“You have a lot of connections,” Ash said.
“I have a lot of unmarried sisters with ardent admirers,” Nick Lee explained. “Plus, every time I come through with something, Bob has to get rid of one of the Andrew Lloyd Webber tapes he makes us listen to in the car, so I have incentive.”
Ash laughed, said, “Whatever it takes. Thanks, Nick,” and hung up.
Windy looked at the address he’d written down for Eve, then at him. “How long will it take to get a warrant?”
“Forty-five minutes if we’re lucky. Three hours if we aren’t.”
“I’ll go get my team ready.” She stopped at the door and turned back around. “Leaky faucets. Both the Waters house and the Johnson house had leaky faucets.”
Ash shook his head. “They used different plumbers. We checked.”
“No, I mean something else.” She was remembering what Ned had said that morning in the parking lot, about the call he took as a rookie and evil being trapped in the walls, certain spaces being cursed. It had stayed with her, suggesting the idea of location as the link. She said now, “What if it’s not the families that are her targets, the triggers for her rage? What if it’s the places? The residences of both the Johnsons and Waterses are old. I haven’t learned Vegas as well as I would like to yet, but one thing I have learned is that 90 percent of the residents live in new houses. The fact that both our crime scenes are older buildings could be significant. And the other day Hank Logan said that sometimes people go back to a place where something happened to them, to try to make sense of it.” She caught Ash’s expression and said, “You think I’m grasping at straws.” Just what she needed, him to doubt her.
“Actually no,” he said. “I’m feeling like an idiot for not thinking of it myself.”
She went to the door. “I’ll take Eve’s house—”
“—And I’ll start looking into former residences.”
Ash watched her head back to criminalistics, thinking how much working with Windy reminded him of being on Army Ranger’s operations with his friend Benton Arbor after college. The confidence of a partner you could count on, someone really smart who got what you were trying to do without you having to explain it. Someone you felt an instinctive bond with.
Only he’d never wondered what it would be like to make out with Benton in the break room.
“Ash,” Jonah shouted from the open door of his office across the hall.
“What?”
“Stop humming.”
“I’m not humming.”
“Yes you are. You’re humming ‘You’re the Inspiration’ by Chicago. Loud. You’ve been doing it since last Friday and it’s driving everyone insane.”
“I am not humming.”
“She’s engaged.”
“I really don’t know what you are talking about.”
CHAPTER 25
“Radio KRST, the station that puts the ‘rest’ in stressed,” a sleepy-sounding voice said on the other end of the phone. “This is Charity, how can I direct your call?”
“Hello, ma’am, I’m calling from Entertainment Weekly magazine? My editor, Ed Sebastian, asked me to get in touch with someone at your station and I was wondering if you could help me.”
“Entertainment Weekly?” The voice wasn’t sleepy any more. “No way. I love that magazine. Are you doing a story about the station?”
“Sort of. We want to do a piece on the life of a female deejay, you know, in honor of Women’s History Month? And the name of one of your deejays—here it is. She uses the name Daisy Deluxe? Has the Hits from High School show?—Anyway, her name came up.”
“Daisy Graber. Sure. Daisy is great. How did they hear about her?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, I just do the errands, make the calls, get the coffee, take the abuse. But someone must have said something pretty spectacular, because my boss came storming in and told me to get on it ASAP.”
A grunt, then, “Bosses think everything has to be ASAP, don’t they?”
“They sure do, Charity. When really ASPA is more like it—A Serious Pain in the Ass?”
Charity laughed. “Sounds like we have the same boss. So, you are looking for information about Daisy?”
“Anything you have? The boss, of course, would like it if you could Federal Express her direct to me at no additional charge, but I’d settle for a phone number or an address.”
“What about both?”
“You are a goddess.”
“To those who deserve it, anyway.” There was a soft flicking sound, like a Rolodex being spun around, then Charity’s voice saying, “Got it,” and reading off the number and address. “Anyone asks, you learned it from 411 information.”
