“You think our killer is planning a wedding?”
“It’s just a hunch.”
Larry started packing the shirt up quickly. “I know about your hunches. Don’t discover anything cool until I get back.”
Windy spread a piece of brown paper over the table in the middle of the garage and shook the magazine over it to collect the trace particles of dirt and fiber that fell out. She sent them to the lab with a plea that they get moved to the front of the line, then started working on the magazine itself.
A piece of paper had been inserted toward the middle of the magazine and Windy flipped to the place, glad she was wearing a surgical mask because it cut down on the power of the Nuit Speciál Parfum sample that assailed her. She removed the three-by-two rectangle of white card stock that had marked the place, and studied the pages. One side was an advertisement for plus-sized gowns; the other an article about “How to Tame Your Inner Mother-in-Law.” Windy grimaced. An outer mother-in-law was plenty. She could even admit that it had been a bit of a relief when Bill told her both his parents were dead.
Windy grimaced again, berating herself for thinking that.
Plus-sized gowns and mothers-in-law. If this was Eve’s magazine, what did that tell them? Even at her most delusional about her weight, Eve could not think she needed an extra-large gown. So was she worried about her future mother-in-law?
Windy decided to set the magazine aside and delay checking it for prints until she found out if Lisa in Trace could link it in any way to Eve. Tiptoeing between the pizza boxes and candy wrappers, more things she doubted Eve had touched, she began examining the eighteen pieces of paper. Three of those she set aside as having contained food. Four others were tissue paper held together with a sticker from a fancy store, not what she would expect to find behind the Yucca Motel. She would come back to those. Five were the kind of flyers people shoved under windshield wipers, three advertising a new after-hours club and two for a free psychic reading. The remaining six had writing on them.
Windy was flattening the fourth one out when her heart rate jumped. A shopping list ripped from a pad of lined paper, the kind she kept next to her phone.
Diet Coke
Celery
Ex-Lax
Black mascara
Crest White Strips
Skim strawberry milk
Corkscrew
Packing tape
Choke chain
Lysol
It was the last item that caught Windy’s eye first, the Lysol, but the others filled in the picture for her. The picture of a weight-conscious killer replenishing her stores.
Larry came in while she was still staring at the list. “Get anything off the magazine?”
“No, I think that was a bust. But I found something better. Or worse. Depending on how you look at it.”
Larry glanced at the list and frowned. “You think this is Eve’s? The Diet Coke, celery, packing tape, all that I get. But what would she do with a choke chain?”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to answer that. The possibilities are endless.”
“Okay, now I have the creeps.”
“I could be wrong. The mascara at her house was brown. If she really does look like me, black mascara would be the wrong color for her. This might not be her shopping list.”
“Unless she dyed her hair,” Larry pointed out helpfully. “Which she probably did, since she’s on the run. I mean, I would.”
“Good point.” Windy stared at the list, different combinations of the items jumping out at her, celery and strawberry milk, mascara and Crest White Strips. Each of those made sense, a weight-conscious woman, concerned about her appearance. The corkscrew might suggest a touch of romance. But add the choke chain and packing tape and you got a serial killer.
“I’ll get the ninhydrin ready to fume for prints,” Larry said, opening one of the large steel cabinets that lined the back wall of the garage. He started pulling out chemicals, talking the whole time, because he was excited, Windy knew. Saying now, “You know, I tried those Crest White Strips. Couldn’t stand them—they made my teeth really sensitive. I was bummed because they’re expensive, right? But now I’m glad. The fewer things I have in common with a serial killer the better. Still, it’s a weird list for a chef.”
“We don’t know it’s her list yet,” Windy said.
Larry said, “Come on, strawberry skim milk? Totally a serial killer.”
“Let’s see if we can find some prints to back up that scientific assessment.”
They sprayed the paper with ninhydrin and used the heat and steam from an iron in the chemical hood to speed up the process of developing prints. They worked on the other objects from the Dumpster while they waited, Larry checking on the paper with the obsessiveness of a new father. They had just tagged the last of the items, finding no other evidence of Eve, when he said, “Uh-oh. This is covered with prints.”
The paper had been touched by dozens of people, probably while they were sorting through the Dumpster, and it was a sea of whorls, y-lines and bifurcated flurries. Checking all of them would take days.
Like a magician picking the ace of hearts out of a deck, Windy looked at the paper and pointed to a print on the left-hand corner. “It’s this one.”
Larry walked off with a puzzled expression on his face. He was back two minutes later, beaming. “You are right. It’s hers. And I figured out how you did that.”
“Great.” The shopping list was Eve’s. That meant—
“Don’t you want to know?” Larry asked.
Windy glanced at him, said, “I already know,” and went back to the list.
“It’s because the corners are where you hold to rip or turn a page on a pad,” Larry said, not able to contain himself. “That’s how you knew to look there.”
“Maybe.” Windy’s eyes kept flipping from “Ex-Lax” to “Choke chain.” There was something unutterably sad about the convergence of those two items, she thought, then shook her head at herself. She refused to feel another flash of sympathy for a serial killer.
