Two San Francisco police cruisers idled in the parking lot of Jacobsen Memorial Animal Clinic. The four officers present were visibly upset and nervous, and with good reason.
Earlier in the evening, Officer Henry King was murdered while on a protective detail, shot once at close range while he sat in his patrol car. Inspector Lindsay Boxer – whom King was assigned to watch over – had subsequently disappeared from her girlfriend's apartment.
Cruelly, the kidnapper also drugged Boxer's dog, placed a fresh calf liver and lung on the table, wrote an insane, cryptic message in blood, and left the animal to die from an overdose of Diazepam. If the girlfriend hadn't arrived home soon after the assault, the poor dog would have died, and the killer's trail would have been even colder.
As it stood, a nationwide manhunt had begun for Peter Raynor, also known as the Kiss-Me-Not Killer. Airports were on alert to prevent international flight. Raynor was wanted for the abduction of Lindsay Boxer, and a multiplicity of homicides dating back to the spring of 2003.
With any luck, Boxer would not be joining the ranks of his victims. One phone call, one sighting, one tip – that's all they needed, and the full force of the California law enforcement system would slam down on Pete Raynor like the hammer of God.
Boxer's closest friends, including DDA Jill Bernhardt, medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn, and San Francisco Register reporter Cindy Thomas (the girlfriend) were sequestered inside the veterinary clinic, awaiting word about the dog, about Raynor, but mostly about their missing friend.
As soon as these women set foot outside the safety of the clinic, they would be under constant “eyes on bodies” police surveillance, on explicit order of Lieutenant Tom Hogan. Failure to secure their charges would result in suspensions without pay – or worse.
******
Everyone deals with stress in their own way, and the three women waiting inside the Jacobsen Clinic emergency room presented a cross-section of various coping methods.
Claire Washburn studied photographs of the crime scene, pored over Raynor's bloody message and that silly gilded mirror until the words turned to alphabet soup. If there was a clue in those words, something to help them find Lindsay, Claire would find it.
If there was no clue, if the message was simply a final taunt devised to maximize pain and confusion for Lindsay's loved ones... no. No, there must be something useful in the images. Claire took a deep breath, rubbed her eyes, and took another look at the photos.
Jill Bernhardt paced and made phone calls to investigators, checking to see if Lindsay's or Pete's credit cards had been used (not yet), whether anyone in or around Cindy's building had seen anything suspicious (they hadn't), and whether the wireless provider had been able to locate a signal from Lindsay's cell phone.
“Goddammit!” Jill spat as she ended that last call. “Maggie says there's no phone signal. He must have destroyed Lindsay's phone, or at least removed the battery. Bastard, bastard, BASTARD!!”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down, please,” Cindy Thomas requested in a heartbreakingly small voice. “Dr. Pam said Martha needs to rest.”
Jill nodded and apologized, even though she was angry enough to kick a nun directly in the face. Instead, she took a seat beside Claire and rubbed her shoulder to try and draw the tense woman out of her presumably dark thoughts.
“Did we miss something at the apartment?” Jill inquired. “Please say we missed something.”
“I wish I could say that, but I don’t think there was anything to miss,” Claire regretfully admitted. “This just doesn't read like a 'come find me' scene. It's like he's... just...”
“Rubbing it in with one last sick joke,” Cindy supplied. “Like he's saying goodbye, because he thinks it’s over and he's won. But he hasn't won yet, has he, girl?”
Cindy gently wrapped her fingers around Martha's leg and gave a light squeeze. The steady beeping of the dog's heart monitor provided some comfort. With counterfeit calm, she whispered to the sedated animal.
“You need to get better so you and Lindsay can go running when she gets home,” she said.
“How can you be so optimistic?” Jill sharply wondered. “I hate to be the voice of doom here, but Pete Raynor has years of experience at avoiding detection and capture. And now, he has Lindsay.”
Turning to face her two compatriots, Cindy mustered a smile and gave her friends a simple reminder.
“And Lindsay has us.”
