Last Breath

41

Rawls had his hands full dealing with Steven Gader, whose mindset in the past two hours had changed from reluctant cooperation to indignant defensiveness and finally to outright hysteria. “I didn’t know about the women,” he kept saying. “Jesus, I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t, Mr. Gader,” Rawls said evenly. As Gader’s tone had risen in pitch and intensity, Rawls’s own voice had dropped half an octave and slowed down, as if to compensate. “You didn’t know anything. I hear you.”

“Well, all right. All right. I knew there might be some… funny business. You know, maybe the women weren’t aware, fully aware, that they were being taped. I mean, that was a possibility. A remote possibility.”

“Remote,” Rawls echoed, his voice deepening still further, entering the James Earl Jones range.

“But the other stuff, these killings, it’s news to me. I mean, a complete shock. I never had the slightest… Look, if I had even suspected…”

Rawls said nothing. He believed Gader, actually. But he wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. The man was scum. Let him sweat.

“Maybe I’d better call a lawyer,” Gader finished.

“That’s your right.”

Gader trudged out of the room. Rawls stared after him, then glanced at Brand.

“What a prick,” Brand commented without looking up from Gader’s computer.

Rawls laughed, his first laugh in quite a long while. “Ned, you always know the right thing to say.”

His cell phone chirped. He took the call, and his smile vanished when he heard Morris Walsh’s first words.

“Got good news and bad news.” There was no life in his voice, and no hope. “Which do you want to hear first?”

“Just tell it all.”

“We identified Bluebeard. SWAT just raided his apartment. He was there, but he got away.”

“He’s at large?”

“Afraid so.”

“And the victim?”

“No sign of her.”

“You think he already did her?” Rawls hated that ugly euphemism, did, which stood for everything from consensual sex to rape to homicide, but he couldn’t bring himself to say killed.

On the other end of the line, Walsh sighed. “We don’t know. I had this theory that he holds them for four hours, but… Well, it looks like I was wrong.”

He sounded tired. More than tired. Defeated. As if he had given up. Not a good sign-for him, for the case, or for C.J. Osborn, if she was still alive.

“Possibly not,” Rawls said, trying to give Walsh some encouragement. “He may have stashed her somewhere.”

“And gone home? Maybe. I don’t think so. You know, the four-hour thing was based mainly on the tattoos.”

“The hourglass,” Rawls said.

“But I guess they had a different significance. Our guy is into spiders.”

This was such a non sequitur that Rawls could only echo, “Spiders?”

A grunt from Walsh. “He laid a trap for our SWAT team… or for anybody else who tried to corner him in his lair. Installed the cover of a fluorescent lighting panel on the ceiling of the hallway inside his apartment. But there’s no light fixture behind it. Instead, there’s spiders.”

“How many?” Rawls asked softly.

“A million of the goddamned things, for all I know. The asshole locks himself in his bedroom behind a steel door, then kills the hallway light-he rewired the switch so he could operate it from inside his room-then activates a hydraulic cable that runs through the ceiling. Simple principle-the Plexiglas cover of the lighting panel is spring-loaded, and the cable releases the spring. Cover slides back, spiders fall out.”

“A million of them.”

“Give or take.”

“Venomous spiders?”

“Oh, sure. Probably not normally aggressive, but when they’ve been dumped out of their cage like that…”

“They bite. How bad is it?”

“We’ve got four SWAT members in the hospital, plus another Sheriff’s deputy who got bitten when he reached the scene. Fumigators are spraying the apartment now. Probably have to evacuate the building

… It’s got central air, and some of the spiders may have gotten into the ducts.”

“Nightmare,” Rawls breathed. No wonder the detective sounded beaten.

“Hasn’t been my best day. Or anybody else’s either. Except for the suspect. He got away clean through a secret exit.”

“Take anything?”

“His computer, it looks like. A laptop, obviously. He must own one. There’s a, whatchamacallit, docking station in his bedroom.”

“If he has a mobile connection or he can get access to a phone jack, he can monitor the Web site.”

“And the video feed. I know. I kept it up and running. He knows we’re on to him, but he doesn’t necessarily know we’re aware of the site.”

“Does that help us?”

“Who knows?” Walsh sighed again. “Can’t hurt. Frankly, I’ll take any advantage I can get over this creep. Hold on a sec.”

Rawls heard Walsh talking to somebody in the background, relaying orders in an exhausted voice. He glanced at Brand. “It’s a mess in