Last Breath (27 page)

There had been children in Montana and Nebraska and the Mojave Desert. One of those children—a rare failure—had been Caitlin Osborn, age ten. He had seen her in the shopping district of her small hard-scrabble town and had been instantly captivated. Such a pretty little thing. He’d known he must have her. He had followed her home and watched her parents’ house on and off for days, until the opportunity offered itself.

She would have been a memorable kill. He had planned to strangle her with his gloved hands. Strangulation had been one method he employed during his early wanderings, but not the only one.

Even in those formative years, he had begun to perfect his craft, testing new techniques, seeking variety. His inspiration was the famed Zodiac killer of California, who had never been caught. The Zodiac was unusual among predators of his kind because of his willingness to alter his modus operandi. Other killers repeated the same shopworn MO, invariably relying on the knife or the garrote or the gun, but the Zodiac was more clever, more creative than that. He tried different methods of execution, while varying the locale of his crimes.

More important, the Zodiac resisted the temptation to advertise. There was a fetishistic impulse among serial killers to identify themselves with a “signature”—a term of art used by psychological profilers and other overpaid savants to designate a nonessential, highly personal feature of the crime. To kill with a knife was an MO. To mutilate the corpse in a distinctive fashion was a signature.

Because the Zodiac varied his MO and left no signature, for a long time his homicides, occurring in different jurisdictions, perpetrated by different means, had not even been connected. There was still some debate as to whether certain crimes were his work or someone else’s.

At first Treat, emulating his hero, had left no signatures. Later he devised a variation on this approach. He concocted a specific persona, complete with MO, victim profile, and signature, for a brief stint of killing. Then he relocated, adopted a new MO and a fresh signature. He was the man of a thousand faces, protean in his ability to reinvent himself, prolific in his output.

He did not fool himself that he had mastered every nuance of his work. What was it old Chaucer had said, in a rather different context? “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” Yes, that stated it exactly. He could never be the complete master of such a complex art. Still, he had progressed. And he’d had his fun.

Having read the literature on serial murder, he knew that it was the fashion among investigators to classify a killer as organized or disorganized, social or asocial, according to the condition of the victim’s body and the crime scene. He played games with the small minds that would pigeonhole him so neatly.

He fit the profile of a disorganized asocial killer on some of his outings, then switched to the organized social type, then mixed and matched, all the time moving from state to state, until the authorities in their blessed confusion must have thought they were dealing with three, six, a dozen separate maniacs.

As his confidence grew, he expanded his menu of victims. He put the lie to any accusation of gender bias by selecting the occasional boy, though the females always pleased him best. He overcame his insecurities by graduating to teenagers, then young adults, and finally to anyone who struck his fancy.

He had been the Bay Area Doctor, dispensing lethal injections to red-haired housewives; the Seattle Bedroom Invader, who killed couples—the husband executed with a silenced pistol shot, the wife asphyxiated with a plastic bag; the Twin Cities Arsonist, who burned his victims in their mobile homes; and others.

Now he was—or had been—the Hourglass Killer of Los Angeles. He’d preyed on single women in their twenties and thirties, leaving his signature tattoo, his coy calling card. He kept his victims alive for four hours. Why four? Well—why not? The time period had no significance to him. Neither did the hourglass tattoo, except as a private joke relating to his passion for black widows. Such details were merely part of his latest act, virtuoso flourishes in the new role he had written for himself, a magician’s sleight of hand. While the police were writing their profiles and studying the pattern of his crimes, he would simply vanish, then reappear in a new guise, with new ground rules, in a new locale. And nobody would make the connection. Nobody would link the Hourglass Killer in LA with, say, the Mesa Campus Stalker or the Boise Bride Snatcher or whatever new identity he crafted for himself.

By this means, he stayed always one step ahead of the authorities. Tonight, admittedly, had been a close call, and in retrospect he should have left town immediately upon noting the police presence in Caitlin’s house. Still, his precautions, a product of experience and long habit, had served him well. He was free, sufficiently far from his home territory to make his arrest unlikely, and he could start over somewhere else, under a new name, in a new occupation.

