Tell No Lies (6 page)

“Sleeping,” he said.

“And they don’t know. They have no idea…”

He laced his fingers, the stupid yellow gloves squeaking together. For some reason he hadn’t taken them off. He’d thrown on jeans and a sweatshirt as well, wanting to face the matter dressed. “We don’t
know
that these letters are death threats, too.”

“They don’t look like Christmas cards.”

“No, they don’t.”

Those gouged pencil marks. The envelopes, thin and nearly weightless. Each one, like the first, seemed to hold a single sheet. What the hell did they say?

Cris checked the phone in her hand, as if a call had somehow been missed in the last thirty seconds. “Where the hell could Dooley be?”

A fresh consideration soared in and skewered him. The words stuck in his throat, so he swallowed and tried again. “What if they’re dead already? What if their deadlines already passed, like Jack Holley’s?” He didn’t say the rest:
Then a mix-up over the goddamned mail would have cost two more lives.

At this, Cristina finally halted. Despite the cool nighttime air, her cheeks were flushed. Through the south-facing window, the city lights gleamed and wavered like something living.

She said, “Should we … open them?”

The question had been working at him like an ulcer since he’d laid eyes on those envelopes. He forced a measured answer. “Wouldn’t that screw them up as evidence?”

“Not if you use gloves.”

“How do you know?”

“
CSI: Miami.
” Cris crouched and set the ledge of her folded arms on the far side of the coffee table. Stared across those envelopes at him. Tapped the antenna of the cordless phone against her lips. “Between your mailbox and here, you’ve already touched them plenty. The cop told you to use the gloves to count them. It’s not like
opening
them’s gonna compromise them all of a sudden.”

Daniel reasoned along with her. “Whenever the hell Dooley gets her hands on them, she’s just gonna do it anyway.”

His mouth had gone sour. The mounted clock behind him
tick-tick-ticked.
Cris ran a hand through her bangs and squeezed, hair spiking up between her fingers.

He nodded at her.

She nodded at him.

The first flap, insufficiently moistened, popped up easily.

admit what youv done. or you will bleed for it.

The paper trembled in his grip as he turned it over.

you hav til november 20 at midnite

A breath shuddered out of him. “That’s Wednesday. Day after tomorrow—”

Cris was gripping the cordless tightly enough that her fingers had gone pale. “So Lyle Kane’s still alive.”

“And Dooley can get to him.” He grabbed the next envelope and slid a yellow rubber forefinger under the flap, desperate to see if Marisol Vargas was already dead or if she still had a shot.

The sheet slid out. Same refrain on the front. And the back—

you hav til
november 18 at
midnite

His heart seized.

Tonight.

“What?” Cris said. “
What,
honey? You’re freaking me out.”

He turned and looked over his shoulder at the wall clock:
11:54.

His voice, little more than a dry rasp. “Tonight.”

“Where…?” Cris bounded around the table to read the envelope without having to touch it. “Where’s she—”

1737 chestnut st #2

“Jesus, that’s across from Moscone Park.”

Four blocks away.

Six minutes.

Four blocks.

The phone shrilled, and Cris yelped and jumped back, dropping it. The battery lid popped off, but the phone kept ringing as it spun over to tap Daniel’s shoes. He snatched it up.

“Dooley?”

“I just got back. My guy filled me in. I was in the garage with no—”

“Midnight tonight he’s killing the next person.” A rush of words, his voice unrecognizable.

“You
opened
them? Wait. Midnight. That’s—” Her breath blew sharply across the receiver. “What’s the address?”

He rattled it off, and she shouted it to someone else.

Daniel was standing. “How long to get someone there?”

“We’re too far away—we work out of Hall of Justice, twenty minutes to get there. Nearest station is Northern. I’ll have ’em pull a patrol unit off Western Addition. If they roll now, they could get there in fifteen, maybe ten if they code-three it.”

“I can get there in five.”

“Brasher?” Dooley’s voice now cool and hard. “Stay put.”

He was moving, taking giant strides across the room.

