Shadowfires (10 page)

With a recklessness evidently born of fear, Rachael plunged into the adjacent bathroom, one of only two places in the house that they had not yet searched, but the intruder was not there, either. She stepped back into the bedroom and surveyed the ruins, shaky and pale.

“Breaking and entering, now vandalism,” Ben said. “You want me to call the cops, or should you do it?”

She did not reply but entered the last of the unsearched places, the enormous walk-in closet, returning a moment later, scowling. “The wall safe’s been opened and emptied.”

“Burglary too. Now we’ve got to call the cops, Rachael.”

“No,” she said. The bleakness that had hung about her like a gray and sodden cloak now became a specific presence in her gaze, a dull sheen in those usually bright green eyes.

Ben was more alarmed by that dullness than he had been by her fear, for it implied fading hope. Rachael,
his
Rachael, had never seemed capable of despair, and he couldn’t bear to see her in the grip of that emotion.

“No cops,” she said.

“Why not?” Ben said.

“If I bring the cops into it, I’ll be killed for sure.”

He blinked. “What? Killed? By the police? What on earth do you mean?”

“No, not by the cops.”

“Then who? Why?”

Nervously chewing on the thumbnail of her left hand, she said, “I should never have brought you here.”

“You’re stuck with me. Rachael, really now, isn’t it time you told me more?”

Ignoring his plea, she said, “Let’s check the garage, see if one of the cars is missing,” and she dashed from the room, leaving him no choice but to hurry after her with feeble protests.

 

A white Rolls-Royce. A Jaguar sedan the same deep green as Rachael’s eyes. Then two empty stalls. And in the last space, a dusty, well-used, ten-year-old Ford with a broken radio antenna.

Rachael said, “There should be a black Mercedes 560 SEL.” Her voice echoed off the walls of the long garage. “Eric drove it to our meeting with the lawyers this morning. After the accident . . . after Eric was killed, Herb Tuleman—the attorney—said he’d have the car driven back here and left in the garage. Herb is reliable. He always does what he says. I’m sure it was returned. And now it’s gone.”

“Car theft,” Ben said. “How long does the list of crimes have to get before you’ll agree to calling the cops?”

She walked to the last stall, where the battered Ford was parked in the harsh bluish glare of a fluorescent ceiling strip. “And this one doesn’t belong here at all. It’s not Eric’s.”

“It’s probably what the burglar arrived in,” Ben said. “Decided to swap it for the Mercedes.”

With obvious reluctance, with the pistol raised, she opened one of the Ford’s front doors, which squeaked, and looked inside. “Nothing.”

He said, “What did you expect?”

She opened one of the rear doors and peered into the back seat.

Again there was nothing to be found.

“Rachael, this silent sphinx act is irritating as hell.” She returned to the driver’s door, which she had opened first. She opened it again, looked in past the wheel, saw the keys in the ignition, and removed them.

“Rachael, damn it.”

Her face was not simply troubled. Her grim expression looked as if it had been carved in flesh that was really stone and would remain upon her visage from now until the end of time.

He followed her to the trunk. “What are you looking for now?”

At the back of the Ford, fumbling with the keys, she said, “The intruder wouldn’t have left this here if it could be traced to him. A burglar wouldn’t leave such an easy clue. No way. So maybe he came here in a stolen car that
couldn’t
be traced to him.”

Ben said, “You’re probably right. But you’re not going to find the registration slip in the trunk. Let’s try the glove compartment.”

Slipping a key into the trunk lock, she said, “I’m not looking for the registration slip.”

“Then what?”

Turning the key, she said, “I don’t really know. Except . . .”

The lock clicked. The trunk lid popped up an inch.

She opened it all the way.

Inside, blood was puddled thinly on the floor of the trunk.

Rachael made a faint mournful sound.

Ben looked closer and saw that a woman’s blue high-heeled shoe was on its side in one corner of the shallow compartment. In another corner lay a woman’s eyeglasses, the bridge of which was broken, one lens missing and the other lens cracked.

