I could almost taste it right that second.
Holly was much more curious about the construction of the turducken than she was in the logistics involved in Sterling’s fall into the Ochlockonee River. At her behest I did my best to explain the precise way a creative butcher nested the birds together like a set of those weird little Russian dolls that fit inside one another.
“Artie wouldn’t like it,” she said. “All those meats in the same meal? He likes to keep his foods completely separate on his plate.” The thought of disappointing Artie made her smile.
“Do you know about the other women?” I asked. Enough about poultry, enough about Artie. If I was still around when Artie showed up, he and I were going to have a chat.
She gestured at the morning newspaper. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe what I’ve been reading. It’s just-it just can’t be true. Not Sterling.” She’d been waiting for me to ask the question about Sterling and didn’t spare a second in answering it.
“You don’t believe it?”
She looked at me, which was good. Her eyes were tight with something; I wasn’t sure what. She said, “Sterling is… pretty, I mean-God, who am I kidding-he’s really gorgeous and… he’s… smooth. You know, he’s not the Sylvester Stallone macho-type guy, he’s more like a short-God, I probably shouldn’t say that. Oh, what the hell-he’s like a short version of George Clooney. Sterling’s really charming, not the kind of guy I usually meet through the-” She stopped herself.
“Yeah?”
She went on firmly. “He wouldn’t kill anybody. No, no. Sterling is just not that type of guy. I know men. I do.”
I whispered a prayer of gratitude for the opening. “So what type of guy is he, Holly?”
I’d been traveling for four days plus through I’d-lost-count-of-how-many-states hoping to get the answer to that question. And now here it was. I was about to hear what kind of guy Sterling Storey was, what kind of guy could cheat on a woman like Gibbs over and over again.
Holly’s phone rang. It was her sister, Artie’s wife.
“You got my message?” Holly said, stepping away from me across the kitchen. “Is Artie going crazy with the delay?” She raised a finger to warn me that she was going to need a minute.
I stood and poked my head into the living room. Carmen had Holly’s son in her lap. She was reading him Christmas stories. I recognized a funny little book that I always read to Simon over the holidays calledBialosky’s Christmas. Simon thought Bialosky was one terrific bear, which was something I never really understood.
Carmen’s storytelling style was full of melody, and she imbued each character with a distinct voice. She was making it sound as if one of Bialosky’s friends was from the barrio. Carmen was good. I listened for half a minute, but only with the periphery of my awareness. Front and center? I was replaying the last few moments with Holly.
Behind me I heard her place the phone receiver back on the cradle.
“Sorry,” she said. “My sister.”
Before I stepped back into the kitchen, I killed the power on my cell phone so we wouldn’t be disturbed, and I changed the weight of my voice, reducing it the way my mom used to reduce the gravy before bringing it to the table. The act was pure instinct, like a big cat flexing her muscles before she pounces. I was about to pounce.
My prey was a cute blond widow who was cooking Thanksgiving supper for her extended family.
“Sterling Storey’s not the kind of guy you usually meet through… what?” I asked Holly.
She took a step back, literally, and bumped against the stove. “I hoped you hadn’t heard that. I’ve been wishing I hadn’t said that.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you hoped I did. Regardless, here we are. I heard it. You said it.”
“I’m a widow,” she said.
“Got that. I’m sorry.”
“People talk. You know what it’s like. My… options are limited. In my personal life.”
“Are we talking about sex, Holly?” I managed to ask the question with a certain panache, as though I talked about sex with cute young widows all the time.
Yeah.
My question amused her. “Yes, Sam, we are indeed talking about sex. Hello.”
I said what, to me, felt obvious. “You’re a lovely girl, Holly. Bright, funny. I don’t see how your options are limited.” I didn’t say,“You could have any guy you might want, any guy at all.”I didn’t say,“A guy would be lucky to be with you. A guy like me would…”
I didn’t allow myself to finish the thought.
“Before he died, my husband and I had an… imaginative sex life. We enjoyed a variety…”
Holly turned away from me.
Holly wasn’t bashful about sex. That’s not why she turned away. She turned away because she instinctively knew I was bashful about sex.
I tried to focus.A variety of what?
“We were careful. Always careful, especially after Zach was born. We didn’t take unnecessary risks.”
At the moment she said that she was talking directly to the turkey. Unlike me the turkey didn’t blush.
“That’s good,” I replied. “You and your husband, what you did together in your private time is… was…”
“Our business. Yes. Is this important? I’m not really comfortable talking about all this with you.”
Neither am I. Trust me, neither am I.
“Your husband’s name was?”
“Mark.”
“Thank you. Detective Reynoso and I are trying to determine what kind of danger you might be in from Sterling Storey. How you know him and how you met him are important parts of that determination. We’d like to leave here today able to assure you that you’re safe.”
She considered my argument. She looked in her hand, pulled out a card, and held it up for me to see. “I don’t have to talk to you, though, do I? Legally, you don’t have any authority here, do you?”
The card she’d chosen from her imaginary hand was a good one. I acknowledged that she held it. I said, “Nope, I don’t.”
