M for Murder, page 31
Jeez! What do you expect to find? A dead body?
She had just taken a tentative step forward, when the grandfather clock chimed loudly. Jumping, she stifled a scream as the knife slipped from her shaking hand.
Christ, Rebecca! Get it together.
She remained standing for a moment in the shadows of the living room doorway, trying to keep her breathing quiet and wishing that her heartbeat would slow down. There was no one downstairs and, so far, she had found nothing to suggest that there was anyone else in the house. She thought about the missing knife and about the scream she had heard. They probably both had perfectly good explanations. Maybe she should just go out to her Jeep and call Hickok.
What about upstairs though? You haven’t checked upstairs yet.
She stooped down to retrieve her own knife then cautiously she stepped out into the hall. As she tiptoed towards the front door, half expecting someone to jump out from behind the grandfather clock and grab her, she thought again about the scream she had heard.
Shit, Rebecca. Who are you trying to kid? The scream came from inside this house and you know it.
Tentatively, she glanced over her shoulder at the staircase. The landing at the top was a mass of black shadows and seemed almost too quiet. Only a fool would venture up there alone. She knew that the wise thing to do would be to go out to her Jeep and call for backup.
What if there isn’t time to wait for backup?
Summoning up all of her courage, and cursing at herself under her breath, Rebecca began to climb the staircase, using her free hand to steady herself on the banister. If anything happened to her now, it would be her own fault.
She imagined her obituary. The stories in the press. Rookie cop killed exploring house. Foolish decision loses cop her life.
She wondered what she would find upstairs.
Would Kylan be lying dead in one of the bedrooms?
The landing at the top of the stairs was long and wide with a high-beamed ceiling. The cream-carpeted floor led off in both directions and the first door on the opposite wall was ajar.
The curtains were drawn shut, but the light was on and Rebecca could see the motionless figure sitting at the foot of the bed.
She caught her breath sharply.
Oh my God!
Cautiously, she pushed the door open and stepped into the room, her eyes taking in the scene before her.
Lawrence Parker sat with his knees bent, head falling back against the floral duvet. His black eyes were wide and staring up at the ceiling and both his hands clutched at the knife buried deep in his chest.
On the floor in the corner of the room sat Kylan. Her pale face was covered with blood and she was hugging her knees to her chest as she shook uncontrollably.
Rebecca stared at her for a moment, too shocked to speak. Finally, Kylan looked up at her through a sheen of tears.
‘I killed him,’ she murmured, her voice trembling. ‘Oh my God! I killed Lawrie.’
Rebecca stared at Parker, and then back at Kylan. ‘Did he hurt you?’ she asked, finally finding her voice.
Kylan nodded numbly. ‘I killed him,’ she repeated, this time her voice even quieter, almost a whisper.
Rebecca set down her knife and eased herself down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around the girl. ‘It’s okay, Kylan,’ she soothed. ‘He tried to hurt you. You had to protect yourself.’ She glanced at Parker’s body. ‘It’s okay now. It’s all over.’
She thought about Hickok. He had been right all along, suspecting Lawrence Parker from that very first meeting. She should call him. Tell him that Parker was dead.
Sick bastard. Trying to kill his own wife.
She wondered if he had intentionally married Kylan because of who she was. Had he planned to kill her all along?
The thought made her sick.
‘Come on,’ she said, squeezing Kylan’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
Being careful not to rush her, Rebecca led Kylan down the stairs and into the kitchen. Now that she knew there weren’t any demons waiting to get her, she felt a lot more at ease. She flicked on the light switch, casting a warm glow onto the room, and sat Kylan down in one of the kitchen chairs. Finding a glass in one of the overhead cupboards, she poured her some water, telling her to sip it slowly. Then she picked up the phone that hung on the wall.
The line was dead.
Certain that she had seen a phone up in the bedroom, she left Kylan sipping the water and went back upstairs.
As she stepped back into the room with Parker, Rebecca screwed up her nose. Although she knew that he was dead, she was still hesitant to go near him, half expecting him to suddenly jump up and grab her, like in the movies.
She studied his face. Lawrence Parker had been a handsome man alive, but in death, his dark features only seemed to make him look ghoulish. Her eyes drifted down to the knife embedded deep in his flesh, and the blood spilling out onto his grey T-shirt.
Yuck! That had to have hurt.
Tearing her gaze away, she spotted the cordless phone on the far side of the bed.
Typical. To get to it she was going to have to pass him.
Coward!
Ignoring her inner voice and telling herself she had every right to be a little spooked after what she’d just seen, she sidled alongside the bed, choosing to get to the phone by clambering across the mattress.
As she picked up the phone, Parker suddenly gave a loud groan and lurched forward, his head dropping between his knees. Rebecca let out a yell, her heart pounding loudly in her chest. Dropping the phone, she scooted back across the mattress. She stared at Parker, expecting him to move again. He didn’t and she suddenly found her attention focused on the cut in the back of his neck.
Rough and jagged, covered by a film of blood. Carved in the shape of the letter P.
What the fuck?
From somewhere in the house came the sound of whistling. At first soft and distant, but gradually getting closer and louder.
Rebecca recognised the tune.