“You bet. For that matter, it would probably be best if you didn’t mention to anyone that we called. Whenever we start working on a lead like this, People magazine or Us tries to swoop in and steal our thunder, and the person who gets blamed for it is me, the peon. If you could keep this under wraps for a few days, help me keep my job, that would be great.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Charity said. “I won’t tell a soul and besides, I leave for vacation on Friday and I won’t be back for a whole week.”
“I’m jealous. Thanks so much for your help, Charity. You’re great. And remember, if anyone asks, don’t mention our story. My boss will kill me if he thinks it’s been leaked.”
“My lips are sealed.”
CHAPTER 26
Eve Sebastian lived in a gated development called the Wetlands, just to the east of the Strip. It was a collection of two-story townhouses gathered around a series of pools, the whole thing inside a brick and wrought-iron fence with remote controlled gates at two entrances for the residents and a guard shack at the third for “All Others.”
Windy peered through the gates at precisely manicured grass as the criminalistics van idled at the guard shack, waiting for admission. She was discovering that you could gauge how fancy any Las Vegas development was from the size of the body of water it was named after. She supposed the best one would be called something like The Oceans, and the worst maybe The Drinking Fountain. The Wetlands, she figured, was somewhere in between.
The guard finally raised the gate and they drove up to a white townhouse with red trim and fake shutters on the windows. Eve had rented the place furnished, generic gray carpeting, light gray walls, lemon yellow leather couch, dark wood coffee table in the living room, white duvet over gray sheets, gray flannel upholstered headboard, gray dresser in the master bedroom, gray towels in the bath. The dark wood night table had a fake white orchid on it, to give it tone, make it look like a boutique hotel. The air was cool and smelled of perfume and Lysol mixed together.
It was big for a single woman living alone, two stories, two bedrooms, three baths, yet there was no sign of anyone but Eve living there. But there were plenty of traces of her. There were fingerprints everywhere, hair in the drains, blood on the toothbrush, brittle nail clippings in the wastebasket. Windy looked around the bathroom, then stopped abruptly and said aloud, “I think she’s anorexic.”
“You can tell that by looking in her garbage can?” Ned peered in himself.
“Not just that, although the brittle nail clippings are part of it. But look at what she has here.” Windy gestured to the beige fake-marble counter of the master bathroom. There was a tube of Sensodyne toothpaste for sensitive teeth and gums, athlete’s foot powder, and two different kinds of under-eye cream, one promising to “Make You Look Younger Today,” the other settling for helping to “End Your War Against Bags and Puffy Circles.”
“All this tells me is that she should visit the dentist more often, wash her socks more frequently, and get more sleep. Hell, I use this toothpaste and you can see that I’m not anorexic.” Ned patted his stomach.
“Maybe,” Windy agreed. “But sensitive teeth, fungal infections, and puffy eyes due to dehydration are all symptoms of anorexia. And did you notice the extra blanket on the bed? Anorexics are always
cold. It would explain the Lysol, because sometimes their bodies give off an odd odor, like those of people suffering from undernourishment. I’d bet we’ll find calcium and magnesium vitamin supplements somewhere. And that all her clothes are size small.”
Ned disappeared, came back a few moments later shaking his head. “Her clothes aren’t size small.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Windy conceded.
“They’re size extra small. Except for the ones that are size zero.”
Windy had always thought that was an awful idea, in a world where many women measured their self-worth based on size, to make clothes that were size nothing. What a thing to aspire to. She and Ash had concluded that the killer seemed to use food to control her victims and now it looked like she used it to control herself too. Windy felt an out of place pang of sympathy for the woman.
She walked around for over an hour saying, “Bag this, envelope for this, use the white powder to dust for prints on the thermostat, paper not plastic for the toothbrush. No! Don’t lick the envelope flap closed, you could contaminate the sample, yes, take the washcloth too.” The place was a DNA analyst’s wet dream. And yet at the same time the whole apartment was sterile, not in the scientific sense, but in the figurative sense of impersonal. Unemotional. Cold.
