‘There was no rape,’ Sam said. ‘Look at me, Grace.’
She looked into his eyes.
‘I don’t believe that any of this is about sex,’ he said.
About gratification of a different kind, he thought, but chose not to say.
‘So it’s power.’ She paused. ‘I think I can fight that a little more easily.’
‘We can fight it,’ Sam said.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
M
ildred arrived at the house on the island at eight fifteen Tuesday morning.
The blue Toyota and Samuel’s car were both there, parked outside, which was unusual in two ways, Mildred thought, since Samuel generally went to work much earlier, and when he was home he parked his car in the garage.
Though by the sounds of it, they’d had themselves quite a time yesterday.
Which had taken a little of the stuffing and a lot of the ease out of her too.
Hearing that
he
was still alive.
The one who’d nearly ended her life, and taken Joshua, and killed at least three people.
She thought of pushing the doorbell, then decided to use her key, because maybe they’d had a bad night, same as she had, and maybe they were sleeping late.
She knew, as soon as she was inside, that something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Joshua was crying and Woody was barking from someplace in the house, when by rights he ought to be skittering around her in the hallway.
Other than that, there was silence.
The wrong kind of silence, Mildred thought.
‘Grace?’ she called.
Received no reply.
‘Samuel?’
Nothing.
Something
wrong
here.
Joshua’s crying was coming from above.
Mildred moved quietly but quickly up the staircase, her heart thumping uncomfortably, her palms sticky, not letting herself think, first step only to get to that little boy.
He was alone in his nursery, standing up inside his crib, holding on to the rails, all damp and upset, his beautiful dark eyes drowning in tears.
‘Sweet child,’ Mildred said and plucked him up in her arms.
He was hot from distress, his diaper wet and soiled, his wailing turning to screaming as he tried to express his fearful isolation to her, and she held him close and did what she could to soothe him.
‘There, there,’ she told him softly, crooning against his warm ear. ‘I’ve got you now, I’ve got you.’
She steeled herself.
Went to the next room, knocked on the door and then, readying herself to spin the little boy right around if something
terrible
was in there, she opened it.
Nothing terrible, except that the Beckets’ bed had not been slept in.
‘There, there,’ she said again to Joshua.
She hugged him close as she took a swift tour of the rest of the small house, checking the bathroom and the bedroom that had been Cathy’s, then heading back downstairs again, going out to the deck, then looking in at the den and the spotless kitchen and the lanai.
Woody was in Grace’s office, shut in, and he was mightily upset too, had wet the rug in there, and his noises were shrill and strange, as if he was trying to tell her something.
‘Oh, my,’ Mildred said.
And went to the telephone to raise the alarm.
ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
S
am had been putting it all together, in his mind for the most part, not so much to spare Grace as to keep his thought processes from
them
if they were listening, and he’d told her that much, because what difference could that possibly make to their situation?
‘I’m trying to work out some stuff, Gracie,’ he’d said a while ago, ‘but I’m not saying it out loud.’
‘Fine with me,’ she’d said, understanding.
He reached down to the shackle on his ankle, tried again to see any way of releasing it, knew it was hopeless, gave another hard yank on the chain, then another mightier one and gave it up again.
‘Gotta keep trying.’ He smiled at her, shifted and stretched out his free leg again, pressed his toes against hers.
‘I’m OK, you know,’ she said. ‘You go on thinking, and I’ll just watch you.’
‘Not looking my best right now,’ Sam said.
No matter what he’d said about their nakedness, he found that he hated it almost more than anything, and Grace was being brave, and she was strong, but seeing her this way, supposing that their intent was to humiliate, to debase, he knew that if Dooley were in his grasp right now, he might not be able to stop himself from killing him.
Though it was hard to fathom which of them was more wicked: the man with a prison record, who’d been so open about that, so fucking
benevolent
to Cathy; or the bitch with her migraines and sick mother.