Tchaikovsky’s ‘Scene from Swan Lake’…
For a moment she found she couldn’t move. Sitting on the bed listening to the familiar whistle and the approaching footsteps on the stairs, she tried to rationalise with herself.
It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.
Her legs unsteady, she climbed to her feet and took tentative steps towards the door. In her mind she replayed the scene she had discovered in the bedroom. Kylan huddled on the floor and Lawrie dead, stabbed with the knife. Self-defence. That was what Kylan had told her. Lawrie had attacked her, and she had protected herself. It had been self-defence.
Thinking about it, Rebecca realised that Kylan had never actually claimed it to be self-defence, not until Rebecca had put the words in her mouth for her.
‘It’s okay, Kylan. He tried to hurt you. You had to protect yourself.’
If Lawrie had attacked Kylan, how come she had been the one holding the knife?
Shit! This is insane. It can’t be Kylan. It doesn’t make sense.
Even as the thoughts passed through her mind, she realised that it did make sense. Everything that pointed to Lawrence Parker being the killer made sense. The tie. Kylan was the one person aside from Parker who would have easy access to it. The affair with Emma Keeley – a jealous wife. The alibis. Kylan had provided them for Parker, but would he have been able to provide them for her?
But what about Richard Lamb? He’d been watching her, following her. He must have known.
Not necessarily. The private investigator claimed to have followed her only during the day. At night he had been out hunting for the killer.
A killer who nobody would have suspected in a million years.
Realising that if she was right then her life was in danger, Rebecca glanced desperately around the room, looking for some kind of weapon to use. The knife she’d earlier brought upstairs was now down in the kitchen, in plain sight of Kylan. No use to her now. As she cursed herself for being so stupid, her eyes dropped to the knife embedded in Lawrence Parker’s chest.
Could she really bring herself to pull it free?
Do you have a choice?
If she touched the knife, she would be tampering with evidence.
Screw evidence! This is a matter of life or death.
Bending down over Parker’s body, she placed both hands firmly on the wooden handle and pulled hard, trying to wrench it from his chest. The blade made a wet sucking sound as it started to tear free from his flesh and Rebecca grimaced, feeling the urge to throw up.
She looked down at the knife. What was visible of the blade was red and shiny, dripping with his blood. Could she do this?
Do you have a choice?
As she started to give the blade a second tug, she heard a noise coming from behind her. She turned to face the door and caught her breath sharply as she saw Kylan standing above her with the knife from the kitchen in her hand. There was no malice in the girl’s eyes. They were wide and glazed, staring at Rebecca as though she didn’t know who she was.
As the knife came towards her, Rebecca tried to duck to the side, but she was unable to miss the penetrating blade as it dove into the back of her shoulder. Screaming loudly, she toppled forward, landing against Lawrence Parker’s corpse.
The pain was blinding and, as she slid off his body, landing in a heap on the floor, she struggled to keep hold of consciousness, knowing that she had to get out of the house.
Nobody knows. They’ll never believe it’s Kylan. I have to tell Hickok. I have to get out of here before she kills me.
Finally, unable to hold on any longer, her eyes dropped shut.
Joel arrived in Seattle a little after midnight.
He had called the local police department just before landing and when he arrived at the airfield two patrol cars were waiting to greet him. As they made their way to Tania Isaac’s house, he thought back to Parker’s house. To the clothes he’d found in the bedroom.
Kylan?
As they approached the house where Rebecca Angell was planning to meet her, he hoped to hell he was wrong. Hoped, but knew it was unlikely.
Kylan stared at Rebecca Angell, lying sprawled across the bedroom carpet, and wondered if she was dead. She hadn’t meant to kill her. Hadn’t wanted to hurt her. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had a choice. Rebecca Angell knew the truth, and if she survived then everyone would find out the truth. They would come and take her away. Lock her up and force her to see all the doctors and therapists again. The ones who made her take pills and thought they could cure her.
What they didn’t understand, what nobody seemed to understand, was that they were wasting their time. Instead of trying to analyse her every thought they should be out there hunting for Boone. He was the one who was dangerous. They had told her that he was probably dead, but she knew different. Rodney Boone was still alive, and she knew that one day he would come for her.
Lawrie had said he would protect her. He had promised that if they moved back to Juniper, he would be there for her. And, at first, he had been. Then he had started working late. Always too tired to talk when he got home. Never reassuring her. No longer telling her that things would work out okay. Kylan had suspected he was seeing Emma Keeley. She had seen the way the two of them acted together when they thought she wasn’t watching. The lingering looks they shared. The secret touches. Lawrie was slipping away from her, and with him he was taking all of her strength. When Boone came back for her, when he came to take revenge for what she had done to him, how would she be strong enough to fight him off?
Then it had occurred to her that maybe she could save herself. If she helped Boone finish his alphabet, perhaps he would leave her alone. After all, that was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?
Twenty-six students. Twenty-six letters. All she needed to do was take up from where he had left off.
She knew the drill. The joker playing card. The initial carved into the back of the neck. She could finish the murders for him and then it would finally be over.
