“Is Windy Thomas here?” a voice yelled from a second floor. Windy could see the outline of a figure, but no face. “I want to talk to Windy Thomas.”
Windy stepped forward. “Yes. I’m right here.”
“Can you come closer? I can’t see you.”
“No,” Ash growled from behind her.
Windy crossed to the middle of the street. “Is this better?”
“Closer.”
“Who am I talking to?”
“Don’t you know? It’s me. Harry. Come closer.”
Windy didn’t move. “Harry, you need to come out of your house. You need to give yourself up.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The shadowy form disappeared from the upstairs window.
“This is too easy,” Ash muttered. “I don’t like it.”
Windy did not say anything, but she did not disagree either. On her right, she heard the SWAT commander tell his men to be on point. The street was silent.
A window on the lower floor of the house opened slowly. “Windy?” Harry’s voice said. “Tell them not to hurt me.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Windy said aloud.
“Promise you won’t let them. I’ll give up, but only to you.”
“I promise.”
“If you take one step, I’ll take one step.”
Ash growled behind her but did not say anything.
Windy took a step forward.
“Take another one.”
“No, Harry. You need to come out now.”
“I don’t trust them.”
“They don’t trust you.”
“Why did you stop believing me, Windy? Why did you stop believing it was Eve? Wasn’t I good enough?”
“Yes, Harry. But it’s impossible to be someone else all the time.”
“I didn’t want you to come here. This is not where I wanted it.”
“What did you want?” Windy waited for him to answer but he didn’t. “Harry, if you come out we can talk. You’ll feel better.”
“You are lying to me,” the voice from the window said. “The way everyone lies. They said it was my fault. I never meant to hurt anyone. They made me.”
“Who?”
“You don’t understand. You’ll never understand.”
Behind her Windy heard the SWAT commander hiss, “Get ready to move on my order.”
She said, “Help me to understand, Harry.”
“I can’t. It’s hopeless. Good-bye, Windy.”
“Alpha team in,” the SWAT commander said into his walkie talkie and Windy watched as black-clothed operatives started to move like shadows toward the house.
“Harry,” she said, “you need to come out now. Right now.”
He did not respond. She could no longer tell if he was standing at the window. For five long seconds everything was completely still.
Then a voice inside the house screamed, “Get away from me! Get away!” sounding terrified and desperate, and a gun fired twice.
The SWAT commander’s walkie talkie shrieked, “Operator down! Operator hit!”
Everything moved at once, the SWAT team swarming up the front walkway, breaking down the door, bursting through windows.
“Take cover!” the commander ordered, but Windy was up and running toward the house.
“No!” she shouted as Ash’s arms came around her, dragging her down. “Let me go. Don’t let them—”
For a split second Windy caught a glimpse of a man in a checked shirt in the living room staring out the door, staring at her. He was holding a huge rifle and as the SWAT operatives poured into the house he ran at them, waving it.
“Harry, no!” she screamed and tried to break free of Ash, but it was too late. She watched with horror as a barrage of shots went off and his body danced jerkily up and down and sideways, then crumbled to the floor.
Two beats of silence. The SWAT commander’s walkie talkie saying, “Subject down. I repeat, subject down.”
Windy felt as though she were seeing a movie. Numbly she observed the paramedics rushing on the house, one team going around the side to where the shot operative was lying in the dirt, the other running into the living room. She was aware of people moving all around her, ambulance lights flashing, but it was as though she were seeing it all with her peripheral vision, none of it in focus. Ash’s face was in front of her now and he was saying something but she could not make herself listen to the words.
She was furious. It should not have ended this way. There was no justice in an ending like this, not for the dead families. Not for her. There were too many questions they all deserved answers to.
She pushed Ash’s hands off her and headed for the house, ignoring him shouting her name behind her.
“Ma’am, we have not checked the premises for—” a SWAT officer said, trying to stop her, but she brushed by him. She was unaware of Ash behind her, telling the officer to stand down.
A group of men all in black with their night vision goggles still on was huddled around the body and the paramedics in the middle of the living room. As she joined them, she heard one of the medics say, “Time of death, eleven twenty-four P.M.”
