The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [167]
She closed her eyes for a moment, attempting to reinvigorate her night vision. The bright bulb, seemingly the only light source, had blinded her, and she wanted to be able to look into the darker recesses around her. Hopefully to gain some clues as to where she was.
Closing her eyes provided a secondary benefit: it focused her senses. She swore she smelled something, a light perfume, more a suggestion than a statement. It was a scent she had smelled before. But where?
When Vail opened her eyes, she looked to her extreme left, where a narrow shelf sat mounted to a bare plywood wall. The space was about eight feet across, the ceiling perhaps eight feet high. It almost had the look of a closet, though slightly larger. She moved her head and looked over her right shoulder. The underside of steps. This was some sort of basement, or dead space beneath a staircase. Dead space for Dead Eyes. The irony was not lost on her.
Also not lost on her were the crime scene photos stolen from her house. Hanging to her right were pictures of the Dead Eyes victims: marked with what appeared to be red lipstick: their names, their identification, their personality—who they were as people—reduced to mere numbers on darkly grained plywood. They were all there, Marci Evers, Noreen O’Regan, Angelina Sarducci, Melanie Hoffman, Sandra Franks, Denise Cranston; and a newspaper photo of Eleanor Linwood, two knives protruding from the wall. Stabbed through the eyes.
Vail now knew where she was: in the killer’s lair. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Tried to block the pain coming from her shoulder joints, which felt as if they were going to snap like the dead twigs she used to crunch beneath her heels in her parent’s yard in Old Westbury. What a far better place to be now.
But her situation was not going to be solved by visualizing better times or reliving the past. She was a spider caught on a web, hung out until the predator could come along and eat her alive.
Her legs, though cuffed at the ankles, were still free to move about. But the tractioning weight on her left knee was substantial. Which hurt worse . . . her shoulders and wrists or her knee . . . it was difficult to say. At the moment, none of that mattered. She had to shut off all pain, all thoughts of defeat.
Visual examination of her surroundings told her there was nothing she could use to her advantage, no walls or stools, boxes or handles for her feet to gain purchase. She would have to use her legs to kick and, hopefully, win her freedom.
Questions flooded her thoughts: Where was she? Down the street from her house or in another state? In the middle of nowhere? She thought of the bank, of the Alvin look-alike, of how there was no tactical team outside backing her up. Yet standing there with her Glock trained on the man’s head, she’d had control, she’d had power. What she would give to be back there.
Because as precarious as it had been, staring down the barrel of a crackhead’s .38 Special, it was nothing compared to this.
BLEDSOE WALKED BACK into the kitchen and joined Robby, who was kneeling beside a forensic technician.
“Anything?” Robby asked.
Bledsoe shook his head. “Nothing of use. There was a struggle in the kitchen. That’s about it. No obvious signs of forced entry.”
“Anything on your end?”
The technician looked up from his toolkit. “About the best news I can give you right now is that there’s no blood. We found a few footprints in the soil outside that don’t match any of your shoes. Sneakers, size nine, Reeboks, if I had to guess.” He stood from his crouch. “Latents galore, but it’ll be a while before we can sort them all out. Sorry. I wish I had more to give you. We may have more later.”
“Later . . .” Bledsoe griped. He walked off with Robby.
“So where does this leave us?”
Bledsoe rubbed tired eyes. “We thought Patrick Farwell was Dead Eyes. Everything pointed to that, even the shit at his place. But he’s dead—”
“Is he?” Robby asked.
“Look, Hernandez, I know it’s late and we’ve been pushed up against the