"Thank you, young man," the woman said.
Byrne took a step back, trying to compose himself.
The woman started her car. After a few moments she waved a thin, blue-veined hand, and angled across the lot.
Two things stayed with Kevin Byrne as the old woman drove away. The image of the young woman who still lived in her clear, ancient eyes.
And the sound of that terrified voice in his head.
Don't make me go up to the attic… he stood across the street from the building. It looked different in daylight, a squalid relic of his city, a scar on a moldering urban block. Every so often a passerby would stop, try to look through the grimy glass-block squares that checkerboarded the front.
Byrne took an item out of his coat pocket. It was the napkin that Victoria had given him when she had brought him breakfast in bed, the white linen square with the imprint of her lips in deep red lipstick. He turned it over and over in his hands as he drew the layout of the street in his mind. To the right of the building across the street was a small parking lot. Next to that, a used-furniture mart. In front of the furniture store was an array of bright plastic bar stools in the shape of tulips. To the left of the building was an alleyway. He watched a man exit the front of the building, around the corner to the left, down the alley, then down a set of iron stairs to an access door beneath the structure. A few minutes later, the man emerged carrying a pair of cardboard boxes.
It was a storage cellar.
That's where he would do it, Byrne thought. In the cellar. He would meet the man later that night in the cellar.
No one would hear them down there.
38
The woman in the white dress asked: What are you doing here? Why are you here?
The knife in her hand appeared extremely sharp and, as she began to absently dig at the outside of her right thigh, it sliced through the material of her dress, splotching it with a Rorschach of blood. Thick steam filled the white bathroom, slicking the tiled walls, misting the mirror. Scarlet streaked and dripped from the razor-keened blade.
Do you know how it is when you meet somebody for the first time? the woman in white asked. Her tone was casual, almost conversational, as if she were having a cup of coffee or a cocktail with an old friend.
The other woman, the bruised and damaged woman in the terry- cloth robe, just stared, the terror building behind her eyes. The bathtub began to overflow, rippling over the side. Blood dappled the floor, pooling in a glossy, ever-widening circle. Downstairs, water began to seep through the ceiling. The big dog lapped at it on the hardwood floor.
Upstairs, the woman with the knife screamed: You're a stupid, selfish bitch!
Then she attacked.
Glenn Close hacked at Anne Archer in a life-and-death struggle as the tub began to overflow, flooding the bathroom floor. Downstairs, Michael Douglas's character-Dan Gallagher-took the kettle off the boil. Instantly he heard the screams. He bolted upstairs, ran into the bathroom, and slammed Glenn Close into the mirror, smashing it. They fought tooth and nail. She slashed him across the chest with the knife. They plunged into the tub. Soon Dan got the best of her, choking the life out of her. She finally stopped thrashing. She was dead.
Or was she?
And that's where the edit was.
Individually, simultaneously, the investigators watching the video tensed their muscles in anticipation of what they might see next.
The video jerked and rolled. The new image was a different bathroom, much dimmer, the light source coming from the left side of the frame. Ahead was a beige wall, a white slatted window treatment. There was no sound.
Suddenly a young woman rises to midframe. She is wearing a white, scoop-neck T-shirt dress, long-sleeved. It is not an exact duplicate of that worn by Glenn Close's character-Alex Forrest-in the film, but it is similar.
As the tape rolls, the woman steadies herself, centered in the frame. She is soaking wet. She is furious. She appears outraged, ready to pounce.
She stops.
Her expression suddenly turns from rage to fear, her eyes widening in horror. Someone, probably whoever was holding the camera, raises a small-caliber gun into the right side of the frame and pulls the trigger. The bullet slams into the woman's chest. The woman reels but doesn't instantly fall. She looks down at the widening intaglio of red.
She then slides down the wall, her blood painting the tile in bright crimson swaths. She slips slowly into the tub. The camera moves toward the young woman's face beneath the reddening bathwater.
The video shudders, rolls, then returns to the original film, to the scene where Michael Douglas shakes hands with a detective in front of his formerly idyllic home. In the movie, the nightmare is over.
Buchanan shut off the tape. As with the showing of the first tape, the occupants of the small room were stunned into silence. Every high they had felt in the past twenty-four hours or so-catching the break on the Psycho tape, finding the plumbing supply house, finding the motel room where Stephanie Chandler had been killed, finding the Saturn submerged along the banks of the Delaware-went out the window.
"This is one very bad actor," Cahill finally said.
The word floated for a moment before settling into the image bank.
The Actor.
There was never any sort of official ritual when criminals got a nickname. It just happened. Whenever a person committed a series of crimes, instead of calling him the doer, or their unsub-short for unknown subject-it was sometimes easier to give him a nickname. This time it stuck.
They were looking for the Actor.
And it looked like he was far from taking his final bow. WHENEVER THERE WERE two homicide victims, apparently killed by the same person-and there was no doubt that what they had witnessed on the Fatal Attraction tape was indeed a homicide, and little doubt it was the same killer as the Psycho tape-the first thing detectives look for is a connection between the victims. As obvious as it sounds, it was still true, yet not necessarily an easy link to establish.
Were they acquaintances, relatives, co-workers, lovers, former lovers? Did they attend the same church, health club, encounter group? Did they shop at the same stores, bank at the same bank? Did they share a dentist, doctor, lawyer?
Until they could identify the second victim, finding the connection would be unlikely. The first thing they would do is print an image of the second victim from the tape and recanvass everywhere they'd been for Stephanie Chandler. If they could establish that Stephanie Chandler knew the second victim, it might be a short leap to identifying the second woman, and finding the link. The prevailing theory was that there was a ferocious level of passion to these two homicides, which indicated some sort of intimacy between victims and killer, a level of familiarity that could not be achieved through casual acquaintance, or fuel such vicious- ness.
Someone had killed two young women and saw fit-through the prism of whatever dementia colored his daily life-to record the murders on tape. Not to taunt the police, necessarily. But rather to first horrify an unsuspecting public. It was certainly an MO that no one in the Homicide Unit could ever recall encountering before.
Something connected these people. Find the connection, find the common ground, find the parallels between these two lives, and they would find their killer.
Mateo Fuentes provided them with a fairly clear photographic image of the young woman on the Fatal Attraction tape. Eric Chavez was off to check on missing persons. If this victim was killed more than seventy- two hours earlier, there was a chance her disappearance had been called in. The other investigators assembled in Ike Buchanan's office.