by R. G. Belsky
“Why did you stop seeing Dr. Lyon?”
“I thought she’d given me as much help as she could. I mean I talked about everything with her and—after a while—it seemed like we were going over the same stuff. Besides, Walter was asking me about where I was going during the week. I made up some story, but I was afraid I’d eventually get exposed. So I just stopped seeing her.”
Kate Lyon was still Kate Lyon then. It was at some point much more recently that she was replaced—and probably killed—by Claudia Borrell, who moved the practice to New York. Patients in Philadelphia knew Dr. Lyon, no one in New York did. Except for Victoria Issacs, but she’d stopped seeing her by then.
“It’s not hard to figure out what happened next,” I said. “Psychiatrists and therapists write everything down. I’m sure Dr. Lyon did that with you. It would have all been in her files. At some point, Claudia Borrell goes through Lyon’s back files and reads yours. That’s how she knew you were Houston. I have no idea why, but that must be why she picked your husband as her first victim. She sent Melissa Ross to that show of yours at the art gallery. Melissa wasn’t really interested in your art—she was just there to meet you and get you to confide in her about your troubles with your husband. Just like Borrell hooked up Melissa with those women in the class at the college. Except you were special, because she knew you were Houston and she knew all about that life and about your marital problems from the Lyon files. She used Melissa Ross to lure your husband to that hotel and murder him because he was married to you.”
“So Walter might be dead because of me.”
She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were talking about someone else’s husband who had been brutally murdered. It was almost as if she’d come to peace with her husband’s death and embraced her new identity as Houston again.
I remembered sitting with her that day on Houston Street when she talked about channeling some of the old Houston back into her life. “She was a tough lady, that Houston,” Victoria Issacs had said to me. “Sometimes I miss her.”
This made me wonder if she had ever been truly comfortable all those years being the wife of a wealthy corporate lawyer, along with her art shows and community projects and country clubs. Maybe Victoria Issacs really was Houston all along. And now that Houston—legendary queen of New York City hookers—was back with a sexy fashion line, a reality TV show, and who knows what else in the future.
Oh, she talked about staying in touch when she walked me to her door. And I said that sounded like a good idea. But I think we both knew that this visit to her was an act of closure on my part. Houston had played a very big role in my life. Changed it dramatically on both a professional and personal level. But now it was time for both of us to move on.
She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek.
I kissed her back on her cheek.
Then I closed her door behind me and said goodbye to Houston for the last time.
CHAPTER 45
THERE was a huge gap in Claudia Borrell’s life that still remained unaccounted for.
I sat at my desk the next morning and made notes about what I knew and what I didn’t know about her.
Well, I knew she was in Belleville, Illinois, in 2000. That was a hard fact. I was pretty sure she was in Philadelphia when she assumed the identity of the psychiatrist named Kate Lyon. I presumed she had killed Dr. Lyon—and very likely other people too—before she left Philadelphia. She may well have killed people in other places too, but that was only speculation at this point. And she had definitely been in Manhattan, working out of the Central Park office and teaching the class at the college, when the New York murders began.
Still that left a lot of years—and a lot of places—where she could have been between Belleville and Philadelphia/New York.
What was she doing then?
And where?
I remembered the News had LexisNexis software that provided detailed data on criminal and legal cases around the country.
I decided to try the Gil Malloy charm on Zeena to see if I could get her to use the software to help me.
“Did you change your hairdo, Zeena?” I said when I approached her at the reception desk. “It looks nice.”
“No, I just didn’t have time to wash my hair before I came to work this morning,” she said.
“Still looks nice.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I need you to use LexisNexis to look up some cases for me.”
“I’m the receptionist, not your secretary.”
“Just this one favor for all the good times we had in the past.”
“What good times?”
“Well, I bought you dinner once.”
“You gave me a leftover slice of pizza that you were too full to eat, after you put away the first five pieces.”
“Exactly. Good times, Zeena.”
“Why don’t you do your own research?”
“You’re so much better at this stuff.”
“Here’s a log-in and password for LexisNexis,” she said, writing them down on a slip of paper and handing them to me. “The computer it’s installed on is next to Marilyn’s office. Have a nice day.”
I deduced by this point that the Malloy charm offensive wasn’t working too well on her, so I went to the computer and logged on myself, eventually figuring out how to maneuver through the system to find what I wanted.
Belleville was in Illinois. The biggest city in Illinois was Chicago. So I first looked up unsolved murders in the Chicago area over the past fifteen years, looking for anything that might look like a link to Claudia Borrell. I found a few possibilities, but nothing clearly jumped out at me as an obvious match.
I moved on to Springfield, the capital city of Illinois and one of the other biggest cities in the state. No reason to be certain that the teenaged Claudia Borrell had gone to a big city, of course. But it made more sense that a teenager wanted for murder could disappear more easily into a large urban environment than a small town where she would stick out more.
