That Cadillac out front, I thought. Woodall’s?
The last of the five foyer archways led to a closed and locked door that might have been rescued from a medieval English castle: thick black oak, ironbound, with an old-fashioned latch and keyhole. On the floor nearby was a big brass key that looked as if it would fit the lock; I picked it up and tried it, and it worked, all right. I opened the door and went inside.
It was like walking onto a stage set for a film about the Spanish Inquisition. Imitation-stone walls hung with chains, racks of whips and paddles and cats-o’-nine-tails, other stuff I didn’t recognize — all of it lit in a reddish glow from bulbs recessed in the ceiling. I could feel my flesh start to crawl. These people were into more than just orgies; they were into bondage and sado-masochism as well.
The room was L-shaped, and I moved ahead to where I could see what was around of the ell. More of the same... and a cross on the wall with a female figure hanging from it, a figure I thought at first was a dummy and then realized was human — had been human. In that bloody light I couldn’t tell the color of her hair or see her face, because the hair covered it, and I thought with a surge of horror that it was McCone. I ran back there but it wasn’t McCone; it was a woman I’d never seen before. Strangled. Dead a long time. Crucified with heavy rope in lieu of nails.
But McCone had been here. There was a purse lying on the floor, and when I grabbed it up and rummaged through it I found her identification. Torn strips of wallpaper lay on the floor too. And high up on the wall, near the ceiling, sunlight streamed in through a hole that led to the outside.
The whole scene was like a warped and distorted religious painting from the Middle Ages — the crucified body, the bondage-and-torture implements, the shaft of sunshine like a divine light cutting through the bloody pagan darkness. Chills skittered along my back. I tasted bile and gagged it down, backing away.
McCone — where was she now?
I turned and ran out of the room, out of the house and into the broiling desert heat. The windows and hood of the Cadillac blazed with reflected sun rays. McCone must have been the one who’d tried to hot-wire it, I thought. But she’d failed for some reason. And then what?
I started toward the Caddy, to give it a more thorough search. I was thinking of McCone locked for God knew how long in that simulated dungeon with the woman’s body. It was the stuff of madness. What if she—
Somewhere on the desert below, there was the dull echoing crack of a gunshot.
It brought me up short, with my head jerking this way and that; sound carries in open spaces, gets distorted by distance so you can’t always tell which direction it comes from. I ran ahead, beyond the Cadillac and my rental car, past a clump of greasewood to where I had a better view of the buff-colored landscape spread out below. Nothing moved that I could see, but the sun glare was intense; it burned painfully against the retinas of my eyes, blurred the edges of everything more than a couple of hundred yards away.
The gun cracked a second time. Hand weapon, I thought; it didn’t have the resonance of a rifle or a shotgun. But I still couldn’t place its source. I thought it might have come from over by the ruins of the water tower and loading dock, and I was looking that way when the third shot came. This time I saw movement, somebody running out in that direction. Five seconds later the figure was gone again, hidden from my view behind the dock and its adjacent shed.
Without thinking what I was doing, I started to run. The ground was hard-packed for the most part, rocky, but there were sandy patches and clusters of spiny cholla cactus and greasewood and sagebrush, so that I had to take a weaving course instead of going in a straight line. There weren’t any more shots. No further movement either; but the dock and the shed were directly ahead of me — the person I’d seen was still somewhere behind them.
I had covered half the distance, with the hot dry air like fire in my lungs, before it registered that I was unarmed and had no idea of what might be waiting for me. But it might be McCone I’d seen — that was the thing that kept me running. She’d escaped the house, she hadn’t been able to start the Cadillac... where else was there for her to go except into the desert?
The half-collapsed framework of the water tower loomed on my left, its tank stays canted at odd angles like a pattern of crooked bars against the bright hot sky. I was within a hundred yards of it now; through the shimmering heat waves I could see that the ground ahead was strewn with pieces of splintered boarding, lengths of iron and steel, the crumbling segments of a wooden duct. Still no movement out there. And no sounds either, except for the thin scrape of my steps and the labored rasp of my breathing.
The heat had begun to sap my strength; as I went past the tower I could feel myself starting to falter, slowing down at the same time I was trying to run faster. I kept waiting for the sound of another shot — and not hearing it, kept thinking that the target of those first three had been hit, killed, so that another bullet wasn’t necessary.
I skirted what was left of a platform that had once housed the tower’s water pump. Ahead, the loading dock was nothing more than a decaying skeleton, but the shed alongside it was still more or less whole. I veered toward the shed, and when I finally reached it there was a stitch in my side and I was out of breath. I leaned against the sagging wall, struggling to take in air. There were gaps in the siding big enough for a man to squeeze through; I rubbed my eyes clear and peered through to the desert beyond.
A man stood twenty to twenty-five yards distant, half turned away from me and bent a little at the waist, a pair of binoculars hanging from around his neck. He was peering at a huddled mass on the ground. A woman — I could see the long dark hair fanned out around her head. McCone.
I could also see the squarish snout of the automatic in the man’s hand. He was pointing it straight down at her.
A kind of desperate rage settled into me. I got my breathing under control; shoved away from the wall and around the side of the shed, picking my way through another litter of splintered wood and pieces of eroded metal. When I got to the front corner I had a better look at the man. Rumpled iron-gray hair, stiff military bearing. Not who I’d expected to see, not Rich Woodall—
Henry Nyland.
McCone wasn’t moving. There was blood on her; I could see it glistening bright crimson in the hard white sunlight. Sounds came to me, like whispers at first, disjointed and indistinct. Then they got louder, and I realized Nyland was talking to her: “I didn’t want to do this. Don’t you understand? I didn’t want to do anything to you. It was the other one, that Sugarman bitch — she killed Elaine, she was evil. I had to kill her, didn’t I? For Elaine?” And all the while he kept aiming the automatic at Sharon’s unmoving head.
Better than twenty yards separated us — too far, too damned far. If I made a rush at him, he’d hear me coming and have all the time he’d need to turn and set himself, and blow me away too. I could try to catfoot it out there while he was still focused on McCone, but the risk would be the same...
Do something, for Christ’s sake!
Hurriedly I scanned the ground where I stood, then picked up a chunk of sandstone about the size of a baseball and stepped away from the shed with it. Nyland was still babbling to McCone, saying now, “I’ll bury you out here. Both of you. They’ll never find your bodies. What choice do I have? You see that I don’t have any choice, don’t you?”