******
In the pure white bedroom he'd dubbed 'the treatment room,' Pete Raynor stood beside his sleeping princess, his bound and manacled treasure, and laid a moist kiss upon her forehead.
Dressed in her white gown, with her black hair neatly plaited and her face scrubbed clean, she looked pristine. A perfect mate and match for Peter the Great in his tailored tuxedo.
Yet he knew that if she woke up just then, that would all change. She would scream and struggle to escape, she would reject his love and mercy... she would break his heart. He skimmed a fingertip across her antique silver manacles and sighed.
“If you loved me, we wouldn't need these chains.”
Pete pressed a button on a remote control, and steel shades fanned across the picture window. The room was pitch black and silent, save their breathing and his measured voice. By remote control, he activated a small spotlight over the bed.
“When you love me, and you will... I'll set you free.”
His fingers ghosted over the imprint of a gun beneath his jacket.
“I’ll set us both free,” Pete promised.
He kissed her closed eyelids and felt them jump beneath his lips – an indication that Lindsay had entered REM sleep. He touched the electrodes on her scalp and glanced at the EEG readout to confirm that Inspector Boxer had, indeed, left the building.
“Where are you? Are you hiding from me?” he asked while stroking her cheek. “No matter. Wherever you are, I know you can hear me. I've made certain of that.”
His eyes strayed to the I.V. stand, to the bag of pale blue magic streaming into Lindsay's veins, into her mind. The drug should make her more receptive to suggestions, provided these suggestions were coded into memory engrams in a specific manner and sequence.
The human mind is an explanation engine. Give it new information, and it will melt and bend previously known truths in order to accommodate the new data.
At least, that's what the Norwegian scientists who created the drug had claimed. Too bad about that lab fire that consumed all their research, and then that horrible skiing accident, where the entire team were mistaken for caribou and shot dead.
Pete snickered and rationalized what he was about to do, which took all of half a second. When you've managed to reason away bushels of murders, a little forced psychological resurfacing is hardly cause for guilt.
“We follow in the steps of Pygmalion and Galatea, Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle,” he whimsically explained. “This is merely a... a remediation for some of our unfortunate missteps. Don't worry, though. Nothing we can't fix.”
He took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair at her bedside, hoisted a clipboard, and began to read his beloved a bedtime story woven from lies. With the aid of modern chemistry-cum-alchemy, these leaden lies would soon shine like golden truth within her mind.
“Five years ago, your father was killed by a junkie named Billy Harris. Marty was trying to stop Harris from robbing a convenience store in Santa Cruz. One month later, Tom Hogan left you for a schoolteacher named Heather.”
Pete stopped for a moment and savored the next part. He breathed softly, swallowed, and resumed reading in calm, even tones.
“I came back to San Francisco later that summer, and took you out to dinner. Even though we hadn't seen each other since college, it was like no time had passed at all. We were still in love, Lindsay. You and I have always been in love.”
******
Act I
San Francisco police inspector Lindsay Boxer stood on the roof of the Hall of Justice as a chill pre-dawn wind ripped across the slumbering city.
She leaned against the low railing and looked out over the streets of her town, where a smattering of headlights and taillights buzzed around like fireflies caught in a maze. Engines roared and spluttered. Gears ground together in dying transmissions. Horns tooted, signaling impatience.
Some motorists were headed to early morning jobs, while some were finally wending their way home after a long night of who knows what. Work, drinking, sex, or maybe all of the above.
Lindsay wished them all well. At that moment, she felt nothing but charity in her soul. Her flesh, however, shivered against the cool wind. She burrowed one hand into the pocket of her soft, somewhat thin, leather jacket.
With her other hand, she brought a lit menthol cigarette to her lips and took a deep, greedy drag.
On some level, she knew she shouldn't be smoking. Really, cigarettes kill people, right? Emphysema, lung cancer, stroke, heart disease... the list went on and on. And yet, here she was, calmly sucking in great, teeming batches of carcinogens as if that little paper stick was perfectly safe.
