The Red Scream (36 page)

A shrill electronic buzz made her pull away and sit up. It sounded as if it were coming from inside her head, but Grady sighed and pulled a tiny pager from under the pillow. “Damn,” he said, looking at the digital readout that glowed in the dark. “I better check on this.”

Molly collapsed on the bed and pointed to the phone on the night table.

Grady reached over to it and punched out the number. After a few seconds, he said, “What, Caleb?” He listened for several minutes and Molly could hear the low voice droning on through the receiver. “No shit,” Grady said. Then again, louder, sitting up, “No shit.” He listened some more and said, “Well done. Thanks for buzzing me. I’ll get back to you.” He hung up and sat there leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out straight.

Molly looked up at him in the dim light. “Well, why do you have that look on your face?” she asked.

“What look?”

“Like a traffic cop seeing a Rolls-Royce zoom by at ninety miles an hour.”

He glanced over at her. “That was Caleb. Fort Worth PD called to say that their check on Marcus Gandy, whom you will recall from your close encounter today, was as recently as one month ago employed by none other than the Fort Worth Division of McFarland Construction.”

Molly was stunned. “Could it be a coincidence?”

He shifted his foot so it rested against her hip. “Molly, Molly,” he scolded in a low voice, shaking his head.

“Well, could it?”

“Is it so hard to accept that Charlie McFarland finds you such a pain in the ass that he arranged to have you beaten up, maybe killed?”

“Yes,” she said firmly.

“Well,” he said, drawing his foot along the side of her thigh, “I
think you might have a problem there.” He lifted his foot and very lightly ran his toes from her knee up the inside of her thigh. “Now where were we?”

“Mmm, prehensile toes.”

“I love it when you talk like that. Big words.” He moved down so he was lying next to her.

She looked into his pale eyes, now only inches from hers. “Oh, I didn’t tell you the rest of what Charlie told me tonight.”

“Charlie who?” he murmured, kissing her throat.

“He’s dying,” she said. “Of cancer. That’s what’s wrong with his back—all these tumors. You better make your case quick. In six months he’ll be dead.”

He stopped what he was doing. “You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Who else knows?” he demanded.

“Georgia knew, and his doctor, and Frank Purcell. He hasn’t told anyone else yet. He just found out a week ago. He wants to get another opinion.”

“Who’s his doctor?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll find out and check on it,” he said.

“Can you get that sort of information from a doctor?”

He pushed himself up to his knees and looked down at her. “I can do anything. Just watch,” he said, leaning over her to begin a slow exploration with his mouth. Grady Traynor—a man who was never in a hurry; she had always liked that about him.

“This police protection isn’t such a bad thing,” she murmured, abandoning all thoughts of dinner.

I
t was ten o’clock before Molly’s hunger pangs returned. “If we don’t eat, I’ll perish,” she announced.

He sighed and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “We’d have eaten hours ago if you hadn’t waylaid me. Can I use your shower before we go out?”

Molly leaned over the edge of the bed to gather up her clothes, which lay in heaps on the floor. “Sure. I’m going to get some ice water from the kitchen. Want some?”

“If you’ll bring it to me in the shower.”

In the glow of the night-light, she pulled her T-shirt on over her head and started down the dark stairs. Suddenly the front door swung open and the click of a light switch downstairs flooded the hall and stairs with light. Jo Beth gave a start when she saw Molly on the stairs.

“Mom, you’re home! There were no lights on, so I thought—”

Jo Beth stopped in midsentence when Grady stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Dad!” she said. Her face, looking up at them, was frozen in shock.

He stopped in his tracks and put a hand down to secure the towel. Molly had never seen him blush before, but his cheeks and neck had turned crimson under his tan. The man who was never at a loss was at a loss. “Oh, Jo Beth. Uh—”

“Sorry,” Jo Beth said, putting a hand in front of her mouth. “I didn’t know anyone was—uh, sorry. I’ll come back later.”

She stepped backward and let a giggle escape. “I’ll ring the bell next time.” As she closed the door, Molly thought she heard her daughter say “Wow.”

chapter
19

I got me a few.

The dragon is blue

The dagger is too.

Jail-house tattoo—

Something to do.

Skeleton’s grin,

The mark of sin,

Death and its twin—

Dreams from within

Inked on my skin.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

A
fter a very late dinner and far too much wine, Molly had fallen into hard slumber. But she woke with a gasp, mouth dry as sand, skin prickling, heart hammering, eyes wide open. She knew what time it was even before she turned her head to look at the glowing green numerals of her digital clock: three o’clock. Always three o’clock—her witching hour, when the fears and anxieties she managed to keep in the closet during daylight hours broke out, reared up on their hind legs, and howled.

For twenty-six years she had suffered from these early morning terrors, ever since that humid summer night, when she was sixteen. She had awakened in a sweat. Her daddy hadn’t come home and she was certain that he was in mortal danger. She had gotten out of bed and sat at the kitchen table, keeping vigil at the black window until sunrise, when she went out looking for him. For five days she searched. For five days she didn’t go to school, didn’t eat, or sleep, or cry. On the fifth day his body floated to the surface of Lake Travis, where it was found by three early morning fishermen.

After that night, the image she often woke from was a face barely
glimpsed through dark rippled water, a face glowing green like the clock numerals, with streamers of decomposing flesh trailing behind like seaweed. She always tried to get closer, to see the face so she might comfort it. She’d reach out her hand, but as her fingers brushed the surface of the water, she woke, gasping for breath as if she had been the one under the water.

But this time it wasn’t her daddy that woke her up.

No. This time it was Tiny McFarland.