The first time had been easy. Lawrie had been working late and her selected victim, Scott Jagger, was a flirtatious football player who’d just broken up with his girlfriend. Kylan knew that he liked her, and it wasn’t difficult to persuade him to go for a drive out to the coast, or to have a few drinks from the vodka bottle she’d earlier laced with sleeping pills. When he finally passed out, she wrapped her belt around his neck and pulled tightly until he stopped breathing.
She dumped his body in the beach entrance of the sewer, just half a mile from where she had killed him, sensibly waiting until she had dragged his body out of the car before she cut the back of his neck with the kitchen blade she’d brought from home. By the time Lawrie returned, later that night, she was in bed, the car was in the garage, and the knife she had used was washed up and returned to the kitchen drawer.
The second victim hadn’t been a difficult choice. If Emma Keeley was having an affair with her husband, she would be able to deal with two problems at once. Playing on her hunch, she had sent two typed notes, one to Lawrie pretending it was from Emma, asking him to meet her at The Coven; another to Emma inviting her to the house. When the girl arrived, she used Lawrie’s baseball bat to hit her over the head then, after strangling her, she dragged her out through the side door to the car in the garage. Not sure how much time she would have before Lawrie returned to the house, she decided not to use the sewer, and instead dumped Emma’s body in the river, which was less than a five-minute ride away.
It hadn’t taken her long to work out that the male victims were easier than the females. Kylan knew she was attractive, and she had no problem enticing Rufus Lind or Kevin North to their deaths. She made sure that they were blind drunk or had passed out before she killed them. Aside from being physically stronger than her, she didn’t want to see them in pain. The only reason she was doing this was to stop Boone.
Catherine Maloney had been risky. She hadn’t known for sure that the girl would show up at the bridge. Catherine had talked non-stop about Aidan and about how much she liked him. Did she like him enough to meet him in the middle of the night, though? Feigning a headache, Kylan had persuaded Lawrie to return home early from their date with Vic and Jill, and she had dropped a couple of her pills into his coffee to make sure he slept like a baby. When she was certain he was zonked out, she had taken the car and gone down to the bridge to find Catherine.
Justine Orton was the only victim who had proved to be a problem. Not knowing enough about her, Kylan was unable to come up with a plot to lure her away from the campus, so using Lawrie’s keys she had let herself into the caretaking block, stolen the master keys to the dorms, and gone into Justine’s room to wait for her. While she’d been in there, she had found Lawrie’s tie. Her mind had worked overtime as she’d tried to figure out if her husband was having an affair with Justine Orton and, when the girl finally returned, it seemed only fitting that she use the tie to strangle her. Killing Justine Orton in her room made it impossible to get the body off campus. Kylan didn’t think Rodney Boone would worry about technicalities though. As long as she completed the alphabet, she figured she would be home and dry. At least that was what she had thought before running into the guy from the grocery store outside her English classroom. Initially she had assumed that he was there to keep an eye on her. Probably working for Boone to make sure she finished the alphabet. Then it had occurred to her that maybe her plan wasn’t working. That maybe Boone was going to kill her anyway. She had panicked and come to Seattle, to get away from everything that was happening and figure out the best course of action.
What she hadn’t counted on was Lawrie showing up on Tania’s doorstep earlier that night, saying that he’d found the case full of clothes. The clothes she had taken from the victims and, not knowing what to do with them, had hidden under the bed in the spare room. Lawrie told her she had to go to the police, that they would help her get psychiatric treatment. Kylan didn’t want treatment, though, she just wanted to be rid of Rodney Boone and in a moment of rage she had stabbed her husband in the chest.
When he didn’t get up again, she realised that there was only one thing to do. Lawrie would have to become the next victim.
Looking down at Rebecca Angell, Kylan wondered what she should do with her body. She was the wrong letter to be part of the alphabet. What was she supposed to do now? Take her body and dump it somewhere? Leave it in the house? As she turned the various possibilities over in her mind, Kylan heard the sound of a car engine. Her whole body still trembling, and her heart caught in her throat, she crossed the room to the window and pulled back the curtain.
In the light of the street lamp, she saw two police squad cars. Men – she could make out five of them, four in uniform, one in plain clothes – were heading down the driveway.
They knew. Lawrie or Rebecca must have tipped them off.
Wrenching the knife out of Rebecca’s shoulder, she gripped the handle tightly in her shaking hand, stumbled across the two bodies and out of the room. What was she going to do? How could she complete the alphabet? If they caught her and put her in jail or hospital, did they really think that Rodney wouldn’t be able to get her?
The doorbell chimed, and she stepped back against the wall, her mind racing, as she searched for an answer. She couldn’t think straight. Everything was a blur. They were coming to get her. They would find Lawrie and they would find Rebecca, and they would know. There was nowhere for her to escape to.
The bell chimed again, the vibrations shuddering through her.
Kylan looked at the knife in her hand, still wet and shiny with Rebecca’s blood, and in that instant, it came to her. There was a way of escape. One thing left that she could do. Hearing the sound of a gunshot hitting the lock on the front door, she raised the knife high in the air and poised the blade, ready to end her nightmare.
Aware of the floorboards vibrating beneath her, Rebecca forced her eyes open and tried to look up.