She stared hard at the dead man. Harry lay on his back on the floor where he had fallen as she watched. On one wrist he wore a medical bracelet advising paramedics that he had diabetes. A cluster of shots over his heart and neck showed the SWAT snipers were good at their job. His face still had an expression of surprise, his mouth open, his forehead furrowed. His arms stretched in front of him, as though he had been reaching out, and although Windy knew this was because he’d died holding a deer rifle, aiming it at the SWAT officers, she could not help feeling like he had been reaching for help.
This man had threatened her. He had killed families. He was a monster.
And yet, she could not wish this death on him. She wanted him to stand trial. She wanted to know why. Why had he done it? Why had he chosen her? She was so damn tired of unanswered whys.
Windy did a solo walk through of the house as she waited for her team to arrive. The living room was riddled with bulletholes and covered with shattered glass and shards of broken furniture, but the rest of the house was intact. Two of the rooms, one on the ground floor and one on the second floor, had locks on the doors and DO NOT ENTER signs on them, making the SWAT commander worry that they were booby-trapped, so the bomb squad was called in and everyone else ordered out.
For forty minutes, Windy and her team remained outside the house while the squad worked, but when it was ascertained that the door of the downstairs room was not wired, she got impatient and went inside. She could feel Ash watching her, but he did not say anything and she would not have listened if he had.
She started her walk-through in the kitchen, looking in empty cabinets and an empty refrigerator. On the kitchen counter were two sets of keys, one on a Camaro key chain, the other on a keychain with a heart. She recognized those as her old house keys, the originals. He must have had a set copied and given those to her, which was why hers had been sticking. She wondered if knowing he had the ones that had been hers excited him, and the thought made her shudder. Once.
Next to the keys was a wallet containing credit cards in the name Harold Williams, a receipt from Mailboxes and So Much More, another from a florist shop, and a five dollar bill. A clear plastic sleeve contained a Washington State–issued driver’s license in the name of Harold L. Williams. She slid it out of the holder and saw that it had a sticker on it that said he was an organ donor. She studied the photo for a long time.
Just before two in the morning, the bomb squad gave the all clear. In the end, there were no traps, no bombs. The two rooms were just rooms, the doors just locked doors. It made Windy think of what Logan had said, about abused children protecting their secrets at all costs. She suspected that whatever was most precious and personal to Harry would be behind those doors.
The keys on the Camaro keychain unlocked them. Windy
went into the upstairs room first. It was almost monastic, a steel desk, an old-fashioned wood desk chair, and matte gray walls lined with file cabinets. One whole file cabinet was labeled EVE. It was filled with hanging files with labels like Hair-pubic and q-tips, ears, bra-dirty, skin-elbow, saliva-morning, blood-menstrual, blood-regular, lollipop. Other drawers had other names on them, some sharing several: DIANE/GERALDINE/CANDY, MONA & TERRY, WINDY & CATE. Windy wanted to take everything out of her drawer and go home, hide it deep in a corner of her house so no one could see, but knew that was not right. She made herself stay cool, professional. Inside she found Windy: condom-used (Bill), and Cate: underwear—clean.
Her hands started to shake. He had been in Cate’s underwear drawer. He had been in her daughter’s bedroom. He had touched—
Focus.
There was a closet filled with different uniforms: waiters, locksmith’s, a mailman, security officer. In the middle of them was a white satin jumpsuit with wide lapels and rhinestones.
The other locked room was a mess, but it looked as though it had been untouched by time. Windy did not know if it was exactly as Eve had left it, but it was unmistakably a little girl’s bedroom. It took her a moment to realize that the windows were covered with plywood, because they were hidden behind frilly gingham curtains. There was a canopy bed with a floral print ruffle and a Holly Hobby dresser. Posters of Madonna and Adam Ant hung on the wall. Prints from the room and hairs they pulled from the sheets and pillows matched the ones they took off Harry’s dead body.
Windy left the job of checking the sheets for semen to Larry.
Outside, floodlights turned the early morning into bright dawn. Windy stood on the front stoop of the house for a moment, breathing the fresh air, watching the emergency personnel weave between the news crews and the growing number of curious neighbors emerging in their pajamas.
