Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney) (25 page)

He stepped into the cramped bathtub. The water burned his skin, scalding his scrotum as he sat down, immersing his legs fully.

Daniel Cooper sighed with pleasure.

DANIEL JAMES COOPER HAD
committed his first murder at the age of twelve.

The victim was his own mother.

Daniel had stabbed Eleanor Cooper to death in a fit of rage over her affair with a neighbor, Fred Zimmer. Zimmer was convicted of the crime and ultimately executed, largely thanks to young Daniel’s poignant testimony, which reduced more than one juror to tears. Daniel was placed in the care of an aunt, who often heard the boy scream himself to sleep at night. Daniel Cooper had loved his mother.

But Daniel Cooper’s mother was a whore.

Daniel believed in hell. He knew that his only hope of salvation was to atone for his past sins, for his mother’s death and Zimmer’s. Atonement was what he had spent most of his adult life trying to achieve, in one way or another.

Now, here in Seville, at last everything was falling into place.

Tracy would come to him now. With Jeff Stevens as bait, she’d be drawn like a moth to a flame. Inspired by the Holy Shroud, as so many pilgrims had been before him, Daniel Cooper would finally be able to complete his life’s work, the penance that the Lord had prescribed for him. With this one, final sacrifice, he would atone for his mother’s death. Then he would save Tracy Whitney’s soul, and his own, through the sanctity of marriage.

Daniel Cooper’s beloved mother had died in a bathtub.

Reaching under the water, Daniel started to masturbate.

Soon it would be time to go.

EL IGLESIA DE SAN
Buenaventura was a hidden treasure. Tucked away in an obscure alleyway, Calle Carlos Cañal, its simple, understated wooden doors belied the utterly sumptuous splendor within.

It was late at night and both the church and the alley were deserted, but a dim light burned constantly above the altar, a gleaming slab of gold that would not have been out of place in a Roman emperor’s palace. Jeff Stevens gasped. There must be millions of dollars’ worth of art in this tiny church alone, one of scores scattered throughout the city. Ornate carvings in ivory and marble competed with burnished gold statuary and stunning medieval frescoes to capture worshippers’ attention—although their true purpose was, of course, to glorify God.

Jeff thought,
I could be a believer in a place like this.
Inhaling the lingering scents of incense, candle wax and wood polish, he remembered the dour, Presbyterian chapels of his upbringing in Marion, Ohio, all whitewashed walls and simple crosses and foul, orange 1970s carpeting.
No wonder I’m an atheist.

“Hello?”

His voice echoed around the empty church. The air was so cold he could see his breath.

“Cooper?” he called again. “I’m alone.”

No answer. Jeff checked his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. The Daniel Cooper Jeff remembered was a stickler for punctuality.
He wouldn’t have left already, would he?
No. That made no sense. It was Cooper who’d requested the meeting. Cooper who felt he had something to say, who wanted to make some sort of deal.

Jeff knelt down in one of the back pews and gazed up at the ceiling, drinking in the beauty and majesty of the place. He’d been nervous on his way over, apprehensive about seeing Daniel Cooper face-to-face after all these years. But now that he was here, alone, he felt a profound sense of peace.

He was turning to admire a statue of Saint Peter when the blow came. It was so sudden, so utterly unexpected, Jeff didn’t even register it as pain. The cold metal smashed into the back of his skull with an audible crack, like a breaking egg. Jeff slumped forward, momentarily aware of something warm and sticky running down his neck.

And then there was nothing.

WHEN JEAN RIZZO WAS
trying to track down Tracy Whitney, back in L.A. after the Brookstein job, he’d physically gone from hotel to hotel. There was no time for that now. Instead, the moment Jean recognized the man in the museum’s photographs as Daniel Cooper, he began e-mailing and faxing Cooper’s disguised image all over Seville.

