Spitting Devil (5 page)

“That’s ridiculous. She probably misplaced them. Or they’re at the dry cleaner. I can’t find my favorite pair of jeans, but that doesn’t mean a killer stole them.”

“Each of the victims was also dabbed with perfume. It’s your wife’s perfume. I recognized it when I met her.”

“I’m sure lots of women wear her fragrance.”

“Did you know that a knife is missing from your kitchen?” Stride asked. “A large carving knife?”

“No.”

“Your wife says she noticed it missing around the time of the first murder.”

“She never mentioned it.”

“You see the problem we’re having, don’t you, Mr. Malville?” Stride asked. “We’re searching your car right now. Soon we’ll search your house and your office. Are we going to find that knife?”

Malville was silent.

“Speaking of your car,” Stride added, “your wife checked the mileage on your odometer before she went to bed the night before last. That was the night that Sherry Morton was killed.”

“So?”

“So she checked the car in the morning, and it had been driven thirty miles overnight.”

“What?”

“Thirty miles happens to be almost the exact round trip distance between your house and Sherry Morton’s apartment.”

“You’re lying. I don’t believe it. Alison didn’t say anything like that.”

Stride and Maggie stared at him, letting the truth sink into his mind.

“Look at the evidence, Mr. Malville,” Stride went on. “Your wife’s clothes go missing and wind up on the bodies of three dead women. A knife goes missing from inside your house. Your car is driven thirty miles on the night of one of the murders. Can you think of any explanation for what we’ve found? Anything that doesn’t point to you as the man who killed these women?”

Malville grimaced. “I can think of one possibility, but I must be wrong.”

“What is it?” Stride asked.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s no other explanation that makes sense. Alison must have killed those women herself.”

*

They let Alison go before midnight.

She picked up Evan, who was already asleep, at her sister’s house, and she deposited him in her car without waking him up. Evan could sleep like the dead. She drove home, where the silence inside their house was like a cathedral. She knew what to expect in the morning. The police would come. They would paw through every inch of her house, touch her things, sweep through their personal lives, and carry away their secrets. Tonight, for one more night, she could be alone. For the first time in weeks, she could feel safe.

Without Michael.

She draped Evan across his bed and covered him, knowing he would kick off the blankets overnight. She watched her son sleeping and wondered how she would explain it to him. What his father had done. What the future held for the two of them. She realized she didn’t have any answers.

Alison undressed in her bedroom and put on her silk robe. She went downstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of white wine to settle her nerves. She took it into the formal dining room and sat at the end of the oak table, as if she were hosting a party for a crowd of invisible guests. She set her wine on a coaster made of red-and-black colored glass, but she left it untouched. As she blinked, tears swelled out of her eyes.

She’d hoped she would feel better when it was done, but she didn’t. Guilt made her chest tight. Acid traced a fiery line up her throat. Under her robe, she felt the ants crawling all over her skin. They hadn’t left. They were still swarming in the ceiling.

What if Michael was right? What if she was insane?

“Go away!” she screamed at the empty room. “Do you hear me? Leave me alone!”

She grabbed her wine glass and threw it at the far wall. Sauvignon blanc spilled across the table like a river. The glass struck the wall and shattered in a spray of razor-like shards. Some of the pieces landed on the table and glittered like diamonds under the light of the chandelier. She stared in disbelief at what she’d done, tasting blood in her mouth as she bit her lower lip between her teeth.

She stood up, tipping the chair backward. She put both hands flat on the dining room table and closed her eyes, feeling herself breathe in and out. She knew what she had to do. Leave. Get away. Take Evan and go. She realized now that her hallucinations had nothing to do with herself or with Michael. It was the house they’d built. The house was haunting her. The house was evil. It had crept inside her husband’s brain and made him into a killer. It had begun to eat away her own sanity.

Get away.