Truth be told, she was enjoying her smoke break. She loved this building, loved the view, and adored the fact that no one bothered her up here. Some potential interlopers feared her temper; others simply loathed smoking so much that they refused to keep her company.
In any case, these few minutes offered freedom and solitude, (and a tempting whiff of self-destruction) so Lindsay was willing to take the risk. The actual cigarette was beside the point. Boxer and Nicotine were not going steady; she just liked the company, or the lack thereof.
She'd come to depend on this time alone, away from all the sympathetic cooing and pitying stares sent her way by mostly well-meaning colleagues who politely waited to speculate about the Hogan/Boxer divorce until Lindsay had left the room.
Everyone in the Hall knew Tom had left her. Most had theories, Lindsay was certain, because that's what cops do. They speculate. Some probably knew that Tom had met another woman – a sweet, doting schoolteacher who probably genuflected every time Big Tom walked past – but they knew better than to mention this woman in Lindsay's presence.
Because Tom didn't leave you for Heather, said a little voice in her head. You left him for a murderer.
Well, that was... odd. Her initial instinct said that Tom had cheated on her with Heather, causing them to divorce. That wasn't true; the simple, horrible fact was that her marriage ended because Lindsay was obsessed with another man.
Granted, he was a very bad man, a killer who tortured women. A man who twisted dreams of happiness into knots, into nooses, and hanged those women on gallows built of fantasy.
Lindsay thought she had caught that man, thought he was dead and in the ground, just like -
She felt tears well up behind her eyes at the mere memory of her late father, shot and bleeding on the floor of a convenience store. Harsh fluorescent light, racks of chips and candy, a wild-eyed young man with a gun. A pool of scarlet spreading across the black and white tiles...
No. Not a convenience store robbery. What the hell, Lindsay? You know where it happened , said that same inner voice. You know why he died.
She concentrated for a moment and dug another memory from her mental stacks, a recollection that cut deeper, felt more like the truth.
In this memory, Martin Boxer lay on the wooden floor of a remote little house while Lindsay grappled with a psychopath. Marty stared at her, steely-eyed and stoic through his pain, and willed his daughter to fight for her survival, which was evidently more precious to him than his own life.
“Dammit,” Lindsay breathed, a soft curse swept away in the morning wind.
Lindsay dragged her thumb across her eye, smearing tears down her cheek. She tucked the cigarette into her mouth and felt the slightly moist paper wrinkle as she pursed her lips. She touched her tongue against the tar-stained cotton filter and felt a soothing chemical burn as mentholated smoke whooshed down her throat.
Wrong again. It's not cotton, said the little voice. Cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate. Also? By the time Marty died, you and Tom had been divorced for a coon's age.
Lindsay realized this was true, and shook her head to clear away a tickle of mental cobwebs.
“Why was I thinking he died in a convenience store robbery?” she queried aloud, as if asking the cosmos where she got such an asinine idea.
And, again, why were you thinking that you and Tom just got divorced? By the time you buried Marty, your marriage was five years in the ground.
For a brief, strange instant, she had genuinely believed those tragedies to be concurrent, or at least within close chronological proximity. But that wasn't true. Why had she felt it was true? Why was her sense of time so muddled?
She tried to remember today's date, but couldn't quite pin it down. It felt like a Thursday, or maybe a Tuesday. Panic flared inside her skull. Not knowing something so basic and necessary made her feel strangely adrift, almost lightheaded.
With a flick of her wrist, Lindsay consulted her watch and belatedly realized it had no functions beyond a simple “17” for the day of the month.
The panic flare within her grew brighter, hotter, and she frisked her own pockets in search of a cell phone. A glance at the home screen would give a correct date and settle this confusion right down. She needed a cell phone.
In her haste, she fumbled the burning cigarette; as it fell, the glowing orange tip brushed against the back of her left hand.
“Oww! Christ Almighty!”