Putting the list aside she looked at Larry and said, “Actually, it was just a lucky guess.”
CHAPTER 45
The old man was skinny as a rail and only about five feet tall, wearing rectangular tinted glasses, his hair brushed back in a pompadour. He sported a black suit, white dress shirt, and bolo tie that said I LOVE JESUS. He stood behind the beige Formica counter of the Yucca Motel reception area, in front of a handwritten sign proclaiming: “RATES: $29/hour, $150/week. Adult channels inclu. No Exceptions. No Excuses. SAVE YOUR SOUL. Cash Only,” and a framed picture of Sammy Davis, Jr.
Oscar White was the head desk clerk of the Yucca Motel. “Also the only one, but I don’t like to tell people that, makes them take me less seriously,” he confided to Ash, leaning across the counter and whispering it.
Ash had returned to the Yucca Motel after lunch, walked around the place, trying to figure out if Eve had used the Dumpster behind it on purpose, or if it was just convenient. The fact that the Dumpster was in an alley behind the motel suggested convenience, but it was in a line of other Dumpsters, all backing up to motels, and many of them closer to the major side streets. What argued the most strongly against coincidence for Ash was the fact that the Yucca Motel had been in continuous operation since 1973. That made it older than many of the others, part of the Vegas landscape when Eve was growing up.
But establishing a connection between her and the place was going to be impossible.
Oscar spread his large, bony hands wide. “The good Lord knows that I would love to help you, detective, but there’s not a thing I can tell you. There are no records past the last few months and I’ve only been working here two years. I can promise you that I’ve never seen that woman here.” Pointing to the photo of Eve they had managed to find for circulation. He patted the worn-looking Bible at his elbow. “I’ll swear to it on my book if you want.”
“That won’t be necessary. Would it be pos
sible for someone to come into the motel without you seeing them?”
“You mean, if they already had their key? Yes, I suppose. But unless they stayed in their room all the time, I’m bound to see them at some point. I would have remembered that girl. She looks lost. I bet her family can’t wait to have her back.”
Ash nodded. “Thanks for the help.”
He touched the Bible and said, “I do my best.”
Ash listened to the office door tinkle shut behind him, looking around the parking lot of the motel. Three long beige buildings flanked the a parking lot in a classic U shape, with a driveway at the mouth of the U that opened onto the Strip. The alley ran behind the middle building.
Ash crossed the half-empty parking lot and headed there, noticing the way curtains flicked in windows as he went by but pretending not to. Even without a police car or uniform, he knew he stood out to those people as a cop. One of the liabilities of having to wear a suit and carry a gun, particularly at the same time.
He slid through the slash in the chain-link fence that was supposed to separate the motel from the alley. It was a warm, dry day and the alley had a sort of abandoned lazy feeling, like you saw in movies about the Wild West, everything tinted slightly brown. Ash walked around the empty space where the Dumpster had been, kicking over cigarette butts and bottle caps, thinking about the case. It felt like it was in a state of suspended animation. He had two officers looking for Ned Blight’s old case file on the domestic disturbance at the Sun-Crest, and a detective at the hall of records, combing through whatever files they had there. That morning he’d thought he had figured out a way to get all of Eve’s old addresses easily by checking her school records, but it only took forty minutes for Nick Lee’s connection in the board of education to squash that. Yes, the records existed. Yes, they could see them. But the only address listed for Eve Sebastian on any of them was her father’s shoe factory, now defunct.
It wasn’t just chasing down Eve’s past that was hard. Where most people today left some kind of electronic trail, Eve was invisible. She had no credit cards, didn’t use her ATM card, no computer, and no cell phone in her name. No way to trace where she’d been, what she’d been doing, or who she knew. The woman could have been Amish, Ash thought. Except that she drove a car.
That was the only thing his officers had been able to confirm, that a green “funky ass looking car,” more officially identified from photographs as a Saab, had pulled up to the Dumpster for between twenty seconds and two minutes, during which an arm had come out of the driver’s side window and begun tossing things in. Apart from one man who suggested to the cops that it could have been Elvis, no one really got a glimpse of the tosser, everyone too interested in what they might find when the car left.
Which meant they might have grabbed first, and gone through their loot later, dropping anything that didn’t look interesting on the ground around the Dumpster. That had been Ash’s thought, anyway. Turning around one last time before giving up, his eye caught on something pressed into the links of the fence. He bent down to get a better look, reached into his pocket for a rubber glove, and carefully extracted a wadded-up sheet of lined paper. Unfolding it Ash discovered a piece of chewed gum stuck to the bottom half, and the words “Nadene, Tues.1230” written on the top.
It could have been nothing. The chances were it was someone else’s trash. But something in Ash’s gut said otherwise, and it wasn’t just the Twinkies he’d had for breakfast that morning.
CHAPTER 46
It was after four in the afternoon when Windy came into Ash’s office and dropped into the chair opposite his.
He looked up, trying to read her face. “You didn’t find any useable prints on the paper I found,” he said, breaking the news to himself that there was no discernible link between it and Eve.
She shook her head solemnly. “Not yet.”
“Oh well. It was worth a try.”
