The man glanced quickly at the windows. The curtains were drawn; not even a crack of light showed through from the streetlamp outside.
Perfect.
He rose to his feet and moved around into the kitchen. “That’ll be fine, I guess,” he said. He was standing right behind her now, looking over her shoulder as she pulled open a drawer to get a bottle opener.
The tool she was looking for sat in the midst of a jumble of other utensils, but the one that caught the man’s eye was a knife.
A large butcher knife whose blade glinted hypnotically.
The man’s fingers began to tingle once again, and the fire moved from his belly to his groin as he made the final decision. “But I don’t think I’ll really need two whole hours,” he said softly.
Then, in a movement executed so swiftly that she had no time even to scream, let alone struggle away from his grip, the man’s right arm slid around the woman’s neck, catching her head in the crook of his elbow. As he jerked hard and twisted to one side, he felt the crunching of bones in the woman’s neck as her spine was twisted beyond its limits. Then she went limp and the man lowered her to the floor.
He stared down at her.
Had he killed her?
He could hardly believe it — it had happened so fast he could barely remember what it felt like. Then, as he watched, the woman’s lips suddenly began to work and a tiny sound bubbled up from her throat. Her eyes, wide open, stared up at him, and now he could see that she wasn’t dead at all. He had broken her neck.
He had paralyzed her.
But he hadn’t killed her.
He stared at her for a moment, anticipating what would come next, the fire now raging within him. He reached for the knife.
At last, savoring the moment he’d been anticipating for what seemed an eternity, the man set to work.
The woman, utterly paralyzed from the moment the bones in her neck snapped, felt nothing.
And, blessedly, she died quickly, unaware of the carnage the man was inflicting on her body.
CHAPTER 18
The Saturday morning that arrived two days later was one of the dull gray Seattle dawns that carried a chill far greater than the temperature warranted. It was on mornings like this that Anne Jeffers’s dedication to retaining the body she’d graduated from college with was sorely tested, for getting up to join the parade of joggers in Volunteer Park was hard enough even when the weather was perfect. Actually, it wasn’t even this hard in the depths of winter, when you knew each consecutive morning was going to be as clammy as the last. But Friday had produced one of those deceptively warm afternoons that promised — generally falsely — a long and sunny summer. Even the evening had stayed clear and warm, and when they’d walked home from visiting Glen in the hospital, she and the kids had cut over to Broadway to get ice cream cones and watch the passing parade. Now, as she lay in bed gazing glumly out the window, she realized she’d been suckered again. It wasn’t summer yet; in fact even spring appeared to have decided the whole thing had been a mistake and invited the gloomy winter skies to take over again. Offered the opportunity, the clouds had quickly gathered, and were now occupied with drizzling their contents onto the city with, Anne suspected, the deliberate intention of drowning the good mood that had spread along Broadway last night.
Well, the hell with it, Anne decided. If it wasn’t enough that Glen wouldn’t be out of the hospital for another week, that she had so far turned up nothing at all in the files she’d been exploring in the basement of the Public Safety Building, and that Vivian Andrews had pointedly asked her yesterday how she was coming with a story, there was also the fact that she was finding sleeping alone in the big bed in the creaking old house a lot harder than she’d thought it would be. For this morning, her body could damn well take care of itself. She rolled over, snuggled deeper under the down comforter and closed her eyes. But instead of sleep, all that came to her was guilt.
She got up, pulled on her clothes, and went downstairs. Both the kids were already up, Heather on the telephone, Kevin staring at the television set. She went into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee from the pot that had already been brewed — one of the less doubtful advantages of having a daughter old enough to start sopping up caffeine like a true Seattleite — and was just wandering back into the living room as the morning news came on. The face of Janalou Moorehead filled the screen, and since Anne had never been a fan of what she and the rest of the Herald staffers thought of as empty heads with nice voices, she picked up the morning paper. But today Janalou’s seductive voice caught her attention: “Murder on Capitol Hill tops our report this morning,” the woman said, putting a suitably serious expression over her normally smiling visage. “The body of a thirty-two-year-old woman has been found in an apartment on—”
Not waiting for Janalou Moorehead to finish her sentence, Anne sprang from the sofa, relieved Heather of the telephone, offered an unceremonious good-bye to the friend her daughter had been talking to, and pressed the button to end the call.
“Mother!” an outraged Heather exclaimed. “That was—”
“I don’t care who it was,” Anne told her. “That’s why we gave you a phone of your own in your room. I have to—” But before she could finish what she was saying, the phone came alive and she instantly released the button. “Yes?”
“Who the hell have you been talking to?” Carl Waters, the weekend editor at the Herald, sounded even more annoyed than usual. “If you’re going to sit on your phone all morning, at least turn on the cellular, okay?”
“I’m sorry, Carl,” Anne said, knowing an explanation was neither expected nor wanted. “I just heard Janie-Lou Emptyhead. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know much more than she does,” Carl replied. “We caught the dispatch on the scanner half an hour ago, and I’ve been trying to get hold of you ever since.”
“What’s the address?” Anne asked. “And who’s already there?”
Carl Waters gave her an address on Boylston, no more than ten blocks from where she was. “A photographer’s on his way. If you head out now, you should be able to get there about the same time.” Anne was about to hang up when Waters spoke again. “Anne, there’s something funny about this one, which is why I kept trying to call you. The police dispatcher gave the address, then told the unit that maybe they sent Blakemoor and Ackerly home too soon.”
Anne’s fingers tightened on the phone. “Blakemoor?” she repeated. “They couldn’t have been talking about the Kraven task force, could they?”
“They didn’t take me into their confidence,” Waters replied archly.
Anne was careful to betray nothing of the excitement she was suddenly feeling. “All right. I’m on my way.” Hanging up the phone, she glanced around the room, but the big leather bag that was halfway between a grip and a satchel wasn’t on the sofa where she was sure she’d left it. “Where’s my gritchel?” she asked.
Kevin glanced up from the TV. “Under the coffee table,” he told her. “You covering the murder?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I go with you?” It was a request he always made, and his mother always denied. Still, he figured it was always worth a shot. Just once, he’d love to get in on the excitement, maybe even get a look at a real dead body …
“No, you can’t,” Anne told her son as she quickly rummaged through the jumble in her gritchel, checking for her tape recorder, notebook, and the camera she always carried, just in case. “And you can’t go wandering over there on your own, either. Okay?” Kevin looked annoyed, but sighed his agreement. “You going to visit Dad this morning?”