After several hours of checking, I was more frustrated than ever. I came up with nothing. And I realized that the Borrell girl could have fled anywhere after breaking out of jail in Belleville—not just Chicago or Springfield.
Still . . .
I called up a map of the state of Illinois. I began looking for any big city within a reasonable distance of Belleville. Someplace else where I could look for a series of unsolved murders of men, presumably men who had cheated on or somehow otherwise mistreated women. I studied the map intently. And that’s when I realized my mistake.
Chicago was in the northernmost part of Illinois, on the shores of Lake Michigan; Belleville was in the southern part of the state, several hundred miles away. I’d been operating under the assumption that the state of Illinois was the key, not the geography around the town of Belleville itself.
I studied the map on the screen some more, looking for any big cities within a reasonable distance of Belleville, no matter what state they were in.
Suddenly I saw it.
Hell, it practically jumped off the map at me.
St. Louis.
St. Louis was across the Mississippi River from Illinois. Less than twenty miles from Belleville. You just had to cross over to the next state.
And I remembered something else.
Before coming to New York City, Bob Wylie had once been the police commissioner of St. Louis.
I went back now and checked the dates. Wylie was police commissioner of St. Louis from 1998 to 2000. Claudia Borrell had committed the murders of her family and Bobby Jenkins in Belleville in 2000. Of course, they didn’t happen in Wylie’s jurisdiction. But it was only twenty miles away,
Just like with Ohio, Bob Wylie kept turning up everywhere I looked.
CHAPTER 46
OKAY, there were two things about the Blonde Ice story I didn’t understand. Actually, there were plenty of things about it I didn’t understand. But two of them that really bothered me. And
both involved Bob Wylie.
First had been the link with Munson Lake—the area where Wylie had grown up and dated Patty Tagliarini.
Now there was the fact that he’d been the police chief of St. Louis at the same time Claudia Borrell murdered her family just twenty miles across the river, in Belleville.
I needed more answers about what might have happened in the past at Munson Lake and in Belleville.
And so I did what any good reporter does who’s looking for answers on a story.
I picked up the phone and made a lot of calls to a lot of people. . . .
* * *
“The Belleville Police Department is pretty small,” I told Marilyn and Stacy later. “They weren’t really equipped to deal with a crime this big. So they got advice—and some personnel support—from large police forces in the area. The most obvious of these was St. Louis, just across the river. Where the police commissioner at the time was none other than our old friend Bob Wylie.”
“Is this in the official records about him being involved in the Borrell murder case back then?” Marilyn asked.
“Nothing I can find.”
“Then how did you get this information?” Stacy wanted to know.
“I talked to a lot of people in Belleville.”
“Did any of them specifically tie Wylie to the investigation?”
“Not officially, no. But I found one old-timer—retired from the force now—who remembered Wylie being there. He said Wylie showed up at their police headquarters soon after Borrell was arrested. Told me Wylie actually went into the interrogation room and talked to Borrell. Questioned her for more than an hour.”
“So why was none of this ever made public?”
“Probably because the case went bad, and the Borrell girl escaped. After she got away, the police handling of Borrell came under all sorts of criticism for letting her get away. Wylie didn’t want to be connected with the case anymore. So he made sure his visit to see her was kept quiet and out of the media. He’s always been smart at manipulating the media to make him look good and, more importantly, to not look bad.”
“But Wylie must have recognized her name when she was identified as the Blonde Ice killer,” Marilyn said.
“That’s right.”
“Except he never said anything about meeting her back then.”
“He’s still trying to keep his involvement in that snafu a secret.”
“Jeez,” Stacy muttered.
“What she just said,” Marilyn added.
It was the first time I’d ever heard them both agree on anything.
“There’s more,” I said.
I handed them a printout of an article I’d found in an Ohio newspaper about the Patty Tagliarini death. It was a recent piece. A reporter from the local paper had gone back and done a big feature about the thirty-year-old drowning at Munson Lake because of all the publicity over the discovery of Melissa Ross’s car and body there.
Most of the details were the same as we already knew. The Tagliarini girl was driving drunk and lost control of her car—plunging into the lake. She managed to get out of the car, but couldn’t swim—and drowned. The police said it was clearly an accident, with no possibility of foul play.
But there was something else in the article. It said someone in a boat nearby that night saw her thrashing around in the water from a distance. By the time he got to the spot where she was, Tagliarini had slipped back beneath the water. Another few minutes, he could have saved her. But it was too late.
The guy in the boat thought he saw two people in the water at first. But when he got closer, he just saw Tagliarini desperately struggling until she went underneath the water and died. It was dark out there, and the guy figured he must have just been mistaken about someone else in the water.
“What if someone else was in the car with her that night?” I said to Marilyn and Stacy.
“Wylie?” Stacy asked.