There were over a hundred hotels in the city and countless guesthouses and B&Bs. Jean knew from Elizabeth Kennedy that Cooper was both practical and cheap. That meant he’d probably chosen to stay somewhere close to the museum, but nowhere too expensive or flashy. The Alfonso was out, as were the real dives on the outskirts of the city. Using Google and the tourist map of the city center that his own hotel had provided, Jean narrowed his “hit list” to ten establishments.

I’ll try them first. Then I’ll move farther out, street by street, mile by mile.

I’ll find him.

I have to.

Not even Jean expected to hit the jackpot so soon, however. On only his third follow-up call, to a small hotel in the Jewish quarter, the girl at the desk answered obligingly, “Oh, yes! Of course I recognize him. That’s Señor Hernández. He’s been with us for almost a month now.”

A month!

“Is he still checked in?”

“I believe so. Let me check the computer.”

The wait was agonizing. Jean Rizzo could hardly stand the tension.

At last the girl came back on the line. “Yes, he’s still here. Would you like me to check his room, see if he’s in the hotel at the moment?”

“NO!” Jean almost shouted. “I mean no, thank you, there’s no need for that.”

The Casas de la Judería was only a short walk away, back across the park.

“It’s rather a delicate matter. I’ll come over myself. I can be there in five minutes.”

WALKING BRISKLY THROUGH THE
underground passage that led to room 66, Jean Rizzo felt an eerie sense of calm. The comforting solidity of his gun pressing against his rib cage beneath his blue windbreaker was certainly a factor. As was the fact that, win or lose, live or die, this saga was about to be over.

Thirteen women.

Eleven cities.

Nine years.

And it ended here, tonight.

The occupant of room 66—Juan Hernández, aka Detective Luís Colomar, aka Daniel Cooper—had nowhere to run. In a few short moments, he would either be captured or killed. Rizzo had called Comisario Dmitri as he arrived at the Casas de la Judería, announcing his imminent strike on Cooper and then hanging up. If Cooper somehow managed to shoot Jean and escape, Dmitri and his men would be waiting. It would be irritating to have to let the obnoxious Spanish policeman take the credit for apprehending the Bible Killer, Jean thought as he drew nearer to room 66, traversing a courtyard enclosed by high stone walls. On the plus side, though, for that scenario to happen Jean would have to be dead, and ergo oblivious. Every cloud had a silver lining.

At the far side of the courtyard four stone steps led to another passageway that stopped almost as soon as it had begun. Jean found himself at a dead end, the wooden door of room 66 directly in front of him.

Drawing his gun, he knocked twice, hard.

“Señor Hernández?”

No answer.

“Señor Hernández, are you in there? I have an important message for you.”

Nothing.

Taking out the key that the girl at the reception desk had given him, Jean started to push it into the lock. The door creaked open by itself. Jean stormed into the room, gun drawn.

“Daniel Cooper, this is Interpol. You’re under arrest!”

Damn it.

The bed was made. There were no suitcases. Everything was spotless, clean and sparkling to within an inch of its life. By the side of the bed, a Bible lay open to John, chapter 19, verse 1.

The highlighted quote read,
“They took Jesus, therefore, to the place of the skull. And there they crucified him.”

Jean Rizzo felt his stomach lurch. So he’d been right! Daniel Cooper
was
the Bible Killer. There could be no doubt now. Room 66 was like all the other crime scenes, with one crucial exception.

There was no body.

Yet.

Only then did Jean Rizzo notice the envelope, crisp and white like the one Señora Prieto had found at the foot of the Shroud. It was propped up against the pillows, and addressed in a clear, cursive hand:

To Tracy Whitney, c/o Inspector Jean Rizzo.

Ripping it open, Jean started to read . . .

CHAPTER 23

J
EFF WAS IN THE
house in Eaton Square. He was naked in bed, with Tracy lying next to him. Only, when he leaned over to kiss her, it wasn’t Tracy. It was another woman, a stranger.

Tracy was standing in the doorway shouting at him.

“How could you?”

