DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (48 page)

"Don't worry, I will. You might have saved my life. I owe you, sweetheart."

"Don't be hurt no one has told you before now. You know what a tyrant Cam is. He doesn't take any of this seriously, what's been happening to you. All he thinks about is Pure and Uncut. Don't blame the others for not coming to you sooner."

"I'll try. It's going to be hard, but I'll try."

After she had hung up, feeling lighter than air because she had done a very good deed for a good man, she squeezed out a tube of yellow color onto her palette and swirled her brush in it. She would paint the sky in her painting with sunshine. The image of the bodies hanging from the windmills out on the desert was disturbing, but the sunny sky behind them would cause a startling effect. She might sell this one for several hundred at the gallery.

She'd title it Plan Gone Awry in Karl's honor. He'd like that.

When the phone rang, she jumped, having become immersed in artwork. She picked up the phone and heard a voice say, "Don't tell him. You tell him, you're dead." Then a click and a dial tone.

She stood holding the phone in one hand and the brush of yellow paint in the other. Her eyes unfocused as she stared into the depths of the canvas past the figures hanging dead, nailed to the windmills in killing sunlight so bright it seared the eyes.

She finally took a deep breath and returned the phone to the cradle of the receiver. "Too late," she said, trying on a grim smile.

33

"Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience

The Body paced through the house, front to back, going in circles, busy grasping at the air as if there was something there to grab hold of and wring to death.

Marilyn couldn't tell Karl about the script. She couldn't do it, she couldn't.

This was a disaster in the making. It would ruin everything. Karl would be put on notice. The Body couldn't surprise him if he knew what was coming. Goddamn Marilyn.

Call her, tell her what will happen if she tells.

The Body snatched up the phone and dialed Marilyn's home number. After issuing the warning some peace of mind should have descended, but it was not to be. The frenzy only increased. Marilyn might not be someone who could be dissuaded by a phone call.

Cursing, The Body hurried into the silent room with the padding and locked the door. Couldn't sit down. Couldn't relax. It was all getting out of hand. How could that have happened? It was planned so meticulously. The Body hadn't believed any of the women involved on the set would tell Karl—at least not until it was too late to save him. They were all ambitious, selfish bitches and The Body had counted on that. They wanted their positions. Every one of them lusted for fame. They wanted this movie more than life itself. It would make them all stars, make them rich, make them immortal if what Cam expected at the box office panned out. This movie might be studied in film classes a hundred years from now because it would be the first commercial success in a new medium. Millions of dollars were invested in it.

How could they let Marilyn tell and chance getting the picture shut down, cops crawling all over the place? How were they going to insure Karl didn't call in someone and sabotage the entire film?

The Body prowled the dark room, the black room. The complete lack of light suited The Body's mood. Blackness, darkness, nothingness. Hate was black. The heart of the darkness lay in wait for hatred to bloom and so it did.

Forgetting that the chair stood in the room's center, The Body ran into it and nearly toppled over it to the floor.

"I'll kill her," The Body mumbled, kicking at the leather chair, then kicking it again.

The refrain rose and fell in the room's confines, the words absorbed into the thick walls. "I'll kill her. I’ll kill her for this. She needs killing for doing this. I have to kill her. I have to stop her."

The dark room wasn't having the calming effect it should have. The Body left it and moved through the empty house, footsteps echoing, to the nursery where the computer monitor sat on the white child's desk. The word processing software was open and a blank page for the diary glared pristine blue, a blue all-knowing eye, shining into the baby's room.

For what might have been hours, The Body sat before the monitor typing over and over again:

Hate, hate, hate, kill her kill her kill her hatehatehate . . .

34

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

Karl could hardly contain himself, his mind on how to prepare for assault from his nameless stalker. He needed to handle a lot of stacked-up business on his desk in the office, but every time he tried, he'd catch himself sitting, daydreaming, staring at the wall.

Lois tried to make the bad news palatable. He had lost two more clients. Someone had sent them updates on his company claiming it was in financial trouble and not to be trusted to handle their affairs. One of the clients, a man who had come to him straight from a hit play, someone Karl had found a high-powered representative in the best talent agency in town, brought his letter to the office and threw it on Lois' desk before telling her he didn't need LaRosa's help from now on.

Karl scanned the letter and before he had finished reading the lies, crumpled it in his fist and threw it across the room. Lies. Innuendoes. Gossip.

But it was losing him clients. Karl wondered how many of his people had received the unsigned letter. He needed to call everyone, reassure them the letter was from an enemy and it was all scurrilous lies, please don't believe a word of it.

Yet all he could do half the day so far, rather than attend to his clients' affairs, was work out in his mind how to fend off the coming attack Marilyn had told him about from the script of Pure and Uncut.

The stalker would attach a bomb to the underside of his car.

He'd had Jimmy drive him into work. He would have to get the loaner, the Caprice, checked out before he drove it. He wasn't going to be blown to smithereens today. He was going to discover who was involved in this crazy thing and put a stop to it, permanently.

After lunch and a brisk walk in the air, he returned to the office and did some of the calling around he had put off. He couldn't find all his clients at home so he'd have to try later. The ones he did get to talk to assured him they would ignore the letter if it came.

At five PM he left the office and took a cab to Malibu. He had an appointment to meet with a mechanic at his house. This man always did the work on the Jag and was repairing it now. He'd know a bomb device when he saw one. He couldn't get away from work until after six, but he'd be there, he told Karl.

Karl was going to get him to explain what to look for and where to look. After this visit, Karl would be the one checking out whatever vehicle he meant to drive. Once he found a device attached to his car, he'd call the police in. This was a direct assault on his life. Now maybe they'd take his stalker case seriously. Sooner or later they had to.

