Last Breath (15 page)

“You have to talk to him, tell him everything’s okay.” On the answering machine Tanner’s voice continued, saying something about the e-mail message she’d received. “He’s a cop, isn’t he?”

She didn’t respond, not out of stubbornness but simply because she couldn’t get her brain to work.

Adam shook her. “
Isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she managed to say.

“Damn it. I don’t want him coming over. Not this soon. You tell him you’re all right. Whatever he’s worried about, it’s a false alarm.”

Tanner’s voice was close now. Adam must have hustled her to the end table beside her sofa, where the phone and the answering machine rested. He knew where the phone was, of course. This had been his house too.

“You try anything clever,” Adam said, “and I’ll kill you right now, C.J., I fucking swear I will.”

Her head cleared a little. “What are you gonna do, chloroform me to death?”

A press of cold metal against her chin. “This is what I’ll do.”

It was the muzzle of a gun.

For a moment she was back in Ramon Sanchez’s converted garage, facing his ancient revolver. But this gun wasn’t ancient. She knew it wasn’t, though she couldn’t see it. Adam would never buy anything cheap and old. He liked shiny new things. He paid top dollar. And he kept his toys in good working order—she smelled lubricant on the gun barrel and knew it had been recently oiled.

“Now I’m going to pick up the phone,” Adam said, “and you’ll talk to this asshole. I’ll hear every word the two of you say. Got it?”

“Got it,” she whispered.

Tanner was saying that he and his partner would be right over, and then his voice was cut off as Adam lifted the telephone handset from its cradle. An instant later C.J. felt it at the side of her face, the handset tilted so Adam could listen in.

“C.J.?” Tanner was saying. “Did you pick up? Are you there?”

“I’m here. Rick.” She was surprised at how normal she sounded. “I’m, uh, I’m glad you called.”

“Did you hear any of what I just said?”

“Not really. I was in the, um, the other room. Sorry.”

“It’s about that e-mail message—”

“E-mail?”

“The message you got. The Four-H Club.”

“Oh. Right. The e-mail.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine. Look, I feel kind of, you know, silly about that whole thing. I mean, I don’t know why some stupid message would, um, would get me all worked up—”

“I don’t know why it would get Detective Hyannis worked up either, but it did.” Tanner’s voice crackled over the receiver, taut with tension. “He turned a lighter shade of pale when I told him about it. Insisted I call you ASAP. Then I’m supposed to call a Detective Walsh, who works Robbery-Homicide in Metro. Name mean anything to you?”

“Uh, not really. I mean, well, he’s a D-three. Handles all the hottest cases.” C.J. felt the handgun’s muzzle press harder against her skin. She forced a laugh and hoped it didn’t sound hysterical. “Sounds like Detective Hyannis picked up on my paranoia. Maybe it’s contagious.”

“I don’t think so. Hyannis isn’t the type to overreact. If he says there’s a problem, I’m inclined to believe him. You planning on going out tonight?”

Adam whispered in her ear, “Say yes.”

“Well, yes, actually, I am.”

“Might be better if you stayed put. My partner and I will come over.”

“I’m way out of your jurisdiction.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just give me your address.”

Adam’s voice again, so low and close it might have come from inside her own head: “Tell him you have to go to the junior high.”

She had forgotten all about that. “You know, I really can’t hang around. I’ve got this, you know, community-service program to go to. I help run it every Wednesday night. I need to be there.” She was babbling.

“This is more important,” Tanner said impatiently.

“What is? An e-mail message? You haven’t told me anything.”

“That’s because I don’t know anything. But Hyannis gave off some bad vibes. I think you’d better stay in your home and arm yourself.”

“No,” Adam breathed.

“Sorry, Rick. I can’t do it. Those kids are counting on me. Look, I’ll be fine, okay?”

“We’re coming over. We’ll be there in ten minutes—”

“I’ll be gone by then.”

“Damn it, C.J., this isn’t some game. You could be in real trouble.”

Tell me about it, she thought. “I’ll be fine. Rick. Don’t worry about me. Go out, fight crime. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“C.J.—”

“Tomorrow. Sorry. Gotta run.”

She heard Adam hang up the phone.

