CHAPTER 66
The chimes on the door jingled as Harry walked into the Mailboxes and So Much More! shop. It was the “So Much More!” that kept him coming back. You could get almost anything you needed to make yourself happy here. Well, if your needs were simple like his.
The girl behind the counter blew a bubble, popped it, and said, “Hello Harry.”
She was skinny like Eve, with thick black eyeliner around her eyes, a pierced nose, and six earrings in her left ear. Her shoulder-length black hair was up in a perky ponytail at the crown of her head, making her look like a cheerleader from hell. She always smelled like Bazooka bubble gum.
He smiled at her. “Hi, Amy.”
“Did you get to try out those keys I made for you last week yet? Did they work?”
“Perfectly,” he assured her.
“Don’t tell me you need more packing tape.”
“I do.”
“You must be sending hundreds of boxes to those poor orphans in Somalia.”
He’d forgotten that was what he told her. “It’s amazing the donations we are getting.”
“I think it’s wonderful that you do that. Use your talent to raise money for those less fortunate.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled and clicked her bubble gum as she rang the order up. Five rolls of packing tape. A box of envelopes. Three mini-cassettes. A do-it-yourself lamination kit. A box cutter. “You know, the packing tape and cutter combos are on sale,” she told him, her fingers hovering over the keys of the cash register.
“I think I’ll keep them separate, like this.”
“Just wanted you to know. In case you want to save your money for other things.”
“I can spring for both,” he said, handing her cash for his purchase. He leaned closer. “You have any time?”
“Do I? It’s the dead zone in here.” She turned behind her. “Ralph? I’m going on break. Cover for me, okay?”
The voice known as Ralph said, “Yeah,” from the back.
Harry went out the front door and Amy came out the back, meeting him at the side at his Camaro.
“It’s been so long, baby,” she teased, settling herself in the bucket seat of his car and pulling him to stand in front of her. “I haven’t seen you since Friday.” She took her gum out of her mouth with one hand. The other reached for his zipper and wrapped around his penis. “Look how happy he is to see me.”
Harry stood with his back to the parking lot, hands resting on the warm roof of his car while she sucked on him. He liked it that way because he didn’t have to look at her and he had a nice view of the mountains. He came here after each killing as a sort of celebration, and also as a release, a way to let off steam. He’d come today because he needed to relax after his meeting with Windy.
His mind went back to the first killing, the Johnsons’. Mrs. Johnson smiling at him when he came to the door, inviting him in, saying the children were in their rooms. Not knowing, not suspecting. Until he showed her the knife and her eyes got big, huge.
She had started to shake and collapse, could barely make her hands work to tape her ankles together, just whimpering on the floor. Her words were almost indistinguishable from her sobs when she begged for her life, he kept having to bend close to hear her.
Not that satisfying. Not like Claudia Waters. She had fought him like crazy. Claudia had been a woman of steel, not believing him when he said he would spare her life if she begged. She had refused to use the tape and he had been forced to have her daughter do it instead. It had been a risk but my, how it had paid off. He stood behind Minette with the knife over her head, out of the girl’s vision but not the mother’s, and watched as Claudia Waters sat and let her daughter immobilize her.
“Can you move, Mommy?”
“No, angel.”
The little girl standing there, spinning the tape around on her finger. “Did I do a good job?”
Her mother, with tears pouring down her cheeks. “Yes, a very good job.”
She had tried to reach for her, to hold her, but the girl didn’t understand. She said, “I’m going to tape Martine now in our room. Bye.”
Claudia had begged for her life after that. Begged better than any of them. That had been a thrill, breaking that woman. He made her tell him she loved him. Not because he wanted to hear it but because he could.
“I love you, Harry. I love you. Please, don’t hurt my daughters. Please.”
He heard it in Claudia’s voice, then in another voice, seeing Windy on her knees, broken, terrified, begging him, “Please don’t hurt my daughter. Please. I love you, Harry. Please.”
“Ahhhhh!” he groaned involuntarily, shuddering at the strength of his climax. He jerked himself out of Amy’s mouth and stood, dick exposed to the air, trying to get his breathing back under control.
“Intense,” she said, putting her gum back in her mouth. “You’ve never done anything like that before.”
He swallowed. “Yes.” He fumbled with his pants then took fifty dollars from his pocket.
“Fifty! That’s a raise. Thanks.”
“It was worth it.”
She started to go then turned around, cocking one hip to the side and wrapping her gum around her finger. “I hope I’m going to see you again soon,” she said in a little girl voice.
“You will,” he promised her. “Wednesday.”
“Good. You know you’re my favorite. I thought men with small feet were supposed to have small you-know-whats. But you’re a full-size package.”
“Flattery isn’t going to get you more cash today.”
She laughed and ran back toward the store. “Bye, lover.”
He sat in the car gripping the steering wheel, amazed at what had happened. It had never felt like that before. Windy was going to be the best yet.
He took several more deep breaths, catching a whiff of bubble gum, and felt himself really starting to unwind. From the back, in her Catholic school uniform, Amy looked exactly like Eve.
