her back, but she pulled free. Tommy, Savich, and Sherlock were
standing in a near circle staring down at the pale-green linoleum
floor. Adam rose slowly.
And suddenly Becca could see her.
Chapter 1 7
The woman had no face. Her head looked like a bowl filled with
smashed bone, flesh, and teeth. He’d struck her hard, viciously, repeatedly.
There were two broken teeth on the floor beside the
woman’s head. There was dried blood everywhere, congealed and
black on her face and on the worn linoleum, streaks of blood, like
lightning bolts, down the white wall. Her hair was matted to her
head, blood-soaked dark clumps falling away onto the floor. And
there was dirt mixed in with the dried bloody hair.
“She’s young,” she heard a man say, his voice low, calm, detached,
but underlying that voice was a thick layer of fury. “Jesus, too
young. It’s Linda Cartwright, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “He killed her right here in the kitchen.”
Linda Cartwright lay on her back on the floor wearing a ratty
old chenille bathrobe that had been washed so many times it was
nearly white rather than pink, except for the dirt that clung to the
robe, dirt everywhere, even on her feet, which were bare, her toenails
painted a bright, happy red. Becca eased closer. It was real, it
was horrifyingly real, in front of her, and the woman was dead.
“Oh, God. Oh God, no, no.”
She watched Savich bend down and unpin a note that was fastened
to the front of Linda Cartwright’s bathrobe. She saw for the
first time that the woman was heavy, just as Savich had read off her
driver’s license. “Don’t let Becca come in here,” he said to Sherlock,
not looking up as he read the note. “This is too much. Make sure
she stays outside.”
“I’m already here,” Becca said, swallowing again and again
against the nausea in her stomach, the vomit rising in her throat.
“What is that note?”
“Becca–”
It was Adam and he was turning toward her. She put up her
hands. “What is that note?” she asked again. “Read it, please.”
Savich paused, then read slowly, his voice firm and clear:
“Hey, Rebecca, you can call her Gleason. Since she didn’t look
like a dog, I had to smash her up a bit. Now she does. A dead dog.
She’s nice and fat, though, just like Gleason, and that’s good. You
killed her. You and no one else. Give her a good wake. This is all for
you, Rebecca. I’ll see you soon and it’ll be you and me, from then to
eternity.
Your Boyfriend.
“He wrote it in black ink, a ballpoint,” Savich said, his voice flat,
emotionless, as he carefully eased the paper into a plastic bag he
pulled out of his pants pocket and closed the zipper. “It’s just a
plain sheet of paper torn out of a notebook. Nothing at all unique
about it.”
“Do you think he’s out of control?” Sherlock said to no one in
particular. Her face was pale, the horror clear in her eyes.
“No,” Adam said. “I don’t think so. I think he’s really enjoying
himself. I think at last he’s discovering who he really is and what he
really likes. I can practically hear him thinking,’I want to scare Rebecca
shitless, prove to her I’m so bad that when I call her again I
won’t hear any more cockiness from her. No, I’ll hear fear in her
voice, helplessness. Now, what can I do to really make this happen?’
” Adam paused a moment, then said, “And so he decided to
kill Linda Cartwright and make her into his fictional dog.”
“Yeah “Tommy said, “I think Adam is right. There’s nothing but
control here. Too damned much of it.”
“I need to make some calls,” Savich said, but he didn’t move, just
stared down at the note and at what had been Linda Cartwright.
There was silence in the small, bright kitchen and the harsh
breathing of six men and two women, one of them drawing hard
on a pipe that wasn’t lit. Then Becca broke free, ran out the back
door, and fell to her knees, vomiting until her body was jerking and