“You did good, C.J.,” he said. “You’re a pro.”

“He may come anyway.”

“Yeah, I know. He sounds like a stubborn bastard.”

“He’s worried about me. I guess he’s right to be.” She remembered Tanner’s mention of Morris Walsh, no lightweight in the department. “Why would Detective Walsh be involved in this?”

“How should I know?”

“He’s a big wheel at Metro. Doesn’t get mixed up in anything less serious than ...”

“Than what?” Adam’s voice was subtly mocking.

“Multiple homicide,” she whispered.

“Well, what do you know?”

“What exactly are you going to do with me?”

“Get you out of here, for starters. And then—well, let’s just say I’ve got quite an evening planned.”

“Adam, this doesn’t make sense ...”

“It makes perfect sense.”

“Not to me.”

“You never did understand me, C.J. If you had, you wouldn’t have messed up my fucking life the way you did. You would have known you couldn’t get away with it.”

She wanted to reply in astonished indignation,
I
messed up
your
life?

He was the one who’d been unfaithful. He was the one who’d ruined their marriage. And she would have told him so, except the chloroformed rag was in her face again, another dose to put her under once more.

She struggled to break away. Adam held her.

“Can’t hold your breath forever, C.J.”

He was right. She felt her lungs crying out for oxygen, and finally she yielded, inhaling the dizzying fumes, and then it all fell away—her body and Adam’s hands and the fear and everything—all gone, and she was gone too.

Walsh had remained at Parker Center after the meeting ended, reviewing the facts about the latest victim with Donna Cellini. Of all the task-force members, Cellini was the one he liked best. Some old cops like himself complained about the rising number of women in the department, but Walsh thought the gals were usually sharper than the men, and they had some extra quality—intuition or something—that sometimes afforded them insights the men overlooked. Besides, Martha Eversol and Nikki Carter had been young Caucasian females, so who better than another young Caucasian female to understand them?

Cellini was talking about Martha’s refrigerator and what its contents implied about her lifestyle when the phone on Walsh’s desk started to ring.

A sick feeling twisted his gut, and he thought. This is it.

He crossed the room and picked up the phone, praying not to hear news of a third abduction. His mouth was dry. “Walsh,” he rasped into the mouthpiece.

“Detective Morris Walsh, Robbery-Homicide?” asked a man’s voice—a middle-aged man like him.

“Speaking.”

“Detective, this is FBI Special Agent Noah Rawls in Baltimore. I’m informed that you head up the task force for a serial murderer known as the Hourglass Killer?”

Walsh blinked. “That’s right.”

“My partner and I work the computer crimes squad. We’ve come across something that’s relevant to your case.”

It occurred to Walsh that it was must be ten o’clock in Baltimore. Whatever the two feds were up to, they were working overtime. “I’m listening,” he said.

“We received an anonymous e-mail message tipping us off to a Web site. I’d like to direct you to the following URL—”

“The following what?” Walsh knew nothing about computers.

“To the Web site address. Can you do that?”

There was a hint of condescension in Rawls’s voice that irritated Walsh. “I can manage,” he said, gesturing to Cellini. “Just give me a minute.”

Muffling the phone, he told Cellini to get online and go to a Web address he would dictate to her. Cellini, unlike him, knew all about high-tech gear. She had the Web browser up and running in a few seconds.

“Okay,” Walsh said, “give me the address.”

Rawls recited the
www
prefix and a short string of dirty words referring to the most interesting part of the female anatomy. Walsh repeated the words. For once he wished Cellini were a man. He felt like some dirty old coot talking to a woman this way.

Cellini entered the address. Rawls talked Walsh through the procedure necessary to log on to the site, and Cellini executed the user name and password entries.

“It’s a porn site,” Walsh muttered when the homepage came up.

“Yes, sir,” Rawls said, “but it’s more than that. Click on the link that reads
Do you like to watch?
”

Walsh tapped a stubby finger at the link, and Cellini clicked it. The page that appeared was empty except for the dim, static image of a bedroom.

“What are we looking at?” Walsh asked.

“Live video feed of a woman’s bedroom. The lights are off, but the Webcam’s lens is sensitive enough to produce a readable image even in darkness.”