She angrily stomped the butt and ground it under her boot heel. A quick look at her hand revealed a dot of red skin and the white swelling of an incipient blister. Her thoughts lingered on self-pity for a moment, and then she resumed her quest for the correct date.
She really, really needed a cell phone, and nearly yelled from joy when her fingernails ticked over a slick plastic shell tucked into her breast pocket. Increasingly emotional, and in some slight physical pain, she jerked her hand from the pocket, and that unbelievably necessary cellular telephone went flying over the building's edge.
Without a moment's thought, Lindsay Boxer dove after it.
She leaped from the roof of the Hall of Justice and hung suspended above the street. Her open leather jacket fluttered like bat wings against the wind.
She should have fallen, should have dropped like a sack of wet cement and splattered on the street, but someone had taken hold of her foot. Illogically, she remained aloft on the breeze, now securely tethered by the firm grip of two hands around her ankle. She felt like a giant kite.
Aside from a quick lurch in her guts, the strangeness of this situation didn't frighten her. Instead, she stared over the ledge as the glowing phone slid down through the darkness. Although it was just a phone - $99 with a two year service agreement – Lindsay felt inexplicably sad.
Profound quiet settled around her, as if the entire city observed a moment of silence in honor of her fallen mobile. There were no traffic sounds, and no wind noise; it was as if God himself had pressed the mute button on His Universal Remote.
Gradually, within this curious silence, she discerned one faint, monotone voice. Somewhere out in the black air, a man spoke in rhythmic patterns, but she couldn't make out his words.
The cumulative weight of all this weirdness began to settle on Lindsay, and her brain-breaking confusion was such that she wanted to cry.
Maybe this is why you never dropped acid.
Wonderland blows.
Hands – presumably the same hands that saved her from falling – eased her back onto the gravel-strewn roof, then patted and rubbed her back in consolation. Lindsay turned to this person, to offer thanks for the help, and found herself face to face with her dead father.
He wore a navy blue pea coat and a woolen watch cap, like a longshoreman. His hands were strong and warm on her shoulders, and his eyes shone with pride and affection. Had Lindsay not been so upset about losing her phone, she might have hugged him.
“Forget about it, sweetheart. You don't need a phone,” said Martin Boxer. “You need a gun.”
He reached inside his coat and produced a nickel-plated 1911 pistol with walnut grips. Marty cocked the hammer and racked the slide, chambering a .45 round.
Lindsay set aside for a moment the surreal experience of watching a dead man load a gun. She knit her brows and shook her head.
“Marty… I don't know the date,” she confessed. “I was floating over the street, and my hand hurts, and I smoked a cigarette -”
“You don't smoke,” Marty interrupted. “And the date doesn't matter. Forget the phone. Take the gun.”
“Why? Who am I supposed to shoot?”
Marty pressed the pistol into her hands. He pointed a finger toward the roof stairwell door, where a familiar villain sat rigidly upright in a wooden chair.
Pete Raynor wore an immaculate, tailored tuxedo. Clean-shaven and smiling faintly, he looked as handsome as a fairy tale prince.
Lindsay nearly retched at the sight of him. Her grip on the gun tightened.
Beneath the dim light of the 'Exit' sign, Pete read aloud from a clipboard. His voice, plain and flat, recited lines as if on a pre-recorded loop.
“Five years ago, your father was killed by a junkie named Billy Harris. Marty was trying to stop Harris from robbing a convenience store in Santa Cruz. One month later, Tom Hogan left you for a schoolteacher named Heather.”
Lindsay shook her head and tried to shut out his words – which she knew to be lies – but the ideas seeped in and took root in her brain. As before, she could easily summon images to support these false memories. She could plainly see racks of candy and chips, a bloodstained checkerboard floor, and Tom smiling at Heather.
Pete spoke again: “I came back to San Francisco later that summer, and took you out to dinner. We hadn't seen each other since college, but it was like no time had passed at all.”
Marty laid a hand on Lindsay's shoulder. “Don't listen. You have to stop this.”