Molly took several ragged breaths, closed her eyes, and on the backs of her lids, she conjured her up—not the pale, rigid body on the steel autopsy table, but the living woman. Though she had never seen the woman in life, she had her clearly in mind when she wrote that scene in
Sweating Blood.
The chic blond woman with the prepubescent body. Wearing a white linen dress and carrying an armload of red flowers from her garden. There she stood in the open door of the garage, looking at Molly.

Molly moved her lips, speaking to her with no sound:
There you are. Looking good in your white dress, a size four, if I’m remembering right. But why are you taking those flowers into the garage? You want to get cut flowers in water right away. Why don’t you take them to the house? There’s no water in the garage. And it’s greasy in there. You, a woman meticulous about your appearance, you in an expensive white linen dress that you plan to wear to a luncheon, why the garage? To do some chore, maybe? But you have a man living right above the garage who does things like that for you.

Mmmm. Yes. You have a man. Living above the garage. A handsome man. Young. And you have difficulty resisting men. I understand that. I have had that kind of trouble myself.

Are you taking him the flowers? Or did he call out to you? Now I know your secret as surely as if we two had sat down over a glass of wine and confided our sex lives. The two of you have been getting it on. You and David Serrano. Lady Chatterley and the gardener. A handsome couple, you so blond, he smooth and swarthy. Oh, yes. He was upstairs in his hot apartment, wearing only shorts, and he saw you out the window cutting flowers and he wanted you. You’d been away for three weeks and he was wild for you. He saw you in your white dress and he wanted you.

One of your children was home, true, but she was napping and you were eager for him, too, because you’d been away. Maybe he came running down the stairs and took you in his arms. Maybe you danced. Maybe you were both so eager you couldn’t wait, just like Grady and I were tonight. Maybe it got out of hand, got too rough, or you fought. Maybe someone surprised you. Maybe your husband came home. What a shock to be making love in the dark and suddenly the light goes on and the garage door starts to lift, and there you are … or maybe someone else came.
Molly’s eyes flew open and the image vanished.

Molly lifted her head and looked down at Grady Traynor asleep next to her, cocooned up to his chin in her Aunt Harriet’s old patchwork quilt. His face was relaxed and peaceful, his breathing deep and even. He slept as he always had, as if the years on the force and in homicide, as if all the horrors he had witnessed, had never touched him where it mattered—a man with no nightmares. She envied that.

She put her hand gently on his shoulder. The second she touched him, he became instantly and totally awake. God, she’d forgotten. You could wake him up anytime of the day or night, and he was immediately ready—to talk, or fight, or listen to the rain, or make love. In her experience, other men tended to be groggy or surly when awakened in the middle of the night, but not this one.

Grady glanced up at her face, then at the clock. He rolled over onto his back and said in a raspy voice, “Looks like the lurkies have got you by the throat, Molly. Three
A.M.
still a bad time for you?”

“Sometimes,” she said reluctantly, hating to admit it was as bad a time as it had always been. “My fire ant bites are blistering.” She pulled one leg out from under the covers to show him her ankle in the glow from the night-light. The top of her foot and her ankle were dotted with tiny pearly blisters.

He extricated a hand from the quilt cocoon he’d made for himself and wrapped his fingers around the ankle, completely encircling it. “Anything an old friend could help with?”

Molly leaned her head down close to him. “Louie Bronk didn’t kill Tiny McFarland,” she said, watching his face intently.

Grady stared straight up at the ceiling in silence for a minute, as if he were reviewing it in his head.

Molly discovered she was holding her breath in anticipation of his response.

Finally he said, “I have my doubts about it, too. What convinces you?”

Feeling too warm and too confined, Molly pulled her foot from his grip and used both feet to push the covers down to the end of the bed. “Oh, Grady. You know how you construct a story, you spin it from a few facts, it looks pretty good, and then somehow it’s set in concrete?”

“Do I ever!” he said with a snort.

Aware suddenly of her nakedness, she reached down to the foot of the bed, pulled the sheet back up, and wrapped it around herself. “Well, that happened here, I think, with Tiny McFarland. Now that I look at it from this angle, there’s so much wrong with my version. It’s always been a messy case. First, it was so different from Louie’s usual MO—away from the Interstate, choosing a blonde, killing her with so little blood, no postmortem rape, the nicks on her scalp. Then there were the stolen things that never turned up—the watch, the earrings, the stuff taken from the house; they were all distinctive. Something should have surfaced if they’d been pawned like he said. And the car, that goddamned Mustang. They dragged the lake twice and couldn’t find the fucking thing.”

The little blisters on her feet and ankles were itching like crazy. “And, Grady, when they questioned him about the case he was already in a frenzy of confessing. He confessed because they wanted him to, because he was in the mood, because it was a status crime, because it had his signature on it already.” Though she’d been struggling to resist the urge, she scratched at the blisters; it just intensified the itch, but she kept on. “And they fed him information. Of course, I know that can happen inadvertently and Louie’s quick to pick up on things. But I think this was deliberate. It probably was Frank Purcell who filled him in on those crucial bits about the scene and where the body was and what was stolen.

“But it’s the car. That’s the final thing for me. Lord help me, I believe him, Grady. I think he did have it painted before the Tiny McFarland murder. I think he
did
junk it in Fort Worth.” She was trying to keep her voice low and in control, but it kept rising and she heard the edge of hysteria in it. “He said at the time of his confession that he’d dumped it in a lake near Fort Worth because he knew if they found it, they’d discover he’d had it painted days before Tiny was killed and it would invalidate his confession. He was never even
there at the McFarland house. And he sure as hell didn’t kill Tiny. It’s all a lie. Which I helped propagate with my meticulously researched book.”