Killing Fear (41 page)

“I can’t thank you enough.”

“Thank me? You’re going to help me make a name for myself as a keen eye for new talent. At least that’s what I’m hoping the art critic will say when he views your work tomorrow.”

“Oh, God, I’m going to panic.” For months, this date had been so far off. But, it was actually happening tomorrow and Robin hadn’t had time to think about it because of the hell Theodore had put her through since his escape.

“You’ll be fine,” Isabelle said. “You already have fan mail.” She reached into her desk drawer and handed Robin an ivory envelope. “This came in today’s mail. You did see that big feature in the arts section of the paper on Thursday, right? I’m expecting a fantastic showing.”

“Wow. Thanks.” Robin hesitated opening it.

“Come on, don’t I get to share in the praise, too?”

She smiled. “I’m just not used to this.”

“Get used to it.”

Robin ripped open the envelope and slid out the heavy note card.

Her stomach turned sour when she recognized the handwriting.

My Robin,

I’m leaving for a while, as I’m sure your boyfriend told you. Are you fucking William again? Of course you are. You’re a slut, like all of them. They wanted me to screw them. They loved it. You know they begged for me. They wanted me. They knew how powerful I am.

You were supposed to be mine. What made you
think you were so much better than me? You’re nothing but an animal in beautiful clothes. What will you do when you find William dead? I hope you don’t kill yourself like Juliet. I want that honor.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Mexico. Free. Think about that. I’ll be free. You’ll never be free as long as I live. Someday I’ll come for you. You’ll never know when. Tomorrow? Next month? Next year?

Sleep well, Robin. Sleep well with the lights on.

Theodore

P.S. Sara did her job very well, otherwise I wouldn’t have known you are still scared of the dark. As well you should be, because the next time the lights go out it will be William’s body you trip over.

Robin read the letter as if she were in a tunnel, everything in the periphery black. Fading.

The next time the lights go out it will be William’s body you trip over.

He wasn’t gone. He knew where she lived, where she worked, where her art was shown. He would come back and hurt her, hurt people she cared about.

Dear God, why? Hadn’t she been through enough?

“Robin?” Isabelle sounded as if she were speaking from far away.

Was she supposed to be scared for the rest of her life, thinking that Glenn could come back at any time? Certainly after a few weeks the police would have more important crimes to focus on. Glenn had money and brains. He could disappear for months, years, until he felt like tormenting her. Send her a card now and again. Keep her scared. Keep her on edge. She’d never live in peace with that bastard free.

Before she realized what she’d done, she’d torn the card up in small pieces.

“No!” she shouted. “I’m not going to live in fear for the rest of my life!”

She looked at the pieces of paper in her hands and realized she’d destroyed evidence. She wasn’t thinking straight. “Do you have a manila envelope?” she asked Isabelle, her voice tight.

With a frown, Isabelle found one in her desk. Robin dropped the pieces into it, then said, “I’m sorry. It’s him. Just trying to hurt me.”

Her eyes burned with unshed tears as she called Will. “Theodore Glenn sent me a letter. Dammit, Will, when is it going to stop?”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Leaving Robin at the club, even with Mario and his team keeping an eye on her, was the hardest thing Will had done, but D.A. Stanton had called him personally to come down to the station.

A plea agreement was on the table and Diana refused to sign it until she talked to Will. He didn’t want to talk to her, but had no choice. The sheriff’s crime scene unit had re-created her deleted files. She kept a computer journal of two murders, other than Anna Clark. Dillon had been right—she had killed before. But he’d been wrong about the victims.

For all Diana’s talk about her father the biologist, he was dead. She’d killed him and his young lover—a teaching assistant—and staged it as a murder-suicide. It had been ruled that the teaching assistant killed him when he allegedly broke it off with her, then killed herself in a wave of remorse.

Diana’s journal admitted to both murders.

He hated leaving Robin vulnerable only to sit across from his warped former lover who had wanted Robin dead, but Will had no choice. This was his job, and he would do anything legal to put Diana Cresson behind bars for the rest of her life.