Cris was behind him, twisting her hands in the hem of the Giants shirt, shifting from bare foot to bare foot, her voice thin with fear: “You sure about this?”

He whipped past the island, tossed the phone on the counter, turned for the stairs. “No.”

“You’re not a cop, Daniel.”

“I know. But a woman’s gonna be attacked in
minutes.
How do I not at least go down there, knock on her door?”

“You could run right into the guy.”

“I’ll stay outside. I’m only gonna warn her, wait in the street with her for the cops. Look—there’s no time to go around and around on this. I’ll be careful.”

Cris reached across the counter. The butcher knife came free from the magnetic strip with a soft ping. She extended it to him, handle first. Her thin arms trembled.

“Just in case,” she said.

Chapter 9

Daniel took the Audi for more muscle, rocketing down the cascade of Webster, the undercarriage scraping and throwing off sparks like flicked cigarettes. The park flew by on the left, a shadowy expanse behind chain-link. The buildings’ letters zoomed at him through the passenger window, and he slid to the curb, fumbling for the knife. From the dashboard the time glowed menacing red—12:03.

He leapt out, stumbling. Discordant laughter reached him from a late-night congregation on the dark softball fields across the street, but it seemed only to highlight the desolation of the midnight hour. The block, infused with his own dread, seemed postapocalyptic.

The lawned sidewalk strip housed a row of sycamores with pollarded branches, upthrust stumps like the severed arms of scarecrows. His footsteps jarred his vision as he sprinted across, his shoulder scuffing a trunk, sending off a puff of bark dust.

He searched for the street numbers, his wild gaze finally landing on 1737. Dueling columns, cracked steps leading to a wide, unlit porch inlaid with Art Deco tile. Three red doors stood out like something from a game show, the building carved into different apartments, number two oddly on the right.

He jumped up onto the porch and skidded to a stop before door number two, his heart thumping. A brass lion knocker stared out at him, and he stared right back.

Now
what?

In his slalom down the hill, he hadn’t contemplated much besides Marisol Vargas and the dashboard clock.

Sorry, ma’am, but someone with bad handwriting’s coming to kill you, oh, right about now.

It would have to do.

As he reached for the brass knocker, his gaze snared on the narrow strip of black at the seam of the jamb. The door was a half inch ajar.

The killer was already inside.

The night breeze seemed to blow right through Daniel, bones and all.

He lifted his hand to the wood, applied a hint of pressure. The door swung silently inward.

The foyer, revealed by degrees. Side table with bowl. A Jim Dine print, tilted nearly off the wire. Tangled fringe of an expensive rug, one corner flipped back to show the pad beneath.

She’d fought.

His fist ached around the knife handle. His arm, knotting from the tension.

He told his fingertips to apply more pressure to the door, and they did, the view widening inch after maddening inch. Past the foyer, beyond the dark dining room, and through a doorway, a recessed light glowed in the kitchen ceiling.

He blinked, the tableau assembling itself in chunks.

Under the fall of light, a woman on her stomach, cheek mashed to the floor, her temple swollen, strands of hair matted to one bloody cheek. The kitchen doorjamb seeming to cut her off at the thighs. Her arms wrenched painfully back, wrists bound at the base of her spine. Eyes straining, pupils swimming in white.

She was staring directly at him.

With horror he realized that she must have been watching the entire time. Pinned to her own floor, her only view a sideways tilt through two unlit rooms, every last hope glued to the front door creeping open.

Dark tracks ran across the bridge of her nose and down her temple, and it took him a moment to realize through his shock what they were. Tears of blood. She’d been cut?

The woman’s lips moved, and somehow he heard her fear-desiccated voice: “… help me.”

Her imploring stare froze him there in the doorway.

The last thing he wanted to do was go into that house. But how could he leave her there?

From somewhere behind her, footsteps creaked the floor.

Daniel made no conscious decision to enter; his legs just moved him. Sliding inside, he eased the door mostly closed behind him to eliminate the light profile, however faint, from the porch.

There he was, armed with a cooking utensil and two weeks’ training in hostage-crisis intervention, in a closed space with a murderer.

