Killing Spree Read Free Page B

lot lately—when she was sure no one was around to see her.
    Gillian found the pepper spray in her purse while fishing out some Kleenex. She dried her eyes at the bus stop.
    There was something else in Gillian’s purse—her mail. They’d been late delivering it today, and she’d grabbed it out of her mailbox on her way to catch the bus to Woodinville. Now, on the near-empty 409 back to Seattle, Gillian glanced over her mail—and tried to ignore the unabashed gaze from a creepy, bearded man with a bad toupee, seated in one of the Handicapped Only spots.
    Most of the letters were bills, some past due. But she’d also received a postcard from her best friend, Dianne Garrity, vacationing in Palm Springs. She and Dianne had grown up together. As a kid, Dianne had been considered a weirdo because she’d had scoliosis and wore a back-brace through tenth grade. But that didn’t bother Gillian, who was never very athletic or popular anyway. They read each other’s diaries, and Dianne was the first person to tell Gillian that she should be a writer. “I mean it,” Dianne had said back in high school. “You’re going to be a famous author someday.” She was saying the same thing when Gillian was trying to sell her first thriller to scores of uninterested agents and publishers.
    Saw “Black Ribbons” in a Walgreens here in Palm Springs , Dianne mentioned in the postcard. You were at eye level, right next to Stephen King—well, okay, NOW you’re there. I moved it.
    There was also a letter from her agent. It was a Xerox of the first few paragraphs of a New York Daily News article. Her agent had attached a Post-it. Doesn’t this seem familiar? it said.
    The bus went over a few potholes, but Gillian barely noticed. She was studying the headline: POLICE HUNT FOR ‘ZORRO’ KILLER . The article told of a stabbing on Halloween night in New York. A man dressed as Zorro had sliced up a woman in the back of a taxi. The clipping was only a portion of the story, and the victim’s last name had been cut off:… visiting from Portland, 28-year-old Jennifer —
    Biting her lip, Gillian set down the news clipping.
    The story was familiar, all right. She had written a scene like that in one of her books.
     
     
    He noticed the curtain move in the front window. For the last hour, he hadn’t seen any activity in Gillian McBride’s half of the quaint, cedar-shaked duplex, but he knew the kid was home. Gillian and her son, Ethan, occupied the first floor of the duplex. The woman who lived in the small unit above them hadn’t been home for several days.
    The duplex had a certain unkempt charm. Fallen leaves covered the sidewalk in front of the place. Gray with dirty white shutters, the converted house had a park bench on the front porch—between the doorways to the units. The basement had a separate entrance on the side. The light outside the cellar door was activated by a motion detector. There was no garage, which couldn’t have mattered much to Gillian McBride because she had no car. The yard was tiny, but the duplex sat on the edge of a ravine. Through some of the bare trees, he could see St. Mark’s Cathedral, a brick and mortar monstrosity, looming on the other side of the ravine.
    He felt as if he knew every inch of Gillian’s place. He’d been watching it—off and on—for the last few days.
    Mostly he sat in his parked car across the street, listening to his iPod and playing his Game Boy to relieve the tedium. Every once in a while, he walked around the block to stretch his legs and peek into the windows.
    He was halfway down the block when he saw the curtain move in the front window. Then he heard her door open. Ducking behind a wide evergreen, he watched the kid step outside. Gillian’s son, Ethan, would turn fourteen in a few days. He was skinny with wavy brown hair he must have recently cut himself, because the bangs were all askew. Despite a trace of adolescent acne, he was a handsome kid.
    Ethan stepped out on