She fled from the dining room without picking up the chair or attending to the broken glass. In the kitchen, she stood stiffly, like a statue, thinking about what she had to pack. She could stuff her entire life in a single suitcase, and it would still be half-empty. Suddenly, there was almost nothing from this place that she wanted to remember or preserve. She didn’t want the photographs on the mantle above the fireplace. She didn’t want the rings, the necklaces, the bracelets. She didn’t even want her clothes, because when she thought about them, she saw the faces of the dead women dressed in her own wardrobe. She would rather let a charity cart it all away.

She had no idea when she’d return, if ever. She would leave the house to the police. Without Michael, there was nothing here for her anyway. The life she’d known was gone, and all she could do was cut the threads that held her here and start over.

Her kitchen.

If she would miss anything, it would be the time they had spent here on holidays, with the smells of good food suffusing the air. All of them together. Evan reading his comic books. Michael typing on his laptop. Alison, rubbing spices on the roast and chopping up vegetables with an expert hand. She could dice an onion with a knife into perfect translucent cubes.

The knife.

Alison stared in disbelief at the kitchen counter. The butcher block for their knives sat at an angle to the sink, the way it always did. Each slot was filled. A black handle jutted out of the empty gash that had taunted her for weeks. None of the knives was missing. The carving knife that had disappeared was back again, as if it had never vanished, never cut into the bodies of three innocent women.

She began to doubt herself. Had it ever been gone? Had she imagined the missing knife?

What was happening to her?

Alison stretched out her hand with her fingers curled like a claw as she approached the counter. She hardly dared to touch the knife, as if it would disappear when she reached for it. But the handle was real and solid. She drew it out slowly, and as she hoisted the blade in the air, her mouth curled into an “O” of horror. The honed silver was covered over and crusted in streaks of dry crimson. It was a killing machine, bloody from its latest butchery.

“Mom?”

Alison spun in shock, expecting Michael behind her. She clutched the knife in front of her chest to protect herself. Instead, she saw Evan at the bottom of the steps, studying her with fear in his big eyes. She cried and let the knife fall from her fingers. It clattered to the floor.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, running to her son and sinking to her knees. She gathered him up in her arms and smothered him with kisses. “Oh, Evan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Evan glanced at the vacant hallway upstairs, where they could see the closed door of his bedroom. His face was grave and mature. He leaned into his mother and whispered in Alison’s ear.

“It’s the spitting devil,” he told her. “He’s here.”

*

Alison stroked Evan’s hair as she held him. “Don’t worry, honey, you just had a nightmare. You’re safe with me now.”

Her son shook his head firmly. “It’s not a dream. He’s real.”

“Did you read something in one of your comic books? Were you looking at them in bed again? I told you not to do that.”

“I’ve seen him,” Evan insisted. “He lives in my closet.”

Alison stared at her son in confusion. “Evan, sweetheart, what are you talking about?”

“He walks around at night,” the boy said. “I hear him coughing sometimes. I pretend to be asleep, but I see him in my room when he comes and goes.”

“Who?”

“The spitting devil.”

“Evan, I’ve told you not to make up stories like that. It’s creepy. You’re scaring me.”

“No, Mom, listen.” The boy cupped a hand over her ear and whispered again. “I think he wants to kill us.”

Alison stiffened with dismay. Cold needles traveled up her skin. “Kill us? Don’t talk that way. Why would you say something like that?”

“I’ve seen him with a knife,” Evan said.

Alison rose slowly off her knees, like a ghost coming out of a grave, and spoke to her son in a calm, soft voice. “You have to be honest with me now, Evan. You can’t lie or pretend, okay? This is very important. Did you really see a man with a knife in this house?”

“I told you. He lives in my closet.”

She stared at the door to Evan’s bedroom above her and tried to bridge the gap between what was real and what was not. Her son had a vivid imagination, fed by his voracious appetite for fantasy books. It was also possible that Evan had seen Michael carrying a knife out of the house and had made up a fairy tale to explain away his father’s behavior. It was a child’s defense mechanism for something he knew was wrong.