The kitchen cabinets contained a can of chicken broth, calcium supplements, a sample pack of multivitamins, and a half-used package of Metamucil. The refrigerator held a container of milk and a two-thirds-empty jar of strawberry jam.
There were only a few clothes, almost all identical, black pants, black sweaters, black shirts, all in dry cleaning bags, all tiny. Three pairs of black shoes, size eight and a half. There was nothing white to match the thread on Mrs. Johnson’s body. The only makeup was a dried out tube of brown mascara, a Blistex, and an untouched Berry Burgundy lip-gloss. Windy smelled perfume on the air but there was no sign of its bottle, no old bottles of nail polish or sample sizes of facial toner. She found a plain white Maidenform bra, no underwire, and pairs of white cotton underwear uncomfortably similar to the ones she had in her drawer at home, and wondered whether it said more about Eve or the man—Barry or Harry—who was her boyfriend. Not really the underwear she’d expect of a bad girl, though.
What kind would that be, Windy asked herself, hearing Bill saying that the expensive silk and lace lingerie she loved reminded him of a cheap brothel.
There were three books on the night table, and they gave Windy another unwelcome flash of sympathy for Eve as she bagged them. The top one was The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. The next one was Sex Secrets of the Pros: What Every Good Girl Needs to Know to Keep Her Man Satisfied, by a Genuine Bad Girl. And the bottom one was A Little Princess. That one was inscribed on the inside in a crooked scrawl: “To Eve, This is my Favorite book, Love, your Goddaughter Nikkie (Nicole),” with hearts for dots over the i’s. Eve Sebastian: lonely single woman, beloved godmother, brutal killer.
Quite a profile.
Of course, Windy told herself, you couldn’t put too much stock in the books, reflecting on her own bedside table collection—Living with Your Six-Year-Old Even If You Don’t Think You Can, a guide for preparing her tax return using some new computer software, and a well-thumbed copy of Auntie Mame.
The books and the items scattered over Eve’s bathroom counter were as personal as the apartment got. There were no souvenirs from theme parks, no pads of paper with logos of places she had visited, no photos, no refrigerator magnets. No notes to, from, or about Harry. The only box of matches came from her restaurant, and the only magazine they found was WHERE?, the magazine that the tourist board put in hotel rooms. It lay on the coffee table like an existential question as Windy and her team kept looking for direct evidence linking Eve to the murders and found none.
The neighbors, the few they found, could barely confirm that Eve had lived there, much less when she had last been home, what hours she kept or if she had a boyfriend. The guard at the gate had no idea when she’d last been home, explaining that each resident had their own clicker and could come and go as they wanted. She hadn’t put anyone on her visiting list in the last month, and renters couldn’t put anyone on permanently.
Eve’s townhouse was one in a row of ten that fronted the fourteenth tee, most of them rented by companies for their executives when they traveled to Vegas for conventions. Some of the townhouses even rented by the week. Everyone minded their own business when they were there, and it was only the most astute who could come up with a description of Eve as complete as “that skinny woman who lives up there.”
Windy was lying on her stomach on the couch, doing a tape lift on the area of carpeting immediately in front of it, when she felt someone tap her on the shoulder.
“Ma’am?”
It was the same young female patrol officer who had been in front of the Waters house. Officer Franca, her name tag said. Windy remembered Ash had sent her and two others to canvass the neighbors. Now the woman said, “You asked us to tell you if we found anyone who knew anything, ma’am. There is a lady, three doors down, who claims she spoke to Eve often.”
Windy sat up. “Please stop calling me ma’am. It makes me feel like I need a better wrinkle cream. Call me Windy. And what do you mean by claims?”
“I don’t know, um, Windy. I guess I’m not sure she is reliable.”
Windy followed Officer Franca to an open door, where a woman in her sixties with a tinted blond bob and gold shoes was standing in a gold workout suit, the kind no one ever worked out in. She looked up at Windy and the lenses of her glasses caught the light.
