“It could be. It would go with her making them kneel, to pray. But I think if they were intended as a funeral offering, she would leave them. Instead, it might tie in with the wedding magazine. There was a piece of paper in the magazine and I thought she was using it to hold her place but now I realize the magazine was holding it.” She held up a plastic evidence bag with the rectangle of card stock in it. “It’s a card from a florist shop.”
“There’s some connection between the anger she feels that makes her kill, and flowers, weddings. Romance. Is that what you are saying?”
“I think so. I had a friend in college who said that only good girls got flowers. Women who put out almost never did—although they got a lot of male attention. Maybe that is what this is about. If what we saw in The Pit really does mean that she was dating someone named Harry and they broke up, someone she knew from her childhood—before her bad girl days—maybe the flowers are a sign of her failure in the relationship. Symbolically representing what she couldn’t be.”
“So now she uses flowers in her revenge?”
“Yes. In fact,” Windy was warming to this, “what if flowers are her key, the way she gets people to open their doors? Saying, these flowers are from your husband, he called and ordered them to be delivered. Using the idea of a loving marriage as her entry to destroy it. Romance as a cover for murder.” That felt right to Windy. Right and scary.
Ash’s expression got serious. “Dammit, we need to find Harry. Whoever he is. Finding out what went on between them might go a long way toward answering our questions.”
“Nothing from her phone records?”
“No. We’re pulling the ones from her restaurant but it’s taking a lot longer. In the meantime, it looks like I’d better start tracking down where Eve is getting her flowers. And catch her before she buys them again.”
“I might be wrong.”
“You might be, but I doubt it.”
She looked at him like he’d said something special rather than just saying the truth. “Thank you.” Then, glancing at her watch, said, “I’m sorry to dump this in your lap, but I’ve got to run. I have a meeting at City Hall with Hank Logan.”
“About Roddy and the other night?”
“Yes.” He saw her swallow. “I’m sorry about that, how it—I didn’t realize Bill was home and—I wasn’t sure—”
Ash’s toothpick tipped up. “I know you were just trying to escape from my pancakes. That’s okay, I won’t take it personally. How are you feeling?” Keeping his tone light, so she would not worry that he’d been upset.
“Fine. Surprisingly. I actually didn’t think about what happened at all this weekend. Did you?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not about Roddy.” It wasn’t even a lie.
CHAPTER 64
“Welcome to City Hall,” Hank Logan said as he ushered her through security in the lobby. “You’ll notice that all the doors have sliding name plates on them. That’s to make sure none of us gets too comfortable.”
His office, on the seventh floor, was larger and newer than hers. Instead of dented steel filing cabinets and unsteady metal bookshelves, his were made of shiny pressed wood, and his desk had a fancy multiline phone on it. When it was first completed, the building at 400 Stewart Avenue that housed City Hall had won several awards for being the ugliest structure of the year, but Windy didn’t think it was that bad, and she certainly liked Logan’s view.
The window behind his desk faced west, giving him a view of the valley stretching for miles, and the hills beyond. It was a slightly hazy day so the mountains hovered in the distance, with a flat quality they only seemed to get here, like they had been cut out of paper and lowered by a movie crane.
“You should see it at night,” Logan told her, following the direction of her gaze. “Lights going out for miles and then, boom, they stop. Anywhere else you’d think it was the ocean, but here it’s just where the developers left off for the day.”
“Do you work a lot of late nights?”
“Depends. I have a lot of sleepless nights, but that’s not the same thing.” Instead of moving behind his desk, he gestured her into an upholstered armchair, and took one facing hers, leaning forward earnestly. “Tell me how you are.”
“Fine. What happened with Roddy really did not upset me too much.”
“Okay. Good.”
“You sound like you don’t believe me.”
Logan shrugged. “Well, most people who get held up at gunpoint are a little less sanguine about it. Maybe with everything you see in your work, you’re inured.”
“That could be it. Or crazy.”
“Is it true that you don’t want to press charges against Roddy?”
“Yes. But I am curious. Why do you think he came after me the other night?”
“Roddy hasn’t had a lot of experience dealing with his own emotions. Most abused children are pretty numb on the inside. Because they don’t recognize the emotions they get scared, and fear becomes anger. Anger can always find a good target.”
“And he is angry at me because I destroyed his chances of spending his life in jail.”
“Because you took away the only life he knew. The abuse, being bad, that was how he defined himself. To you and me, where he is now looks like an improvement and I think it will in time to him too, but for now he’s on shaky ground.”
“Poor Roddy. Can I ask you a hypothetical question about the results of abuse?”
“Sure.”
“If a child were abused by being set on fire, for example, when they grew up, would they retaliate by setting other people on fire? Repeating the patterns of their abuse?”
Logan thought for a moment before answering. “It could happen that way, but it’s not likely. Do you know the story of Bluebeard?”
“The legend?”
“More like a fairy tale. It’s about a man who kept marrying beautiful women, each of whom would mysteriously disappear. Finally he marries one and tells her I’m going away but here are the keys to every room in the house, all I ask is that you not use this one little key which opens that one little door. But of course curiosity gets the better of her and she unlocks the door, only to find the heads of all his other wives there. When he comes home he figures out what she’s done and cuts her head off.”