She would have been certain that the spitting devil in Evan’s closet was nothing but a bad dream if it weren’t for one thing.

The ants.

The ants living in the ceiling and in her nightmares. Watching her. Tormenting her. Like a million eyes driving her mad.

What if her paranoia was real? What if her brain had conjured the ants to send her a message? The same message over and over. You’re not alone.

“Evan, how long have you been seeing this man?” she murmured.

“I don’t know. Since the weather got cold.”

Since the weather got cold and the women started dying.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“I thought it was my fault he was here.”

Alison didn’t know what to believe. She saw the earnestness in Evan’s face and knew that he believed it. She bent down in front of her son again and gave him a reassuring smile.

“You stay here,” she told him. “I’ll make sure there’s no one in your closet. Okay?”

“Be careful, Mom. Don’t let him spit on you.”

“I won’t.”

Alison put Evan in one of the kitchen chairs and gave him several of his comic books from a stack on top of the refrigerator. She opened the utility closet and removed a heavy silver flashlight that had once belonged to her grandfather. With a weapon and a light in her hand, she climbed the stairs toward the dark second floor. At Evan’s door, she hesitated, but then she turned the knob and crept inside. She shot a cone of light around the dirty space, and the plastic eyes of stuffed bears glistened back at her. She stopped in the middle of the room, listening to the quiet. She inhaled but smelled only the cigarette she’d smoked in the car. Nothing felt out of place.

Evan’s closet door was open by six inches.

Alison opened the door with her foot and tensed. No one jumped out at her. No one spat at her. There were no devils. She examined every inch of the closet floor with the light and saw nothing but Evan’s mess thrown together in small mountains. The man with the knife was only a comic book villain. He wasn’t real.

She was almost sorry. She’d almost hoped it was true.

As Alison turned away, her flashlight beam swept upward and glinted on a small gold ring in the wall. Around it, she saw the outline of a square access panel, and she realized that one of the sliding stairways to their sprawling, unfinished attic was located here in the closet. She flinched at the odd coincidence that her son’s closet, where his spitting devil lived, led upward into space that loomed over the entire house.

It was a spying ground for every other room upstairs. Including her bedroom and her bathroom.

Standing in the closet, uncertain and afraid, Alison realized that something had changed inside her head. The ants were gone. They’d fled. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel them or hear them above her.

Maybe they had finally delivered their message; maybe she’d finally heard what her mind had been screaming at her.

Look upstairs.

She doused the light. In darkness, she tugged the gold ring, anticipating the squeal of the hinges on the access door. Instead, the door opened silently, as if the hinges had been freshly greased. She reached up by feel to unhook the laddered steps, and the steel structure slid smoothly down to the floor, creating a narrow, angled staircase leading to the upper level.

Alison listened again. She heard wind blowing through the peaks of the roof. The tunnel of air flowed onto her face. She put a bare foot on the lowest step, which was metal and cold, and she used her hands on the railings to climb upward. She ascended into blackness. When her torso cleared the hole, the wind became a gale. She shivered as she stepped from the ladder onto the plywood floor.

As she reached for the switch of the flashlight, she froze.

Behind her, someone coughed.

*

“Hemoptysis,” Maggie said to Michael Malville.

“Our guy coughs up microscopic particles of blood,” Stride added.

Malville thumped his chest with his fist. “Do I look sick? I’m a swimmer, for God’s sake. I swim one hundred laps a week. Do you think I could do that if my lungs were so weak I was coughing up blood?”

“No, I don’t,” Stride acknowledged.

“Then let me go. I didn’t do this.”

Stride shook his head. “Unfortunately, Mr. Malville, we finished searching your car, and our technicians discovered the same kind of microscopic blood pattern that we found in the homes of the women who were murdered.”

“That’s not possible.”

Stride pushed a photo across the desk, showing the steering wheel and dashboard of Malville’s car under a luminol spray. The dispersion of tiny blue dots looked like paint shaken from a brush.