Catherine Coulter - Split Second

“With the thought of killing her?”

“Of course.”

Savich held himself still as a statue, couldn’t trust himself not to rip the IV lines from Comafield’s body. To listen to him talk so calmly about murdering Sherlock. He said very quietly, “The redhead is my wife. They had to pump her stomach.”

Comafield stared at him for a moment, then grinned. “Go figure that. That girl really is your wife? So she was in on the setup, too,” and he fell silent again.

Savich smoothed himself out. He didn’t know why he’d even told Comafield; it had just come out. He said, “Since you worked for Lansford, you couldn’t see her all that often when she left San Francisco.”

“Yeah, since I had to stick with him, it was difficult to get away to join her.” His voice trailed off, and Savich feared he’d fallen into a drugged stupor, but then he whispered, his eyes tightly closed, “I remember one night we were together in Cleveland. She told me she sometimes warmed her hands over the fires. ‘What fires?’ I asked. ‘In hell,’ she said, where she was sitting cross-legged next to her daddy while he told her what he did to have the most fun. And he’d ask her when she was going to get serious about her own work, when was she going to hit the road, like he did?

“Then she’d talk about how sexy her daddy said dead people were, but only when you were the one who put out their lights. Then that made them yours, and it was a fine thing to come back to visit your works of art and enjoy them, over and over, until they fell apart, and then they weren’t art anymore, they were trash. I didn’t want to know exactly what she meant, but deep down, I knew.”

Comafield’s words were slurring. Savich knew he didn’t have much more time before he was out of it. “Of course you knew, since I’m certain you’ve read everything written about Ted Bundy, including his taste for necrophilia.”

“Yeah, lots of it. Maybe it scared me a little, and then she’d shrug and look at me like she was—” He closed his eyes again—from the pain or the image?

“Like she was picturing you with catsup?”

That snapped Comafield’s eyes right open. “No, you bastard!” He swallowed, and Savich knew the morphine was slurring his brain as well as his speech. “Well, maybe, but I knew she’d never hurt me. Do you know, after her kills, she’d come back to our hotel and she’d always be flying high? She’d want sex and booze, and she’d want to dance and hoot. You know what else she did? She always dressed up like the woman she’d just killed. She liked to play that role as well as play the lead, she’d say. She had all these wigs, and she’d put on the one most like her woman-of-the-hour, she called them. And she’d sometimes let me play the kill and she’d—” His voice faltered.

“Yes?”

“—pretend to strangle me with the wire. But she never really hurt me—” His voice was fading.

“Bruce, were you her acolyte?”

Comafield’s eyes focused on Savich’s face. “Her acolyte? That sounds like I wore a black robe and chanted. No, you’ve got it all wrong, damn you. I didn’t wear robes and chant Latin. I was her rock; I tethered her to the world so she wouldn’t fly off the planet. She needed me. She loved me.”

“Did you love her?’

Comafield whispered, “Oh, yes. She could do what I never could. She was a whirlwind, always racing to catch her daddy. She was doing a countdown. I asked her how many women she had to kill to catch up to her daddy, and she said one hundred. She never told me how she came up with that number.

“Now it doesn’t matter. I won’t ever see her again.” His eyes were suddenly hard on Savich’s face. He whispered, “At least I know she’ll kill you. Wherever she was going, it’s off now, because she’s coming to kill you. Sweet Jesus, I’m going to die and I’ll never see her again.”

“You’re not going to die, Bruce.”

“Yes,” Comafield said very quietly, his voice nearly singsong with the morphine. “I know I am. I feel it. I wish I could see Kirsten just one more time, but I know I can’t.”

And Bruce Comafield turned his head away.

Savich went back to Sherlock’s room, ordered her to stop moving around and lie still, no arguing, and listen. Then he said to her, Coop, and Lucy, “Let me tell you about a very strange and sad couple.”

They spoke to Mr. Ricky Levine, skinny and tall, standing at attention behind the small reception counter of Handler’s Inn. Savich thought he could still be in high school, with the acne on his chin, his belt pulled tight to keep his tan uniform pants up. He was so nervous his hands shook when they introduced themselves. He kept chewing on his lower lip, and had a hard time meeting their eyes. No, he told them, no, really, he didn’t know a Mr. Bruce Comafield. He’d remember a dude saddled with a name like that. He offered to let them see that he wasn’t registered in the computer.

Lucy sidled up to him, all friendly face and sweet smile, so he wouldn’t drop over in a dead faint with Savich and Coop standing over him, that or start babbling nonsense.

“Mr. Levine, who did you give room one-fifty-one to late Monday night?”

Mr. Levine’s nervous fingers worked the computer keyboard. “Here it is—Mr. Cane. He checked in, said his wife was joining him later. Cane—Comafield. I see, that’s pretty close. Well, he seemed like a nice guy—young, you know? Yuppie-looking, had a gold credit card, I saw it in his wallet, even though he used cash to pay for the first night. I remember I asked him how long he was going to stay, and he said two, maybe three, days.”

“How late was it Monday night when he got here?”

“Wow, it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.”

Lucy nodded. So he and Kirsten had driven directly here from New York City. And she started partying the very next night.

Coop kept his mental fingers crossed. “Does the Handler have a policy of getting the license plate number?”

“Yes, we do, but I always go check myself, since guests never know. Mr. Cane drove a light blue Chevy Cobalt. Look here, the number’s by his registration. It’s a Maryland plate, that’s white, with black lettering, CTH six-two-five. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“That’s fantastic, Mr. Levine,” Lucy said and beamed at him.

Coop asked him, “Did you ever see his wife, Mr. Levine?”

Mr. Levine nodded. “They ate breakfast together the past two mornings here in our dining room. I eat when I come on duty, that’s one of my perks, and so I saw them. That’s how I know. She ate a bowl of prunes and a load of muffins. I remember that because she was so skinny and those muffins are loaded with fat. Go figure. As for Mr. Cane, he ate cereal, I believe, and a banana. More healthy. He looked really fit, a sharp dresser. I heard several of the waitresses talking about how cute he was, with his thick hair, and especially in his aviator glasses.”

“How did she look? How was she dressed, Mr. Levine, do you remember?”

“She had long blond hair, real thick, sort of curly, hanging down her back. She was wearing blue jeans and one of those skinny knit tops. That’s how I could tell she was so skinny. I thought it was kind of chilly out for that getup. She looked, well, arty, I guess you could say. She was wearing bloodred lipstick, I remember thinking exactly that, and her face was real white. I think it was makeup.”

Lucy said, “Do you remember anything else about them, Mr. Levine? Anything they did that was out of the ordinary?”

Ricky thought about that, then slowly nodded. “It was the oddest thing. I was doing a double shift last night. I happened to be looking outside and saw him walking to his car. Like I told you, most times I saw him, he was dressed really sharp. But last night he was dressed more like my brother the nerd, you know, down to the black thick-framed glasses, pants too short, showing his white socks, and this crappy tweed jacket? And he had this dorky hat pulled down low over his head. Then she came out; her blond hair was gone, so I knew it was a wig. Now her hair was all short and black, and she was wearing a red blazer. I wondered if they were going to a costume party—” Mr. Levine swallowed, looked like he was going to throw up.