“Whose bedroom is it?”

“We don’t know. But we have still images of the woman—and of two other women whose bedrooms were similarly wired over the past three months.”

“Two others?”

“Yes, sir. The first two victims of the Hourglass Killer.”

Walsh caught his breath. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. I read the memos and bulletins as they came in, so I was aware of the case. But to be certain, I went online and matched the photos to images of the victims from the FBI database. They’re Nikki Carter and Martha Eversol.”

“Christ. You said the tip-off message was anonymous?”

“Yes. Scrubbed, so we can’t trace it. Probably a visitor to the site got suspicious and decided to let us know.”

“Why you in particular?”

“The Web site’s server is in Baltimore. But the camera must be in LA.”

“Christ.” Walsh took another look at the image on the computer. “Wait. You’re saying this bedroom belongs to a
third
woman?”

Cellini was staring at him. Having heard only his end of the dialogue, she had no idea what the excitement was about.

“Right,” Rawls said. “We have images of her but no name or address. She was in the bedroom earlier tonight.”

“Damn. She’s the next one. The next victim. This son of a bitch has been putting them on the Net before he kills them.”

“That’s the same conclusion we’ve reached,” Rawls said. “He strikes on the last day of the month, I understand.”

“Yeah.” Walsh licked his lips. “He’ll try to take her tonight. Agent Rawls, we’ve got to identify this woman immediately.”

“I understand, Detective, but it may not be possible.”

“You can’t trace the video feed?”

“Unfortunately, no. It’s being sent through a proxy.”

Walsh didn’t know what this meant, but he let it slide. “All right, look. Can you send me the images you’ve got? Of all three women, but especially the latest one?”

“I’ll e-mail them to you. Just give me your address.”

“Actually, I, uh ...” Walsh was feeling more and more like a dinosaur as this conversation continued. “I don’t have an e-mail account, but hold on.” He asked Cellini for her e-mail address and recited it to Rawls. “Send the pics there.”

“We’re doing it now.”

“Should we, uh, get offline so the computer’s not busy? You know, so the message can get through?”

Walsh thought he heard Rawls chuckle. “You’re not really an Information Age type of guy, are you, Detective?”

“How’d you guess?” Walsh said sourly.

“The message will go through whether you’re online or not. Let me give you my cell phone number.” He recited a number with a Baltimore area code, and Walsh scribbled it on his desk blotter. “Once you’ve received the images, call me back and we’ll discuss our options.”

“Right. Thanks, Agent Rawls. This is a break. This is our
only
break.”

Walsh hung up, then briefed Cellini on the news. “You think this is legit?” she asked.

“We’ll know when we see the pictures.”

Cellini logged on to her e-mail account and found a message from Rawls. She opened the attached files and tiled them across the screen. Nikki Carter, Martha Eversol, and a third woman stared at them.

“It’s him,” Walsh said. “It’s our guy.”

“No doubt. Victims one and two.”

Walsh tapped the last picture. “And three. Unless we find her right away.”

“Any ideas?” Cellini asked.

“We print out her picture, photocopy it, distribute it throughout the divisions. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will know her.”

“What if we put her on TV?” Cellini was already sending the image to the printer, which went to work churning out pages. “Get her picture on KTLA, KCAL, KTTV, and KCOP at ten o’clock, follow up with the eleven P.M. broadcasts on channels Two, Four, and Seven. If enough people see it, someone will recognize her. She may even watch the news herself.”

“Could work,” Walsh said slowly. He was thinking of the panic that would ensue if people knew that a serial killer was not only stalking his victims but putting them on public display over the Internet. “Or we could try to track her down ourselves. Is there anything in her bedroom that might give us a clue to where she lives?”

Cellini guided the Web browser back to the video feed. “Nothing I can see. No windows, so we can’t look at any outdoor landmarks. No indication of whether it’s an apartment or a house.”

Walsh saw an unmade bed. Beyond it, the door to a bathroom. That was all.

“Could be anyplace,” he muttered.

“God, this is sick. Guys have been watching this woman. She’s been on the Web all month.”

“Looks that way.”

“Her bedroom on public display.” Cellini shivered.

“He exhibits them before an audience before he moves in for the kill.”