“But then,” she said, “you don’t have to be here at all, do you?”
“Nope, I certainly don’t. I’m a volunteer in this fire department.”
She turned back toward me. The fact that I was there on my own time and on my own dime carried a lot of weight. She said, “Who will know about this? I mean, if I decide to tell you?”
I sipped at some coffee. It was cold. “This is where I could lie to you and tell you nobody but us, me and Detective Reynoso, but the truth is I don’t know who’ll end up knowing. Secrets are like puppies. Once you let them out, they tend to be pretty hard to control.”
“South Bend’s a small town. Notre Dame’s a Catholic university. A very Catholic university. I’m a mom. Some of the things I do in my private life aren’t acceptable here. I have no illusions about that.”
“I understand,” I said. “I know about small towns and secrets. In case you’ve never been, Boulder is more small town than big city. I grew up in a much smaller town in Minnesota. So how did you meet him?”
Instantly, she entered a little time warp. I recognized it. It was a little Jules Verne moment where time stopped and she tried to decide whether to tell me the truth. Ten seconds later she exited the warp with what sounded to me like honest words. “I have personal ads on the Web. Adult personal ads. I try to meet men with… similar interests… who are traveling, you know, who are in town on business. Mostly I end up going to Chicago to…”
Part of me was grateful that she left the sentence unfinished, part of me was just the smallest bit curious about what happened when she went to Chicago. “But Sterling came here to South Bend?”
“Yes, he did. His work brought him here-brings him here. You know about that, don’t you? His work?”
“I do. You didn’t meet him through his job, though?”
“No, we met, if you can call it that, over the Internet. We never ran into each other on our jobs. Even after. My job concer
ns primarily women’s sports. I don’t deal much with the men’s teams.”
“See, I didn’t know any of that. You have a copy of the ad you run? May I take a look at it?”
“What?”
Holly had heard me just fine. Her exclamation was understandable, about what I would have expected had I asked if I could fish through her underwear drawer. I softened the request. “I’d like to know what exactly Sterling responded to. It will help me… understand him a little better.”
She exhaled, her eyes wide. She dropped her arms to her sides and spread her legs a couple of inches farther apart. “He responded to a revealing picture of an attractive woman who said she likes sex with strangers. It’s not that complicated, Detective. Getting people to respond to my ad wasn’t difficult-isn’t difficult. Finding someone I can feel safe with… that’s a whole different problem.”
I blushed. “How do you-”
“E-mail. I set up temporary Hotmail accounts, and then I e-mail back and forth with the guy until I’m comfortable. If I don’t get comfortable with him, I close the account and start all over with somebody else.”
I didn’t know what a Hotmail account was. Hell. I’d ask Simon when I talked to him later in the day. My kid would probably know. “How long did the process take with Sterling?”
Carmen chose that moment to step into the room. “Smells great in here. You guys making progress?”
“We’re doing great, Carmen. Maybe a few more minutes?” I said. The expression on my face was intended to shout “bad timing.”Real bad timing.
She backed out.
Holly said, “I don’t like her.”
“Yeah, well. She’s great with your kid. That’s good, right? You were saying how long it took to-”
“Not long.”
“So you met him… where?”
“On campus.”
“And you…?”
“Jesus, Detective. Do you really need to know? Really?”
I said yes. I didn’t feel yes, but I said yes. Some things you want to know even if you don’t want to know them.
This was one of those.
Holly stepped over next to me, lowered her mouth to my ear, and whispered what it was she’d done with Sterling Storey.
Maybe it was the moist heat of her breath, maybe it was what she told me, but I blushed all over again.
FIFTY-THREE
This was going to be a first. Holly and her husband had talked about doing something like it a couple of times, but the discussions were always more joke than anything else. But this guy from California? He was serious. Right from the start, she could tell.
Totally serious.
She thought about his proposal overnight. Excitement overcame fear, fear became excitement, and she e-mailed a simple lowercasedyes.
It had been a Saturday afternoon in September a year before. Notre Dame was playing Michigan in Ann Arbor. The date for the date was Holly’s idea. The university campus would be empty. The students and faculty and staff who weren’t in Michigan for the football game would be holed up watching the annual tussle anyplace that had a big screen and plenty of beer.
One-thirty to two-fifteen. That was the window she’d given him. She’d be there by one-thirty. She’d leave by two-fifteen. They had to be gone before Saturday afternoon confessions began.
In between? For Holly, the sweetest of all aphrodisiacs: anticipation.
“What are you going to do while you’re waiting for me?” he asked in one of his e-mails.
He knew all about anticipation. She’d figured he would.
“Pray,” she’d responded.
Some secular universities have chapels; some Catholic universities have elaborate churches. Notre Dame University has a basilica.
Holly was waiting for Sterling opposite the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the vaulting nave of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
Ten minutes before two o’clock he knelt in the pew that was right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach. He was the church mouse.
“Don’t turn around,” he whispered. “No, don’t.”
Her lungs felt bottomless. She was breathing so deeply that she had to open her mouth to get enough air.
