Michael Prescott - Last Breath

Her house was a bungalow with a detached one-car garage, where she parked her Neon. She lugged her groceries to the front door, and after some fumbling with keys, got the door open and stepped inside.

In her cramped little kitchen she put away her purchases. She thought of the van again. Here in her home, she found it ridiculous to imagine that anyone could have been following her, spying on her. She must be still worked up from the Sanchez incident. A hot shower was what she needed.

Nevertheless, before heading into her bedroom, she checked and double-checked the locks on the front, rear, and side doors. A sensible precaution, she told herself, though ordinarily she was not so wary in daytime.

Finally she was satisfied that the house was secure.

“You’re all alone, Killer,” she said aloud, chiding herself. “Nobody is watching you? Got that? Nobody.”

Treat arrived home just in time for the 5:00 P.M. news. He had expected to be the top story, and he wasn’t disappointed.

He stood in front of the Sony Trinitron in his living room, his windows shuttered, the lights off. The phosphorescence of the picture tube painted the room in bright colors at first, as the newscast began with its two comely anchorpersons at their desk.

Then the taped report began, and the screen dimmed with a shot of a strip mall in the predawn darkness.

The mall, closed pending renovation, was on Sepulveda Boulevard south of Pico. Every morning for the past month. Treat had driven past the mall on his way to work. Today he saw a crowd of squad cars parked outside, and he knew his latest work had been discovered at last.

LAPD cruisers, roof lights cycling, threw scintillant stripes of blue and red across the camera lens. In the background was the sad little mall, where his most recent victim lay undisturbed until today. Treat wondered who found her. A night watchman alerted by the odor? The smell must be fairly noxious by now. Or perhaps some wandering street person seeking shelter-they were always finding their way into sealed buildings, as resourceful as Treat himself.

It hardly mattered. He had known that she would be found eventually. By now, enough time had passed to ensure that her remains would yield no clues to the task force hunting him.

Now the news camera was moving forward, drifting, restless as a shark, among the squad cars, its lens focused on the strip mall wrapped in crime-scene ribbon.

At the time of Treat’s reconnaissance this morning, the authorities had not yet brought out the body. It would have taken a good long while, he knew, for the criminalistics team to take the photographs and make the measurements, collect the raw data that would be filed away in a report in the cold steel drawer of a file cabinet, just as the subject of that report would be filed away in another drawer in another cabinet, this one in the morgue.

The report cut to later footage, recorded after sunrise-the body’s emergence from its tomb. It had been stuffed inside a bag, and he saw nothing but its outline. Still, he was glad the shot was included in the report. Seeing it on TV made it more real.

Odd how nothing was real these days unless it was a picture on a screen, how life itself had become only a succession of pictures on a succession of screens, and relationships had become transmissions of electronic data, people reaching across a void. Sad, in a way.

The shape inside the bag seemed unaccountably small. Treat had not realized that Martha Eversol was so petite. It seemed wrong of him to pick on someone who was not his size. He wasn’t playing fair.

The camera followed the body until it disappeared inside the coroner’s van. When the van drove away, the newscast cut to a standup of a babbling reporter at the scene, and Treat lost interest. He clicked the TV off. He was in darkness again, alone in the silence and privacy of his bedroom.

He stood still, conscious of nothing but the expansion of his belly with each slow intake of air.

He was in a contemplative mood, as was often the case shortly before a kill. There was something about the taking of a life that made him philosophical. He supposed it was the awareness of being so near the great and final mystery of death.

In darkness he went down the hall to his bedroom, where his notebook computer rested in its docking station on the bureau. When he raised the lid, the machine flickered out of suspend mode, and the screen-another of the many screens in his life-lit up.

His fingers, long and supple like a pianist’s, prowled over the keyboard and the touchpad, initiating an Internet connection, then navigating to a bookmarked Web page.

And there she was-his next chosen one, or her electronic simulacrum. Undressing in her bedroom. Entering the lavatory. Disappearing behind the translucent shower curtain.

Treat inhaled, exhaled. Watched.

He was glad she was taking a shower.

He liked his ladies to be clean.

It took Rawls more than an hour to track down the network’s system administrator at home. When he finally had the man on the line, the sysadmin admitted having given the Web site only a cursory inspection. Yes, part of his job was to survey the block of IP addresses assigned by his network and ensure that no unacceptable content was being displayed, but he concerned himself mainly with content stored on the network’s servers. The Web site in question was stored on a private server; its owner used the network simply to connect his computer with the rest of the Web.

“So what’s his name?” Brand asked after Rawls had concluded the conversation.

“Mr. Steven Gader,” Rawls said. “At least that’s the name on the billing account.”

“He’s local?”

“Sure is. Got his address and his phone number. But I don’t plan on making a phone call.” Rawls smiled. “A face-to-face meeting is what I have in mind.”

“Let’s hope he’s home.” Brand shrugged on his overcoat. “Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a video stream of an empty room-”

“Hold on.” Rawls leaned closer to his monitor. “It’s not empty anymore.”

He had returned to the site for a last look before heading out, just in time to see a female figure enter the frame. Her image was small but reasonably sharp, her movements rendered fairly smooth by the video stream’s fast refresh rate.

Brand circled behind him and looked over his shoulder. He whistled. “Miss January is a looker. No wonder she got the most votes.”

The woman was slender and fit, her smooth brown hair falling across her shoulders. She wore a blue jumpsuit and carried a handbag, which she tossed on the nightstand. With her back to the camera she began to undress.

Rawls reached for the button that turned off his monitor. “Maybe I should-”

Brand stopped him. “Don’t you dare. This is evidence of a possible felony we’re looking at. Major privacy violation, and we are on the case.”

Rawls sighed. He didn’t want to participate in some Internet peep show, but if he put a stop to it, he would catch hell from Brand. And he needed Brand with him on this.

The woman unhooked her bra and dropped it on the bed. She sat down and kicked off her shoes, then stood and began wriggling out of the bottom half of the jumpsuit.

“Here comes the good part,” Brand whispered.

“You’re a pervert,” Rawls observed dryly.

“Can I help it if I know how to have fun on the job?”

She discarded the slacks and then her underpants. She stood naked, stretching her legs. Lean, limber legs, the legs of a dancer, an athlete.

Brand let out another low whistle and tried out his streetwise patois. “Man, she do look fine.”

Rawls cast a cold stare over his shoulder. “Notice that? She just turned on the bedside lamp. That means it’s getting dark out.” He checked his watch: 8:15. “It’s been dark here since shortly after five P.M. I’m betting there’s a three hour time difference.”