Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [32]
Silence was usually a comfortable place for Lydia and Jeffrey. They meshed, wrapped around each other like wicker. But tonight the air between them was charged, electric with desire and fear.
She reached for a cigarette in the small drawer in the table by the chair. She lit it and took a deep drag.
“I thought you quit,” Jeffrey said, disapproval in his voice.
“I can’t quit.”
“Please. You have a stronger will than anyone I know.”
“Fine, then, I don’t want to,” she said stubbornly.
“I fail to see how you can run as much and as far as you do and still suck that poison into your lungs. It’s physically impossible.”
“For me, it’s the same drug.”
“Are you going to explain that?”
“No.”
She wasn’t oblivious to what was between them. She knew what he wanted. She wanted the same thing, more than she admitted to herself. But something powerful held her back—a dark fear dwelled in the pit of her stomach that somehow for her, love and death would be inextricably linked.
“So maybe we should pay a visit to Chief Morrow tomorrow, Lyd. What do you think?”
“Yeah, I guess so. You know he’ll be glad to see me.”
“Because you’re so charming.”
“Right.”
She rose from the chair. He was always surprised by her beauty, amazed by the power of his desire for her. Bathed in the orange light from the fire, she was radiant as she raised her arms above her head and stretched, exposing flat, supple abs as her shirt lifted a bit.
“I’m going to go to bed,” she announced.
He nodded toward the pile of clippings and the information Lydia had printed out from the Internet. “I think I’ll sit up for a while, look over those articles.”
“Good night, Jeffrey.”
“Good night, Lyd.”
chapter eleven
“You can make a murder into art,” Sting and the Police sang from the car radio. The irony was not lost on him but the heat was cranking and his legs were getting cramped. He rubbed his eyes and put the copy of With a Vengeance by Lydia Strong in his lap. The cover was bent and cracked and the pages coming loose from the binding, he’d read it so many times. But he had been looking at the same page for the last hour.
He knew that for many killers, Jed McIntyre included, stalking was half the game. But he hadn’t been enjoying it. He found it boring. He’d been waiting in front of Maria Lopez’s small dilapidated apartment building in the barrio for almost three hours and he was starting to lose his patience. He stared at the plastic Madonna and Child his wife had stuck to his dashboard years ago.
“ ‘Please God,’ ” he said, “ ‘how long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart. How long will my enemy triumph over me?’ ”
He turned off the ignition and was glad for the silence. A moment later, like an answer to his prayer, he saw the man that the whore Maria had taken home leave through the front door, get into his black pickup truck, and speed off. He waited a few minutes, let the adrenaline stream through his veins. Then he donned a pair of surgical gloves and a black ski mask. From a plastic bag on the passenger-side seat he took a terry washcloth that had been soaking in chloroform. He patted his pocket, checking for the scalpel and the picklock he would use to get in the building door.
But when he got to the building, the door had been left ajar so there was no need to pick the lock at all. He walked up the one flight to her apartment, and then knocked lightly on the door, knowing she would assume it was the man who had just left.
He stood to the side.
“Forget something?” she called, and flung the door open carelessly. He grabbed her by the throat, almost lifting her small body off the ground with one arm and shoved the washcloth covered in chloroform over her nose and mouth with the other, before she even had a chance to scream. When he felt her body grow limp, he uncovered her face. But it must not have been for long enough because her eyes fluttered, she saw him, and she started screaming