The Girls He Adored

81

Pender had been a dog owner most of his life. He liked dogs. Lost the last one, a handsome shepherd named Cassidy, in the divorce-the house he didn't mind losing so much, but he was still bitter about the dog and had steadfastly refused to get another, though he understood perfectly well that he was only punishing himself.

So shooting the Rottweilers would be no cakewalk, either emotionally or physically. Pender was lying on his left side, his right hand under his jacket. Once he'd caught his breath he began drawing the SIG Sauer millimeter by agonizing millimeter, until it was free of the holster but still concealed beneath his coat-most dogs this well trained would have been taught to recognize a weapon and disarm the bearer. Slowly, though his every instinct screamed at him to do the opposite, to protect his underbelly and his manhood by curling up into a fetal ball, he rolled onto his back.

Warning behavior from the dogs-snarls, a display of incisors.

“Good dogs. Aren't you good dogs?” Pender crooned to them in his soulful tenor. Though the muzzle of the SIG pointed to the left, he'd have to begin shooting from right to left, before the dogs on the right side got to his shooting arm. The dogs to the left he figured he could fend off with his left arm until he could swing the gun around. “Calm down, now. Nice and easy. See, I'm not gonna-”

Blam. Blam. Blam. He dropped the first three with head shots, and the other three turned tail and ran whimpering for the kennel. Apparently they weren't that well trained after all, thought Pender, climbing to his feet and mentally thanking SIG Sauer for the dual-action firing mechanism. Then he smelled something burning. He looked down, saw the smoldering bullet holes riddling his new jacket: the blood-spattered fabric had been ignited by the muzzle flash.

After slapping the fire out with his bare hands, Pender raced around the sally port, hurriedly gathering up the ID, receipts, credit cards, scraps of notes, ticket stubs, and business cards that had fallen from his wallet when the dogs hit him, then looked around the sally port, trying to work out his next move.

In one direction, an unlocked gate leading to safety; in the opposite direction, a locked gate leading to Maxwell. Pender knew what the smart move was, but once again he was blinded by his secret vision of the strawberry blonds waiting in the darkness. And even if they were a fantasy, he told himself, Dr. Cogan wasn't. If Pender left now, what was to prevent Maxwell from executing her, then fleeing? He had cash and cunning-how many more would die before they ran him to ground?

With no time to waste, Pender had already wasted precious seconds. He ran toward the inner fence and fired a fourth round into the lock-he figured the element of surprise was pretty much lost anyway. Then he crashed through the gate shoulder first and hurriedly left the blacktop, cutting to his right, into the relative safety of the woods.

The first structure Pender came upon was a weathered shack six feet square. A pumphouse; he could hear the high thin whine of a motor and smell the water in the deep covered well.

He ducked inside and waited, listening. Nothing out there-no barking, shouting, no gunshots, no footsteps. Where the hell is Maxwell? He's not deaf-is he gone? It was tempting to rest there in the cool darkness for a few minutes; instead he closed the door behind him quietly and moved on, following the ridge.

Pender almost missed the house at first. What caught his eye was the dark triangle of the roofline glimpsed from behind through the sweeping, upturned boughs of the firs. It was a dense geometric shape floating high in the trees where everything else was airy grace and flickering light, where the only other straight lines were the soaring verticals of the tree trunks.

He began moving toward the house, walking quietly on his rubber-soled shoes, keeping to the cover of the trees, and came upon the damnedest sight. A rustic-looking wooden chair and a slatted chaise had been placed at forty-five-degree angles to each other, with a three-legged table in the angle between them holding a pitcher of water, two plastic drinking glasses, an ashtray full of unfiltered butts, and a box of pop-up lilac-colored tissues.

Despite the oddness of the setting, Pender recognized the simulacrum of a psychiatrist's office. A good omen, an excellent omen: it almost certainly meant that Dr. Cogan was alive. Or had been, fairly recently. He picked up one of the butts-a Camel-then tossed it back down and followed the path through the woods to the house, a high, narrow dwelling of dark-stained, weatherwarped deal.

He entered through the back door, found himself in the kitchen. Bread, baggies, a knife with damp traces of mayonnaise and mustard on the counter. It looked like someone had packed a lunch here-not long ago, either.

A picnic or outing of some kind? Was that why no one heard the shots?

There were two doors ahead of him, the open door to the hallway and a closed door to the right of the hallway door. Again the vision of the strawberry blonds waiting in a cellar appeared to Pender: apparently his subconscious mind had grasped where the closed door led before his conscious mind could reason it out.

He switched the gun to his left hand, opened the door, felt around for the light switch, started down the open-treaded stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he looked left-laundry room-then turned right, rounded a corner, and came upon the glass-fronted display case containing four shelves, each with three featureless white mannequin heads, all but two wearing wigs of human hair.

Pender groaned softly to see his secret hope, his secret vision, so cruelly, surrealistically parodied. Here were his strawberry blonds-he even recognized a few. That one with the bangs on the second shelf from the bottom, that was Gloria Whitworth, wearing her hair the way she wore it in the photo her roommate snapped a week before she left Reeford. This darker one on the top shelf, with the reddish highlights, that was Donna Hughes. And there on the bottom shelf was Sandra Faircloth-her long straight hair had faded badly in the ten years since she'd disappeared from Eugene, Oregon, shortly after meeting the man of her dreams.

So much for hopes and visions. In a career spent hunting serial killers, many of them of the type known as collectors, Pender had seen far more obscene and gruesome displays. This one was pretty tame in comparison. Why then was he so badly shaken, he wondered? Because he had come to believe in his hopeful vision?

Let that be a lesson to you, Edgar Lee, he told himself. Now get your fat ass out of this house and back down that hill and get some real cops in here, clear-eyed, clearheaded young ones who'll shoot first and have visions later.

Then he remembered that Dr. Cogan might still be alive. He tiptoed back up the stairs, switched off the light, closed the cellar door behind him, sidled around the doorway into the hall. His steps were noiseless, Hush Puppies on hardwood, as he started up the stairs.

When he reached the second-floor landing, Pender heard someone moving in one of the rooms. He tiptoed toward the open doorway, peeked around the jamb just as a woman in a long green dress emerged from an adjoining room and crossed to the bed, her back toward Pender. Her strawberry blond hair was short and curly. Dolores Moon, he thought, taking a step forward.

Miss Miller turned; her green eyes started to widen over the mask, but the surgically repaired lids couldn't go any higher. She tried to scream-Pender closed the gap between them in two strides and clapped his hand over her mask. A disconcerting sensation-there didn't seem to be any nose under there.

“It's all right, I'm with the FBI,” he whispered. “Don't make a sound. Do you understand me?”

A nod. He loosened his grip. She tried to scream again; again he closed his hand over the mask, this time covering both her mouth and the hole where her nose would have been, denying her air. She clawed at his arm, tried to kick him. He bent backward far enough to lift her off the ground and held her dangling there, legs kicking and arms flailing, chest heaving, until her body went limp. He dropped her onto the bed, turned her over.

Please let her be breathing, he thought to himself-he didn't want to have to perform mouth-to-mouth on whatever was under that surgical mask. But the green bodice rose, fell; the silk mask fluttered. And as Pender looked around for something to stuff into her mouth to prevent her from screaming again when she regained consciousness, it occurred to him that he still didn't know whether he'd rescued a victim or captured an accomplice.