They sat in a room normally reserved for defense attorneys and their clients, Diana across from him, in jailhouse orange, and shackled. Her face was devoid of makeup and her blonde hair hung in a limp ponytail. Her eyes, however, glowed with an appeal for something. What, forgiveness? Understanding? She would get neither from Will.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, smiling brightly.

“I didn’t have a choice. You refused to sign the agreement unless I did.”

“We always have choices, Will.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Everything I did, I did for the right reasons.”

“You can’t believe that, Diana.”

She nodded vigorously, her eyes glistening. “I’m sorry about Jim. I’m really sorry about Jim. But he knew about me.”

“No, he didn’t.”

She blinked. “He was looking into the Anna Clark case. He told me to my face that no one was reviewing the evidence, but then he walks out of the building with all the case files? He never leaves early. I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to get those files back.”

“The FBI had copies of all those files. And nothing in the files incriminated you for Anna’s murder. What they did tell us was that someone other than Theodore Glenn killed Anna. Jim discovered that the cuts on Anna’s body were made postmortem.”

She frowned. “I didn’t want to kill Jim. I had to.”

“You didn’t have to kill Anna Clark.”

She waved her hand as if swatting a fly, her shackles rattling. “Who cares about her?”

“She had a mother who cared about her. Friends.”

“Friends like Robin McKenna?”

The viciousness that suddenly crossed Diana’s face surprised Will. “I wanted to kill that slut, not her lesbo roommate. Anna came in unexpectedly. I had no choice.”

“Why did you call me after you killed Anna?”

“I didn’t.”

“Someone paged me from the apartment.”

“When Anna came in, I was already there. I was getting ready for Robin, and I didn’t expect her for another thirty minutes. I told Anna that I was processing evidence in Robin’s closet. She didn’t believe me, walked over to the phone and paged you before I could stop her. I didn’t want it to go that far, I didn’t intend to kill her, but I had no choice. She paged you so I hit her with my gun. She was stunned, and I dragged her to the entry and slit her throat. Just like Glenn did to his victims. I had it all planned, except I didn’t expect Anna. Robin should have died, dammit!”

“Why did you want to kill Robin?”

“She took you away from your job. She was a whore, Will. She didn’t deserve a good man like you. If she were dead, you could focus again on your career. Your future. You could have been chief of police someday, Will.”

“I never wanted to be in charge, Diana. That was something you got in your head.”

“Why’d you do it, Will? Because she was easy? Because she would do anything you wanted? Men are so shallow, they’ll give up anything and everyone for a good fuck.”

Will refused to discuss his relationship. “The Sheriff’s Department found the journals you attempted to delete. You admitted to killing your father and his lover.”

“I did not kill anyone. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The police in Massachusetts are going to reopen the case.”

She shrugged.

“You killed your own father. You never told me he was dead, Diana. You talked about him as if he were alive.”

She didn’t respond, playing instead with her fingernails. They’d been bitten to the quick. Still, she picked.

“You were furious that your father betrayed your mother. That he slept with another woman—”

Diana slapped her handcuffed hands on the table. “My mother? That stupid twit? She trapped my father into marriage. She got herself pregnant.”

The conversation from earlier came back to Will.
You’re lucky she didn’t get herself pregnant.

“So he married her and they had you.”

“My father loved me. He wanted me. We had a wonderful life, even with her around. Then came
Tiffany.
” She spat out the name. “That little whore seduced my father. He was going to leave me!”

“Fathers don’t leave daughters,” Will said.

“He spent more time with her than me! I watched them in bed. He was nearly fifty years old and fucking a twenty-three-year-old grad student! He spent all his free time with her. And then he cancelled our winter ski trip. We went every year for two weeks during winter break, and he cancelled it. He
lied
to me. Told me he had to write a paper for a big journal. And you know what? He didn’t! He spent every day, every night, with that bitch.”

Will could all too easily picture the young Diana feeling betrayed by her father, walking in, shooting him. Framing the girlfriend. Killing her. Even then, smart.

