I felt it in the elevator with Donna Mason. And I felt it now as the neighbors peeked through their windows at me and the joggers huffed by askance and a jet left a thin contrail high in the blue spring sky.
Johnny found plenty of prints from Brittany’s room, but most of them were small, and the others came from places her mother would likely have touched. He lifted a partial from the aluminum window frame and another from one corner of the window glass. The screen yielded nothing. He rolled the shed skin lengthwise in newspaper, hoping that the ALS or bench laser in the Crime Lab might illuminate a latent print.
“He’s slick as shit,” Johnny said to me quietly, glancing toward the hallway. “I’ll glass this whole room and where he was standing outside. I’ll get down on my hands and knees. I’ll pick up every bit of sand, hair or fiber I can find outside this window and let Reilly figure out where it came from. But you know what, man? He’s careful, he knows what he’s doing and he’s not giving us one goddamned thing.”
“He’ll make a mistake.”
He sighed and looked at the hole cut out of the glass. I pictured a snake crawling through that hole. “That’s what I want. I want to find a guy who’s got that piece of glass stashed in his van. Or his garage. Or his guest house. He’s not that careless, though. He’ll take it into a parking lot, step on it and kick the pieces everywhere. And even Johnny Escobedo won’t be able to put them together again.”
“Work it, Johnny. That’s all you can do.”
“We got to do something more, man. We can’t just wait on him. I’m sitting here playing with fingerprint tape and he’s got her out in the woods somewhere. Is that woman in there ever going to see her girl alive again?”
I knew he was right. The Horridus had waited twenty-six days between Pamela and Courtney. Now he was down to fifteen.
“There’s a miracle in here, Johnny. Somewhere. Find it.”
Johnny ran his hand past his widow’s peak and through his thick black hair. “We got to make a miracle of our own, man. He’s not going to do it for us.”
I called Louis and told him to drop the vintage clothing stores for now and triple up with me and Frances on the homes-for-sale listings. We were down to ten sellers who might be our man.
“Ish told me Frances isn’t coming in today.”
“Why not?”
“Still upset about yesterday, I guess.”
“We’re all upset, goddamnit.”
“Yeah, but no telling what kind of pictures she found in Chet’s den.”
“Then it’s just you and me on the listings, Louis.”
I read off the next five names and agents to him, complete with phone numbers and the real estate office addresses.
“Double time, Louis. This guy’s brave and getting braver.”
Before ringing off I got Jennifer Clark’s and Bridget Simenon’s numbers from Louis. I had to wonder if either of them might have been looking for “bright tomorrows.” Who wasn’t?
I called Melinda. She answered in her investigator’s voice.
“It’s just me,” I said. “He took another one.”
“I heard. How old?”
“Five. He left a snakeskin in her bed. I... I just called to say things are going to be okay. They have to be okay.”
“What things? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
She was silent for a moment. “Well, Terry,” she said. “When you do, you can fill me in.”
“I just... Penny get off to school okay?”
“Of course she did. Why?”
“All right, Mel. Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Last night was really good.”
“Yes. It was.”
I hung up and called Donna. Her secretary knows me only as Skip, and to always put me through. She did.
“I wanted to hear your voice,” I said.
“And I yours. You don’t sound too good.”
“He took another one. A five-year-old.”
Donna’s intake of breath caught in her throat. For a woman who made her living on mostly bad news, Donna Mason could also choke — almost literally — at times of great emotion.
“I’m with you,” she said.
“I wish you were. I’ve got these bad feelings all around and I’m trying not to let them get in.”
“Where are you?”
I told her.
Twelve
He hefted Item #3 over his shoulder and backed out of the side door of the van. The automatic opener had already shut the door behind him and the garage was lit only by a bare bulb, but it was enough to see by. The blinds on the window were down. He steadied his load as he straightened and walked toward the door to the guest house. The Item kicked and made noises, but its mouth and hands and ankles were taped and it was in the thick duffel and couldn’t move very well. When he was inside the bedroom he set it on the bed and opened the top of the bag wide.
He tried not to look directly at its face while he tied the little black velvet hood over its head. He’d made the hood himself, with small holes at the bottom so they could breathe but couldn’t see. During the brief time it took to fit the hood over its head he got a brief look at it — a lot like the mother — slender and pretty. But dark hair. Its eyes were brown, and wide with unutterable terror. The tape around its head was still tight over its mouth. With its eyes bugging out like this it looked like a rat being constricted by a snake, like his mother had looked when Moloch was wrapped around her. He snugged the drawstrings firmly and knotted them. Then he dug the Hiker’s Headlight out of the duffel, where he’d put it after stripping it off his head once he was back inside the van.
He didn’t worry that it would be able to describe him later because he was hidden behind the oversized, wraparound angler’s sunglasses — polarized to cut glare and reveal trout underwater — the baseball cap pulled down right on top of the frames and the bandanna over his nose and mouth like a bandit. His breath smelled extra terrible, trapped up close to his nose like this. When he had the hood secured over Item #3 he stripped off the hat and shades, pulled the bandanna down around his neck and dropped some cinnamon breath drops onto his tongue.
Stop crying and don’t worry, he said amiably, screwing the top back onto the little bottle. Fresh. You’re going to be just fine.
He set up the three tall tripods and affixed his cameras to them — one video and two digital stills. He used a stool to get them aimed down at the bed where Item #3 lay and get the still cameras focused right. Then he climbed down and took the extra long remote exposure cables and set them on the floor just under the bed where he could reach them easily.
Brittany lay on her side, breathing fast, her heart pounding. She felt her ankles wrapped tight together and her arms tied behind her back. Not being able to move was the worst feeling in the world. Her nightie was all twisted up and half choking her. She had thought just minutes ago, when she was inside the heavy bag, that she might faint from the lack of air. She just couldn’t draw enough in with her mouth taped shut and the bag all around her. And she could hardly move. They were in a white van then, she knew that. He hadn’t put her in the bag until they were inside and the door was shut.
Now she was on a bed and there was some kind of opening near her nose and she was getting deep breams that didn’t smell like canvas tennis shoes. Instead, she smelled someone else’s smells, like when she stayed at her grandmother’s house. These odors were kind of similar — bed smells, blanket smells — sweet and personal. Then they would go away and she would smell something sticky and industrial that she understood was the tape beneath her nose.