“Oh, God,” Rachael said, “he not only stole the car. He killed the woman who was driving it. Killed her and stuffed the body in here until he had a chance to dispose of it. And now where will it end? Where will it end? Who will stop him?”

Badly shocked by what they’d found, Ben was nevertheless aware that when Rachael said “him,” she was talking about someone other than an unidentified burglar. Her fear was more specific than that.

Two snowflake moths swooped around the overhead fluorescent light, batting against the cool bulbs, as if in a frustrated suicidal urge to find the flame. Their shadows, greatly enlarged, darted back and forth across the walls, over the Ford, across the back of the hand that Rachael held to her face.

The metallic odor of blood rose out of the open trunk of the car. Ben took a step backward to avoid the noxious scent.

He said, “How did you know?”

“Know what?” Rachael asked, eyes still closed, head still bowed, coppery red-brown hair falling forward and half concealing her face.

“You knew what you might find in the trunk. How?”

“No. I didn’t know. I was half afraid I’d find . . . something. Something else. But not this.”

“Then what
did
you expect?”

“Maybe something worse.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I have asked.”

The soft bodies of the moths tapped against the fire-filled tubes of glass above.
Tap-tap-tick-tap.

Rachael opened her eyes, shook her head, started walking away from the battered Ford. “Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed her by the arm. “We have to call the cops now. And you’ll have to tell them whatever it is you know about what’s going on here. So you might as well tell me first.”

“No police,” she said, either unwilling or unable to look at him.

“I was ready to go along with you on that. Until now.”

“No police,” she insisted.

“But someone’s been killed!”

“There’s no body.”

“Christ, isn’t the blood enough?”

She turned to him and finally met his eyes. “Benny, please, please, don’t argue with me. There’s no time to argue. If that poor woman’s body were in the trunk, it might be different, and we might be able to call the cops, because with a body they’d have something to work on and they’d move a lot faster. But without a body to focus on, they’ll ask a lot of questions, endless questions, and they won’t believe the answers I could give them, so they’ll waste a lot of time. But there’s none to waste because soon there’re going to be people looking for me . . . dangerous people.”

“Who?”

“If they aren’t already looking for me. I don’t think they could’ve learned that Eric’s body is missing, not yet, but if they have heard about it, they’ll be coming here. We’ve got to go.”

“Who?” he demanded exasperatedly. “Who are they? What are they after? What do they want? For God’s sake, Rachael, let me in on it.”

She shook her head. “Our agreement was that you could come with me but that I wasn’t going to answer questions.”

“I made no such promises.”

“Benny, damn it, my
life
is on the line.”

She was serious; she really meant it; she was desperately afraid for her life, and that was sufficient to break Ben’s resolve and make him cooperate. Plaintively he said, “But the police could provide protection.”

“Not from the people who may be coming after me.”

“You make it sound as if you’re being pursued by demons.”

“At least.”

She quickly embraced him, kissed him lightly on the mouth.

She felt good in his arms. He was badly shaken by the thought of a future without her.

Rachael said, “You’re terrific. For wanting to stand by me. But go home now. Get out of it. Let me handle things myself.”

“Not very damn likely.”

“Then don’t interfere. Now let’s
go
.”

Pulling away from him, she headed back across the five-car garage toward the door that led into the house.

A moth dropped from the light and fluttered against his face, as if his feelings for Rachael were, at the moment, brighter than the fluorescent bulbs. He batted it away.

He slammed the lid on the Ford’s trunk, leaving the wet blood to congeal and the gruesome smell to thicken.

He followed Rachael.

At the far end of the garage, near the door that led into the house through the laundry room, she stopped, staring down at something on the floor. When Ben caught up with her, he saw some clothes that had been discarded in the corner, which neither he nor she had noticed when they had entered the garage. There were a pair of soft white vinyl shoes with white rubber soles and heels, wide white laces. A pair of baggy pale green cotton pants with a drawstring waist. And a loose short-sleeve shirt that matched the pants.

