couch was still open. Tumbled.

Strange.

Chris came to a halt, wondering what had happened to her afghan. The colors were all wrong. All dark, as if a bucket of paint had been dropped on them.

Something crawled into her stomach. Something vile.

She whispered now. "Dinah?"

Whispered and crept, like a child. Terrified of what she'd find. Suddenly knowing and still not believing.

Dinah was there. She was there, but her arm hung over the end of the bed. Her hair was strewn out like black seaweed. Her peach satin gown was drenched.

Drenched. Glistening and thick and black.

Chris heard the first buzz of flies and gagged. "Dinah?"

Now a plea.

She stumbled toward the radio.

Elvis Jones heard the screams for help from the dispatch radio all the way back to the last jail cell where he slept.

Chapter 17

Mac broke the door in to find Chris trying to do CPR. One look at the scene should have told anyone how useless that would be. She was pumping, though, breathing into wherever the mouth had been and yelling as if with just her own will she could force life back into the stiff, mutilated figure that hung off the edge of her foldout couch.

He made it over to her in three steps. "Chris, stop," he commanded, pulling her away. "There's nothing you can do."

She struggled to get free, her eyes wild, her hands and clothes thick with old blood. "No! Damn it, I did this to her!"

Which was just about when the first reporter elected to show up.

From that moment, it was a madhouse. Mac didn't have nearly enough men to control the scene. Ray Sullins pulled up hoping to be interviewed, and Weird Allen almost got into a fistfight with a sound man from CNN. Neighbors gathered and traffic stopped to see what all the commotion was for. Inside, the air was thick with the distinctive stench of disaster, and Chris was curled up into a chair out in the kitchen, her hands clenched in her lap, her head down, ignoring Victor's attempts to get her attention through the window.

Mac had seen some ugly ones in his time. This one stood right up there. Multiple knife wounds, stabbing and slashing, mutilation at its finest. The little agent hadn't had a chance.

And Mac couldn't figure out how the hell it could have happened.

He'd been sitting out front until two watching the two of them talking on the couch. He'd been relieved by JayCee, who swore he hadn't left his post until he heard the screaming. He hadn't seen or heard a thing.

"The lights were on all goddamn night long," Mac insisted, one eye on Chris, another on John, who was doing measurements for him. "How the hell couldn't you see anything?"

JayCee was beginning to sweat beneath his chiefs scrutiny. "Nobody came in or out of that house," he retorted. "Not nobody. I'd swear it."

Mac swung his arm around behind him to indicate the level of mayhem. "I suppose the serial killer fairies snuck in from under the floorboards and then disappeared again while you watched. Maybe sprinkled some fairy dust on you so you couldn't see 'em slashing their way through a hundred pounds of person."

"Doc Clarkson just pulled up," Curtis announced from the door, still in his sweatsuit. "And Reverend Sweetwater."

"Oh, shit," Mac said, now truly pissed. "That's the last thing I need."

"Don't worry," John advised from where he was poising the Polaroid. "He'll be too busy performing for the minicams to bother you."

"They deserve each other. I want a time of death!" he yelled to Tom as the doctor stepped into the door.

"Shit, shit, shit," Tom breathed, faltering to a halt, truly overwhelmed. "I'm gonna have to find me a quieter county."

"And see to Chris."

Tom's head snapped up. "Where?"

Mac motioned. "Kitchen."

He turned to check on her again, to see her climbing to unsteady legs. "Mac?"

It was impossible that she was upright. She looked paler than the corpse on her couch. Her eyes were sunken and bleak, her hands trembling. Mac had cleaned off her face at the kitchen sink. Had washed her hands as she stood there shaking and silent. But her clothes were still stiff and muddy with blood. She still clasped her hands together as if forcibly holding herself together.

Mac stepped over tape and fingerprint equipment to get to her. "Go sit down, damn it. You're not helping a thing."

She shook her head, her expression dazed. "I have to... show you something."

Something more? he wanted to ask. He followed her anyway. Slowly, holding onto the bannister like a lifeline, she climbed up the stairs.

Mac heard the humming before they reached her work area. The computer was still on. Evidently she'd been working on it. He wondered how, considering what was in her living room.

"I fell asleep," she explained as if she'd heard him.

Down below, Tom looked up at the sound of her voice and frowned. "I was working last night after Dinah fell asleep. A new..."

