Shadowfires

her in Santa Ana in connection with the Hernandez killing.”

The Law Enforcement Data Net, through which the county's many police agencies shared information among their computers, was a new program, a natural outgrowth of the computerization of the sheriff's department and all local police. Hours, sometimes days, could be saved with the use of Data Net, and this was not the first time Julio found reason to be thankful that he was a cop in the Microchip Age.

“Was the woman killed here?” Julio asked as they circled around a burly lab technician who was dusting furniture for fingerprints.

“No,” Mulveck said. “Not enough blood.” He was still combing one hand through his hair as he walked. “Killed somewhere else and… and brought here.”

“Why?”

“You'll see why. But damned if you'll understand why.”

Puzzling over that cryptic statement, Julio trailed Mulveck down a hallway into the master bedroom. He gasped at the sight awaiting him and for a moment could not breathe.

Behind him, Reese said, “Holy shit.”

Both bedside lamps were burning, and though there were still shadows around the edges of the room, Rebecca Klienstad's corpse was in the brightest spot, mouth open, eyes wide with a vision of death. She had been stripped naked and nailed to the wall, directly over the big bed. One nail through each hand. One nail just below each elbow joint. One in each foot. And a large spike through the hollow of the throat. It was not precisely the classic pose of crucifixion, for the legs were immodestly spread, but it was close.

A police photographer was still snapping the corpse from every angle. With each flash of his strobe unit, the dead woman seemed to move on the wall; it was only an illusion, but she appeared to twitch as if straining at the nails that held her.

Julio had never seen anything as savage as the crucifixion of the dead woman, yet it had obviously been done not in a white-hot madness but with cold calculation. Clearly, the woman had already been dead when brought here, for the nail holes weren't bleeding. Her slender throat had been slashed, and that was evidently the mortal wound. The killer — or killers — had expended considerable time and energy finding the nails and the hammer (which now lay on the floor in one corner of the room), hoisting the corpse against the wall, holding it in place, and precisely driving the impaling spikes through the cool dead flesh. Apparently the head had drooped down, chin to chest, and apparently the killer had wanted the dead woman to be staring at the bedroom door (a grisly surprise for Rachael Leben), so he had looped a wire under the chin and had tied it tautly to a nail driven into the wall above her skull, to keep her facing out. Finally he had taped her eyes open — so she would be staring sightlessly at whomever discovered her.

“I understand,” Julio said.

“Yes,” Reese Hagerstrom said shakily.

Mulveck blinked in surprise. Pearls of sweat glistened on his pale forehead, perhaps not because of the June heat. “You've got to be joking. You understand this… madness? You see a reason for it?”

Julio said, “Ernestina and this girl were murdered primarily because the killer needed a car, and they had a car. But when he saw what the Klienstad woman looked like, he dumped the other one and brought the second body here to leave this message.”

Mulveck nervously combed one hand through his hair. “But if this psycho intended to kill Mrs. Leben, if she was his primary target, why not just come here and get her? Why just leave a… a message?”

“The killer must have had reason to suspect that she wouldn't be at home. Maybe he even called first,” Julio said.

He was remembering Rachael Leben's extreme nervousness when he had questioned her at the morgue earlier this evening. He had sensed that she was hiding something and that she was very much afraid. Now he knew that, even then, she had realized her life was in danger.

But who was she afraid of, and why couldn't she turn to the police for help? What was she hiding?

The police photographer's camera click-flashed.

Julio continued: “The killer knew he wouldn't be able to get his hands on her right away, but he wanted her to know she could expect him later. He — or they — wanted to scare her witless. And when he took a good look at this Klienstad woman he had killed, he knew what he must do.”

“Huh?” Mulveck said. “I don't follow.”

“Rebecca Klienstad was voluptuous,” Julio said, indicating the crucified woman. “So is Rachael Leben. Very similar body types.”

“And Mrs. Leben has hair much the same as the Klienstad girl's,” Reese said. “Coppery brown.”

“Titian,” Julio said. “And although this woman isn't nearly as lovely as Mrs. Leben, there's a vague resemblance, a similarity of facial structure.”

The photographer paused to put new film in his camera.

Officer Mulveck shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The way it was supposed to work — Mrs. Leben would eventually come home and when she walked into this room she would see this woman crucified and know, by the similarities, that it was her this psycho really wanted to nail to the wall.”

“Yes,” Julio said, “I think so.”

“Yes,” Reese agreed.

“Good God,” Mulveck said, “do you realize how black, how bitter, how deep this hatred must be? Whoever he is, what could Mrs. Leben possibly have done to make him hate her like that? What sort of enemies does she have?”

“Very dangerous enemies,” Julio said. “That's all I know. And… if we don't find her quickly, we won't find her alive.”

The photographer's camera flashed.

The corpse seemed to twitch.

Flash, twitch.

Flash, twitch.

11 GHOST STORY

When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but cooperative.

No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.

Benny kept looking desperately left and right.

Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.

Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a for SALE sign in the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in need of a gardener's attention.

“Eureka,” Benny said.

He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the headlights, the engine.

Darkness fell over them.

The car's hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.

The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.

Benny said, “Give me your gun.”

From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.