Jeff felt sick. He ran to the door, but when he got there Tracy had gone. Now it was Jeff’s mother, Linda, who was talking. She used the same words Tracy had:
How could you?
But she was in another house, in another time, and she was shouting at Jeff’s father. Linda Stevens had caught her husband out in another affair.

All her inheritance money was gone, squandered on Dave Stevens’s latest get-rich-quick scheme.

“Get off me, you bitch!”

Cowering outside their bedroom, Jeff heard the crack of bone on bone as his father’s fist smashed into his mother’s cheek.

Linda screamed, “Stop it, Dave! Please!”

But the beating went on:
thwack, thwack, thwack.

THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.

Something hard and cold slammed again and again into Jeff’s back.

He was lying on the floor, a metal floor, being thrown around like a potato in a sack.

I’m moving. Where am I?

He heard a sound like roaring engines and felt the shaking intensify.

A plane? A cargo plane?

Then he slammed down hard on the floor. The blackness returned.

THE BED WAS WARM
and soft but Jeff had to get out of it. His stepmother wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Hold me, Jeffie! Your dad won’t be back for hours.”

Her breasts were like pillows, soft and enormous, suffocating him. Rolls of smooth, feminine flesh pressed down on him like dough. He couldn’t move! Panic rose up within him.

Jeff ran to the window and jumped out, naked, into the snow.

He started to shiver. It was so cold. So deathly cold.

Some instinct told him,
Don’t fall asleep. If you sleep you’ll die.

Wake up, Jeff. Wake up!

“WAKE UP!”

The voice was real. The cold too. Jeff wasn’t moving anymore, but he was still on his back. The stone beneath him was like a block of ice.

“I said ‘wake up!’ ” A sharp kick to the ribs made Jeff scream and writhe in agony.

The voice was distinctive, masculine yet oddly high-pitched, and with a distinct note of hysteria. Jeff recognized it at once, and a flood of memories came back to him.

Seville.

The church.

Going to meet Daniel Cooper.

Cooper was quoting from the Bible. He sounded utterly deranged.

“ ‘Are you still sleeping?’ said the Lord. ‘The hour has come. I am to be delivered into the hands of sinners. Wake up!’ ”

Jeff groaned. “I’m awake.”

His ribs hurt from Cooper’s jackboot, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his head, a constant throb, as if his brain had swollen to such catastrophic proportions that it was about to shatter his skull from within. Instinctively he moved to touch the wound, then realized that his hands were bound.

Hands, arms, legs, feet.

He was dressed, but not in his own clothes. What he had on was flimsy and insubstantial, like a hospital gown. A blindfold of something thicker and coarser had been tied around his head. Could it be a bandage?

“I need a doctor,” Jeff croaked. “Where are we?”

Another kick, this time to the collarbone. The pain was excruciating. Jeff couldn’t understand why he hadn’t passed out.

“
I
ask the questions,” Cooper squealed. He sounded like a stuck pig, or an angry child who’d just inhaled the helium out of a party balloon. “The Lord will heal your pain. Only the Lord can help you now.”

Unless “the Lord” had a flair for emergency cranial surgery, and/or an ability to convince deranged psychopaths to release their hapless prisoners and walk into the nearest mental hospital, Jeff couldn’t bring himself to share Cooper’s confidence in His present usefulness.

He remembered another quote from the Bible, something Uncle Willie used to say:
“The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
Jeff’s survival instincts began to kick in.

Step one was to figure out where he was. From the echoing quality of Cooper’s voice, he could tell they were in a very large building of some sort, something high-ceilinged and drafty.
A church?
No. All churches had a certain smell to them that this place lacked.
A barn?
That seemed more likely. When Cooper wasn’t spouting off about the Lord or kicking him like a dog, the silence was total. There was no sound of traffic, no ambient noise, no birdsong even. Just an enveloping blanket of soundless peace.

We’re in a barn, somewhere remote.

The cool temperatures suggested that it was nighttime. Also that they were probably no longer in the south of Spain. The plane ride came back to him . . . if it was a plane ride. And something else.
A car?

