Killing Spree (41 page)

Jason gently took hold of her arm, and she squeezed his hand.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “Listen, you still might be able to catch April. As I said, she just left. The employee entrance is on the right side of the building—along the pier.”

Outside, Gillian held onto Jason’s hand as they merged with people on the crowded sidewalk.

Gillian spotted April just where she’d seen her a few days ago. Standing on the pier, April stared out at the water and smoked a cigarette. The cold wind swept through her hair. As Gillian approached her, she could see April was crying.

Jennifer’s friend glanced her way, then she smiled sadly and shook her head. “So—you must have heard the news,” she said, wiping her eyes.

Gillian nodded. “Yes, we just found out. I’m sorry, April.” She touched Jason’s shoulder. “This is Jason, a friend of my husband’s.”

He nodded. “How do you do?”

April shrugged. “Not so hot.” She nervously puffed on her cigarette.

“April, I know Jennifer was seeing my husband,” Gillian said. “I understand why you couldn’t tell me anything the other day. Since then, I’ve found out my husband is dead, too. The same person who stabbed Jennifer murdered him last week. And now, this killer has my son.”

April stared at her. “You’re joking,” she murmured.

“I wish I were,” Gillian replied gravely. “I talked with a private investigator yesterday. Jennifer hired him about a month ago to find Barry. Do you know anything about that?”

April took one last drag off her cigarette, then tossed it on the pier and ground it out with her foot. “Yeah, I knew about it,” she muttered. “The thing between Jennifer and your husband had been kaput for almost two years. Jennifer was over him, I know she was. But about six weeks ago, she met some guy. Jennifer was never good at keeping secrets, but she kept her relationship with this guy under wraps—but good.”

“Did she tell you his name?” Gillian asked.

April shook her head. “Nope. That’s just it. She was very hush-hush about who he was. He swore her to secrecy or something. I figured she must have hooked up with another married one, but she claimed he was single. Everything she told me about their relationship I practically had to browbeat out of her.”

“What exactly did you find out?” Gillian pressed.

“Well, for one, hiring the detective was
his
idea. Apparently, he knew about her and Barry, and he wanted to make sure she was really over him.”

“Eighteen months after they’d broken up?”

April nodded. “It struck me as weird too. Jenny had been in other relationships since Barry. One of them was a lot more intense than what went on with—your husband.”

April suddenly seemed embarrassed. Reaching into her purse, she fished out another cigarette and lit it.

“How did this new boyfriend find out about Jennifer’s affair with Barry?” Gillian asked.

Taking a long drag from her new cigarette, April shook her head. “I have no idea how the guy knew. But he insisted that Jenny track Barry down and see him again.”

“For
closure
?” Gillian said.

“That’s right. The guy even gave Jenny the money to pay this private investigator. But once the detective finally located Barry someplace in Montana, Jennifer’s boyfriend suddenly dropped the whole thing. And not long after that, he suddenly dropped Jennifer. At least, that’s what she told me.”

“It sounds like there’s room for doubt.”

“Well, one of the things I put together on my own was that this mystery man lives somewhere in this neighborhood. And Jenny admitted as much to me.”

Gillian glanced up at the cluster of high-rises—most of them fairly new—along the waterfront and in nearby Belltown.

“While she was seeing him, I happened to run into Jenny a few times around here—and she hadn’t even told me she was coming to town. That’s how I figured he must live around here. She was alone each time, but I realized she was probably on her way to see this guy or coming back from some rendezvous with him. The last time was after they were supposed to have broken up, just a week before she went to New York.”

April shrugged. “I know Jenny went on a few dates with different guys after officially splitting with this mystery man. That was about three weeks before her trip. So maybe it
was
over. I can’t say for sure. I didn’t mention anything to the police or Jennifer’s family about him when they asked about current boyfriends. They didn’t press it. Everyone seemed so sure the guy who stabbed her was someone she picked up at that bar in New York.”

She dropped her cigarette on the pier and squished it with the heel of her shoe. “Anyway, that’s all I know, I swear. I’ve really got to go. I need to catch my bus.” She touched Gillian’s arm. “I—I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Tanner. And I hope you get your son back.”

Gillian just nodded, and then watched April retreat toward the sidewalk. She disappeared in the crowd.

“Do have any idea who this mystery man could be?” Jason asked.

Tears stung her eyes and she shook her head. Gillian turned toward the choppy gray water of Elliott Bay, and saw the ferry approaching the terminal.