In his dash for escape, he had left behind his van, most of his clothes and all of his furnishings, not to mention his arachnid menagerie. All he had was the old Buick—and his laptop computer, which he’d grabbed as he fled, and which now rested on the passenger seat. He was glad not to have lost it. Of course, the hardware could be replaced easily enough—in addition to the cash in the trunk, he had money banked in untraceable accounts, readily available, and he was quite an accomplished burglar as well. But there was a great deal of private information on the computer, including his bookmarked Web pages, one of which was the video display of Caitlin Osborn’s bedroom.

As far as he could tell, the police remained unaware of the Web site. They had exhibited no knowledge of the secret surveillance and had neither disconnected the camera nor pulled the plug on the site. Conceivably he could continue to use it.

To watch Caitlin, if and when she returned home.

To watch ... and perhaps to strike.

He shook his head. Smarter to forget her. Smarter to move on, reinvent himself once more, start the games anew.

But she had eluded him once before. It galled him to have been cheated of her not once, but twice. To leave their relationship unconsummated.

Well, perhaps all was not yet lost. Anything was possible. And he was patient. He could wait for her. He had already waited so long.

No way out.

C.J. had sprinted past blocks of lightless buildings, across swards of brown grass, until she reached the chain-link fence at the edge of the complex. From a distance it didn’t look like an insuperable barrier. Only when she drew close did she see the coils of razor wire cresting the fence like spiked, unruly hair.

The wire would cut her to pieces if she tried to climb over.

Next she skirted the perimeter in search of a gap in the fence or an open gate. She found no gaps, and the gate, when she came to it, was padlocked.

Pick the lock? She didn’t have any tools. Cut the chain or the hasp? Not without a hacksaw.

Craning her neck, she peered up at a sign over the gate, which read “COMING SOON—MIDVALE OFFICE PARK.”

Below the words was an artist’s rendering of an immaculately landscaped commercial development on narrow, winding streets. The colors were bright and clear, and the picture had the wholesome appeal of a storybook illustration. But it was streaked with dirt and rain, and she guessed that construction on the project had halted some time ago.

She looked through the steel mesh of the gate at the surrounding darkness. There had to be a road or a home nearby, some sign of habitation or activity.

There was nothing. The office park lay in an unpopulated wasteland of sere desert hills, an environment that reminded her a little of the Mojave Desert where she had grown up. In the congested sprawl of the LA basin, Adam had managed to find that ultimate rarity—a secluded place.

She leaned against the gate, fighting for breath, trying to decide what to do.

Well, there was one option. She could bust her way out.

Adam must have parked his car near the garage, although she hadn’t seen it during her escape. If she could find it ...

Maybe she could hot-wire the engine. All she needed was a tool to pry off the ignition cylinder—any bit of scrap metal would do. Then ram the gate and blow it off its hinges.

The difficulty lay in defeating the BMW’s antitheft system. But maybe she would get lucky. Maybe Adam had left the car unlocked. Even if he had, the system might automatically lock the doors and arm itself after a set period of time. Well, she would face that problem when she came to it. For all she knew, Adam had left the doors open and the key in the ignition. She could dream, couldn’t she?

At least it was a chance. A plan.

Carrying it out meant returning to the vicinity of the garage. If Adam had anticipated her strategy, he might still be there, lying in wait.

No, that was crazy. He couldn’t read her mind, for God’s sake.

Anyway, she had to risk it.

She headed back toward the garage, hoping Adam wasn’t smart enough to set an ambush there.

Adam had hated his ex-wife for a long time, but until tonight that hatred had been impersonal, driven by the conviction that she had wronged him, that justice demanded retribution.