“That’s my guess.”
“He survived and she died,” Marilyn said. “He could have saved her, but he didn’t.”
I nodded.
“Think about it. Wylie’s girlfriend in high school was from a rich family, an influential family. The father was a big shot alumni and contributor to Cornell University. He told Wylie he could get him into Cornell. Get him a scholarship too. It was the key to his future. He just had to make sure he didn’t mess up the relationship with the daughter. Except he did. He was sneaking out again behind his girlfriend’s back with Tagliarini. He probably could have saved her, but he saved himself instead. He did that to insure his future. If anyone ever found out he was with her, the rich girlfriend with the powerful father would dump Wylie and the scholarship to Cornell and everything else would be gone. Maybe he didn’t realize she couldn’t swim at first. But, even when he heard her screams for help and saw the boat in the distance trying to reach her, he knew he couldn’t take a chance on being there, so he fled. Leaving her to die. He ran to save his own life and his own future. It’s the only scenario that makes sense.”
“My God,” Marilyn said. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, ain’t it?”
“But what does any of this have to do with Claudia Borrell? How did she find out about it? Why does she care so much about Wylie who, as far as we know, only met her briefly years ago when she was confessing to murdering her family? What does any of this stuff you found out have to do with the new victims here?”
“Like we keep saying, I guess we just have to wait for Claudia Borrell to tell us.”
CHAPTER 47
CLAUDIA Borrell called me again, like I knew she would.
“I should have been more careful to not let anyone take my picture that night,” said the now familiar voice on the end of the line. I realized she didn’t sound anything like she had when I thought she was Dr. Kate Lyon—she must have disguised her voice with me on the phone then. “To tell you the truth, I was getting tired of being Kate Lyon anyway. She kinda cramped my style. It was time to move on from her. Just like it was time to move on from Melissa Ross.”
“Hello, Claudia,” I said, trying to keep any anger or emotion of any kind out of my voice so she’d continue talking to me.
“Well, at least we’re on a first name basis now.”
“Did you call me to give up?”
“Ha! That’s funny. You’re a pretty funny guy, Gil. I like a sense of humor in a man. But only to a point.”
“So tell me about Belleville.”
“Oh, I still remember those first murders in Belleville. I remember them like they happened yesterday. I’d dreamed of that moment for so long, fantasized about it, planned for it—all of which made the final culmination of the deed so especially exciting and fulfilling for me. My only concern had been that it would be a singular thrill, one that I could never hope to repeat again. That I would never again feel that level of indescribable ecstasy I had felt that first time I took a human life. At least not the same way. That the first time would always be the best. Like a first kiss. It was so different, so exciting, so thrilling the first time you kissed someone new. After that, the thrill eventually wore off. Like the thrill I’d felt the first time I’d kissed Melissa Ross. But I got tired of those kisses after a while, just like I got tired of Melissa and her whining and complaining.
“The amazing thing that I discovered about killing, though, was that the first wasn’t necessarily the best. It kept getting better and better each time I did it. Oh, killing Bobby Jenkins had been great, no question about it. But killing my entire family—watching them die one by one as I moved through the house on that memorable night—well, that was even more satisfying than poor Bobby. Didn’t you ever fantasize about killing someone, Gil?”
“No.”
“Sure you have. Everyone does.”
I didn’t say anything.
“With me, the fantasy became more and more powerful. My father would hug me and say how much he loved me. And all I could think about was how great it would be
to slit his throat and watch him bleed to death.”
“Did your father abuse you in some way as a little girl? Is that what you’re doing when you kill all of these men? Killing your father over and over again because of things he did to you?”
Borrell laughed. “It wasn’t like that. My father never did anything bad to me. The truth is he was a good father. Almost a perfect father. The whole family was perfect. I was growing up in the perfect house in the perfect community with the perfect family. My whole damned life was perfect.”
“So then why did you murder your family?”
“Because I wanted to see what it felt like.”
“And you enjoyed it?”
“More than I could have ever imagined.”
“And you just kept on killing people . . .”
“That’s what God put me on this planet to do. We all have a purpose. Killing is my purpose. I’m already looking forward to my next victim. The anticipation of it is almost as good as the actual killing. Maybe better.”
“Why do you hate men so much?” I asked, just trying to keep her talking. “Why kill them?”
“Did anyone ask Speck and Bundy and Son of Sam why they only killed women? Of course not. When men kill women for the sexual thrill of it, no one thinks that’s unusual at all. Well, I do it for the same reason as Speck and Bundy and Son of Sam. I’m just like all the other serial killers you ever heard about or read about. Except I’m smarter than any of those men ever were.”
There was a ping in the email inbox on my computer.
“Another message from you?”
“Of course. You knew it was coming.”
“More killings?”
“Killing is what I do.”
“Who is it this time?” I asked, fearing the worst.