“Jennifer could have been here to catch the ferry,” she murmured. “Maybe he lives on one of the islands.” She wiped the tears from her eyes, and sighed. “Damn it, I keep thinking about Chase Scott. All signs point to him. He was my student. He might have known about Barry and Jennifer. I remember how disappointed he was that I didn’t want to write about the Schoolgirl Murders. He acted as if I were passing up this golden opportunity. He seemed to take it personally—as if I were snubbing him or—”

“Or refusing a gift he was offering you?” Jason cut in.

Gillian stared at him. It was a strange way to put it—yet very on target.

“From everything you’ve told me about the Schoolgirl Murders,” he continued, “they sound like something out of one of your books, Gillian. Do you think it’s possible he killed those girls so you could write about it? Maybe he wanted you to immortalize him.”

Biting her lip, Gillian considered what he was saying. In some awful, twisted way, it made sense. Chase knew Boyd Farrow, and he could have set up the former priest to take the blame for those murders.

They started back toward the front of the Aquarium. “It can’t be Chase,” she sighed.

“I know, I know,” Jason muttered, walking alongside her. “They’re still fishing pieces of him out of the Puget Sound. Do you know if Chase had any friends who could have…” He trailed off. He seemed to know they’d run out of possibilities.

Gillian stared down at the sidewalk. Their chances of finding Ethan in time seemed more and more hopeless. They’d reached another dead-end.

Someone screamed. Gillian and Jason stopped in their tracks. A man burst out of the doors to a souvenir shop near the Aquarium. He had something wrapped up in a coat tucked under his arm. He knocked down a tourist, and kept running.

“My camera got you!” yelled the store owner, a balding, Middle Eastern–looking man with a mustache. He shook his fist in the doorway of his shop. “Go ahead and run, you son of a bitch! I’ve got you on videotape!”

The young cop who had driven Gillian and Jason to the Aquarium jumped out of his patrol car. He pointed to them. “Stay right here,” he said hurriedly. Then he took off after the shoplifter. “Hold it! Police!”

But the thief kept on running. The cop chased after him.

Dazed, Gillian—along with everyone else in the area—watched the young policeman pursue the man. It took her a moment to realize Jason was no longer beside her. She glanced around, a bit panicked, but then she spotted him by the side of the Aquarium. He seemed totally oblivious to the little drama that had just unfolded in front of them. He was writing something on the Aquarium’s dirty window. Gillian stepped closer, and saw what it said:
IMALEGEND2.

“Your reviewer online,” Jason whispered. “He’s been telling you all along who he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the plot of
Killing Legend
?”

Gillian frowned at him. “Well, you know. You said you’ve read it.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Gillian sighed. “It’s about this movie star who is in a terrible car accident. Everyone thinks he’s dead, but he isn’t. He’s killing…” Gillian didn’t say any more. She stared at Jason.

“Maybe Chase Scott didn’t die when his car went off the ferry. Maybe that’s another man’s remains they’re fishing out of the Puget Sound.” Jason pointed to the writing on the window.
“I’m a Legend Too
.”

Ethan woke up in a stupor. He had an awful, sour taste in his mouth, and couldn’t stop shivering. Someone had taken most of his clothes. Dressed in only his jeans, he was lying on a cold, hardwood floor. It was coated with sawdust and grit. He felt it on his hands, his bare chest, and his feet. He couldn’t move. Someone had tied his feet together, and his hands were bound behind him. Thick duct tape covered his mouth. There was also something tied around his neck, but Ethan didn’t know what it was.

He heard a strange flapping sound, like a ship’s sail in the wind. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there. But the place was dark and damp and freezing. His fingers and toes were like ice.

“You’re awake,” someone said in a soft, friendly voice.

Ethan saw the shadowy figure of a man sitting on the floor across from him in the gloomy, barren room. There was another weird sound—something crunching. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, Ethan realized the man was eating an apple. There was a big, army-type knapsack at his side.

“You must be cold,” the man said. “If it’s any consolation, I’ll let you keep your pants on until the very last minute. I’m just doing it the way your mother wrote it.”

Grabbing a flashlight, the man switched it on and shined it in Ethan’s face. Blinded by the glare, Ethan could only see the spot moving against the pitch black and nothing else. But he heard the man getting to his feet. He was still eating that apple too. The light came toward him. He heard something hard hit the wood floor, and realized the man had tossed aside his apple.