Mac didn't want to hear the rest. He bent to read the screen.

...
so bad it was difficult to recognize the victim as human. Blood saturated the sheets, the cushions, the floor. Blood, a dark, thick tide of it...

He didn't need to read anymore. "I think I did it," Chris whispered, stricken. Ashen and shaking. "I think I must have killed her."

* * *

It only got worse. Much, much worse. Mac couldn't convince Chris that she hadn't murdered her agent, and he couldn't find a reasonable explanation for how someone else could have done it. He wanted to take her away someplace where they could talk, where he could get to the core of things without interruption or interference. Instead, he had to deal with the mayor and the press and every two-bit official this side of Farmington, all vying for their chance at sensation. He had to try and glean information from a hopelessly contaminated scene.

"John, do me a favor," Mac asked as he guided Chris back down the stairs. "Take Chris on over to the sheriff's office. City hall's already overrun with people. I need some prime time with her."

"She under arrest, Mac?"

"She damn well better be," Judge Edward Lee Axminster III said from where he'd taken up a position by the grandfather clock.

Mac didn't need him on his case, either. Axminster was here for revenge, pure and simple. And if Mac didn't step very carefully, give up some of the little points to the local power boss, the judge was going to get just that. And then Chris would be left to the wolves, which meant they'd never find out what was going on.

"I'll read her her rights," Mac conceded, turning to a dazed Chris.

John brought out the cuffs. Chris took one look at them and backed away as if she'd seen a copperhead. "No," she begged in a horribly small voice. "Please, I can't... don't..."

"Chris, I have to," John protested.

Still reciting the too-familiar words, Mac waved them away. "...do you understand these rights as I've read them to you?"

Her eyes were still focused on John as he reclipped his cuffs.

"Chris?"

She started. Gave a jerky nod. "Yes."

"I'll be over as soon as I can. Till then, Elvis'll keep an eye on you."

She wasn't listening again. "There's a... an envelope," she said, her head down so the judge couldn't hear from where he was busy destroying the integrity of Mac's crime scene. "Of Christian's. You bring it," she said. "Nobody but you."

Mac nodded, not having the slightest clue what she was talking about. "It'll be OK," he promised.

She looked over to where they'd finally covered the body with a tarp. "No," she disagreed. "It won't. And then she let John usher her out the back door to try and escape all the lights and film.

It took Mac another fifteen minutes to resecure the scene. Five more to find the envelope he thought she meant. An old battered thing with the carefully printed name of Christian Charity Evensong on it.

He was heading back down the stairs when his radio crackled to life.

"Chief!"

It was Marsha and she sounded desperate.

Mac damn near dropped the envelope to get to his radio. Everybody in the room could hear the terrible high screams in the background.

"What the hell's going on?" he demanded of the dispatcher.

John came on, breathless. "Elvis was trying to get her into a cell... Chief, you'd better get down here."

The screaming went on and on.

"Tom!" Mac yelled, vaulting the last four stairs and running for the door. Bag in hand, Tom was right behind him.

* * *

Chris opened her eyes to a bright, pastel room where the sunshine splashed across yellow walls. It took two more hours for her to be able to pull together any kind of coherent thought.

Her brain was cotton wool. Her mouth was parchment, and she could feel the cool slime of drool on her cheek.

Drugs. They'd sedated her.

Panic threatened. Who'd sedated her? Where was she?

Who
came back first.
Why
took a little longer.

She ran her tongue around cracked lips and shifted her limbs. There was going to be a bruise on her thigh. A big one. She wondered why. Her memory of the jail was fractured, drifting. Difficult to pull together.

Elvis. She'd told him not to put her in there. Anywhere but in those terrible little black holes. Anywhere but back in the dark. She wondered if they'd used IV Valium to settle her down. Still the drug of choice for a quick, painless nap. As out of control as she'd been, they'd probably needed about fifty of Thorazine, too. Maybe Haldol. She wasn't sure. Her tongue was thick, her mouth brackish with the aftertaste of chemicals.

She'd begged them not to, to just get her out in the open where she could get a breath. She'd pleaded and wept. But no one understood. They didn't realize that the drugs terrified her even more than the dark. That the reason she'd never had a drink was because it sucked the control from her, just like the drugs. Uppers and downers and psychotropics. Crowd control on a trolley.