CHAPTER TWO
“Honey, I talked with him,” Jeff
sighed. He was wheeling the tall recycle bin toward the end of the
driveway. Molly walked alongside him with a Hefty bag full of cans.
She’d put Erin on the school bus five minutes before, and now Jeff
was about to leave for work.
“Obviously, Chris is shaken up,” Jeff
went on, talking over the bin’s squeaky wheels. “But he’ll be okay.
We just need to downplay this thing. If he sees you making a big
deal out of it, he’ll start thinking it’s a big deal—”
Molly stopped in her tracks and set
down the Hefty bag. The cans rattled. “Jeff, honey, it is a big deal. The man was murdered.”
“What I’m saying is, if you—if
we make a big to-do about this and fuss over
him, Chris will end up rehashing the entire episode from five
months ago—and he’ll be blaming himself all over
again.”
“He blamed me, too,” Molly
murmured.
“You did the right thing,” Jeff said,
setting the receptacle by the end of their driveway. He grabbed the
Hefty bag from her and leaned it against the bin. “Personally, I’m
not shedding any tears over the guy’s demise. I’m not as forgiving
as my son is.” He rubbed his hands together to brush off some
residue from the bin handle. “Anyway, for Chris, let’s just
downplay this whole thing, okay?”
Nodding, Molly glanced down at a crack
in the driveway. “Don’t forget to swing by the optical place
today,” she murmured. “You wanted to get your glasses tightened for
your trip.”
Jeff put his arm around her, and they
headed back toward the garage. The automatic garage door was locked
in the open position. Earlier, he’d tossed his briefcase into the
front seat of his silver Lexus. “You know, I’m not so sure I should
go off to Denver tomorrow, not when I think about that family in
Renton last week.”
Molly shuddered. “God, don’t remind
me.” She’d read all about the Renton killings online and in the
Seattle Times.
“Jesus, the whole family.” He sighed.
“It’s enough to make you sick. The twin girls were Erin’s age.” He
gave Molly’s shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t feel good leaving you and
the kids alone for two nights—not while this maniac is on the
loose.”
Molly shrugged. “You can’t go changing
your work schedule because of some nutcase. It could be a while
before the police catch him.” She tried to smile. “Besides, we’ll
be okay, because I’m going to that Neighborhood Watch potluck
today. I’ll know just what to do in case a serial killer comes
knocking on our front door. . . .”
The lunch would be across the street at
the Hahns’ house. A police detective had been invited to speak to
the residents of the cul-de-sac. That included Jeff’s ex-wife’s two
best friends, Lynette Hahn and Kay Garvey.
Angela would be attending, too. She was
still chummy-chummy with her Willow Tree Court pals, even though
she lived on another cul-de-sac—in Bellevue with her new boyfriend
and his thirteen-year-old daughter. The new relationship didn’t
keep Angela from meddling in Jeff’s life. Apparently, it wasn’t
enough that she talked to her kids every day and asked them to
convey messages to their dad. At least once a week, she was back in
her old stomping grounds to visit Lynette or Kay. She even tried to
make friends with Molly early on. But Molly quickly figured out
this was just another way for Angela to have some kind of control
over Jeff—albeit indirectly. It seemed pretty damn manipulative. So
Molly did her best to avoid Jeff’s ex—and stayed distantly polite
to her.
She wasn’t looking forward to this
Neighborhood Watch potluck with Angela and her cronies. She’d
almost just as soon take her chances with a serial
killer.
“I thought that lunch wasn’t until
tomorrow,” Jeff said, opening the car door. “And aren’t those
neighborhood watch things held on weekends and evenings so it
doesn’t interfere with people’s work schedules?”
“Not this one. Lynette pulled some
strings. It’s in four hours, and I still have to make chocolate
chip cookies for it. Do you want me to pass along any messages to
the former Mrs. Dennehy?”
“Just that I’m blissfully happy,” he
said, kissing her. Then he climbed into the car and buckled his
seat belt. “Good luck with that crowd.”
Molly gave him a wry smile. “We who are
about to die salute you.”
Shutting his door, he blew her a kiss,
and then started up the car. He backed out of the garage. Molly
waved at her husband.