CHAPTER 67
At two fifty-eight in the morning Windy awoke to the sound of Cate screaming.
“Mommy! MOMMY!”
She flew to Cate’s room and found her daughter sitting up in bed, sobbing.
“Honey, I’m right here.” She wrapped her arms around her and Cate began to tremble uncontrollably. “Cate, lovie, it’s okay. I’m right here.”
Brandon hovered in the doorway to make sure everything was okay, but Windy nodded him back to bed. “Shhh, honey, it’s okay. I’m right here. Nothing is going to happen to you.”
Slowly the crying and the shaking began to subside. Windy kissed the top of Cate’s head and said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It was a really scary dream,” Cate said.
“If you talk about it, it might start to seem less scary.”
Cate clung to her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, honey. No talking about it.”
Cate pulled away and looked up. Her eyes were deep blue from crying. “Mommy, you aren’t going to go away and leave me, are you?”
Windy smiled at her. “No way.” She bent down so their foreheads were touching. “I am going to be right here until you’re forty-three.”
“What happens when I am forty-three?”
“Then I might let you move out of the house. But until then, you and I are a team.”
“Are you forty-three?”
“Not yet.”
“When will I be forty-three?”
Windy decided that Cate’s equilibrium was coming back. She said, “You know subtraction. You figure it out. What is six out of forty-three?”
“A lot.” Cate wrinkled her nose. “When your face is so close like this, it looks like you only have one eye.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“Eeeew,” Cate squealed, and wiggled away from her.
Windy let out a big breath. Cate was fine. “Do you think you can try to go back to sleep?”
&nb
sp; Cate stopped squealing and shook her head solemnly side to side. “No.”
“What if I stay here and sleep with you?”
“No.”
“Let’s just try it, okay?”
“Okay.”
She and Cate and Big Fred snuggled up together in Cate’s twin bed until Cate’s breathing grew deep and regular. Then Windy climbed out and went downstairs. The LED display on the oven told her it was three thirty-eight in the morning, but she knew there was no way she was getting back to sleep. She made herself a cup of Earl Grey tea, because a friend of hers had told her it would bring her good fortune, and sat cross-legged on the couch. She could use some good fortune, she thought, as she pulled the lab reports she had brought home from the office out of her bag. She could not shake the idea that she was doing the same thing with the case she had done with the wedding magazine, looking at it inside out, being so preoccupied with the pages that she had almost missed the florist’s card.
The top report was the result from the bloody T-shirt they had found in the Dumpster, which turned out to be covered in dog blood, so she set that aside. Dogs were not in her jurisdiction.
The next report said that the hairs found in the lacerations on Kelly O’Connell’s neck were a visual match to Eve’s hairs, but could not be tested for DNA because they had no roots.
The fibers from the choke chain were microscopically matched to the white fibers found at the Johnson and Waters crime scenes, as well as on the roll of tape from Eve’s house.
Best of all, the prints Ash had recovered from the doorjamb between the O’Connells’ living room and their hallway matched the fingerprints from Eve’s apartment. It was the first time Eve had left her prints at the scene, and although there was enough other evidence to place her at the crimes, fingerprints were something juries really liked when going for a conviction.
Everything present and accounted for, Windy said to herself. All the evidence pointed conclusively to Eve. Windy was still puzzled by what Eve would have been doing gripping the doorjamb close to the floor—had Kelly attacked her? If she had, why didn’t Kelly have any defensive wounds?
The next item in Windy’s stack was the rogue crime scene photo she had asked Ash about on Friday. She had brought it home to see if she could learn any more about it. When she was a sheriff in Virginia, other law enforcement agencies would send her their crime scene photos from time to time to see if she could help them with tough cases. It was one of the things she had promised Bill she would stop doing—she had been on the news once, and that made him worry that she could be a criminal target—but she figured that this one posed no threat. And there was something about it that had continued to nag at her from the first time she looked at it.
Initially she’d thought that whoever took the shot was simply a bad photographer, someone she would fire. When she realized what the problem actually was, she thought she should fire herself instead. Because it wasn’t a crime scene photo at all. It had no scales in it to show the size of footprints, no numbers following blood drops, no markers of any kind, no crime scene tape. It was a photograph of a murder scene, but not a professional one taken by a criminalist. This was the work of an amateur. Someone who just wanted to document a job well done.
“What kind of amateur photographer takes pictures of dead bodies?” Erica, the visual imaging computer whiz, asked her the next morning when she brought the photograph to her desk.
“My guess is, a serial killer.”
“Taking pictures of his kill before the police arrive. Way creepy. Well, what do you want me to do with this?”
“Can you enhance the footprints, the shadowy area off to this side, and the milk carton?”
“Why do you want the milk carton if you already know what it is?”
“Milk is one of the few commercial products with both regional and chronological characteristics. If you can pull any information off that carton at all, we should have the date and location of this photo.”
Erica rubbed her hands together with excitement. “I’d been looking for an excuse to use that NASA software again.”
