“This could be what we discussed yesterday, a change in her methods. Have you been able to confirm that her family lived in this house?”
“Not yet. Why?”
“What if she is becoming less interested in families, the houses she used to live in, and is going to start targeting women? Like herself.” Like me, Windy wanted to shout, struggling to keep her hands steady.
“That’s an unpleasant thought.”
Focus on the crime scene, she told herself. Keep it professional, don’t let yourself get scared, don’t let your guard down. She looked at Kelly O’Connell’s mangled face and said, “I have another one for you. I think I just figured how she got Kelly to sit still for breakfast.”
CHAPTER 54
Dr. Bob’s first words in the warm examining room at five that evening confirmed what Windy had been thinking. The medical examiner pointed her gloved hand to marks on Kelly O’Connell’s neck that became visible when the blood was cleaned off and said, “Choke chain was used to control the victim.”
“Like you would use on a dog? Or in S&M?” Ash asked, wanting to make sure his detectives were on the right track.
“For S&M people usually prefer bigger links than this one. More dramatic effect. Anyway, the one used here was a pretty standard dog chain with an aluminum coating. I pulled a flake of it out of her hair.”
“But she wasn’t strangled with it, was she?” Windy asked.
“Oh no.” Dr. Bob shook her head definitely. “She didn’t die of that. Your killer just used it for discipline.”
“You were right,” Ash said to Windy. “Eve used it to make her do what she wanted.”
“What was bad news for the victim is good news for you,” Dr. Bob went on. “Some fibers got pressed into the skin. White satin. To the naked eye they match the ones from the other crime scene, but you’ll want to have the lab look them over. And a hair. Not the victim’s.” She held two glassine envelopes out to Windy.
Windy wanted to take them and run them up to the lab, run away, but she handed them off to a courier and made herself stay until the end of the autopsy. At one point Ash’s phone rang and she looked at him with envy as he left the room. He was back after only a few minutes with the news that Nick Lee had been able to confirm through a connection at the water board that Eve’s family had lived on Cottonwood Drive.
“At least we know she’s sticking with her old houses,” he said.
“Too bad Nick’s connection can’t tell us where she lived before she kills.”
“Oh, he could. He offered to. Said it would take about six weeks.”
Dr. Bob was moving around, weighing organs, making notations, while they talked. “Nice pink lungs. She must not have been in Vegas long. And this is interesting.” She looked up at them. “Your victim seems to have had breakfast twice.”
“Twice? Like a double portion?” Ash asked.
“No. Twice like on two separate occasions three to four hours apart. The last one was shortly before the time of death.”
“Eve tortured her for that long,” Ash said. “Long enough to get hungry twice.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t satisfying enough the first time,” Windy said. “Maybe without anyone else to threaten, the thrill wasn’t adequate.”
“Can you give us a time of death?” Ash asked the pathologist.
Dr. Bob looked at the thermometers poking out of the piles of organs, and back at the body. “It’s hard to say. It would depend on the temperature.”
“The thermostat in the house was set at seventy-two degrees,” Windy told her.
Dr. Bob shook her head. “Not that temperature. The temperature of the freezer where the body was stored.”
“I’m sorry.” Windy leaned forward as though maybe she had misheard. “Did you say freezer?”
“Yes. This woman was frozen. Probably for at least a day. I’ll have to get the ice crystals on her heart under the microscope. Look at this—” The pathologist pointed at something, going on with the explanation, but neither Windy nor Ash were paying attention.
They were both wide awake now, their eyes meeting over the body, her saying, “The message on my voice mail must have been taped.”
Him saying, “But what the hell was Eve doing in the house with a frozen dead body for twenty-four hours?”
“At least twenty-four hours,” Dr. Bob corrected.
Windy was already moving to the door of the examining room, stripping off her gloves, almost gone when she said, “I don’t know, but I am going to find out.”
“Right behind you.”
CHAPTER 55
Harry had just finished writing Eve: Hair-pubic on the envelope and was getting ready to go out when he saw the unmarked sedan pull to the curb in front of the O’Connells’ and Windy get out, then saw Ash Laughton’s sports car roll by and park in the other direction. What the hell were they doing here?
They were supposed to be long gone by now. He had spent the earlier part of the afternoon while they were next door catching up on cataloguing his samples—Eve: Hair-head; Eve: Hair-arms; Eve: nail-big toe; Eve dental floss; Eve cigarette butts in lipstick, lip gloss, or plain—but now he had things he wanted to do, and somewhere to be. He did not really care if any of the others noticed him near the house, he could pretend to be cutting through from an adjacent lot, thinking the house was empty, a million things. But he could not risk having Windy see him. That would ruin everything.
Windy started pulling equipment from her trunk, Ash joining her now, lifting out a big duffel bag and a black box, like they were planning to go back in and work the crime scene again. He did not like seeing them together. He wanted Windy in there on her own, just her, reconstructing the crime, looking just like Eve would have if she had been the one doing it. Ash was an annoyance, and a distraction for her. For both of them.