The garage door started to descend. As
the Lexus drove off, Molly caught a glimpse of a strange car parked
in front of Dr. and Mrs. Nguyen’s house. She hadn’t noticed the
metallic blue minivan earlier when she’d walked back from Erin’s
bus stop. Then again, she hadn’t really been paying
attention.
She ducked inside—through the garage
entrance, then past the closed door to the basement, through the
kitchen area, the dining room, and finally the living room in the
front of the house. At the big picture window, she pushed aside the
sheer curtain and glanced out at that minivan again. It was too far
away for her to tell if someone was in the front seat.
This would probably be one of the first
items the cop would address at the Neighborhood Watch potluck in a
few hours: Look out for unfamiliar cars parked on
your cul-de-sac. The Nguyens lived in Denver eight months
out of the year, and sometimes, they had friends using the place.
Molly had to remind herself that it wasn’t so unusual to see a
strange car parked in front of their house.
Stepping away from the window, she
wondered if—before last week—the mother of those twin girls had
been on the lookout for strange cars in their cul-de-sac in
Renton.
She remembered the front-page headlines
in the Seattle Times last Tuesday. She
remembered, because she’d looked up the article again online just
last night. She’d become a bit fixated on the murders.
RENTON FAMILY SLAIN
4
dead in Another Cul-de-Sac Killing
PARENTS
AND TWIN
DAUGHTERS STABBING
VICTIMS
A photo of the murdered family ran
under the headline. It showed the dark-haired, husky father and his
pretty, somewhat mousy, blond wife. Grinning proudly, they posed
behind their blond daughters in one of those family portraits from
Sears or JCPenney. The twins looked darling. They were laughing in
the picture. One of them was missing a front tooth.
SENSELESS
MURDER, read the caption. Renton residents,
Lyle Winters, 33, and wife, Terri Anne, 31, in a photo taken last
October with their 6-year-old twin daughters, Claudia and Colette.
The family was brutally slain in their Loretta Court home late
Sunday night. This is the fourth in a series of bizarre cul-de-sac
killings in the Seattle area since February.
The news article had been broken up
with different subheadlines in boldface print: Neighbors Heard Nothing, No Screams—Every
Light Was On and Bodies in Closets, A Killer’s Calling
Card.
Each time this Cul-de-sac Killer
struck, he left nearly all of the lights on inside the house—and
his victims shut inside closets.
Lyle Winters, his throat slashed, was
found in the closet off their guest room. His wife, strangled and
stabbed repeatedly, was discovered in the master bedroom closet,
curled up amid some shoes and a pile of blouses that had fallen off
their hangers. Both children were stabbed and left—one on top of
the other—in their bedroom closet.
Like nearly everyone who lived on a
cul-de-sac in the Seattle area, Molly was constantly on her guard
now. That was why she walked Erin to the bus stop every morning and
waited there with her. It was why she kept a lookout for strange
cars on the block. They never used to turn on their house alarm at
night, but they did now.
The newspapers didn’t mention if any of
the Cul-de-sac Killer’s victims had home security
systems.
Molly had read so much about the
murders that she’d almost become an expert. She didn’t know why
she’d become so preoccupied with the cul-de-sac killings—except
perhaps to make sure it didn’t happen to her new
family.
The first to die had been an elderly
woman, Irene Haskel, who lived alone in a split-level house on a
dead-end street in Ballard. A neighbor had noticed nearly all of
Irene’s lights were on for three nights in a row. She stopped by to
discover Irene’s front door ajar—and a foul odor permeating the
seemingly empty house. Irene’s neighbor followed the pungent smell
to a bedroom closet in the upper level. The Seattle
Times reported that Irene had thirty-eight stab
wounds.
The killer struck again a week later,
stabbing three coeds who lived in a townhouse on a dead end near
Seattle Pacific University. A fourth roommate, who had spent that
night at a friend’s apartment, returned the following afternoon to
find all the lights on inside the townhouse. She also found all her
roommates’ bodies, stashed in closets on the second
floor.