He wondered how long he’d been unconscious. Hours? Days?

They could be anywhere by now.

Jeff tried to work back logically. What was the last thing he could remember? The pain in his head and body made it hard to focus for more than a few seconds. Thoughts and images came back to him piecemeal. He remembered the church in Seville. The smell of incense, the beautiful altar.

Then what?

The plane. The cold metal. Tracy. His mother.

It was so hard to untangle what was real from what was imagined.

Jeff’s mother had been dead for twenty-five years, but her voice, her screams, had felt so
real.
He felt himself on the brink of tears.

“Do you know why you’re here, Stevens?”

Cooper’s voice stung like a cattle prod.

“No.” Talking seemed to require an inordinate amount of strength. Each word was exhausting. “Why?”

“Because you are the lamb. The third and final covenant.”

Great. Well, thanks for clearing that up.

A weak smile played at the corners of Jeff’s bruised lips.

“Do you think this is funny?” Cooper seethed.

Jeff braced himself for another blow, but none came.
What’s he waiting for?

He tried to put himself in Cooper’s shoes, to get inside his mind-set—not easy given that the man was clearly a card-carrying fruit loop.

He’s talking to you. That means he wants to engage in a dialogue.

He could easily have killed you by now, but he hasn’t.

Why not?

What does he want?

What does he need that you have?

Jeff’s mind was a blank. But he knew he had to do something, say something. He had to keep Cooper engaged. On instinct he said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think this has nothing to do with the Lord, and everything to do with Tracy.”

Cooper erupted. “DON’T SAY HER NAME!”

Jeff thought,
Jackpot.

“Why shouldn’t I say her name? She is my wife, after all.”

Cooper made an awful, howling noise like a dying animal.

“No. No no no. She is
not
your wife!”

“Sure she is. We never actually divorced.”

“It doesn’t matter. You defiled her. You took what was mine. You took something beautiful, something perfect, and you made it filthy. Like YOU.”

Jeff heard the little man scrabbling around on the floor. Then he felt himself being rolled over onto his stomach and the thin garment he was wearing being ripped off his back.

“You will atone.” Cooper let out a wild shriek, then struck Jeff hard on the back with some sort of crude whip. It felt as if it were made from electrical wire, with sharp metal tips that ripped into Jeff’s flesh like razors.

Jeff screamed

“You WILL atone.”

The whip came down again.

And again.

And again.

The pain was beyond words, beyond anything Jeff had ever experienced.

He was still screaming, but the sound seemed to be coming from outside him now. Inside, he had shut down, waiting for oblivion, knowing that it must surely come soon.

The last thing Jeff remembered was the sound of Daniel Cooper’s labored breathing, the little man gasping with exertion as the blows kept raining down. Then, like a lover, the silence rushed up to greet him.

“DO YOU PLAY CHESS?”

Jeff opened his eyes. He could see nothing but blackness. For a second he panicked.
I’m blind! The bastard’s blinded me!

But then he remembered the cloth bandage over his eyes and took a breath. He waited for the pain to shoot through his rib cage as air entered his lungs. Or for his headache to return or his raw, flayed back to start screaming. But all the agony he’d felt before was gone. It was miraculous. Wonderful.

It wasn’t long before the obvious thought struck him:

Cooper must have drugged me.

But he didn’t care. Jeff’s whole body felt warm, as if a glow of contentment and well-being were heating him from within. He had no idea how much time had passed since he was last awake—since the beating—but whatever Cooper had given him felt great. The strange thing was that Jeff felt none of the mental fog usually associated with morphine or other opiate-based painkillers. His body might have been lulled into a false sense of security, but his mind was clear. Perhaps, he wondered, adrenaline was keeping him focused? Very obviously he was still in danger. Other than his hunch about Tracy, Jeff still had no idea why he was here or what Daniel Cooper wanted with him.

“Chess?” Cooper repeated. “Do you play? Oh, never mind, it’s a rhetorical question. I know you do.” His earlier anger seemed to have dissipated to the point where he sounded positively cheerful. “Let’s play. I’m white, so I’ll go first.”

