Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

Meredith. Finally he understood.

His voice was a whisper. “I see.”

“You’ve been killing her over and over again. Christ, you’re so sick.”

“I prefer to think of myself as unconventional,” Jack said dryly. Distantly he was pleased with himself for finding some faint humor even in this most extreme crisis of his life. “So you deduced everything from a few photos? You should have been a detective.”

“There was a little more to it than that. All the murders took place out West; I knew you’d moved to L.A. years ago. The girls were picked up in bars; that sounded like you. You always were a ladies’ man.”

“And you always were jealous.”

“Not anymore.”

Bitterness flavored the words. Steve’s face was no longer empty of expression; his pinched lips and narrowed eyes conveyed an unmistakable impression of disgust.

“Besides,” he went on acidly, “there were limitations to your sexual prowess, weren’t there? You never dated blonds. I remember your once saying you had a problem with blond women. That was how you put it: a problem. I’ve thought about that a lot in the past six months. Looks like you’ve still got the same problem, Jack. Looks like killing Meredith didn’t get it out of your system.”

Killing Meredith. Steve was right, of course. But how had he known?

“I thought you believed Meredith’s death was a diving accident,” Jack said slowly. “I thought that was what everyone believed.”

“It’s what I wanted to believe. Up until a couple of minutes ago, I was still capable of persuading myself that it might have happened that way. If you hadn’t tipped your hand, I never could have been sure.”

Steve reached down and retrieved the knife. He studied it, the blade turning slowly, a pirouetting dancer.

“I recognize this. You used to bring it with you on our boat trips.”

Jack swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, his voice unexpectedly thick.

“And now you were going to plant it in my back. Nice.” He put the knife on the seat beside him and lifted the gun a little. The blued barrel gleamed like the cresting fin of an albacore. “How about Kirstie? What did you have in mind for her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

A beat of silence. The sun, hanging at its zenith, set the sky aflame. Jack wondered, in an oddly impersonal way, if he was about to die here, in this boat that rocked so gently, gently, a cradle on the water.

“You going to shoot me, Stevie? That the idea?”

“I ought to. I really ought to. My wife fits the pattern, doesn’t she? Blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. She’s another Meredith. That’s how you see her, right?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it-”

“Drop the pose. She explained how you acted on the beach. I had to tell her it was only her imagination. I still wasn’t certain about this-any of this. Now I am.”

The gun trembled. Jack could almost feel Steve’s trigger finger slowly drawing down.

“You would have killed her,” Steve breathed, “if I hadn’t come along. Wouldn’t you?”

A truthful answer might prove fatal, but instinctively Jack knew there was more certain danger in a lie.

“Yes,” he said, and tensed himself for the crack of the pistol’s report.

Nothing.

The gun didn’t fire, the world didn’t go away.

Steve merely nodded and went on nodding, as if in confirmation not only of Jack’s words but of every evil he had ever known.

“You would have left her floating in the shallows,” he said, voice hushed. “Facedown like Meredith. You bastard.” He glanced at the knife. “Was this what you were going to use?”

“Yes.”

“Cut her throat?”

“Yes.”

“You motherfucker. You piece of shit.”

Jack sat motionless, untouched by the insults. Bullets could wound, kill. Words left no mark.

“Is that how you murdered your other victims? With the knife?”

“No. A needle. An injection.”

“Meredith, too?”

“That was different. Cruder. I was only a kid then.”

“Yeah, sure, you were just the boy next door.” Steve frowned, the disgust on his face deepening, becoming open revulsion. “Literally, in fact. You did live next door to the Turners.”

“Yeah.”

“But you didn’t kill Meredith at home. You went to the bathing pavilion. Why?”

“I wanted it to look like an accident. I knew she always stayed late after locking up. She would practice her breaststroke, execute some dives. She took that lifeguard job seriously, I guess. Anyway, I hid in the bathroom till the other bathers were gone, then crept up from behind while she was swimming laps. Slammed her head against the side of the pool. Held her under till she drowned. Easy.”

“You sound real remorseful.”

“I don’t pretend to be. That bitch deserved it.”

“Why?”

“There’s a reason.”

“You always hated her. Never made any secret of it. But you wouldn’t say why.”

“It’s not important.”

“It was important enough to kill her for.” Jack said nothing. “Did she turn you down? Is that it? Was she immune to the patented Dance charm?”

“No-shit-nothing like that, Stevie.” Jack sighed. “Just drop it, okay? It doesn’t matter now.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. But it sure did matter back then. That must have been why the cops got interested in you-because everybody knew how much you’d hated her, how you’d always referred to her as a bitch, a cunt, every ugly word you could think of.”

“All of them entirely appropriate.”

“You think you’re so goddamn smart. So fucking superior. But if you are, how come you never anticipated that you’d become the most obvious suspect? How come you didn’t prepare an alibi in advance?”

Irrationally, Jack bristled, his criminal competence challenged. “I assumed the coroner would say she’d struck her head on the bottom of the pool after a dive. Which is what he did say-eventually.” His shoulders moved in a shrug. “I didn’t mess up so bad. In the end, things worked out exactly the way I’d planned.”

“Oh, sure. Everything worked out great, just great-thanks to your quick thinking. Did you come up with that story of yours on the spur of the moment?”

“More or less. I worked it out on my way over to your place. It sounded plausible. You knew Lisa and I had a little thing going.”

“That part was true, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, mildly surprised to taste the bittersweet flavor of nostalgia in the words. “It was true.”

Lisa Giovanni had been a married woman of thirty-three, recently separated from her husband. She’d liked sharing her bed with an eighteen-year-old lover, tanned, muscular, virile; and Jack in turn had enjoyed her small, firm breasts and slender legs and silky dark hair, her finely chiseled Italian features, the perfume that wound around her like a flower’s fragrance.

Their trysts had been secret, of course. A scandal if the relationship should come out. Only Steve had known.

So it had been easy enough to formulate the lie and sell it.

“The cops are going to want to know where I was the night Meredith drowned,” Jack had said, pacing Steve’s bedroom on that humid August evening, while Steve listened, first puzzled, then concerned, then afraid. “They’re desperate for somebody to pin it on. Here’s the thing: I’ve got an alibi, but I can’t use it. ’Cause I was with Lisa. She gave me the world tour, as usual. But if I mention her name, it’ll be all over town in two days.”

“What can I do about it?”

“Tell the cops we were together that night. Doing something-I don’t know-maybe we took a drive. A long drive, say, down to Asbury and back. We’ve done that before.”