“I’m not listening. Speaking of illegal activities, do you know where Ash is? I haven’t been able to find him.”
“Yeah.” Erica turned to feed the photo into her scanner. “He’s got his phone off.”
“Where is he, Erica?”
“I could tell you, ma’am, but then I’d have to kill you,” Erica said without looking up from the screen, then pointedly ignored Windy until she went away.
At four that evening a man who looked like Ash after being wrecked on a desert island appeared in her office, dropped a piece of paper on her desk, and said, “Nadene Brown’s flight got in an hour ago. I had Jonah call her house but she wasn’t in yet.”
“Were you at this all night?”
“No. I also chased down some Harry Williamses—none of them our Harry Williams. Nadene is our best chance for information about Eve and Harry. Would you mind going? The way I look right now I would just scare her. Plus, you can go and seem less threatening. Maybe she won’t ask why we’re questioning her.”
Windy’s eyes narrowed. “Where have you been?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Why does everyone keep telling me that?”
“Because if you don’t know, then you won’t have to lie to anyone.”
“How illegal is what you were doing?”
“You should probably get going.”
“I am not joking, Ash. Anything that requires you to practically go hide in a cave isn’t a good idea. And I can’t believe you didn’t have your phone on.”
“That would not have been advisable.”
“What if something happened here?” Windy asked, sounding more upset then she’d intended. “What if Eve killed again and we needed to find you.”
“I would have heard about it.”
Windy stood up, smacking her desk with her open palm. “How? You are the head of the Violent Crimes Task Force. You can’t just turn your phone off when you want to. What if something happened to you?”
He leaned toward her. “Believe me, Ms. Thomas, I am aware both of my job and of my responsibilities.”
“Good.”
“Good.” His jaw tightened. He said, “I have my phone on now if you need anything,” and ducked out the door.
Jonah was waiting for him in the hall. “That sounded ugly.”
“Yes.”
Jonah looked at Ash more closely. “You’re smiling.”
“No way.”
“You think she yelled at you because she missed you today.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” Ash said. But he was definitely smiling.
CHAPTER 68
Nadene Brown lived in a sprawling one-story house which looked like an English cottage that had been run through a play dough extruder and come out long and skinny. It was surrounded with a white picket fence, and between the fence and the house the front yard was a riot of colorful wildflowers.
Windy felt herself being watched as she slid through the gate and walked past the flowers to the door, a feeling confirmed when it opened almost before she pushed the bell. The woman standing behind the screen had piercing blue eyes, short silver hair, and incredible cheekbones. She made Windy think of Lauren Bacall, one of those women who are beautiful and ageless, then made Windy jump when she said, “Many people think I look like her. Lauren. But we met recently and there isn’t really a resemblance. Don’t be startled, I’m a bit of a mind reader. I’m Nadene Brown and you are Chicago Thomas.”
“Yes,” Windy said, holding out her card. She figured Ash had finally gotten through and told Nadene to expect her, but she would play along with the mind reading thing. “From Metro Criminalistics. May I come in?” Nadene led Windy into a white-and-blue silk covered living room that felt more Marie Antoinette than Vegas suburban. There were portraits on the wall, all of young women. Or the same young woman, Windy realized, looking from them to
her hostess.
“I’m fifty-nine,” Nadene told her as she settled herself into a blue chaise. Windy had never seen anyone look comfortable in one of those, but Nadene managed it. On the table in front of the chaise a Wedgwood tea service was set up. “You were trying to guess my age.”
“You don’t look fifty-nine.”
“And you don’t look like a policeman.” She cocked her head to one side and ran her fingers over a necklace of thick lapis beads with an elaborate diamond clasp. “You look like her, you know. Eve.”
Windy didn’t feign surprise that Nadene knew why she was there, just said, “So I’ve been told.”
Nadene began to pour tea, and Windy glanced around at photos in silver frames displayed on the sideboard and the top of the piano. There was one of Nadene and Gerald Keene, it looked like during his election bid for mayor. Windy’s mind sent up a “be careful” flare.
Nadene was saying now, “It’s something around the eyes that makes you two look alike. You’re both a little haunted, in opposite ways, like mirror images. You should learn to let that go, Chicago America Thomas. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. I can see I’ve made you uncomfortable. I have a tendency to do that to people I like.” She handed Windy a cup and saucer, saying, “But we were talking about Eve. She’s lovely. You are wrong, you know—whatever you think she’s done, she hasn’t. But I have decided to help you anyway.”
“Thank you.” Windy went to add milk to her tea and realized that Nadene had already done it for her. She brought her eyes to the other woman’s, which sparkled mischievously. “How do you know I think she’s done something?”
“The police don’t spend their afternoons making social calls on costume designers just to follow up missing persons cases,” Nadene told her. “You thought I was going to say that I read your mind.”
“I was curious. How did you know Eve?”
“Have you been to her restaurant?” Windy shook her head, and Nadene said, “You should go. I designed the outfits the waiters and waitresses wear. The wings. That is my specialty, designing angel wings.”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 31
