The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,10
back door. She could shoot him right between the eyes and he would never know what had hit him. She could already see the blood and brains sprayed all over the walls and the window. It would be one mess she wouldn’t mind cleaning up.
But she might miss. And if she did… If she missed, God help her. He would kill her. She had no doubt about that. There would be no hope for either her or Derek then.
She rested her head on her hands and wept.
* * *
3:35 PM
Sarah Jo McElvoy’s mother was not doing well today. Not well at all.
She met Halloran and Chapman at the door with red eyes and tousled hair, looking like she hadn’t slept in days and smelling faintly of whiskey. She made no move to let them in, said nothing to them as she looked at them blankly. She had been forty when Sarah Jo had been born, Halloran remembered her telling them, which would make her fifty-four now, but she looked at least seventy this afternoon.
Halloran licked his dry lips. “Mrs. McElvoy?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m Detective Mike Halloran,” he said, holding up his badge. “This is my partner, John Chapman. Remember us?”
She continued to stare at them.
“May we come in and talk with you for a minute?”
She moved aside and they stepped into the dark house.
The living room was dusty and cluttered and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cat urine. Halloran took a seat on a ragged sofa, and Chapman sat tentatively beside him. Mrs. McElvoy slumped into a grimy vinyl recliner opposite them and continued to stare.
Halloran swallowed and took a memo pad from his shirt pocket. She was beginning to unnerve him with her glazed expression. “First of all,” he said, “I just want to let you know how sorry we are for—”
“You caught him yet?”
Halloran looked up at her. “Excuse me?”
“The bastard that killed my little girl. Have you caught him yet?”
Halloran managed a grim sympathetic smile. “Not yet.”
Mrs. McElvoy was shaking her head. “Sumbitch is gonna pay. He’s gonna pay for what he did to Sarah Jo.”
Halloran glanced at Chapman, then leafed through his notepad. “Mrs. McElvoy, when Sarah Jo first disappeared, you told us that you didn’t know anyone who might have taken her. Is that still the case?”
She looked at him squarely. “I don’t know anybody that would have wanted to hurt Sarah Jo.” One tear, fat and round, squeezed from her eye and slid silently down her lined cheek. “She was sweet. Such a sweet girl.”
“What about Sarah Jo’s father? Have you heard anything from him? The last time we talked to you, you said you hadn’t spoken to him. Has any of that changed since…” He started to say “since the body was found,” but decided that was a bit cold; the poor woman was just now coming to grips with the fact that her daughter was officially dead, not just missing. He cleared his throat. “Has he contacted you since Sarah Jo was found?”
She shook her head. “Haven’t heard from the sumbitch in seven years. Don’t expect to now.”
Halloran glanced around the cluttered room. Pictures of Sarah Jo lined a shelf along one wall. One of them—the same photograph that had been repeatedly plastered in shop windows and left to fade on telephone poles the last three months—showed a smiling, fresh-faced girl on the verge of womanhood, her large blue eyes staring into the camera lens into infinity, into the unlucky and damnable fate that awaited her. Chapman was staring at it, too, and Halloran quickly looked back at his notepad.
“Mrs. McElvoy,” said Chapman, “just now you said ‘that bastard.’ Do you think it’s a man?”
She snorted, a wretched, ugly sound. “It’s always a man, ain’t it? Ain’t no woman that would kill a little girl and leave her floatin’ in the river. Ain’t no woman alive would do that.”
Halloran folded up his memo pad and stuffed it back into his pocket, glancing about the house. “Mrs. McElvoy, do you have anyone staying with you? Any family?”
“Nope.”
“Friends?”
“Nope. They’ve come by and stayed for a bit, but I sent them on home. Ain’t nothin’ they can do.”
“Do you want us to send someone over for you? A counselor or anyone?”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I told everybody else. I just want to be left alone now. I want to be by myself. Just let me grieve in private.”
He nodded, then rose from the sofa. Chapman, taking the cue, practically leaped