He still couldn’t see his abductor’s face—though the man hovered over him. He took hold of Ethan’s arm, and then pulled him up.

With his ankles bound and his hands tied behind him, Ethan had to twist around to keep from falling back. He suddenly felt dizzy and nauseous. The man maintained a tight grip on his arm, and shined the flashlight under Ethan’s face.

“Your mother decided you should be naked,” the man whispered. “At least, that’s how she wrote it. The victims were all naked—except for the killer’s trademark, his calling card.”

Ethan gazed ahead at a sliding glass door. There was a dark tarp covering the other side of it. The plastic sheet flapped in the wind. The darkened glass was almost like a mirror. Ethan could see himself, propped up by this still-faceless stranger. He stared at the silver-gray tape over his mouth. He was shirtless and shivering in the man’s grasp. And he saw the thing tied around his neck.

It was a black ribbon.

Gillian watched the ferry pulling up to the pier next door to the Aquarium. She could see the lower level where the cars were parked.

She had a pretty good idea of how Chase must have faked his death. She remembered peeking into the garage by his house in Bremerton, and seeing the scuba gear. The erotic thriller he’d written in her class had included some sea-diving sequences amid all the sex and violence. He must have had his scuba gear in the car—along with the corpse of someone who resembled him. Security people and bomb-sniffing dogs checked out all the cars departing from the Seattle side during rush hour. But late at night—from the other side? She wasn’t sure. Chase would have had to be first in line on the ferry. He would have had to practice putting on his underwater gear within the confines of a small car—and in a hurry too. He probably enjoyed the challenge. He must have gotten a thrill from the dangerous stunt-dive off the ferry, and his escape from the sinking vehicle. But he couldn’t have planned on the ferry propeller chopping up his car and the dead man inside it. Chase must have done something to the corpse ahead of time to make it unrecognizable, especially the face. Gillian cringed at the thought.

The same person who had done all this now had her son.

She and Jason stood by the empty squad car. The cop hadn’t yet returned from chasing down the shoplifter. Every few moments, someone ran by them—obviously on their way to catch the ferry. Gillian wondered if it was the Bremerton ferry.

“Twenty-four hours,” she murmured. “That’s how long the killer in
Black Ribbons
kept his victims alive.”

“Where does he take them after he abducts them?” Jason asked.

For the killer’s holding area, Gillian had thought about the scene near the end of
Rebel Without a Cause
, when James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo explore a deserted mansion. She’d decided her
Black Ribbons
killer would keep his victims in a similarly remote, gloomy estate not far from his own one-bedroom carriage-house apartment.

“He takes them to an old deserted house, just walking distance from where he lives,” Gillian explained. “There are a lot of isolated, old-money homes in Chase’s neighborhood—in Bremerton. In fact, there’s a big, empty house undergoing some repairs just down the block from him.” She glanced at the ferry again. The next one wouldn’t be for at least another hour, maybe two.

“You think Chase did the same thing with Ethan?” Jason asked. “I mean, he must know you’re going to figure him out. It’s kind of a risk for him, going exactly by the book.”

“But that’s just what he does,” Gillian said. “He thrives on the risk. He
wants
me to figure out his next move. You said so yourself, he’s been telling me all along who he is.”

Imalegend2
’s critiques always affected her more than any of the other online reviewers, because he was so critical. Funny, how the bad reviews were the ones that stuck with her. And he was never very kind. But he always mentioned the murders. He seemed to dwell on them. Now that she thought of it, each one of the killings he’d copied had been cited in his reviews.

The last time she’d checked Amazon.com—a few days ago—there hadn’t been any comments from
imalegend2
about
Black Ribbons.

“When you were reading my reviews on the plane this afternoon, did you notice if
I’m a Legend Too
critiqued
Black Ribbons
?”

Jason nodded. “Yeah, he did, but I didn’t read it.”

“I need to know what he said, and what he’s going to copy from the book. His plans for Ethan could be in that review.”

Jason tried to open the passenger door of the police car. It was locked. He tugged at the handle to the back door—to no avail. “Dammit, my laptop is in there,” he muttered.

A few passersby gave him strange looks as he ran around the unoccupied patrol car and tried to open the driver’s door. Gillian anxiously scanned the street for the young cop. But there was no sign of him.

A man in a gray suit, carrying a briefcase, raced toward her. Gillian stepped out of his way. “Excuse me!” she called. “Are you heading for the ferry?”

“Yeah! Coming through!” he grunted, rushing by her.