“Punishing her for her curiosity.”
“Yes, that and her disobedience. Being a bad girl. But I’ve always thought that the real reason he kills her is because she’s seen his big secret. Abused kids are like that. They work hard to hide the evidence of their abuse.”
By cutting people’s heads off, Windy thought to herself. Could this be what Eve was doing? The woman in her gated community, her sterile house. Coming out only to behead her victims. Because they saw something in her she couldn’t stand?
She said, “So they purposely mislead people about what happened to them?”
“They might pretend to love the abuser when in fact they really hate them. They’ll acquire a hundred other psychoses to mask their real one. Anything to draw attention away from what the real problem is. Anything to keep people from seeing behind that door, getting their hands on the key.”
“So you’re saying Bluebeard had a bad childhood?”
Logan laughed. “Something like that.”
“Doesn’t everyone keep secrets? Have things they don’t want other people to know about them?”
“Of course. In fact, there’s a way in which the core of anyone, what drives them, is precisely what they are afraid of. And many so-called normal people do a modified version of the Bluebeard thing, keeping a box of old photos or a birthday candle from when they turned sixteen, things that trigger memories, both sad and happy. That trigger is the key to their secrets. With victims of abuse, what they’ve packed away is more volatile and so they have to work harder to keep the door closed, drawing attention away from it with other vices, or dodging detection by faking their feelings.” He paused, gave a deriding laugh. “God, I must sound like a lecturing f
ool. Sorry for the long answer—sometimes when I get started talking about work, I forget to stop.”
“It’s fascinating,” Windy said, a little uncomfortable. She felt like she heard a bit too much about herself in his description of people locking things away.
“Sure. Now that I’ve given you a tedious lecture about my work, maybe one day you can tell me a little about your job. Over lunch, for example. I’ve been thinking about maggots since I saw those pictures at your office.”
“I’ve found that discussing my job over lunch usually leads to getting asked to leave a restaurant. Most people prefer to eat their Cobb salads without having to hear words like ‘pubic hair.’ ”
“Maybe in Virginia, where you’re from, but this is Vegas. Here people think you’re odd if you’re not commenting on someone’s anatomy while you dine.”
Windy started to laugh, then heard her cell phone ringing. “I’m really sorry. I need to take this call,” she said, pulling it out of her bag.
“Windy Thomas.”
“Windy? It’s Trish. Eve’s friend? I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this but I thought of something. Can you hear me? I’m on my way to work.”
“I can hear you great. What is it?” She fished in her bag for a pad of paper.
“Remember you asked me if Eve ever mentioned anyone named Harry or Barry and I said no? I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe she did and I’d forgotten about it. And then last night, I remembered who it was. This guy who lived next door to her when we first met. We called him KS. That’s why I didn’t get it right away.”
“Case?”
“No K-S, like the letters. For kitchen sink. Because he was so fat he looked like he’d eat anything—”
“—including the kitchen sink,” Windy finished for her. “Nice.”
“Yeah, we weren’t really the most thoughtful people. I did not realize he and she were friends, but right after she left to live with her aunt in L.A. he came up to me at school and asked me if she was okay, if something had happened to her. I was surprised because her family had moved out of the house next door to his like two years earlier, but I guess they had stayed in touch. Eve was ever a woman of mystery where men were concerned. The idea that he could be the guy you were looking for kept bugging me, so I got out my old yearbook.”
“We’ve already looked in her yearbooks.”
“Eve and I didn’t go to the same school. She went to the regular school and I went to a special magnet school for the arts, the Las Vegas Artistic Academy, you know, because I was going to be a world class painter.” Trish snorted. “He went there too, in the music program. He was two years ahead of me, but I found his picture. His name is Harold Williams.”
“Harold Williams, Las Vegas Artistic Academy,” Windy repeated, cradling the phone between her ear and her shoulder and writing fast. “What year is the yearbook?”
“Nineteen eighty-five. He’s on page seventy-eight. I’m on page twenty-three if you’re interested.”
“Do you think you would be able to recognize him if you saw him now?”
“I hope not for his sake,” Trish told her. “You’ll know what I mean when you see the picture.”
Windy thanked Trish and hung up, gathering her things together.
“Was that a lead?” Logan asked.
“Yes. A big one.” She stood up. “I apologize, but I have got to get back to the office.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
They shook hands and then Windy nearly sprinted down the corridor to the elevator, her bag on one shoulder, her other cocked to hold her cell phone to her ear. Harry stood in the doorway of his office watching her go with his fingers on his wrist. His heart was racing, and that was without even doing anything, just hearing that she was on his case. Just hearing her say his name.
He went to the armchair she had been sitting on and carefully lifted two blond hairs from it and wrapped them in a sheet of memo paper. He would put them with the others in the envelope labeled Windy: Hair-head he had at home. His collection of Windy was not yet as extensive as his archive of Eve, but it was coming along.