35

"I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death."

Francis Bacon, An Essay on Death

It had been a very long day. Marilyn played Olivia's best friend in the film and the scene they had just shot entailed Marilyn listening in horror to a tirade Olivia went into about the man she loved and hated, the man she would destroy given half the chance.

It was an emotionally draining scene to shoot and Cam was hard on her. He was harder on Olivia, but the whole scene was a study in despair and lack of control. Olivia raved. Marilyn, as her friend, stood by, shocked at the vehemence displayed, and afraid that her friend really meant what her character was saying. Marilyn had to try to dissuade her, talk sense into her. Cam made her do the scene over and over, different angles, different lighting. It took forever.

They never even got to the bomb scene and what a relief that was. Although Marilyn wasn't featured in that scene, she didn't even want to be present when they shot it. Not after she knew how someone on the set was stalking Karl, using the script scenes. At least she had warned him. She wouldn't have his death on her conscience.

She went straight home from the studio lot and let herself in the front door. She didn't immediately know she was not alone. She flicked on the living room light, dropped her carrying bag she always took to the studio, and, stooping, untied and pulled off the size-too-small Nikes she never should have bought.

On the way to the bathroom to shower, she began to unbutton the blue painter's smock she had worn that day to work.

In the hall between the living room and bath she realized someone was in the house. She halted, breath catching in her throat. She had heard a door ease closed behind her. She twirled around, ready to scream. Saw nothing in the shadowy hallway.

"Who's there?"

A shadow slipped across the hall, a human silhouette falling from the light in the living room. Someone had been in there when she came in.

She was supposed to be safe here. It wasn't fair someone had come into her home and waited for her. She'd never believed that could happen. She should have taken a lover or a roommate to live with her. She should have had an alarm system installed, but who could afford it?

She was trembling all over and underneath the smock her skin had slicked down with a sheen of sweat that now chilled her. She might paint the most appalling visions of death and disorder, but the thought of it actually encroaching and invading her own life had always been the farthest thing from her mind. What she worked out in her studio was art, torturous artscapes from a timid, frightened mind. Real life horror, not the kind in movies or her paintings, was two steps beyond any of her real experience. Even in those days on the streets, she'd never been in mortal danger.

She began to call out again, but her voice was a croak and she didn't recognize it. She swallowed hard and tried once more.

"What do you want? If you're here to rob me . . ."

She hadn't seen the shadows flicker again, nor had she heard any sounds. It might all be her vivid imagination. It's true she was easily spooked. Sometimes at night she'd be sound asleep and wake up startled at some sound from the house settling. She'd creep from bed and search out the house before she could sleep again.

She might not have seen the human shadow at all, really, or heard a door closing at her back . . .

The horror that she drew, the horror that she imagined so well on canvas, but did not believe might ever come close to her, leapt from behind, strangling her and lifting her off her feet. She kicked wildly, gasping for air, beating at the arm around her neck which shut off her wind so that she could not scream, could not even speak.

She was flipped around to face the bathroom door that stood slightly ajar. Her kicking, stockinged feet knocked it open and she was bodily carried into the bath. She thought she caught a glimpse of her attacker in the counter-length mirrors above the sink, but the image was a blur of black cloth, black ski mask, and then she was turned to the right, toward the shower and tub stall. Her head was forced forward with a jerk and her forehead banged into the frosted glass of the shower door, cracking it.

Marilyn saw stars and prayed not to pass out. She squirmed and gouged and kicked for her life, but she hadn't a chance to divert or stop the unseen big blade of a knife that drove between her third and fourth ribs on the left side, angling up toward her heart and lung.

Her screams, loud and echoing with abandon off the tiled walls, went higher and higher as her head hit the glass again and the knife plunged again and the blood ran down her side to her waist, her hips, her thighs, and down her jeans soaking them black, pooling on the floor where her white socks were quickly soaked red. She slipped and slid until finally her legs gave out from under her and she collapsed down, down in a heap, dying with her eyes open, staring at how incredibly red was her blood, more red than any paint she had ever seen, redder than a fiery sky shining down over a field of the crucified windmill dead.

~ * ~

The Body stood panting over the corpse for what seemed an eternity. Finally when breathing was regulated to an even flow of air in and out of the lungs, and the flooded fury of combat eased to a trickle, The Body leaned over and carefully removed the clothes from Marilyn Lori-Street. Blood was everywhere, but there was time, all night in fact, to take care of that.

Once the corpse was nude, The Body lifted it onto the lip of the tub and tipped it over into the purity of the white porcelain. Her neck was crooked, perhaps broken now. The legs lay cocked up against the tiled wall. Something about the vulnerability of the naked feet gave The Body pause. They were small, blood-smeared and high arched; beautiful in the way only perfect appendages could be. Marilyn's hands were not nearly so nice as her feet.

The Body looked at the large knife lying in the pooled violet-red blood on the floor. It was sharp, having just been sharpened for this specific job of murder. How hard could it be to dismember the body in the tub?

The Body had all night.

36

"Every murder turns on a bright hot light, and a lot of people . . . have to walk out of the shadows."

Mark Hellinger, The Naked City

Officers Dorian Lepski and Shane Miller patrolled the street past the famous Garden Palm Restaurant and Bar during the eleven-to-seven shift. Dorian drove, idly glancing along the sidewalk to his left as Shane monitored the buildings to the right of the car. He was tired and his back ached. He should get one of those wooden car seat covers purported to massage the driver's back during long hours at the wheel. He'd seen them for sale at the drug store for less than ten bucks. Cheap investment.