“Where? Where’s the ferry going?” she called.

“Bremerton!” he yelled back over his shoulder.

She turned to Jason. “I think we should go,” she said. “We need to catch that ferry. It’s obvious he’s holding Ethan somewhere near his house in Bremerton. We’ll go to his neighborhood, and look for a green SUV. Forget about looking up the review. We’ll just call the police from the ferry, and…”

Gillian fell silent as she watched Jason stoop down and pick up a big chunk of concrete that had cracked off the curb. All at once, he smashed the patrol car’s passenger window with it. The glass shattered into pieces.

A woman on the sidewalk screamed, but Jason didn’t even look up. He reached though the broken window and opened the door. Then he grabbed his laptop computer from the floor, and shut the car door.

“C’mon, let’s try to catch this ferry,” he said, grabbing Gillian’s hand. And they started running.

Imalegend2
gave
Black Ribbons: A Maggie Dare Mystery
only two stars in his Amazon.com review. It had yesterday’s date. Apparently, Chase wanted to submit his critique before he carried out his next copycat killing.

Gillian sat beside Jason in a row of seats on the crowded ferry. Just in their vicinity, she noticed several other passengers with laptop computers or carrying cases for laptops. Breaking into that squad car really hadn’t been necessary. They could have borrowed a computer from any one of these people. But she didn’t say anything. The fact that Jason had broken that window for her was rather sweet—if willful destruction of police property could somehow be construed as
sweet
. It made for a charming story anyway, one she hoped to tell Ethan—once they found him. And she prayed they’d find him.

“Is Gillian McBride Losing Her Touch?”
was Chase’s headline.

“We can’t let the police know where we are or what we’re doing,” Gillian said. “Not until we try to do this on our own.” She looked at Jason and shrugged. “I guess it’s presumptuous of me to say ‘we.’ You don’t have to be involved, Jason. You’ve already helped so much—”

“Oh, shut up,” he whispered, putting his arm around her for a moment. “You know you can’t get rid of me that easily. You’ve tried.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Jason.”

“You don’t want the police rushing into a booby-trapped hideaway. Is that it?”

She nodded. The
Black Ribbons
killer had rigged a detonating device in his home, killing two SWAT members and wounding several others. He’d also planted mines and exploding devices in a warehouse where the police thought he might be hiding. Three more policemen perished—along with one of the killer’s recently abducted victims. Gillian had no problem creating these six fictional deaths, but she didn’t want any more real murders on her conscience.

It wasn’t just the cops’ lives that were at risk either. She didn’t want Chase’s recently abducted victim dying in an explosion during some ill-planned police operation. She wasn’t going to be the author of her son’s death.

“If we can’t find Ethan within ninety minutes,” Gillian said, “we’ll tell the police everything. But we have to try it alone first.”

She imagined Ethan, bound and gagged like one of her
Black Ribbons
victims. The young woman left alone in that abandoned wired-for-detonation warehouse hadn’t known she was going to die. Gillian couldn’t have been that cruel, not even to a fictional character. Was Chase as merciful? Or was he telling Ethan his plans right now?

Gillian remembered another scene in her book, between the killer and one of his victims. The exchange between the sweet, doomed young captive and the killer was both creepy and heartbreaking. At least, that was what Gillian had been going for when she’d written it. He was sitting with her in a second-floor bedroom of the old, abandoned mansion near his apartment. The young woman’s hands and feet were tied. He’d removed her blouse and shoes while she’d been unconscious. She was wearing her bra and a pair of jeans when she woke up. He’d put tape over her mouth to keep her quiet.

He took a pair of shears out of his case, and told her not to squirm. He started to cut at the jeans—beginning at the cuff, by her ankle. He worked his way up to her thigh—exposing her creamy skin. “If you promise not to scream, I’ll take the tape off your mouth,” he said.

The girl had been very obedient. She hadn’t squirmed or kicked. She nodded.

The
Black Ribbons
killer reached for the tape.

When the man ripped the tape off Ethan’s mouth, it hurt like hell. But Ethan didn’t cry out. He gasped for air, and then thanked the man. He’d decided he might live longer if he was cooperative. Besides, the more docile he seemed, the less guarded this guy might become—and the better his chances for escape. His abductor had already cut along one side of his jeans with a pair of scissors, and Ethan hadn’t tried to pull away. In fact, he’d stayed perfectly still for the ordeal, like he was getting a shot from the doctor.