She already knew from experience that the fire of anticipation consumed immense quantities of oxygen.
She hadn’t spent the time praying. No, she’d been counting the other people in the church. Currently, there were thirteen. One lovely woman in a dreadful purple suit was only a few feet from her in the Chapel of the Reliquaries. Thirteen was just right. Not too many, not too few. Just right.
“Sex in churches shouldn’t be reserved for priests,” he whispered to her in an over-the-top Irish brogue. “Should it, now?”
She’d been thinking that they’d use the confined space of the confessional for their tryst, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be in the dark with him.
Fear? No. That wasn’t it. Not at all.
She wanted to be able to see him.
Without a word Holly stood, walked down the length of the nave, and climbed the stairs toward the pipe organ. Her idea.
A few minutes later he followed.
She knew he would. They always did.
As his footfalls brushed the stairs, one by one, she knew that what she’d been thinking about, fantasizing about, since she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was about to happen.
Holly didn’t actually see his face until they were finished. Until anticipation was nothing but sweat on the cold church floor. When she finally turned toward him and saw the white slash of his Roman collar and the ruby light from the stained glass that limned his profile, his physical beauty almost took her breath away again. She thought,Mark would have vetoed him for sure.
For sure.
FIFTY-FOUR
Carmen and I left Holly’s house before I had a chance to meet Artie. That disappointed me.
We were out the door and all the way down the porch steps when I thought of something else, told Carmen to go ahead and get in the car, and returned to the screen door. Zach was playing with a pile of those oversized fat Legos in the living room, making something that looked like Frankenstein’s dog.
“Holly,” I said, calling her back to the door. “I’m sorry, one more thing.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You’re not frightened of him? Of Sterling?”
“No, I’m not.”
“The other women he’s suspected of murdering? They don’t-”
“I’m not convinced. Far from it.”
Her expression changed just enough that I guessed that whatever came next was going to be at a different level of intimacy than what had come before. I found myself struggling to tune my antennae.
“Listen,” she told me, “I e-mailed him again a couple of weeks ago. I asked him if he was interested in going to church with me again sometime. That’s how not-frightened of him I am.”
“You would see him again?”
“Before this week and all the news in the papers? Before you and Detective Loves-Kids-Lacks-Social-Graces started trying to scare the bejesus out of me? I would have seen him, yes. We had a great time together.”
Sometimes people ask me why I’m a cop. I don’t usually answer with the public service/public welfare refrain. I answer with the truth: People are endlessly interesting.
Holly Malone was a damn good example.
“Did Sterling respond to your e-mail?”
She shook her head convincingly. Even a little ruefully, I thought.
“I gave you my cell phone number, right? Just in case? You’ll call if you see him around here, or even if you get a feeling?”
“Yes, Detective. You did. And I will.”
I reached into my pocket and handed Holly the crappy photo of Brian Miles. “Him too. Keep it. Call if you see him.”
“You’re not going to tell me who he is, are you?”
“His name is Brian Miles. He’s somebody you should avoid.”
She held the picture loosely in her hand.
“I told you, I’m careful. No matter what you think about my lifestyle, I don’t take chances with my safety. You haven’t convinced me that Sterling’s a killer, but you’ve convinced me that seeing him might involve taking an unnecessary risk.”
“Might?”
She smiled at me in a way that seemed full of understanding and wisdom. The wisdom was bearded with just the slightest tease. I found it all quite disarming. Me and women? What a frigging mess.
With my thumb and index finger I spread my mustache away from the center of my lip. Holly was watching me carefully, waiting to see where I was heading next; I thought she knew that I hadn’t come back to her door to ask her about Sterling and Brian Miles and to make sure she had my phone number.
Holly probably knew things about men that I wouldn’t know for the rest of my life.
In the grand scheme that was probably an okay thing.
I said, “You and your husband, you and Mark? Did your, what did you call it before, your ‘imaginative’ sex life-that’s right? I got that? Did it include, you know, other people, other couples? Sexually, I mean. I don’t know if I’m asking that exactly right. But what I’m wanting to know is… well…”
My voice disappeared like stormwater down an open manhole.Swooosh.
“Is this a professional inquiry?”
“Actually, no, no, it’s not. It’s, um,… it’s personal. It’s something I’m struggling with… myself.”
I watched muscles change in her face. Her mouth softened, and the tendons along her jaw slackened. Fine lines erupted alongside her eyes. She said, “Yes, it did. It included other people sometimes. We were active swingers long before we were married.”
“And it didn’t…” Some questions are harder to ask than others. Those seemed to be the only kind I was asking. Or trying to ask. I wasn’t doing a bang-up job.
“Didn’t what?”
“Cause problems? For the two of you? In your marriage? Fidelity, and trust, you know? Feelings weren’t hurt?”
She shook her head. “Far from it. This may sound funny, but it was all about trust for us. Mark knew every man I was involved with sexually, and vice versa. We each had total veto power over the other’s partners. What we did enriched us.” She glanced back to make sure Zach was still engaged with his Legos. “This is a hard thing to explain. Sex with other people brought us closer.”
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