Harry wracked his brain, trying to think of anything he might have left out, any clue he hadn’t wanted them to discover that he had left behind, but couldn’t come up with anything. He had taken a risk spending more time with Kelly, experimenting on her, and he’d been a little nervous after Windy spent so much time in the kitchen earlier in the day, but he had told himself to cool it, stay calm. Now it wasn’t so easy. Her looking so hard, so long—harder and longer than at the other crime scenes—made him feel like he must have missed something. He never should have taken Eve in there. Although the only thing she could have left behind were a few extra hairs, since she had barely been wearing any clothes.
That thought made him feel better, slightly. But he could not help feeling that Windy was going off on tangents. He’d left everything she needed in plain enough view, with a few surprises thrown in—he wondered how she’d liked learning the body was frozen. But what she was doing now was not what he wanted. She was being disobedient.
It was as though she were slipping away from him, just when he wanted to be tightening his control over her the most. Clearly he was going to have to do something. Something to upset her enough so that she would come straight to him. So that she would need him.
CHAPTER 56
Windy expected the officers in front of the O’Connell house to say “Who goes there?” they looked so serious and official when she and Ash came up the driveway at eight thirty that night.
“Its just us, Veronica,” Ash said to Officer Franca. Calling her by her first name, Windy noticed, then kicked herself for noticing.
She had decided not to take Larry or Ned away from whatever their Saturday night plans were, partially out of compassion, and partially because she felt like she wanted to do this alone. Or mostly alone. She did not mind having Ash there.
They easily found the freezer where the body had been stored, in the back, behind the house, a big old model. Windy gave it a cursory glance, didn’t see anything striking right off, and decided to leave it for Ned or Larry to go over the next day. She knew she was rushing things, but she wanted to get into the house. To figure out what Eve had been doing in there all that time.
“I’m afraid I’ve never been a CSI before,” Ash told her as they stepped into the dark house. “You’ll have to give me step by step instructions.”
“Don’t touch anything, don’t lean against anything, don’t move anything.”
“Okay, that’ll be a cinch.”
Windy stood in the darkness, aware of him beside her in a way that was comforting, trying to figure out where to start.
Be Eve. What would Eve do.
“She cleans up the dishes after she’s done the murder,” Windy said, talking to herself, walking around. “I expect she did it right after, even here, because she’d want it to be taken care of. Erasing signs of breakfast is the most crucial and consistent part of her killings.” Ash nodded, waiting for her to go on. “If she did, and if she wore latex, and if we are lucky, we might get some prints.”
“Through gloves?”
“Soap degrades latex. But it’s not even prints I am really interested in. It’s more smudges. I want to know everything she touched.”
“Are we looking for anything in particular?”
“A door. Figurative. Into Eve’s past. There is something in this house she had to spend time with. Hopefully it will explain why she was so much more violent here too.”
Windy had Ash start dusting in the living room, any surface that did not already have fingerprint powder on it, while she got to work in the hallway. Ash got a hit right off the bat with a nice set on the doorjamb, but given their location—near the floor—Windy was willing to guess that they belonged to one of the emergency workers who had been in the house. Still, you never knew when a killer who so far had left no prints might start, so they lifted them. As they worked they played “Name That Tune,” until Ash stumped Windy on “MacArthur Park.”
“That doesn’t count, it doesn’t start off at all like the song.”
“And ‘The Rainbow Connection’ does?”
“I’m still impressed you know that one. I thought having The Muppet Movie be Cate’s all-time favorite would at least have some advantage.”
“I think Cate has great taste in movies,” Ash said.
“She takes after her father. Anything with a sappy musical score. Evan’s favorite thing to watch on TV was Annie. Except for National Geographic shows about windsurfing.”
“Annie is okay, but I bet windsurfing is better. Have you done it?”
“A few times before Cate was born. After that it seemed too risky.”
They dusted in silence for a while until Windy said, “Evan died windsurfing.” Why was she telling him this? She did not talk about Evan with anyone.
Ash stopped what he was doing and went to the hallway. She was sitting on the floor, staring down at the beige carpeting. He came closer to her hesitantly, like he didn’t want to overstep, didn’t want to invade. He stayed two paces away, standing. “Windy, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how that felt.”
“When they found his body he was smiling. People kept telling me I should be happy. You know, because he looked happy. Had a good run.”
“People can be idiots.”
She swallowed back a lump and turned to Ash, his big hands dangling at his side, looking awkward as he just stood there but remembering not to lean against the doorjamb, eyes holding hers with warmth. He made her feel good when he looked at her, she realized, then told herself he probably had that effect on all women. She shrugged and said, “Anyway, it’s over. That part of my life, anyway. But in the present, I think I found what I’ve been looking for.”
I think I have too, Ash thought.
He looked around the hallway, seeing a line of iron-colored smudges along the freshly painted white wall in both directions. “Are these fingerprints?”
“Sort of. Eve was running her hands along here, looking for something but that is just window dressing. I was an idiot not to have thought of it sooner. The evidence was right here all the time.”
Ash looked around. “Where?”
