She opened the single drawer on the nightstand, hoping to find a handgun. No luck.
Still certain that her only hope of safety lay in movement, that crawling into a hole and hiding should always be the strategy of last resort, Chyna had gone around to the other side of the king-size bed before she quite realized that she had taken a first step. In front of the bathroom door, the carpet was badly stained.
Grimacing, she went to the second nightstand and eased open the drawer. In the mortal fall of light, she discovered a pair of reading glasses with yellow reflections in the half-moon lenses, a paperback men’s adventure novel, a box of Kleenex, a tube of lip balm, but no weapon.
As she closed the drawer, she smelled burned gunpowder underlying the hot-copper stench of fresh blood.
She was familiar with that odor. Over the years, more than a few of her mother’s friends either had used guns to get what they wanted or had been at least fascinated by them.
Chyna had heard no shots. The intruder evidently had a weapon with a sound suppressor.
Water continued to cascade into the shower beyond the door. That susurrous splash, though soft and soothing under other circumstances, now abraded her nerves as effectively as the whine of a dentist’s drill.
She was sure that the intruder wasn’t in the bathroom. His work here was done. He was busy elsewhere in the house.
Right this minute she was not as frightened of the man himself as she was of discovering exactly what he had done. But the choice before her was the essence of the entire human agony: not knowing was ultimately worse than knowing.
At last she pushed open the door. Squinting, she entered the fluorescent glare.
The roomy bath featured yellow and white ceramic tile. On the walls at chair-rail height and around the edges of the vanity and lavatory counters ran a decorative tile band of daffodils and green leaves. She had expected more blood.
Paul Templeton was propped on the toilet in his blue pajamas. Lengths of wide strapping tape across his lap fixed him to the bowl. More tape encircled both his chest and the toilet tank, holding him upright.
Through the semitransparent bands of tape, three separate bullet wounds were visible in his chest. There might have been more than three. She didn’t care to look for them and had no need to know. He appeared to have died instantly, most likely in his sleep, and to have been dead before he was brought into the bathroom.
Grief welled in her, black and cold. Survival meant repressing it at all costs, and surviving was the thing that she did best.
A collar of strapping tape around Paul’s neck became a leash that tethered him to a hand-towel rack on the wall behind the toilet. The purpose was to prevent his head from falling forward onto his chest and to direct his dead gaze toward the shower. His eyelids were taped open, and in his right eye was a starburst hemorrhage.
Shuddering, Chyna looked away from him.
Although the intruder had needed to kill Paul in his sleep to establish control of the house quickly, here he had been fantasizing that the husband was being forced to watch the atrocities committed against the wife.
This was a classic tableau, a favorite of those sociopaths who took delight in performing for their victims. They actually seemed to believe that for a while the recently dead could still see, still hear, and were thus capable of admiring the bold antics and posing of a tormentor who feared neither man nor God. Textbooks described the delusion. In one of her aberrant-psychology classes at UCSF, a speaker from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Section had given them more graphic descriptions of such scenes than any textbooks could provide.
Firsthand, however, the impact of this brutality was worse than words could convey. Almost paralyzing. Chyna’s legs felt heavy and stiff. The tingling in her hands was incipient numbness.
Sarah Templeton was in the stall shower, which was separate from the tub. Although the glass door was closed—and frosted—Chyna was able to see a faint, vaguely pinkish shape huddled on the shower floor.