Pete's voice grew louder, stronger. “We grew up together. You were my best friend, and I was yours. I have always loved you, and you have always loved me.”
The invasive presumption of such a lie sickened Lindsay. Though her hands shook with rage, she raised the gun and leveled the sights at Pete Raynor. Marty reached over and supported her arms.
“Last month, I asked you to marry me,” Pete recited, now with some passion in his voice. “Your friends discouraged you. Jill is jealous and feeds off your misery. Claire says our relationship is co-dependent and unhealthy; she doesn't want you to grow up.”
“Honey, just shoot the son of a bitch,” her dead father whispered.
“But you followed your heart and said 'yes,'” Pete continued. “Beloved, we know each other so deeply, so intimately, that others cannot comprehend our connection. We belong together.”
Wake up, Lindsay, said the little voice. It's the only way to make him stop. You have to wake up.
“While the slumbering world dreams of happiness, we will live it. Forsaking all others, defeating all enemies, preserving our nation of two...”
Pete stood and held out his hand. His words should have meant little or nothing to Lindsay, but, quite against her will, she felt them deeply. Since a part of her found it easy to believe Pete's shimmering lies, she felt certain there was enchantment at work here. Surely, the bastard was cheating.
As a bulwark against the mental sorcery, Lindsay's mind conjured a beautiful auburn-haired young woman, with a bewitching smile which instantly bolstered her courage.
She thumbed off the 1911's safety.
“Live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove,” Pete intoned. “You will love me until the sun turns cold. You will be my true and only bride.”
“Like hell,” Lindsay said, and pulled the trigger.
******
The .45 boom echoed across her San Francisco dreamscape, and Lindsay Boxer awoke.
Her eyes flashed open and found not a black sky overhead, but a white acoustic tile ceiling.
She lay partially upright in a hospital bed, cuffed hand and foot to steel side rails. She yanked at the shiny, odd-looking cuffs, but her weak efforts yielded only a pathetic rattle.
Upon noticing that she wore a spectacularly overdone white bridal gown – which belonged to Tom Hogan’s mother – Lindsay said the first thing that came to mind.
“Well… shit.”
The back of her left hand hurt. She glanced toward it, expecting to find a cigarette burn. The only wound present came from a needle; there was an I.V. port taped to her skin.
The attached plastic tube led to a bag of light blue fluid hung on a tower beside the bed. This light blue fluid was apparently flowing unabated into her bloodstream.
Looking around the room, she found all the correct visual cues to convey 'hospital.' Only one thing stood out; just beyond the foot of the bed was a large picture window with a stunning view of the sun rising over the ocean.
Rising. Over the ocean. East coast. Oh, no.
Before she could deal with that revelation, Lindsay took a moment to process that her Hall roof experience was merely a dream, a melon-twisting, mother-loving, drug-induced dream.
Pete drugged me. At Cindy's place... he killed
Martha. Or hurt her. I couldn't tell, couldn't even call for help before I
passed out. Jesus, what's he dosing me with? That dream, the things I thought
and felt about Marty and Tom... it all seemed so real.
Snapping out of her reverie, Lindsay grasped that in her very real, very dire reality, she was being held prisoner in a hospital room or a clinic– evidently on the eastern seaboard – by a deranged, lovesick serial killer.
Silent as a cat, Pete Raynor approached from her right. His outfit looked more appropriate for a black tie dinner than a torture session, but he came bearing gifts: one hand held a plastic anesthesia mask while the other opened the valve on a squat gas canister.
Casually, and with disturbing sweetness, Pete smiled at his captive.
“Your body chemistry is surprisingly drug-resistant. Maybe from all the drinking?” he guessed. “No worries. We'll simply adjust the dosage until we get it right.”
As Lindsay opened her mouth to speak, he covered her face with the mask and pressed down hard.
She stared at him, projecting every bit of hatred she could muster, until her breath ran out and she was forced to inhale the gas. As sleep grabbed at her limbs and pulled her down, she realized that the gas tasted of menthol.
******