Overall he could not remember when he had enjoyed spending time with a living person so much, but one part of the interview had been a disappointment. He had expected her to be upset by the encounter with Roddy. It had gotten her into his office, yes, but it did not seem to have shaken her confidence in her abilities at all. In fact, she hardly seemed to have noticed it.
He sighed. That meant he would just have to come up with something better next time. Something she would not be able to shrug off. Not scare her, this time. Terrify her.
To do that he would have to dig into his third collection. The one he thought of as an invisible choke chain, the one that would allow him to control Windy. It was labeled Cate.
CHAPTER 65
At a quarter after one Monday afternoon Jonah dropped a cardboard box filled with yearbooks on the conference room table, sneezed, and said, “Okay, now will you explain why I just had to do something I swore I would never do again once I graduated from high school?”
“Don’t tell me that the man who told off the Los Angeles police commissioner is intimidated by a school librarian,” Ash said.
“Watch it, Scamp. These weren’t in the library, I had to go see the superintendent of schools. Of course I’m afraid. You can’t honestly tell me you’ve never had that nightmare where you’re back in high school, flunking out of history.”
“French,” Ash said. “My dreams are always about Mademoiselle Jacques.”
“Oui?” Windy said, coming into the room then. “And what kind of dreams are those, monsieur?”
“I bet Windy speaks perfect French,” Jonah said to Ash.
“No.” Windy shook her head. “But I spent some time in France. A long time ago.”
Ash saw something—pain?—flicker across her face, and changed the subject. “Jonah outdid himself. He got every 1985 yearbook from every high school.”
“I was scared, man. Wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.”
Windy laughed and riffled through the box of yearbooks until she found the Las Vegas Artistic Academy Arcadian from 1985. She pulled it, flipped the pages, and stopped at page seventy-eight.
“There,” she said. Her finger was next to a grainy school photo. “That is Harry.”
Harold Williams weighed three hundred pounds when the photo was taken, and looked into the camera like he was scared of it.
“Are you sure?” Ash asked.
“That’s what Trish says.”
They stared at the photo. It was hard to believe this boy could have grown into the man they had been searching for since they first heard of Eve. “He’s not what I expected,” Ash said.
“No. Given Eve’s own weight issues, I wouldn’t have thought she would get involved with someone so heavy,” Windy agreed. “Of course, he probably looks different now, so this photo is more or less worthless.”
“I put out an APB on Harry Williams when you called with the name and had Jonah begin checking all the databases.”
“In process,” Jonah said. “But you might be jumping the gun. I found eleven Harold Williamses already.”
“That was fast. How?” Ash asked, impressed.
Jonah raised one eyebrow. “I looked him up in the phone book.”
Windy sat with her feet propped on her garbage can and stared at the calendar hanging on the wall of her office and tried to clear her head. Five days from Saturday, the last time Eve had killed, was Wednesday. The day after next. And they were no closer to finding any of the other houses Eve had lived in, anyone who might know where to find her.
Her eyes moved from the days of the week to the photo above them of the woman with the shiny lip gloss astride the golf club. The woman looked so serene sitting on that golf cart in her bikini, not caring that it wasn’t proper golf attire. The photo was taken at the Turtle Egg Golf Course, a course notorious for not allowing women
to play. Apparently the rules were different if they showed up in bikinis.
Her phone rang, startling her, and she knocked the receiver off with her elbow before answering it.
“Windy Thomas, Criminalistics,” she managed to say breathlessly. There was no response, just some background noise and a faint sound like someone making an announcement on a PA system. “Hello? Is anyone there?” Windy heard a click, and the line went dead.
She scrolled back through the call log but it just showed “unknown number.” Glancing at the calendar where she’d written Bill’s flight information she thought maybe it was him, calling with a bad connection to say he had landed and—
Windy sat up so fast she almost launched herself out of her desk chair. Coming into her office at that moment, Ash took a step backward.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I figured out what the note means. The one you found. Nadene Tues. 1230. What if it is a flight number?”
“You could be on to something,” Ash said, excited. “And if Eve wrote it down, maybe she was planning to meet the flight.”
“Right. Could you trace something like this to a ticket record?”
“Not legally,” Ash said, heading for the door.
“Don’t get caught,” Windy called after him.
“I haven’t yet.”
She got out of her chair and followed him. “Wait, what were you coming to tell me?”
Ash paused, already halfway to the exit. “We found Eve’s florist. She put in a standing order for flowers, delivered to her at her restaurant on Mondays, three weeks ago. She paid a month in advance, in cash. But what I think you will find most interesting is that they come in an octagonal glass vase. And the assistant manager remembers commenting to Eve on the flowers Monday night, and noticing they were gone the next morning. Tuesday. The day the Waterses were found. Which brings me to the best part: the flowers have been coming for several months and everyone in the restaurant thought they were from her boyfriend, Harry. But as of at least three weeks ago, Eve was paying for them.”
Three weeks ago, Windy thought. Three weeks ago Eve had started sending herself flowers, pretending they were from Harry. Windy was willing to wager that three weeks ago Eve and Harry had broken up. And one week later she had started killing.
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