‘You’re always the best sight in the world to my eyes,’ Grace told him.
‘Joshua aside,’ Sam said.
‘About equal,’ she said.
‘Mind if I sit up again,’ he asked her, because it was good to touch, but it was uncomfortable, and it was easier for him to think properly when he was sitting, knees bent, hunched over a little.
‘No problem,’ Grace said, and withdrew her foot, sat up the same way.
Some things were becoming clearer to Sam. The domed plastic dish could have been what Martinez had hit on when they’d been in Christou’s restaurant, a monster version of the kind of thing sometimes used to display desserts or cheeses. Large tanks were often used in upscale seafood restaurants to let customers choose their own dinner. And even if the Resslers’ dumping ground had been a sculptor’s kiln, that was still a goddamned oven, if you wanted to look at it that way.
All restaurant-related, at a stretch. Part of their game – they’d been right about that much, at least. The Christous and their fish tank probably chosen with as much care as any of the victims. The art connections just more game-playing.
So what did they have in mind for the Beckets?
‘They’re going to think this is Jerome, aren’t they?’ Grace said abruptly.
Sam knew she was right, that the squad might still be heading in pointless directions, wasting valuable time – and
time
was something he’d lost track of, and it had to be Tuesday, though how far into the day he couldn’t guess.
‘They won’t think it once Cathy tells them about the dinner,’ he said.
If Cathy was free to tell them.
He did not say that, knew Grace had to be thinking it anyway.
He tried controlling his thoughts again, wondered when
they
would come here, if there might be some way to persuade them to make do with him, to let Grace go for the sake of their son or even Cathy. None of the other couples had had dependent children, and maybe, if even a fraction of the kindness that Dooley and Simone had seemed to show Cathy over the months had been genuine, then maybe he could find a way to spare Grace.
He knew how improbable that was.
He also knew that he and Grace were not the only ones now who would ultimately be able to identify the killers.
If Cathy didn’t know yet that they’d been taken, if she had not been able to let Alvarez and Riley know about last night’s dinner, if she was not already under protection, then their daughter was in such danger again, and it was too much.
He looked at his wife, saw pain in her eyes, tautness in her jaw, knew she was thinking about Cathy too.
‘She’ll be OK,’ he told her, his voice husky.
‘Keep telling me that,’ she said.
ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
W
ithin an hour of Mildred having called David, everyone was on it. The Couples squad, the whole unit.
‘Is this Cooper?’ Alvarez was the first to voice it. ‘Could this all have been down to him? All the homicides?’
It was a crazy thought, yet suddenly it seemed the most obvious proposition of all. Cal the Hater had survived the Atlantic and had crept back into Miami Beach to play a weird and inexplicable new killing game.
‘I don’t buy it,’ Riley said. ‘Cooper’s big thing was race hate.’
They’d all learned a lot about the man from his writings.
The Epistle of Cal the Hater
, a long series of ramblings in a number of exercise books found in Cooper’s last hiding place, had been read by everyone involved in the case and was likely to become study material, long-term, for student profilers.
‘He hated Sam and Grace, too,’ Mary Cutter pointed out.
‘So what?’ Riley said, sceptically. ‘One happy couple turned him into the Couples Slayer?’
‘I’ve heard wilder theories,’ Alvarez said.
And it was, right this minute, the best and only one that did make sense.
Jerome Cooper was wanted all over again, this time as prime suspect in the killings of six people.
And for the suspected abduction of Sam and Grace Becket.
ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE
D
avid thought he might lose his mind.
This time, he might
really
lose it.
He’d managed the first call, the crucial one, to Sergeant Alvarez, because Sam had told him the sergeant was working the case with Riley in his absence, and because he knew Sam thought Alvarez was a good man and a fine cop.
And Alvarez had taken the information on board: that Sam and Grace were missing and had left their beloved eighteen-month-old son alone in the house, which he knew, almost as well as Sam’s father and Mildred Bleeker, they would never, under any circumstances, have done.