A month passed, and it happened
again—this time, a married couple in their fifties, who lived at
the end of a cul-de-sac in the Queen Anne neighborhood. Coming home
from college for a weekend visit, their son discovered the
blood—and then their bodies, stuffed in two upstairs
closets.
And now this family of four was
slaughtered just last week.
Nervously rubbing her arms, Molly
returned to the kitchen. Going through the cabinets and the
refrigerator, she started to pull out all the ingredients for Toll
House cookies. She didn’t want to think about the cul-de-sac
murders now, not while she was the only one home. She felt
uncomfortable enough in Angela’s house.
The place still seemed to belong to
Jeff’s ex-wife. Hell, half the spices in the kitchen cupboard had
been bought by Angela. The glasses she drank from, the plates the
family used—they were all Angela’s.
Molly started mixing up the white and
brown sugar, eggs, and butter in a bowl. She kept glancing over at
the sliding glass doors in the big family room off the kitchen
area. The backyard was rather small—with just enough room for a gas
grill, a patio, and a small strip of grass. The forest started only
fifteen or twenty feet behind the house. Some evenings, raccoons
came right up to the other side of the sliding glass door. When
Molly was alone in the house at night, she occasionally got scared
and imagined something else emerging from that dark forest to watch
her through the glass, something on two legs instead of
four.
She thought about closing the drapes,
but they were so damn ugly—maroon with gold fleur-de-lis on a
heavy, velvetlike material. Hello, Angela, what
were you thinking?
Given her druthers, Molly would have
redecorated the entire first floor. She didn’t share Angela’s
fondness for hunter green, maroon, and gold—and the charmless,
dark, Mediterranean furniture that made the big family room look
like the lobby of a small, cheesy Best Western. She also thought
the tall grandfather clock that didn’t work was kind of ugly. But
Molly told herself that Jeff’s kids were going through enough
changes in their lives. They probably didn’t want to see their
mother’s house transformed into something else entirely.
Nevertheless, every other week, Molly would make a subtle
alteration to Angela’s drab, almost impersonal design scheme. One
week, she added jazzy throw pillows to the hunter-green sofa.
Another week—and about time—she got rid of a tall, ugly standing
vase with a dried flower arrangement in it.
Molly figured three dozen cookies were
enough for Angela and her pals. They’d probably turn up their noses
at dessert anyway. It was a competitively thin crowd.
She left the cookies out to cool and
started washing the dishes. The phone rang. She grabbed the kitchen
cordless on the third ring. “Yes, hello?”
“It’s above the heart
now,” whispered the woman on the other end. At least that
was what it sounded like she said.
“Pardon me?” Molly said. She pulled the
phone away from her ear for a moment so she could glance at the
caller ID screen on the receiver. CALLER
UNKNOWN, it said.
“Pardon me?” Molly repeated into the
phone. “Hello?”
There was a click on the other end of
the line.
Frowning, Molly hung up. She moved over
to the glass doors and peered out at the backyard once more. The
sky had grown dark, and the woods looked gray and a bit sinister.
Trees and shrubs swayed in the wind. She wondered if the
cul-de-sacs where the killer had struck were in wooded
areas.
“Would you cut it out already, Molly?”
she muttered to herself. She checked the lock on the sliding
door.
She really wished Jeff hadn’t mentioned
the cul-de-sac murders earlier. Of course, before Jeff brought up
the serial killings, she’d been unnerved by the news of Ray
Corson’s death—another senseless murder.
Molly heard the washing-machine buzzer
go off downstairs in the basement. She’d put her coffee-spattered
sweatpants and some other clothes in the quick cycle a half hour
ago. With a sigh, she plodded to the basement door. Opening it, she
switched on the stairwell light. It sputtered and went
out.
“Oh, terrific,” she muttered. “I really
need this now.”
She could see the overhead in the rec
room still worked. The staircase was a bit dark, but Molly held on
to the banister and quickly made her way down there. The rec room
was the kids’ domain. In one corner sat a rowing machine belonging
to Jeff, but in the ten months they’d been married, Molly had yet
to see him use it. She guessed Jeff and Angela bought the maroon
sectional sofa and black end tables at Ikea. The fat, clunky
big-screen TV was from before the day of HD and plasma. Chris must
have been in charge of the art on the walls—which included a
Mariners poster, a lighted Hamm’s Beer clock, movie posters of
Zoolander and Avatar,
and four pictures of dogs playing poker. The Ping-Pong table had
become a catchall for everything from Erin’s Barbie Dream House to
a science-project volcano Chris had built with papier-mâché, paint,
and some chemicals.
