Spitting Devil (6 page)

“The blood at the crime scenes came from a male,” Maggie added. “It wasn’t your wife.”

Malville stared at the photograph. “Look, test my lungs. Go ahead. It’s not me.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I’m the only man who has ever driven that car, and I don’t have any kind of lung condition.”

“Do you know someone who does?”

“Possibly, but it’s not like I do chest x-rays on my friends. I also don’t go around handing them my car keys.”

Stride leaned forward across the table. They were all tired. They’d been going back and forth with Malville over the course of several hours. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Malville, I’m not convinced you did this. Without the blood evidence at the crime scenes, you’d probably be in a cell now because of everything your wife told us. But we do have blood evidence, and that means a DNA test will rule you in or out. I’m guessing you’re right, and you’re healthy, and you’ll be ruled out. That doesn’t change the situation. We’ve got spatter in your car that matches the murder scenes, and if it doesn’t belong to you, then who the hell does it belong to?”

“There’s also the mileage overnight,” Maggie added. “If your wife is correct, someone drove your car to Sherry Morton’s apartment and back.”

“And there’s the missing knife in your house,” Stride said.

Malville frowned. “Unless you think my ten-year-old son taught himself to drive, there’s no one else in our house.”

“Who else has access?”

“I’m telling you, no one.”

“Relatives? Service people? Painters, plumbers, cleaners, anyone who could have taken a knife or copied your car keys?”

“No, no, no, there’s no one like that.”

“It wasn’t a ghost,” Stride told him. “Someone was inside your house. Someone drove your car.”

Malville gave a hollow laugh as he struggled for an explanation. “Well, my son thinks we have a spitting devil.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s something he read about in his comic books. It’s a demon who lives in your house and does bad things.”

Stride’s eyes narrowed. “Why would your son think that?”

“He’s a boy, Lieutenant. Boys have active imaginations.”

“Maybe so, but have bad things been happening at your house?”

“Bad things? No, not really. Evan has simply been acting out more because of the difficulties between me and Alison. Yesterday he broke one of Alison’s collectibles and didn’t want to admit it. Little things like that have been happening for weeks. Rather than tell us he’s upset, he created a monster to take the blame.”

“What else has he done?” Stride asked.

“Lieutenant, I hope you’re not suggesting my son is a serial killer.”

“I just want to know what other problems you’ve observed in your house.”

Malville shrugged. “Food has gone missing. Cookies, cheese, leftovers. Evan has been in my office a couple of times, even though he knows he’s not allowed in there. My papers have been moved around. He’s been on my computer.”

“What if it wasn’t Evan?” Maggie asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, could someone else be responsible for the things that have been happening?”

“I already told you, there’s no one but the three of us in the house,” Malville said.

“Are you sure?” Stride asked.

“Am I sure? What the hell are you saying?”

“I mean, is there any space in your house where someone could be hiding?” Stride asked.

“You’re suggesting a stranger could be living in my house?”

“Is that possible?”

“Well, we have an unfinished attic, but that’s crazy.”

“Not necessarily. It happens more often than you think. Homeless people will sometimes make a nest in an unused space and only come out when the family is away or asleep. The incidents you describe are consistent with that possibility.”

“You think someone could live in my house for months, and I wouldn’t notice?”

“It sounds like you did notice,” Maggie told him. “You just didn’t realize what it might mean. Has anything else happened that seems unusual?”

Malville opened his mouth to protest again, then closed it as he remembered something. “My e-mails,” he said.

“What about them?”

“Someone hacked my home e-mails. They got into my wi-fi and gave e-mails to the plaintiffs in litigation against my company. The other parties claimed the information came from an anonymous source.”

“Could someone do that from inside your house?” Stride asked.

“Sure.”

“If that’s true, it doesn’t sound like the kind of risk a homeless stranger would take,” Maggie said. “It sounds personal.”

“Do you have any enemies?” Stride asked.

“I run a business. When you do that, there are people who don’t like you.”

“Is there anyone in particular?”

“Take a number,” Malville replied. “I’ve had major layoffs because of the recession. People are suing me. Everybody’s got a grudge.”

