He lay on his back. The few clouds in the pale blue sky were slowly spinning. His ears rang.
“RICK!” Bert’s voice, high and terrified through the ringing.
He lifted his head, turned it.
The ground tilted and tipped, much like the clouds.
Bert was on her back, writhing under the man. He was sitting across her hips, leaning down over her, pinning her wrists to the ground. Blood from his gashed face splashed Bert, rained down on her cheeks and lips, trickled down her chin.
The man’s knife stood up straight, its blade embedded in the ground a few inches above her shoulder.
Rick rolled over. As he struggled to raise himself, the man’s right hand flew up, releasing Bert’s wrist. She wasn’t quick enough to block the punch. It crashed against her cheek. Her head snapped to the side. Her body went limp.
The man jerked his knife out of the ground.
He scooted backward, his blood spilling a trail onto her chest and belly and shorts. Then he was sitting on her knees. He slipped the broad blade down the front of her shorts and ripped. The edge came up through her waistband, severed her belt, slit open the tan fabric down her left thigh and parted the small cuff.
Rick forced himself up to his knees while he watched.
Face torn from forehead to chin, eye split open, a bone-deep stab wound in his left calf—and he’s stripping her!!
He clawed Bert’s pants open like a flap, baring her left leg, her groin. He tugged at the other side so hard that her breasts shook. The shorts slid out from under her and down to her knees.
Rick’s knife flew end over end.
It flashed past the back of the man’s head, missing by more than an inch.
The man didn’t even seem to notice.
He was working Bert’s pants farther down her legs.
“NO!” Rick yelled.
He turned toward Rick, stared at him with one eye, and spat blood. His red penis was standing rigid and thick.
Rick shoved himself up, took a wobbly step forward, and fell.
The man turned again to Bert. He got his knees between her legs. With the dull edge of his knife, he shoved her left leg aside.
Rick crawled toward him.
He had no weapon and the man had the knife. He didn’t care....
“I’LL KILL YOU!” he yelled.
The man ignored him.
Then there was someone else.
For a moment, Rick thought it was one of the girls. It was a girl and she was naked and torn and bloody, but not mutilated like Andrea or Bonnie, not a butchered carcass, not dead.
She ducked as she ran, and swept Rick’s knife off the ground where it had landed after his throw.
She ran straight toward the man.
His head turned.
She leaped, twisting herself in midair, coming down behind him, between Bert’s spread feet. She grabbed the man’s hair. Her right knee buckled. She dropped to her rump and threw herself backward, still clutching the man’s hair.
He flopped on top of her, head between her breasts.
For an instant, two knives waved above his squirming body.
The knife in the girl’s hand flashed down and ripped across his throat.
Blood erupted.
The man flapped his arms, his knife slashing through the red curtain rising from his neck. He kicked his feet high.
Rick thought vaguely that he hoped the bastard wouldn’t kick Bert in the face.
The shower of blood diminished, then stopped, as if a faucet had been turned off.
The man lay sprawled motionless on top of Bert and the stranger.
Nobody moved.
Thursday June 26
“Police today received a package containing a scrapbook allegedly belonging to Fredrick James Holden, who was slain Monday during a killing spree that left two hikers dead in the Sierra wilderness.
“The scrapbook, which contained newspaper clippings related to disappearances and killings of an undisclosed number of young women in several different states, was accompanied by an anonymous note which read, ‘I found this in Holden’s house. He murdered these people.’
“This latest revelation only deepens the puzzle of Fredrick James Holden, the orphan who was taken into the home of his aunt at the age of four and inherited her wealth twelve years later when she was raped and viciously murdered in her bed, along with the celebrated fashion designer Harriet Woodall. In light of the recent developments, authorities now speculate that the double homicide may have been the work of the same man responsible for Monday’s killing rampage.
“The scrapbook, received today by the police opens the possibility that Fredrick James Holden may have been involved in a nationwide string of sex slayings. But was the scrapbook the property of this man? And who mailed it to the authorities? How much might this person know about the trail of killings revealed in the pages of the scrapbook? With more on this story, we take you live to Henry Gonzalez.”
“Thank you, Laura. I’m coming to you live from the Encino home of Dr. Richard Wainwright, the prominent ophthalmologist who, along with his fiancee Bert Lindsey, was assaulted by Fredrick James Holden shortly after Monday’s double-homicide.
“Dr. Wainwright, is it your opinion that Holden’s scrapbook was sent to the police by the woman who called herself Mary Smith?”
“I have no idea. It wouldn’t surprise me, though.”
“Miss Lindsey?”
“We’ve talked about it. We both think she may have sent it. She had something to hide, we’re sure of that.”
“Could you tell us more about her?”
“She was eighteen or twenty, blond, very attractive ...”
“She was very beaten up. She’d been cut with a knife, and sustained a lot of superficial injuries while she was escaping from the bas—killer.”
“We bathed in the stream after ... after he was dead. All of us were bloody. Then we patched up some of her wounds with my first aid kit.”
“She didn’t say much.”
“None of us did. I think we were all in a state of shock.”
“She did tell us that her name was Mary Smith, and she’d been abducted the night before. Holden brought her out to the mountains in the trunk of his car. She said he’d intended to kill her ‘like the others.’ ”
“That’s one reason we think she might be the one who sent the scrapbook. She seemed to have knowledge of other murders.”
“Also the fact that she skipped out on us.”
“Wearing my clothes. Not that I resent that. Hell, she saved us. She came out of nowhere like some kind of crazed, avenging angel and slit the throat of that animal.”