“Yes. Because it turns out we didn’t need prints. We have something better.”
Ash sat forward, his eyes wide. “You found a connection to Eve?”
Windy, unable to contain herself, grinned. “A good one. You’ll like this.”
“That was mean. You should play poker, that deadpan expression you have.”
“You’re not bad yourself. Look at this.” She pushed a photograph across Ash’s desk toward him. It showed the piece of paper he’d found, but now a bunch of marks were lightly visible all across it.
“Is that writing?” he asked.
Windy nodded. “Using low angle lighting we were able to raise the impression of writing from the preceding page on the pad.”
“But what does it say? How do you know it links to Eve?”
“Because we just happen to have that page.” She handed him another photograph, this time of the shopping list. “The tear marks from the top of the pages match.”
“Well, at least she’s eating her vegetables,” he said, scanning the shopping list, then added, “I’ll get someone out talking to adult stores about choke chain purchases.”
“Oh. I’d only thought of pet stores.”
“You just haven’t lived in Vegas long enough.”
“I can hardly wait to feel like a native. Apart from that, the shopping list seems straightforward. But what do you think this note you found means? ‘Nadene Tues. one-two-three-zero’?”
“My first thought was an appointment, twelve thirty, but most people indicate time with a colon between the hour and minutes.”
“Have you come across the name Nadene in any of your searches?”
“We’ve barely come across the name Eve Sebastian in our searches,” Ash said, and gave her the highlights of Eve’s virtual invisibility. He was just saying, “She almost could not have planned it better if she had tried,” when his phone rang and Jonah’s voice on the intercom said, “It’s for Windy. It’s Lisa, from Trace.”
Ash put it on the speaker phone and they had Lisa’s voice saying, “I found two black carpet fibers in with the dust you sent over from the bridal magazine.”
Windy frowned. “Black fibers? Eve had a lot of black clothes but no black carpet in her house. Are you sure they’re carpet?”
“Positive,” Lisa said. “And not just carpet. Tri-lobal. That means auto-grade. Lucky for you, I just happened to do my graduate work on auto carpeting.”
“You can ID it?”
“It’s not all that common. In fact it’s only used by Scandinavian car manufacturers. This particular type has been discontinued. If I had to guess, I’d say your magazine spent some time riding around in the trunk of a 1996 Saab.”
Windy felt a chill, thanked her, and hung up.
Ash said, “So the bridal magazine in the Dumpster was Eve’s. Looks like your hunch about the white material we’re finding at the crime scene coming from a wedding dress might be right.”
“Might be.” Windy sighed. “It’s another piece of the puzzle anyway. I just wish one of them would tell us where to find her now, not where we could have found her in 1984. Speaking of puzzling—” She reached into her bag and pulled out a large brown envelope. “Did you get one of these? Or did you send this to me? I can’t find a log of it, and Vera at the front desk doesn’t remember seeing it. It just ended up in my mailbox.” She pushed the envelope across his desk toward him.
Ash opened it and slid out the eight-by-ten photograph. It showed a kitchen with dark wood paneled walls and a table in the middle, like a million other kitchens in America. There were breakfast dishes and a milk carton on the table, two wood chairs next to it, and a high-chair pulled up to one side. What made it different from other kitchens was the body of a woman lying on the floor perpendicular to the table, her legs pointing into the lens of the camera. It had been taken with a flash so part of it was brightly lit, the other half in shadow, and there was a glare bouncing off the window over the kitchen sink.
“I haven’t seen this before. What do you think it is?”
“It looks like a
crime scene photo,” Windy said.
“How do you know it’s a crime scene? Maybe she just slipped and fell.”
Windy leaned close to the desk. “Look at these.” Her finger hovered over four small ovals leading from the woman toward the edge of the frame. “Those are footprints. And I think there is something over here—” pointing to the shadowy corner of the photo now, “—an object.”
“And you have no idea where it came from?”
“No. I imagine it ended up in my box by mistake. I wanted to check with you first in case it was something you recognized.”
“Not one of mine.” He handed it back to her. “Do you want to have Erica see if she can clarify any of the images using the computer? Maybe help figure out where it is, who it should go to?”
“I think the mayor would explode if he thought we were using valuable lab time on a crime we don’t even know was committed here. No, I think I’ll just hold on to it.”
“I really like the idea of Gerald exploding. Are you sure?”
Windy smiled and said, “Tempting,” but Ash could see from the little indentation between her eyebrows that something was bothering her.
“What?”
“It’s the fact that she threw away her license plate.”
“She could just be trying to make herself harder to spot. The license plate is the most obvious part of the car.”
“Maybe. But what if it means she’s stripping off her bad girl image?”
“Do you think that could mean she’s changing her MO? Changing how she picks her victims?”
“And what she does to them.”
Ash’s jaw tightened. “We might be in for a nasty shock at the next crime scene.”
Windy’s eyes went to the words “choke chain” on the shopping list. “Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of.”
Ash looked at his watch then and Windy said, “I’m sorry, I forgot it was Friday night. You don’t need to be listening to my prognostications of gloom. You probably have somewhere to go.”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 23