“Are you going to sign the plea agreement, Diana?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

“Will you visit me in prison?”

The thought made him physically ill. “No.”

“Are you sleeping with Robin again?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“She’s going to suck the ambition right out of you.”

“Maybe I don’t have the same ambitions you have.”

“Then I should have killed you, too.” She said it with such calm assuredness that Will didn’t know how he could even respond.

He slid the papers over to Diana. “Sign it.”

She faltered, for just a moment, and Will saw the scared, vulnerable woman inside. Then her stone expression returned, she grabbed the pen, and signed. “Don’t think I’m done with you, Will.”

“Yes, you are.”

Will stood and walked out with the papers without another word to Diana Cresson. He tossed the agreement at Stanton and said, “Done.”

“Thanks for coming down, Detective,” D.A. Stanton said. “We are expediting the agreement to try to keep this mess under wraps, make sure her past cases aren’t put under any unwarranted scrutiny.”

“The reporter Trinity Lange knows all about the Anna Clark homicide,” Will reminded him. “She’s expecting an exclusive.”

“I can handle Ms. Lange,” Stanton said. “She’ll get an exclusive and more provided she doesn’t mention Anna Clark in the same report as Diana Cresson.”

Will didn’t like that Diana wasn’t going to be prosecuted for Anna’s murder, but he understood why.

The chief frowned. “Is everything kosher, Hooper?”

Will glanced at the closed door. “At least she’ll never get out of prison.”

Whoever was tracking him was smart. Too smart.

Theodore patiently hid in the alley. He detested the foul stench of rotting food and feces, but it was the only place he could hide that provided him with a view of the restaurant where he’d spotted the man for the second time.

His tail was six feet one, broad and lean, with longish black hair pulled back. He looked half Mexican or Cuban, a little like that bodyguard Robin had hired, except thinner and wiry. He didn’t act like a cop, but more dangerous.

Theodore did not like being the prey.

He still had the gun Sara procured for him, since carrying the rifle was too conspicuous when he’d crossed the border with the old folks. He’d also picked up a second gun from the waitress he’d fucked the night before. Had her boss not called and warned her that someone was on his way over he would have been caught.

Theodore wouldn’t go down without a fight, but had no intention of losing any fight.

He hadn’t wanted to go back to San Diego for at least two weeks. He’d planned on crossing into New Mexico, then slowly working his way back to San Diego. Give Robin enough time to go half crazy, wondering when he would come for her.

But that damn asshole had been following him all day. Twice he’d almost got him. Twice Theodore had slipped away. But the cop, or whoever he was, was sly. Cunning. Theodore didn’t think he’d leave Mexico alive if he were caught.

Instincts propelled him forward. Every scent, every sight, every sound was crystal clear. But it wasn’t the sound or sight that saved Theodore’s life. Instead it was a touch, a prickly sensation on his skin. He
felt
the door behind him opening. So slowly that it made no noise.

He rolled across the alley just as the whiz of a bullet brushed past his head.

The bastard definitely wasn’t a cop. He was an assassin.

Theodore jumped onto a Dumpster and without hesitation grabbed onto the balcony above him and smoothly pulled himself up. Decades of mountain climbing benefited him now as he scaled the old, crumbling brick building. Up, up, up. Grab the next balcony. The lack of safety equipment coupled with the assassin pursuing him gave Theodore a burst of adrenaline that topped everything, even murder. He survived by his own wits and skill, his brains, his strength, his superiority.

From the corner of his eye he saw his pursuer on the building, gaining on him. Fuck that, the bastard moved up the face like a real-life Spider-Man.

Theodore swung over to a narrow window ledge. He took out his gun and fired at the man below him.
Pop, pop, pop.

Then he kept moving, his fingers raw from the rough stone. He reached up for the roof ledge and rock crumbled. He didn’t look back, didn’t know how close the assassin was, but he must have stalled him for a few seconds.

That was all Theodore needed. He pulled himself up onto the roof, rolled low, jumped up, then ran, leaping across two roofs until he saw a balcony with the window open. Perfect.