“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you feel their ghosts or something, their life force?” Or dead force, as the case might be.
“No, I can’t.”
“Then if they aren’t dead, I’m the only one that knows they’re on his hit list.” Bile rumbled into her throat. “And if they aren’t dead, I’m the only one who can save them.”
“I’m not even sure you can save yourself, Max.”
She could. By killing Bud Traynor.
*
Cameron’s murderers. Scum of the earth. Worthless excuses for human beings.
Killing Bud would save them, but did she want to save them? No. She wanted them to die. She wanted Bud to die more. In the early morning hours of a September day, three months ago, after Wendy’s Closet Dream, she’d made a sacred vow to Wendy. Bud would pay, no matter what it took. Now she would make him pay for what he’d done to Cameron.
Max dialed Witt’s cell number. She’d promised him she wouldn’t go after Bud. She didn’t want a lie to stand between them. The ring sounded like a refrain of guilty, guilty, guilty. She wasn’t sure what she’d say when he answered.
“Long here.” The tinny sounds of street traffic, the buzz of nearby conversation, and car horns bleating muted his voice.
“Where are you?”
“San Francisco.”
Her heart stopped beating. Actually it skipped a beat or two, then kicked back into gear with ferocity. He’d found out about Scarface. “Why?” she asked to confirm.
“Already know why, doncha, Max.”
Right, cops weren’t stupid, especially not Witt. But he couldn’t think that, could he? “I didn’t do it.”
“Christ,” he swore over the bark of a male shout in his vicinity, and when he went on, frost entered his tone. “Didn’t cross my mind. I know you better.” The implication being that she should have known him better. “Figured you had another of your visions.”
Worse. She had Bud Traynor’s phone call in the middle of the night. Her eyes ached, but crying wasn’t an option, not with frustration nor self-pity. “I need help, don’t I?”
“Right now,” he paused, his breath picking up pace. She imagined him walking away from nearby cops, from the crime scene he’d obviously invited himself to. “They’re of two minds. One, ya wanna get caught when it’s all over. Two, someone else wants ya caught.”
Hope flared. “So they think someone’s framing me?”
“Not ruling it out.”
“Thank God,” she murmured on the out-breath.
“They’ll wanna interview you.”
“Question me?” That sounded worse than if they only wanted a talk. Talk was friendly, interview was ominous.
“I’ll pick you up.” Then, after the briefest of pauses that didn’t give her a chance to answer, he added, “You still at home?”
“I told you I wouldn’t leave.” But she’d been planning on it, and she couldn’t allow him smack dab in the middle of her plans now. “But—”
“No buts. You don’t have an alibi for last night.”
“I was at home in bed.”
“Can’t prove it.”
“They can’t prove I wasn’t.”
He sighed amid a faint thump, thump, thump. Jeez, was he banging his head against a wall? “You’re with me when the third one gets whacked, no question—”
“Third one? What about the second?” She was getting a really bad feeling here.
After a dangerous silence, filled by the shushing of car tires on the road, indistinguishable background voices, and the bad connection, he blew her last shred of hope to smithereens. “Found the second one this morning just before seven. Thought that’s what you were calling about.”
“Shit.” Shit, shit. “I was calling about the first. Which one did they find this time?”
“Tattoo markings.”
They’d have no trouble connecting him to her by the snake on his arm. In the statement she’d given from her hospital bed, she’d been exceptionally detailed about the tattoo. “When did it happen?”
“Killed last night between ten and two.”
“How?” she fired back.
“Gunshot.”
Why hadn’t Bud called her after that first death? Did that mean he’d done all three in the same night with one still left to be unearthed? “What did they find on him?”
Uncannily, Witt understood her thought processes, answering her abbreviated questions to the letter. “Cuff links on his chest.” A car honked close to him. “How’d you lose that stuff, Max?”
“Bud stole them from my apartment while we were in Michigan.” Should she tell him about the gun, too? Nah, Cameron said he had that fixed.
Witt muttered a curse she couldn’t make out. “Also found a newspaper clipping covering your husband’s murder shoved in the front pocket of his jeans.”
Max closed her eyes, took in a deep breath and held it so long, spots swam behind her lids. Bud had tightened the net around her. There’d be no mistake to whom the cuff links, watch, and stick pin had belonged.