“This afternoon I noticed those vacuum marks on the carpet in the hallway but I was too busy being scared by the idea that Eve was going to come after me next that I stopped thinking like a criminalist. You should fire me.”
“Too much paperwork. You stay. What do the vacuum marks tell you?”
“When the hallway was vacuumed. Do you see these drops of blood?” Windy pointed to rust-colored spots on the beige carpet. They still had numbers next to them from when the crime scene team was there earlier, taking photos and trying to establish a time line. “This one,” she went to the one marked 3, “is smeared, like something went through it. The nail of Kelly’s big toe on her left foot had a blood smear on it that we matched to this drop, which means we know Eve dragged the body from the bedroom into the living room.”
“Like she did at the other crime scenes.”
“Yes. But at this crime scene, there were no drag marks. The blood was smeared, but there were no marks on the carpeting. Only the vacuum trail. Which means the hallway was vacuumed after the body was moved. By Eve.”
“Why?”
“To get rid of this.” Windy ran her finger over the baseboard and showed it to Ash. It had white powder on it. “The house was painted before the O’Connells moved in, two months ago, and whoever did it used cheap paint. When Eve pulled up the carpet—”
“She pulled up the carpet?”
“Yes, and when she did, paint from the baseboard flaked off and left white powder. You can see the baseboards are slightly scuffed in that direction—” She pointed down the hallway, “But it stops about here.” Where she was sitting. “This is where it is.”
“What?”
Windy went to the end of the hall and tugged on the carpet. It came up easily, not hammered in any more, and she rolled it back to the place she had been sitting.
“This,” she said, uncovering some beat-up, stained oak floorboards, and a trap door. “This neighborhood was built in the 1950s and they included what every house needed then. A bomb shelter. In the seventies people sometimes converted them into basements or rec rooms.” Four wood putty-filled holes and a rusty outline showed where hardware had once been fitted over the door, from the looks of it a substantial lock. Windy rested her fingers over those and said, “I’d say while Eve lived here this one was made into a prison of sorts.”
The first thing Ash noticed when they flipped open the door was the smell, sickly sweet like overripe fruit and cotton candy.
“That is what the Lysol is for,” Windy said, not bothering to keep the excitement out of her voice at the discovery. She leaned on her stomach into the hole to dust the ladder that led downward. “To cover this smell. It smells to me like diabetic kematosis, what happens when certain kinds of diabetics get their insulin dose wrong. Can you move the light a little to the left?”
Ash shifted left. “Does that mean Eve is diabetic?”
“Probably. It usually shows up more in obese people than anorexics, but her body chemistry must be really messed up. I’ll bottle a sample for the lab.” She handed him a capped glass vial, got busy with the fingerprint powder again, then reached her arm out and said, “Camera.”
Ash gave it to her and waited until she was done shooting the dark-colored blob on the ladder rung to ask what it was.
“Footprint,” she said. “Eve must have come down here barefoot. Not as good as a fingerprint because there’s no national database, but it’s the first piece of identifying evidence we’ve found at a scene. Maybe that means she was careless down here, figuring we’d never find this.” Windy dangled a powerful flashlight into the bomb shelter, shining it on the four walls looking around. After only a few seconds, she sat up, jerking the light with her, and said, “Oh brother.”
“What’s down there?”
How to describe it, Windy asked herself. She shook her head and said, “I think you could call it the autobiography of a serial killer.”
CHAPTER 57
“Something nuclear definitely happened here,” Ash said when
they were standing inside what they started calling “The Pit.”
He held the light while Windy photographed the walls. They, like everything else down here, were covered in layers of dust and cobwebs, but the writing was still visible. Fucking cunt piece of garbage horse’s ass little fucker chicken shit piece of crap loser deadbeat fat pig fat fat fat disgusting bloated hussy bitch bitch bitch bitch fat bitch, I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill you, foul faced ass wipe crap head showed in the circle of light Ash was holding, and every wall was covered with the same.
There was a wooden table off to one side of the room, with footprints in the dust showing Eve had gone to stand next to it, but she hadn’t touched the chair, or the objects on the table. They sat just where she must have left them the last time she was down here decades ago, three decapitated Madam Alexander doll heads, staring at the chair. One of them had its nose sliced off.
“I wonder if this is where she got the idea for how to treat Kelly,” Ash said.
“I hope not,” Windy said, looking at the other two dolls. One of them had her eyes gouged out, and the other had been repeatedly hit with something that left round marks, like a hammer.
They followed Eve’s footprints around the room to a boarded-up window. The board and nails were old, but when they pulled on it, it came away from the cinderblock wall instantly, as though it had just been propped there.
“Eve must have taken this out earlier today,” Windy said. There were plants growing in front of it, which explained why they hadn’t seen it from the outside, but when Windy pushed them aside, they could see the house next door. All the windows were dark.
“There are NO TRESPASSING and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs all over the front yard of that place, and during the canvass today the private security officer who patrols the neighborhood said the owner of that house is out of town. That would have made it easy for Eve to come in the side door without being spotted,” Ash said.
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