Now he knew what real hatred was. He knew it with the agonized throbbing of his genitals, where she had shocked him—Jesus, shocked him like some prisoner in a Third World jail with his nuts hooked up to a car battery. He knew it with the complaint of his left knee, already stiffening up. She’d struck him with the flat of the plank, hard against his lower thigh, close to the knee, and though he didn’t think there was any permanent damage, he could feel the swelling of a nasty bruise.

She had hurt him.

He repeated the thought in his mind, trying out different emphases—
she
had hurt him, she had
hurt
him, she had hurt
him
.

No matter how it came out, it sounded equally incredible.

For her to hurt him had never been part of the plan. He was the one who was supposed to inflict pain and punishment. Hell, he was
entitled
to.

Now here he was, limping through the dark streets of Midvale Office Park, his balls aching, his knee on fire, and she was out there somewhere, uninjured as far as he knew, having equalized the contest.

He was pretty sure she couldn’t escape. That was one reassuring thought. He knew the complex well, and with the gate locked, it was a giant cage.

A cage. That was the first thought to strike him on the night when Roger Eastman had shown him this place.

Eastman was another attorney at Brigham & Garner, but unlike Adam he was no newcomer to the firm. He’d been there fifteen years, developing a healthy roster of clients and an even healthier paunch, which hours on the golf course did nothing to reduce. For some reason he had taken Adam under his wing.

One day three weeks earlier, Eastman asked if Adam had plans for the evening. “Nothing important,” Adam said, aware that the only item on his personal agenda was a visit to the Web site he had discovered, the one showing C.J.’s bedroom.

“Great.” Eastman smiled. “I want to show you something.”

He was very mysterious during the drive out of town. He refused to answer any questions. “You’ll see” was all he would say as he steered his Lexus away from the last remnants of the January sunset.

It was fully dark by the time they reached his secret spot. Adam remembered the moment when the Lexus turned onto the unlighted asphalt road that seemed to lead nowhere—and then Eastman flicked on his high beams to illuminate a construction-site sign.

“Midvale Office Park?” Adam asked. “This is where you wanted to take me?”

“That’s right, kid.” Eastman often called him kid. Adam hated it. “And you know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because it’s mine.”

From his coat pocket Eastman produced a ring of keys—not his regular keys, but the kind of heavy chain a night watchman would carry. He unlocked the gate, pushing it open, then returned to the Lexus and drove into the complex, past shells of three-story buildings, lightless, bare of trees or other foliage. The artist’s rendering on the sign over the gate showed a Tudor architectural motif, but the facades had not been put up, leaving only featureless wood-frame walls with dark, glassless windows.

“Mine,” he said again. “Well, partly mine anyway. I’ve got this client. Tommy Binswanger—I’ve mentioned him.”

“Sure.”

“Tommy’s a broker. Handles commercial real estate. He tipped me off about this place. Prime investment opportunity. The original developers hit a financial snag, had to shut down construction, declare bankruptcy, unload all their assets. Tommy put together a group of investors, and we snatched this place for a song. To ante up my share, I had to burn through my portfolio, take out a second mortgage, pay IRA penalties for early withdrawal. The wife didn’t like it, let me tell you. Well, fuck her. She never approves of anything I do. This deal’s gonna make me rich.”

You already are rich, Adam thought. But he merely said, “Wow.”

“Wow is right. The developers were so desperate for ready cash, they were in no position to bargain. Tommy estimates this facility will be worth a minimum of twenty million when completed. We paid a fraction of that.”

“Has construction resumed?” Adam asked, looking at the dark avenues gliding past, the empty windows, the excavations and dead ends.

“Not till next year. March is the tentative start date. We need to work out a few details first. Legal matters, tax issues, all that crap. Tommy’s handling it.” He waved his hand vaguely.

It was clear to Adam that Eastman had no idea what the details were or how long they might take to work out He had put his faith in the infallible Tommy. Adam hoped his trust was misplaced. It would be amusing to see Roger humbled by financial ruin. He could imagine the fat blowhard crying over his martini—he still drank those—and cursing Tommy Binswanger and the injustice of the world.