Looking up from the clothes, he saw that Rachael’s face was no longer merely pale and waxen. She appeared to have been dusted with ashes. Gray. Seared.

Ben looked down at the suit of clothes again. He realized it was an outfit of the sort surgeons wore when they went into an operating theater, what they called hospital whites. Hospital whites had once actually been white, but these days they were usually this soft shade of green. However, not only surgeons wore them. Many other hospital employees preferred the same basic uniform. Furthermore, he had seen the assistant pathologists and attendants dressed in exactly the same kind of clothes at the morgue, only a short while ago.

Rachael drew a deep hissing breath through clenched teeth, shook herself, and went into the house.

Ben hesitated, staring intently at the discarded pair of shoes and rumpled clothes. Riveted by the soft green hue. Half mesmerized by the random patterns of gentle folds and creases in the material. His mind spinning. His heart pounding. Breathlessly considering the implications.

When at last he broke the spell and hurried after Rachael, Ben discovered that sweat had popped out all over his face.

 

Rachael drove much too fast to the Geneplan building in Newport Beach. She handled the car with considerable skill, but Ben was glad to have a seat belt. Having ridden with her before, he knew she enjoyed driving even more than she enjoyed most other things in life; she was exhilarated by speed, delighted by the SL’s maneuverability. But tonight she was in too much of a hurry to take any pleasure from her driving skill, and although she was not exactly reckless, she took some turns at such high speed and changed lanes so suddenly that she could not be accused of timidity.

He said, “Are you in some kind of trouble that rules out turning to the police? Is that it?”

“Do you mean—am I afraid the cops would get something on me?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said without hesitation, in a tone that seemed devoid of deception.

“ ’Cause if somehow you’ve gotten in deep with the wrong kind of people, it’s never too late to turn back.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”

The backsplash of dim light from the dashboard meters and gauges was just bright enough to softly illuminate her face but not bright enough to reveal the tension in her or the unhealthy grayness that fear had brought to her complexion. She looked now as Ben always thought of her when they were separated: breathtaking.

In different circumstances, with a different destination, the moment would have been like something from a perfect dream or from one of those great old movies. After all, what could be more thrilling or exquisitely erotic than being with a gorgeous woman in a sleek sports car, barreling through the night toward some romantic destination, where they could forsake the snug contours of bucket seats for cool sheets, the excitement of highspeed travel having primed them for fiercely passionate lovemaking.

She said, “I’ve done nothing wrong, Benny.”

“I didn’t really think you had.”

“You implied . . .”

“I had to ask.”

“Do I look like a villain to you?”

“You look like an angel.”

“There’s no danger I’ll land in jail. The worst that can happen to me is that I’ll wind up a victim.”

“Damned if I’ll let that happen.”

“You’re really very sweet,” she said. She glanced away from the road and managed a thin smile. “Very sweet.”

The smile was confined to her lips and did not chase the fear from the rest of her face, did not even touch her troubled eyes. And no matter how sweet she thought he was, she was still not prepared to share any of her secrets with him.

 

They reached Geneplan at eleven-thirty.

Dr. Eric Leben’s corporate headquarters was a four-story, glass-walled building in an expensive business park off Jamboree Road in Newport Beach, stylishly irregular in design with six sides that were not all of equal length, and with a modernistic polished marble and glass porte cochere. Ben usually despised such architecture, but he grudgingly had to admit that the Geneplan headquarters had a certain appealing boldness. The parking lot was divided into sections by long planters overflowing with vine geraniums heavily laden with wine-red and white blooms. The building was surrounded by an impressive amount of green space as well, with artfully arranged palm trees. Even at this late hour, the trees, grounds, and building were lit by cunningly placed spotlights that imparted a sense of drama and importance to the place.