Stride shook his head. “This is more than a grudge, Mr. Malville. We’re talking about someone capable of several brutal murders. Someone willing to destroy you and your family. Do you know anyone like that?”

Malville’s face, which was closed and confused, slowly came alive. A dark horror spread across his features. “There is one man.”

“Who?”

“His name is Carl Flaten,” Malville said. “He’s a software engineer. I fired him.”

“Why?” Maggie asked.

“Carl was brilliant but severely anti-social. A lot of the good ones are rain men, but they’re mostly harmless. Not Carl. He sabotaged equipment for co-workers he didn’t like, he used company technology to develop sick video games, he was abusive to our customers. I kept him around longer than I should have because he was a genius, but finally, I had to get rid of him. That was about three months ago.”

Malville paused, shaking his head, and then he added, “He had something wrong with him, too.”

“What do you mean?” Stride asked.

“He was sick.”

*

The cough rattled like the sound of death.

Alison spun, illuminating the corner of the attic with the beam of her flashlight. There he was. The spitting devil living in their house was tall and bony, like a walking skeleton, and his clothes sagged on his frame. She recognized the black turtleneck and jeans he wore; they were Michael’s. The man’s face had a sunken, ghostly pallor. His dirty blond hair hung low on his forehead. He was young but looked old, except for glistening blue eyes that pierced her with a naked malevolence.

Behind him, Alison saw old blankets shoved together on the floor; they’d been taken from their closet. Remnants of food stolen from their refrigerator and freezer sat on a wooden tray. She saw a laptop computer fed by wires that climbed the walls and disappeared toward an electrical conduit. The bare beams of the attic surrounded him, and he’d stuck dozens of paper photographs to the protruding roof nails. The pictures flapped in the air currents that blew through the space.

She recognized close-up color images of herself. Naked, in and out of the shower. Pictures of her and Michael making love, from weeks ago, before she drove him out of their bedroom. Pictures of women with red hair, dressed in her clothes, dead from dozens of stab wounds.

He coughed again, and sputum bubbled up from his lungs and dribbled onto his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve.

“You did it, didn’t you?” he rasped. “You turned him in to the cops. I knew you would.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Carl,” he told her. “Don’t you remember me?”

“No.”

“You saw me at your husband’s office dozens of times, but you looked right through me. I was a non-person to a woman like you. I was invisible.”

“Carl Flaten,” she murmured, as her brain put together the pieces.

“That’s right. You won’t forget me again, will you?”

Alison did recognize him, although he’d wasted away from the man she remembered. She also knew the stories that Michael had told her about his sadistic behavior at the office. If he didn’t like you, he tormented you, like a boy with an insect in a jar. He could smell a person’s weakness and exploit it.

“My husband fired you? That’s what this is all about?”

“Oh, it’s about more than that.” Carl took a step toward her, and Alison retreated. “I used to watch you hanging out with him, you know. It made me sick. Michael had everything. Money oozing out of his pockets. Power to dictate everybody’s else lives. A kid to show off. And you. This beautiful wife he could fuck whenever he wanted. And what did I have? Terminal cancer, that’s what I had. You call that fair? I’m twenty-six.”

“You’re right, that’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

“Shut up. I don’t need your pity. I’m the one with the power now. An invisible man who controls your whole life. How does it feel, Alison?”

Carl Flaten laughed, and then he coughed so hard that his knees buckled. She took a step toward the hole, looking for a way to escape, but he reached into his front pocket and withdrew a corkscrew with a sharp, spiral point that he nestled between his fingers. From his rear pocket, he extracted an eight-inch saw with jagged, rusty teeth that had once hung on a peg board in their garage. He blocked her way to the stairs that led down into Evan’s closet.

“Michael dumped me by the side of the road like garbage,” he told her. “The bastard thought he was better than me, even when he was making a fortune off my brain. He had everything, and he left me with nothing. I wasn’t going to crawl away and die like that. I wasn’t going to let him win. So I figured out how to commit the perfect crime. The ultimate revenge. I decided to steal his perfect life.”

“By killing innocent women?” Alison snapped. “You’re nothing but a sick freak.”