“This is Mrs. Dutton,” the officer said.
“Chicago Thomas, Metro Criminalistics,” Windy said. “I’m told you are friendly with Eve Sebastian.”
The woman lifted her eyebrows meaningfully behind the square frames of her glasses. “I would not say we were friendly. A bit too aloof, that one, for friends.”
“Did you ever see her with anyone?”
“See and hear. They were hollering at each other.”
“Who was she with?”
“A man, of course. He was tall. Had a ponytail, you know. One of those artsy-fartsy Hollywood types. Wearing a cap backwards, and a leather jacket, a real hot shot.”
“I see. Could you see the color of his hair? Or his jacket?”
“Yellow.”
“Which one?”
“Both. All of him. The lights outside? They turn everything yellow. They call these safety lights. Whose safety, I want to know? It would only take one burglar with hepatitis to blend in with the background and rob the entire street. And I saw on the Discovery Channel that there are more cases of hepatitis in America now than ever before.”
The woman looked at Windy like she expected a response so Windy said, “Oh,” as noncommittally as she could. “Do you remember when this was? That you saw the man?”
“Last week, or two weeks ago. I’m not sure.”
“What about the time?”
“It was late. I was watching the television, CSI? Wonderful show. Have you seen it?”
Had she ever. Windy dreamed of equipment like the stuff they showed. It came on Thursday nights. She said, “If you remember which episode, we can probably learn when it was. Did you hear the man’s name?”
“No. Just ‘leave me alone’ and ‘I told you I didn’t want to see you again.’ ”
“He said that?”
“No, she did.”
“Had you ever seen the man before, Mrs. Dutton? Here?”
“One other time. About a month earlier. I asked her if he was her boyfriend and she said no. But she did have one. At least, she said so. I offered to set her up with my grandson, Ernie, who is a fine boy. He drives for UPS. You should see how cute he is in that outfit. But she always shook her head, no, she had a boyfriend. Could not have been much of one if I never saw him.” She eyed Windy again and said, “Are you related to her?”
“Me? No. Why?”
&nbs
p; “You look like her is all, only fatter. And with different colored eyes.” The woman’s eyes moved from Windy’s face to her left hand and back up. Windy didn’t understand the meaning of the gesture until the woman said, “You’re single. Would you like to meet my grandson?”
Windy felt herself take a step backwards. “Thank you, ma’am, but actually I am engaged.”
Mrs. Dutton shook her head with disapproval. “Why aren’t you wearing a ring? My grandson, Ernie, would give you a ring. Like I told Eve, a ring isn’t just a present. It is a sign a man respects you. Even those girls on that Bachelor show know it.”
“Thank you for your help, Mrs. Dutton,” Windy said, moving away, fast. “If you think of anything else, please be in touch.” And then, to Officer Franca, “Maybe I don’t need to talk to the neighbors.” Wondering how long it would take for the exchange about Ernie Dutton and the rings to get around the squad room.
She forgot all about it and Mrs. Dutton, as she worked the rest of the room with her team. They took samples of all the materials in the rooms and of Eve’s clothes to use as standards, a basis of comparison, if the lab was able to find any trace evidence on the victims. If Eve was the murderer, she likely had a murder kit with packing tape and the knife in it that she kept with her. That meant there could be virtually no trace of the killings at her house. But there had to be something and Windy was determined to find it.
At that point she turned the magazine over so it would stop asking her WHERE? The back side was an advertisement for a jeweler, a picture of a man and a woman in close profile, telling them to “Make it Tonight, Make it a Diamond, and Make it Forever.” Make it Pepto-Bismol, Windy thought, lying on her stomach on the couch and checking beneath it.
The beam of her flashlight showed her a few dust balls, a broken nail, another hair. Then something glinted in the back against the wall, and her heart leaped. Using a set of sterile tongs, she brought the object toward her, gave a low whistle and said, “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” as she admired the roll of clear packing tape she found.
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 15