There was also a small walk-in
closet—with shelves full of board games, sports equipment, and
toys. The door was open a crack. Molly paused in front of it. She
imagined Jeff lying dead on the floor in there, his throat
slit—just like Lyle Winters. The thought made her skin crawl. She
tried to push it out of her mind.
Nervously rubbing her
gooseflesh-covered arms, Molly retreated to the laundry and utility
room. With its bare floor, exposed pipes overhead, and shadowy
nooks around the furnace and water heater, the big room was kind of
creepy. It had become cluttered with unwanted furniture and
knickknacks from Jeff’s years with Angela. There were also some
collapsed folding chairs leaning against a square support beam, and
boxes of Christmas decorations.
Molly emptied out the washer and tossed
the damp clothes in the dryer. While she threw in a strip of
Bounce, her mind started to wander toward that morbid direction
again.
Why does he put the
bodies in closets? Why does he leave practically all the lights on
inside the houses of his victims? The police must have come
up with some theories. Maybe she’d ask the cop at the
potluck.
While setting the timer for the dryer,
Molly thought she heard a creaking sound above her. Quit it, she told herself. It’s the
house settling, stupid—or maybe something outside. You’re all alone
here. From everything she’d read, the Cul-de-sac Killer
usually struck at night. And right now, it was ten o’clock in the
morning. Quit it, she told herself
again.
Molly closed the dryer door and pushed
the start button. The dryer drum began rolling and roaring. But the
sound she heard past the racket was unmistakable.
Upstairs someplace, a door slammed
shut.
“Shit,” Molly whispered, a hand over
her heart. She quickly reached over and switched off the dryer. The
rumbling noise stopped, and the hot air gave out one last wheeze.
Molly stood perfectly still, and listened. She didn’t hear anything
upstairs.
Glancing over at Jeff’s worktable, she
made a beeline for it and snatched the crowbar from a hook on the
wall. She took a deep breath and crept back into the rec room. Then
she made her way up the darkened stairs to the first floor. She
cautiously looked around. Everything seemed just the way she’d left
it five minutes ago.
“Hello? Is anyone home?” Molly called,
a nervous tremor in her voice. She wondered if maybe Chris had
decided not to go to school today after all—and he’d come back.
“Chris? Is that you?”
No one answered.
Molly checked the locks on the front
door, the garage door entrance, and even the sliding glass
doors—which she’d just checked minutes before. All of them were
locked. But that didn’t make her feel any better.
Tightening her grip on the crowbar, she
headed up to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, she saw
Erin’s bedroom door was closed. Erin never shut her door—not even
while she was sleeping in there.
Molly tiptoed down the hallway and
slowly opened Erin’s door. She felt a cool breeze against her hands
and face. The window was open. The lacy white curtain billowed.
The wind slammed the door shut, it’s that
simple, she told herself. Still, she checked Erin’s closet
before she went to the window and shut it with one hand. She wasn’t
ready to let go of the crowbar, not just yet.
Molly looked in the guest room and
Chris’s bedroom—the closets, too. She poked her head in the kids’
bathroom, and then scurried down the hallway to the master bedroom.
It was empty—as was the big walk-in closet and master bath. Molly
even peeked behind the closed shower curtain. Nothing.
Jeff had let her redecorate their
quarters. But even with the bedroom’s new Mission-style furniture,
a recent paint job (sea-foam green), new carpeting, and photos of
her and Jeff prominently displayed—it still seemed like Angela’s
domain. Angela had been with Jeff in that bedroom
first.
Molly still held on to the crowbar, but
it was down at her side. She paused at the doorway to the third
floor. Maybe she was being silly, but it was worth checking up
there—just to put her mind at rest. She climbed up the
stairs.
