4th of July

Chapter 108

AS WE HEADED TO Cat’s house, Martha jumped around from backseat to front, barking like a fool. And when I parked in the driveway, she leaped through the car’s open window and ran up to the front door, where she stood wagging her tail and singing in a high key.

“Be cool, Boo,” I said. “Show a little restraint.”

I jiggled the key in the lock and opened the front door; Martha trotted inside.

I called Joe and left him a message: “Hey, Molinari, I’m at Cat’s house. Call when you can.” Then I left a message for Carolee, telling her that she and Allison could stand down from pig-sitting detail.

I spent the day thinking about the Half Moon Bay murders while I cleaned up around the house. I cooked up some spaghetti and canned baby peas for dinner, making a mental note to do some grocery shopping in the morning.

Then I brought my laptop into my nieces’ room and set it up on their shelf of a desk. I noticed that the sweet potato vines had sent another couple inches across the windowsill, but the notes Joe and I had tacked up on the girls’ corkboard were unchanged.

Our little scribblings detailing the circumstances and the savagery done to the Whittakers, Daltrys, Sarduccis, and O’Malleys still led nowhere. And of course my lone John Doe remained pinned to the wall.

I booted up my laptop and went into the FBI’s VICAP database. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a national Web site with one purpose: to help law enforcement agents link up scattered bits of intel related to serial homicides. The site had a kick-ass search engine, and new information was always being plugged in by cops around the country.

Now I typed in key words that might make the tumblers spin, some answers fall into place.

I tried them all: whippings administered cum-mortem, couples killed in bed, and of course slashed throats, which sent up a storm of information. Too much.

Hours passed, and my vision started to blur, so I put the computer on “hibernate” and dropped down onto one of my nieces’ small beds to rest for a few minutes.

When I woke up, it was pitch-black outside. It felt as though something had awoken me. A slight noise that didn’t belong. According to the time flashing on the kids’ VCR, it was 2:17, and I had a prickly sense that I couldn’t nail down, as if I were being watched.

I blinked in the blackness and saw a red blur shoot across my vision. It was the afterimage of that red Porsche and it called up snatches of the disturbing scenes I’d had with Agnew. The set-to at the Cormorant and the one at Keith’s garage. The near collision on the road.

I was still thinking about Agnew. It was the only thing that explained the sensation of being watched.

I was about to get up and go to my room for what remained of the night when a series of hard pops and the sound of splintering glass shattered the still night air.

Shards of the window fell all around me.

Gun! Gun! Where the hell was my gun?