“Sick? Is that all you can say to me? My plan was brilliant. Like masterfully designed computer code. At first, all I wanted was to live inside Michael’s house and be a part of his life without him having a fucking clue. Then I realized I could have so much more. I could drive the two of you apart. I could kick him out of your bed. I could own his wife’s mind. Look at what I’ve done to you. I made you believe that the man you loved was a monster. I made you betray him. You did just what I programmed you to do, Alison.”

“I’m not one of your computers,” she told him. “I’m a person. So were the women you murdered.”

“Do you think I care about them? Do you think I care about you? I’m already dying.”

He took another menacing step closer. His left hand hoisted the saw high in the air. She knew what would happen next.

“Stay away from me!” Alison screamed.

She switched off the flashlight. The attic turned black as he charged her. She heard the thunder of his footsteps, and she ducked into a ball, causing him to spill over her body and fall hard behind her. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted toward the exit ladder, but as she did, she slipped on loose sawdust, and her legs shot out from under her. She tumbled forward face-first, gasping as the impact emptied her lungs. The flashlight rolled out of her grasp. Before she could get up, Carl landed on her back, and one of his skinny arms snaked around her throat.

The twisted point of the corkscrew punctured the skin on her neck. She gasped and felt a stab of pain and a warm trickle of blood. His mouth was at her ear; she heard the gagged noise of his labored breathing. He coughed from deep inside his lungs, spraying a mist over her face. She wriggled under him, struggling to throw him off her back, but he hung on fiercely, dragging the corkscrew into a deep gash across her skin.

Alison felt something else. Something worse. The teeth of the old saw landed on the bulge of her carotid artery. She felt it like a vampire’s bite. With one jagged pull, he could send her blood pumping like a fountain from her heart directly onto the dirty floor of the attic.

“Now I can take what’s left of his life,” he whispered. “His wife. And his son.”

“No,” she gasped.

Carl began to saw at her flesh, but then he froze. The light of the flashlight bathed the two of them, flooding their faces. Alison’s eyes squeezed shut as she was blinded. She heard a young voice only inches away, and her heart seized.

Evan.

“YOU DON’T SCARE ME!” the boy bellowed.

The beam of light streaked like a comet in the night sky toward Carl Flaten’s head as Evan swung the flashlight with all the strength he could muster in his two little hands. It landed with a sharp crack of bone on the side of the man’s skull, enough to deaden his grip and give Alison a chance to dislodge him from her back with a mighty upward thrust of her torso. The light disappeared.

“Evan, hide!” she screamed.

Alison heard Carl Flaten staggering toward her again, and as they collided, the two of them wrestled in the darkness. Her hands clawed for his eyes with her long nails. Her cocked knee pummeled his groin. In pain, he swung the saw blindly, and its dull blade slashed her shoulder, drawing blood. She dropped to the ground, and the saw whistled above her head a second time, barely missing her. She grabbed his ankle, trying to topple him, but his whole body arched upward as he prepared to chop the saw downward into the meat of her skull like a cleaver. She dove free just as the metal whipped through the cold air toward the attic floor.

The blade stuck there, buried in the soft wood. She heard its vibrations. Carl struggled to dislodge the saw, and she followed the noise of his ragged breath. She leaped forward with both arms outstretched, catching him with her fists in the center of his chest, driving him backward. Her momentum carried her with him, and they both seemed to fly, cascading downward until Carl’s body landed at the speed of gravity against the low, angled roof of the attic.

An abortive scream died in his throat. Then there was silence.

Alison scrambled free, waiting for the man to rise to his feet, but she heard no movement, only a nauseating gurgle from his chest. In a corner of the attic, Evan flipped a light switch, and she saw Carl Flaten wriggling against the roof beams, his body contorted at an odd angle. She instinctively jumped backward, but he was pinned there, like a butterfly in a collection. Trickles of blood oozed over his bottom lip. His eyes blinked frantically. His legs twitched, scraping along the dusty floor. When he freed himself, he couldn’t stand. He sank to all fours and pitched forward, squirming on his face and choking. Blood matted his head and shoulders.