Unless something very bad had happened.
Unless someone had forced them to.
And the Beckets were a happy couple.
Perhaps in the mind of this killer,
the
couple.
So Alvarez had taken David seriously, had asked if he or any of the family had seen Sam or Grace since their return, and David said that the last he and Mildred had seen of them was when they’d picked up Joshua and Woody yesterday, and he knew that after that, Sam had gone to visit Martinez, but then they’d all agreed to leave them to rest after the traumatic final hours of their cruise.
‘Do you know what they did for dinner last night?’ Alvarez had asked.
Asking it casually, but thinking of the other couples.
‘I have no idea,’ David had told him. ‘Probably something simple. We’d shopped for a few basics, put them in their refrigerator.’
Alvarez had offered to send someone over for support.
‘No, thank you, Sergeant,’ David had told him. ‘I’m not alone, and I’d sooner you didn’t waste manpower babysitting me.’
Alvarez had told him to stay put in Golden Beach with Joshua and Mildred, had told him that as of now Sam and Grace’s house was a crime scene, so there was no point any of the family going over there.
‘You have to leave this to us,’ Alvarez had said. ‘I know how incredibly tough that’s going to be, Dr Becket, but we’re going to get them back, believe me.’
‘So you really think this is Cooper again?’ David had said.
‘I think it’s too big a coincidence for him not to be involved,’ the sergeant had said. ‘We’ll be looking at every option, but Cooper’s our prime suspect.’
David wasn’t sure how he’d managed not to cry out with pain before and after he’d put the phone down, but his little grandson was in the house, poor child who’d suffered at Jerome Cooper’s hands once before. Bad enough that he’d been alone and frightened for heaven knew how many hours before Mildred had found him this morning – David was not going to do anything more to distress Joshua, so he kept his pain locked down.
But if anything happened to Sam and Grace . . .
It was Mildred who made him call Saul.
He’d been putting it off, hoping to be able to spare both his younger son and poor Cathy more suffering, praying that this would turn out to be some impossible mistake, that they’d return any minute, guilt-wracked for leaving Joshua, but unharmed.
Impossible was the word for it. He knew that all too well.
‘If you don’t call Saul,’ Mildred said to him at ten thirty-five, ‘I will.’
‘You will not do any such thing,’ David said.
‘And you can put on your fierce old man snarl and speak to me any way you want,’ Mildred said, ‘but Saul and Cathy have the right to know, besides which it’ll help you to have them close by.’
‘I’m doing all right,’ he said. ‘I have you here.’
They seldom touched – these two ‘elderly housemates’, as Mildred had once described them to Grace – but now she came and sat beside the doctor on the beaten-up sofa that had been there for over thirty-five years, and put her arm around him.
‘I am so sorry for your pain,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ David said. ‘Don’t start me off, please.’
‘Please call Saul,’ she said. ‘If he finds out another way, he’ll be mad, and worse, he’ll be hurt.’
So David made the call.
‘I don’t want you to panic,’ he said.
‘Dad, what’s wrong?’
David filled him in, heard his son’s struggle for composure.
‘Did you talk to them last night?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Saul said, ‘but Cathy saw them.’
He told his father about the dinner that Dooley and Simone had made for Sam and Grace, about how kind they’d been when Cathy had told them about the lousy end of the cruise and about how exhausted her parents were.
Something triggered in David’s mind.
Something that Sam had told him about the homicides.
‘Dad? Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘I need to speak to Cathy,’ David said.
‘She isn’t here,’ Saul said.
New fear stabbed at David. ‘Have you seen her this morning?’
‘I saw her,’ Saul said. ‘She was fine, you don’t have to worry about her. She went running.’
‘She didn’t go to work?’
Mildred had left the room, but now she was back in the doorway, alarmed by the expression on his face, the intensity of his eyes, the hawk nose seeming to jut more sharply as he listened.