Jeff heard the sounds of a board being set up, of wooden pieces being set down gently in their respective battle lines. He barely knew how to play chess, hadn’t played since his teens, in fact. But he sensed this would be a bad time to admit as much. Something told him Cooper wasn’t likely to go for a hand of poker instead, or to whip out the Monopoly board.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” Jeff asked.

“Of course not,” said Cooper. “I never forget things.”

Jeff said, “I can’t see. Or move my hands. How am I supposed to play chess if I can’t see the board or touch the pieces?”

Cooper seemed amused by the question. “With your mind, Mr. Stevens. I’ll tell you my moves and you tell me yours. Then I’ll move your pieces for you. It’ll be just like on the
QE2
. The game you rigged between Melnikov and Negulesco. Remember?”

Jeff would never forget it. It was the first scam he and Tracy had pulled off together and it had worked like a charm. The two grand masters had sat in separate rooms and unwittingly copied each other’s moves. Jeff had run a book on the match for fellow passengers and cleaned up. The question was, how did Daniel Cooper know about it?

“How much did you make on that fraud, out of interest?”

Jeff’s voice was hoarse. “Around a hundred thousand dollars, I believe.”

“Between you?”

“Each.”

“Your idea or Tracy’s?”

“Mine. But I couldn’t have done it without her. She was magnificent. Tracy was always magnificent.”

Cooper said nothing, but Jeff could feel his jealousy in the air between them like a living, malevolent thing, a hovering falcon poised to strike. On the one hand, it seemed crazy to keep provoking a man who was obviously totally crazy and who already wished him dead. On the other, Tracy was Cooper’s one weakness. If Jeff could get him to reveal more about himself and his obsession with Tracy, maybe he could use that information to figure out a way out of here . . .

It was worth a shot.

“C4 to C5.” Cooper scraped his piece across the board. “Your move.”

Jeff hesitated. How did it work again? The horizontal rows had numbers and the vertical ones had letters? Or was it the other way around.

“I said YOUR MOVE!” Cooper shouted.

“Okay, okay. I wanna move my knight. That’s
N,
isn’t it? . . . er . . . Nd5.”

“Hmm.” Cooper seemed unimpressed. “Predictable.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” said Jeff.

“Don’t be sorry. Be better. This might be your last game. You want to leave a good impression, don’t you?”

Jeff ignored the threat. Instead he focused on keeping his captor engaged.

“I guess no one could accuse
you
of being predictable, could they, Daniel?”

“Don’t call me by my first name.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so, that’s why not.”

“You don’t like your name?”

Cooper muttered under his breath. “
He
used to call me that.
Zimmer.
”

Jeff registered the loathing in his voice.

“Zimmer?”

“Fred Zimmer. He was disgusting. A lech, like you. Bxd5. Say good-bye to your knight.”

More clattering on the chessboard. Jeff tried to picture the pieces but it was so hard to focus.

“G5 to E5.” He tried to draw Cooper back into the conversation. “How did you know him?”

“He was our neighbor,” said Cooper. “He used to come over to our house and defile my mother.”

Defile. He likes that word.

“Fred Zimmer and your mother were lovers?”

“It was disgusting. Afterward he would pass me in the hall as if nothing had happened. ‘Hey,
Daniel,
how are you?’ ‘You wanna go to a game,
Daniel
?’ Zimmer turned my mother into a whore. But I brought down the Lord’s vengeance on him. On both of them.”

“What did you do?”

“I did the Lord’s will. I spilled the blood of the lamb. That was the first covenant. Ra5.”

“You killed Fred Zimmer? How?”

“Are you deaf? I said ‘the lamb.’
The lamb!
Zimmer wasn’t the lamb. He was a wolf. Your move.”

Jeff tried to wade through Cooper’s deranged logic. It was like trying to swim through molasses with your arms tied behind your back. If the neighbor was the wolf . . .