The quickest way to the fence was a crab scuttle on all fours; if she tried to get there standing up she was liable to lose her footing, blunder into something, make noise that might carry over the diminishing wind. She dropped and began to crawl, weight on her forearms, hands brushing through the storm debris. Her cold fingers tingled, anticipating the end of the blacktop and the touch of the high, wet grass.
Sudden flare like a camera flash.
Faint popping noise.
One of the flashlight beams jerked skyward, pinwheeling, then dropped straight down and extended outward—an elongated yellow streak along the littered surface of the lane.
Gunshot! One of them shot the other!
Shock held Shelby rooted for two or three seconds. Urgency released her, propelled her forward, scrabbling at the lane now, her head turned toward the two figures. The one still standing swept his light over the motionless form of the other, over the pavement nearby; then the beam foreshortened as he bent or knelt, probably to make sure the one he’d shot was dead.
He took his victim’s torch, too: One bolt of light reappeared, followed by a second. Both swung around in Shelby’s direction, then steadied into wavering parallel lines.
Before either one found her she was off the lane and into the high grass, wiggling through it flat on her belly, her arms making awkward swimming motions in front of her. One sweeping hand encountered an obstruction; she detoured around it, but so close that part of whatever it was plucked at her raincoat, cut painfully into her cheek.
The flash beams separated, one probing the woods, the other swaying back and forth along the lane. Coming closer.
The fence, it couldn’t be much farther—
There! One hand touched it, then her forehead bumped solidly against one of the vertical stakes.
The nearest light flicked away from the blacktop, hunting through the grass not more than a few feet behind her.
She found a chink between two boards, used it to lift onto her feet. Hung there for a moment to steady herself. The direction she wanted to go was where the light was; she had no choice but to pull herself away from it. Three steps, four, and all at once she was out of the grass and onto pavement again. But she hadn’t lost the fence; one of her nails tore on the splintery wood—
No, not on wood … on a rounded projection of metal. Her gloved fingers traced over it, identified it.
Hinge, gate hinge.
The entrance gates. If she could get over them …
The one light was almost directly behind her.
She groped ahead of it to the joining of the two gate halves, searching for a foothold so she could make the climb. But in the next second she discovered she didn’t need a foothold, she didn’t need to climb—the halves were joined together but not locked.
She yanked them apart and plunged through.
T W E N T Y - T H R E E
IT’S TRUE,” CLAIRE LOMAX said. Her eyes were open now, rounded, the pupils dilated and the whites that sickly clabbered-milk color in the fireglow. “I don’t care who knows it now, I don’t care what the police do to me if I live through tonight. It wasn’t the Coastline Killer who shot Gene, it was Brian. And not down the coast, in our own living room. Brian, Brian, Brian!”
A sick metallic taste had formed in Macklin’s mouth. He said, “For God’s sake, why?”
“He blamed it all on me,” she said. Talking to herself now as much as to him. Her gaze had shifted away, was fixed on something only she could see. “But it’s not my fault, it’s his, his. None of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t started treating me like a … a toy he was tired of, a piece of useless baggage. I was faithful to him until then … I swear I was, I never even looked at another man. But you can only stand so much. That’s why I had the affair, to get back at him.”
“Decker? He’s the one you had the affair with?”
“I didn’t have any feelings for Gene,” she said, “I never even liked him very much. But he’d been after me for a long time and finally I just … I let it happen. Twice, that’s all. Only twice.”
“How’d your husband find out?”
“I don’t know how he found out … something Gene said, the way he kept looking at me with that smarmy smile of his … I don’t know. But Brian knew and he kept on hitting me until I admitted it. He wouldn’t listen when I told him I was sorry, just hit me some more, then sat up most of the night drinking and brooding. Paula must’ve heard us, that’s why she left. Brian accused Gene after she was gone. Gene laughed at him and Brian hates to be laughed it, he went and got that fucking gun of his, but Gene the stupid drunken fool kept right on laughing. You won’t use that, he said, quit playing Dirty Harry, he said, and Brian … Brian …”
She shuddered, hugged herself before she went on. “Afterward he put the … the body in Gene’s car and made me take it down to that rest area so it would look like the Coastline Killer did it. All that way with Gene dead beside me and Brian just ahead so I couldn’t get away, so he could bring me back here and beat on me some more.”
It had been Claire driving Decker’s Porsche Monday afternoon, grinding the gears because she was scared or unused to a stick shift. He hadn’t heard the SUV because Lomax, leading, had already passed by.
“Threatened to kill me too if I didn’t do what he told me, if I didn’t lie to the police when they came. But he’s going to do it anyway—I knew he would, I knew it. He’s crazy, he’ll kill anybody who gets in his way …”
Shelby!
What if Lomax went all the way to the highway and she’s still there and he finds her, tries to stop her from bringing help?
Another chilling thought jolted Macklin.
What if Lomax was the Coastline Killer?
T W E N T Y - F O U R
THE ESTATE DRIVEWAY SLOPED downward, flanked closely by timber on the south side. The darkness here wasn’t quite as impenetrable as it had been on the other side; Shelby could make out the faint luminosity of frothing waves and high-flung spindrift below and to her right, and that the north side of the property was mostly treeless, the land folded into a long, deep crease. Half-seen tree trunks flicked past like black ghosts as she staggered ahead. The nyctophobia kept nibbling at her mind, radiating panic that threatened to send her into a disastrous headlong flight. The fight against it, the effort it took to move at a retarded pace and trust to the feel of pavement under her feet, had pushed her near the edge of exhaustion.
Had he seen her come through the gates?
No lights behind her yet. Maybe he hadn’t—
Yes, he had. One beam appeared, then the other, splitting the night with short and then elongated streaks.
Without thinking she lengthened her stride. One foot slid on something yielding; she lost her balance and went down awkwardly, jamming her left knee this time, scraping more skin off her right palm. Pain flared and ran hot up into her crotch as she slid, then rolled half onto her side. She had to dig fingers and elbows into the sloping blacktop to check her forward momentum.
Neither of the shafts had found her yet, but they were drawing closer. Any second now.
The skidding fall had torn a long slit in the front of her raincoat; the oilskin flapped like loose skin, got in her way as she tried to stand. She fought free, finally gained her feet, biting down hard against the throb in her knee, and flung herself off the driveway into the timber.