And once he was unconscious, Beckett was supposed to come in and finish the job. Shoot Chaleen point-blank in the head, make it look like suicide. Another reprise of Cory’s cold, evil MO: leave the dirty work, the wet work, to the men in her life, and her brother was the only one left. Except that she’d overestimated her power to manipulate Kenneth into an act he was incapable of committing. But he must have come close because he’d been in here with the gun and something else Cory had given him, the sheet of bond paper that now lay crumpled on the floor in front of the couch.
Runyon picked up the paper, smoothed it out. Chaleen Manufacturing letterhead stationery with six lines of computer typing on it and Chaleen’s scrawled signature at the bottom. But he hadn’t typed it and he hadn’t been the one to sign it.
I can’t go on living. Business on the edge of bankruptcy, my whole life in shambles. I killed Andrew Vorhees. We had a fight and I hit him with a paperweight and put the body in his car and made it look like a carjacking. The police are suspicious, they’ll find out, I can’t face prison. This is the best way for everybody.
The hell it was. Best for Cory. Only Cory.
Runyon shoved the phony suicide note into his pocket, then made a quick search under and around the couch and of the rest of the office. There was no sign of Cory’s small-caliber automatic; Beckett had taken it with him.
At the door Runyon cast one more look at Chaleen. Limbs starting to twitch a little now; pretty soon he’d wake up sick and bewildered. But not half as sick as he’d be when he took the fall for killing Vorhees.
Runyon was in the Ford and on his way down Basin Street before he rang Bill’s home number. Caught him in, gave him a terse report-what Beckett had told him, what he’d found in Chaleen’s office, what he was afraid might happen or have already happened.
Bill said, “The kid may not have gone back to the apartment. If he’s enough afraid of his sister…”
“Plenty afraid, but he won’t be able to stay away from her. He’s like a whipped dog with nowhere else to go.”
“She wouldn’t hurt him. It’s not her style.”
“Not normally, but she’s bound to be furious when he tells her he didn’t go through with it. I’m on my way there now.”
“Intervention? Cory could make a lot of trouble if he refuses to give her up.”
“I know it, but I don’t see any other choice now-I’ve got to try for his sake. I’ll take full responsibility-”
“No, you won’t,” Bill said. “I’ll meet you there and we’ll see this through together.”
24
I had a shorter distance to travel, so I got to the Nob Hill address ahead of Runyon. The blue Dodge van wasn’t anywhere in the immediate vicinity, but that didn’t mean anything. The neighborhood has a smattering of small parking garages where residents pay outlandish monthly fees to lodge their vehicles. I left my car in the nearest one, the hell with the expense.
While I waited I paced the sidewalk in front, looking up at the lighted windows of the Beckett apartment. No telling for sure if both of them were in there; the curtains were closed. I wondered if Runyon and I were going to have trouble getting in, first to the building and then to the apartment. We couldn’t go barreling through doors like a couple of commandos; admittance, at least to the building, had to be by permission.
If we did get into the apartment and Beckett was all right, I was not looking forward to the face-off with Cory. We had plenty of circumstantial ammunition against her, but none of it, including the fake suicide note, was much good from a legal standpoint unless we could convince the kid to open up to the authorities. If he sided with his sister, let her control him and the situation, we’d have no choice but to back off again.
I’d been there ten minutes when Runyon came hurrying up the block. We conferred in the foyer while he leaned on the bell. I expected it to be a while before we got a response, if we got one, and that the first thing we’d hear then was a voice on the intercom. But it was only a few seconds before the door buzzer went off, while the intercom stayed silent.
Neither Jake nor I said anything on the way inside. I could feel a sharpening tension. Nothing either of the Becketts did was completely predictable, it seemed.
The door to their apartment stood ajar. That ratchetted the tension up another notch. The sudden constricted feeling in my gut was one I’d had before, a sixth-sense warning sign: something wrong here. From the look on Runyon’s face, he felt it, too. He was armed as a precaution; he’d mentioned it in the foyer. I saw him put a hand on the holstered Magnum under his coat and keep it there as we moved ahead to the door.
We went in slow and cautious, Jake announcing us on the way. Almost immediately Kenneth Beckett answered in a flat, toneless voice, “In here, Mr. Runyon.”
So he was all right. One hurdle cleared.
Beckett was in the gaudily decorated living room, sitting stone-rigid on a chair in front of one of the gold-flecked mirrors, fingers splayed like hooks over his knees. Alone in there, his sister nowhere in sight. His unblinking gaze shifted from Runyon to me and then fastened on Jake. If Beckett saw me at all, he didn’t care who I was or why I was there. The look of his eyes-dark, opaque, like burned-out bulbs-confirmed my gut feeling of wrongness. So did a pair of long, fresh scratches below his left cheekbone, the blood from them still oozing a little.
Runyon said to him, “Why didn’t you wait for me at the factory, Ken?”
“Cory.”
“You called her after we talked? Or did she call you?”
“She did.”
“Did you tell her you’d talked to me, that I was on my way there?”
“No.”
“But you told her you couldn’t do what she wanted.”
“She said if I didn’t, she didn’t want anything more to do with me… I wasn’t her brother anymore. But I couldn’t go back in there. I thought if I could just make her understand…” He shook his head, a wobbly, broken movement. “Cory,” he said then. And again, twice, like a half-whispered lament, “Cory. Cory.”
“Where is she?”
“I’m sorry. Oh God, Cory, I’m sorry!”
“Where, Ken?”
Nothing for several seconds. Then Beckett lifted one hand in a vague gesture toward the rear of the apartment, let it fall back bonelessly onto his lap. Closed his eyes and sat there mute.
I moved first, with Runyon close on my heels. The kitchen and dining rooms were empty. So was the first bedroom, hers, that opened off a central hallway. The adjacent bathroom was where we found her-a luxury bathroom with gold-rimmed mirrors set into baby-blue tile, a sunken tub, and a glass-block shower stall. The air in there was moist, as if a bath or shower had been taken not long before, and thick with the odors of soap and lotions.
And bodily waste.
And blood.
I smelled the waste as soon as I entered the bedroom, in time to gird myself before Runyon and I crossed over far enough to see the body. She lay sprawled on her back on a fuzzy black rug in front of the shower stall, a bright yellow robe covering her from neck to ankles. Alive, she’d been beautiful; dead, she was a torn, soiled, ugly travesty. The bullet had gone in under her chin at an upward angle, ripped through the side of her face and opened up her head above the temple. The stall door and glass blocks were streaked and spattered with blood, bone splinters, brain matter, the blood still wet and glistening. Dead less than half an hour.
Runyon said between his teeth, “Goddamn it, why didn’t he stay at the factory?”
There was nothing to say to that. My stomach was kicking like crazy; I’d seen dead bodies before, the bloody, twisted aftermath of violence in too many forms, but I had never become inured to the sight. The reaction was always the same: sickness and disgust mingled with sadness and an impotent anger at the inhumanity of it.