Split Second - Catherine Coulter [95]
“Yeah, lots of it. Maybe it scared me a little, and then she’d shrug and look at me like she was—” He closed his eyes again—from the pain or the image?
“Like she was picturing you with catsup?”
That snapped Comafield’s eyes right open. “No, you bastard!” He swallowed, and Savich knew the morphine was slurring his brain as well as his speech. “Well, maybe, but I knew she’d never hurt me. Do you know, after her kills, she’d come back to our hotel and she’d always be flying high? She’d want sex and booze, and she’d want to dance and hoot. You know what else she did? She always dressed up like the woman she’d just killed. She liked to play that role as well as play the lead, she’d say. She had all these wigs, and she’d put on the one most like her woman-of-the-hour, she called them. And she’d sometimes let me play the kill and she’d—” His voice faltered.
“Yes?”
“—pretend to strangle me with the wire. But she never really hurt me—” His voice was fading.
“Bruce, were you her acolyte?”
Comafield’s eyes focused on Savich’s face. “Her acolyte? That sounds like I wore a black robe and chanted. No, you’ve got it all wrong, damn you. I didn’t wear robes and chant Latin. I was her rock; I tethered her to the world so she wouldn’t fly off the planet. She needed me. She loved me.”
“Did you love her?’
Comafield whispered, “Oh, yes. She could do what I never could. She was a whirlwind, always racing to catch her daddy. She was doing a countdown. I asked her how many women she had to kill to catch up to her daddy, and she said one hundred. She never told me how she came up with that number.
“Now it doesn’t matter. I won’t ever see her again.” His eyes were suddenly hard on Savich’s face. He whispered, “At least I know she’ll kill you. Wherever she was going, it’s off now, because she’s coming to kill you. Sweet Jesus, I’m going to die and I’ll never see her again.”
“You’re not going to die, Bruce.”
“Yes,” Comafield said very quietly, his voice nearly singsong with the morphine. “I know I am. I feel it. I wish I could see Kirsten just one more time, but I know I can’t.”
And Bruce Comafield turned his head away.
Savich went back to Sherlock’s room, ordered her to stop moving around and lie still, no arguing, and listen. Then he said to her, Coop, and Lucy, “Let me tell you about a very strange and sad couple.”
CHAPTER 47
They spoke to Mr. Ricky Levine, skinny and tall, standing at attention behind the small reception counter of Handler’s Inn. Savich thought he could still be in high school, with the acne on his chin, his belt pulled tight to keep his tan uniform pants up. He was so nervous his hands shook when they introduced themselves. He kept chewing on his lower lip, and had a hard time meeting their eyes. No, he told them, no, really, he didn’t know a Mr. Bruce Comafield. He’d remember a dude saddled with a name like that. He offered to let them see that he wasn’t registered in the computer.
Lucy sidled up to him, all friendly face and sweet smile, so he wouldn’t drop over in a dead faint with Savich and Coop standing over him, that or start babbling nonsense.
“Mr. Levine, who did you give room one-fifty-one to late Monday night?”
Mr. Levine’s nervous fingers worked the computer keyboard. “Here it is—Mr. Cane. He checked in, said his wife was joining him later. Cane—Comafield. I see, that’s pretty close. Well, he seemed like a nice guy—young, you know? Yuppie-looking, had a gold credit card, I saw it in his wallet, even though he used cash to pay for the first night. I remember I asked him how long he was going to stay, and he said two, maybe three, days.”
“How late was it Monday night when he got here?”
“Wow, it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.”
Lucy nodded. So he and Kirsten had driven directly here from New York City. And she started partying the very next night.
Coop kept his mental fingers crossed. “Does the Handler have a policy of getting the license plate number?”
“Yes, we do, but I always go check myself, since guests never know. Mr. Cane drove