He took swift, weightless steps through the foyer, then sliced through the dining room to get out of the sight line, veering for the wall just beside the doorway. As he neared, a large shadow edged into view in the kitchen beyond, but he jerked right and flipped, planting his shoulder blades silently against drywall, just out of sight. Hanging plants all around stained the air with a fecund, earthy smell.

A blurred, masculine voice: “What?”

From the cramped vantage, Daniel could see only a sliver of kitchen, the outer edge of the light’s glow, a tumble of Marisol’s hair.

He was sucking air. His heartbeat seemed so loud he thought it might give him away.

Breathe. Breathe.

He wanted to get the drop, but there was no time. He’d have to go in blind. Straight jabs so the killer couldn’t block his arm.

Just like a wrestling takedown.

But with a butcher knife.

“… elp me.”

Daniel braced himself. A panic beat pounded in his skull. His legs tensed to pivot and leap.
One … two …

An instant before he reached
three,
he heard that same hushed voice say, “Here you go,” followed immediately by a sickening sound:
Slit.

Daniel had barely registered the noise when a mist of blood pattered on the visible wedge of kitchen tile.

There came a burbling of breath, then another faint spray of blood—timed with the heartbeat or the lungs.

A hideous rattling against the floor. The unmistakable sound of someone dying, just around the corner. Daniel’s hesitation—the final second he’d taken to steel himself—had been the difference between her life and her death.

His heart jerked, a throat-crowding heave.

Even from the far side of the jamb, Daniel saw a sharp flash of light illuminate the kitchen—a camera? He jerked his head back, squinting against the flare.

Before he’d recovered, a dark form strode through the doorway, speeding right past him without taking note. The killer moved quickly but without panic, heading to the front door. The breeze from his movement chilled the panic sweat on Daniel’s face. In the gloom Daniel could make out only parts of the man as he passed through falls of weak light from the windows. He seemed to be big, broad, indistinct in loose-fitting black sweats. At his side dangled a wicked-looking blade, a military knife that he swiped across his thigh and back again.

Unaware of Daniel, the man walked on through the dining room and into the foyer.

At once, for no apparent reason, he halted. His back to Daniel, he was nothing more than shadow against shadow, a charcoal silhouette.

Electricity coursed through Daniel. His chest seized. He didn’t want to take a breath, didn’t want to exhale. If he so much as shifted his weight, it could announce his frozen presence in the darkness.

The man’s head cocked. What the hell was he looking at?

The front door. When Daniel had arrived, it was barely cracked. But in his rush to get to Marisol, he’d left it open several inches.

The man’s arm shifted inside the sleeve of his sweatshirt, muscle flexing as he tightened his grip on the blade.

He turned.

And stared across the unlit dining room at Daniel in the shadows.

It was a horrifying blank face, nothing more than a polished oval. Wait, no—it was a black neoprene mask that was wrapped tight, removing the features. A missing figure-eight band for the eyes, like a reverse superhero mask. Triangular peak in place of the nose. A circle of breathing perforations where a mouth should be.

The knife spun around the man’s black-gloved hand as if of its own accord, flipping across the knuckles, blade catching light. Then the fingers seized it in a new grip, angling it down along the forearm, cutting edge out. A well-practiced hold.

All sound vanished, leaving nothing but a white-noise rush in Daniel’s ears. His back—literally to the wall. Nowhere to run. But that also meant the attacker had only one way at him. Daniel slid his heel to the baseboard, gauging the distance. Let him come, then counter hard.

Daniel lifted the butcher knife.

The man took a step toward him, then another, his boots pounding the floor as he wound into a run.

And then, in the distance, a police siren warbled, freezing the man just as he was getting up speed.

He and Daniel stared at each other across the length of the dining room. Daniel’s chest burned, and he realized he was still holding his breath.

The masked face dipped a bit, perhaps in amusement, and then the other gloved hand rose from the man’s pocket, a small digital camera lifting into view.

Before Daniel could process what was happening, a blinding flash bleached the unlit dining room, turning everything hospital white.