The third floor was the only place in
the house Molly felt was totally hers. With her own savings, she
took Angela’s unfinished attic and transformed it into an art
studio. She’d even had a bathroom installed up there. There was
also a very comfortable chaise longue on which life-study models
could pose—and Molly could nap.
She glanced inside the bathroom:
nothing. Her one closet was so narrow and crammed with easel
frames, canvas, and paint supplies, if someone could hide in there,
he’d need to be half her size and a contortionist. She was alone up
here.
With a sigh, she looked at the
painting-in-progress on her easel in front of the dormer window. It
showed a shapely, gorgeous, tawny-haired woman in a torn
bodice—which still needed some detail painted in. Standing proudly,
she looked skyward as a shirtless hunk knelt behind her with his
brawny arms wrapped around her trim waist. In the background, a
full moon illuminated a castle by the sea. This would be the cover
to Desiree’s Destiny, the latest in a series
of romance novels. Molly had already gotten the advance money for
it: $1,750, minus her agent’s commission. She would get the same
amount once she delivered the finished painting. She’d created all
seven of the Desiree covers, so far. Both
Desiree’s resemblance to Angelina Jolie and the always-shirtless
Lord Somerton’s similarity to Jude Law were no
mistake.
It wasn’t exactly what Molly had
intended to do after six years in art school, but book covers,
magazine illustrations, and ads had become her bread and butter.
Occasionally, she sold one of her more serious works. She was proud
of those paintings, mostly still-life studies or moody portraits
that seemed to tell a story. Her Woman Playing
Solitaire (at a dinette table with a melancholy look on her
face and a cigarette in one hand), went for $2,600 at the
Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown. But sales like that were few
and far between.
Before marrying Jeff, she’d barely eked
out a living as an artist, so Molly had taken on an assortment of
part-time and temp jobs: everything from office worker to waitress
to hotel desk clerk. She’d figured she was paying her dues. Molly
felt a bit guilty for not needing to work those kinds of jobs
anymore. She had quite a nice setup here. She wondered if Angela
and her friends said as much behind her back.
She was glad for this space on the
third floor, where Angela had no claim. The studio was Molly’s
escape, a haven for old family knickknacks she couldn’t part with,
photo albums, and her collection of elephants.
When she was a kid, she’d heard
elephants brought good luck, so Molly started collecting elephant
figurines—in marble, jade, porcelain, mahogany, plastic, you name
it. She’d given most of them to Goodwill two years ago, but kept
about forty figurines—all of them now neatly arranged on a bookcase
along one wall of her studio. No photos of her family were
displayed. It just didn’t seem right. Her dad and her brother were
dead, and she and her mother weren’t on the best of
terms.
Considering how her brother had died,
Molly wondered if those elephants were really so lucky. A few of
the elephants on that bookshelf had originally belonged to him.
He’d collected them, too.
Nearly every time Molly looked through
her family albums, she ended up crying. So it seemed pretty
masochistic to frame those pictures and put them on display. Jeff
and his children were her family now.
Though she sometimes felt like a
houseguest they merely tolerated, Molly still really cared for
Jeff’s kids. It was why she waited at the bus stop with Erin this
morning. And it was why she worried about Chris getting through his
school day when Ray Corson had just been murdered last night. It
was why she tried to be cordial—albeit distantly cordial—to Jeff’s
ex. After all, she was their mother.
At the same time, she dreaded this
Neighborhood Watch potluck with Angela and all her pals. Molly
glanced at her wristwatch. It was less than an hour from
now.
Downstairs, the phone rang, and it
startled her. Molly hurried down to the second floor and rushed
into her bedroom. She snatched up the cordless from the nightstand.
“Yes, hello?” she answered, a bit out of breath. She set the
crowbar down on the bed.
“Molly?” the
woman whispered. It was the same voice from before. What she
murmured next still sounded like gibberish: “It’s
above the heart now. . . .”
“I can’t understand what you’re
saying,” Molly cut in. “Could you talk louder, please? Who is
this?”
“I said . . .”
She still spoke in a whisper, but the words were very clear this
time. “It’s about to start
now.”
“I don’t understand. What’s about to
start? Who—”
Molly heard a click on the other end of
the line—and then nothing.