“I’m standing here in front of the scene of an exciting SWAT operation,” five reporters were saying into five different cameras, almost the same words as Windy walked toward them. She pushed through the corridor of people, hearing the operation described as a “raging firefight,” a “gun battle of Wild West proportions,” and “a nightmare,” before she found Ash. He stood at the front of the police lines and behind him, a female anchorwoman pressed as close to the scene as she could get. As Windy came over, she was saying, “And so it looks like the Home Wrecker has wrecked his last home.”
It was weak, Windy thought, but she wouldn’t have been able to do any better at this point.
She tugged on Ash’s sleeve and he turned from his conversation with the SWAT commander. He smiled at her, hesitantly, and that made her feel worse.
“There is a pile of evidence inside to show he was harvesting samples of Eve’s body to leave at the crime scenes. We also found this in a closet.” She handed Ash an evidence bag with the white satin jumpsuit in it. “I’ll have the lab see if it matches the fibers we found at the Johnsons’, Waterses’, and O’Connells’. If it does, I think we know how he was getting in.”
“Looks like you were right about Vegas camouflage, just wrong about the type.”
“Dressing up like Elvis, rather than wedding dresses,” she agreed. “Who could resist that. It would explain the black mascara on the phone as well. Touching up his sideburns.”
Ash wanted to take her and hold her, brush away her quiet stoicism which had to be costing. He said, “Okay.”
“I think we were right about the flowers. I think he probably pretended to be delivering them, maybe doing a singing telegram, and that got the women to open their doors. I also think he was planning for another performance. Soon.”
“What did you find?”
“In his wallet he had a receipt from a florist’s shop, dated today, and there was a vase of flowers in the living room. It got shot at, but I am pretty sure it will reconstruct into an octagon. I found this next to it.” Windy held out a clear plastic evidence envelope. Inside was a card, the kind that came from a florist. It read, “To Windy, with deepest admiration.”
Neither of them said anything. Windy looked up at the blue sky over the house. The sky in Vegas was a different color than in Virginia. Or Hawaii. Finally she said, “You were right to keep me from running in. He would have killed me. I’m sorry I fought against you, Ash.”
“I’m sorry I made you feel like you had to.”
“You know, I stared and stared at him. At his body and his driver’s license photo. I would swear I have never seen that man in my life.”
“I did the same thing,” Ash told her. “With the same result. He looked so ordinary. He could have been anyone.”
The anchorwoman appeared then, stretching the crime scene tape as far as it would go to get near them, her microphone out. She said, “I’m here with detective Ash Laughton and head of criminalistics Chicago Thomas. We’ve been told the man inside was the prime suspect in the Home Wrecker murders. Would it be safe to say that the Home Wrecker is dead?”
Ash looked at Windy, who nodded, and said, “It’s not official but yes it would.”
“You heard it here first, America.”
Lucky America, Windy thought.
CHAPTER 83
At nine A.M., Windy ran out of adrenaline. The clouds that had moved into the Las Vegas Valley the day before hung lower, and it started to drizzle, sending the press crews scattering. Windy watched them go and knew she had to get out of there too. She was making mistakes, snapping at her team. Thinking too much. She caught Ned by the arm and said, “Can you take over?”
“Go home, boss,” he told her. “We’ve got this.”
She hitched a ride from one of the patrol cars. With Brandon and Cate in Chicago, she would have the house to herself. What she wanted more than anything in the world was to fill a glass with ice, pour a beer over it, take it into the bathtub and lay there for about three hours.
She spoke to the patrolman still stationed in front of her house, telling him he could go, the case was over, fumbled for her key, and just had it in the lock when Bill came up the path toward her.
“Next time you change the locks, would you mind telling me?” he said, his folding bag draped over his arm.
“Bill. Of course. I’m sorry. It’s been a crazy week. I didn’t realize you would be here so early.”
“I got the feeling you weren’t expecting me when the bulldog guard over there practically arrested me for trying to get into my own house.”
She opened the door and said, “I’m sorry,” again. Feeling as though her whole vocabulary consisted of those two words.
He peered at her. “What happened to you? You look exhausted. And what are you doing home now? After all your talk about work, I didn’t expect to see you for hours.”
Windy was assessing the chances of having a beer over ice in the bathtub now that Bill was here, and decided they were nil. She dropped her bag in the middle of the hallway and fell onto the couch, saying, “My case just ended. I worked all night.”
Bill moved her bag, putting it on the hall table where it belonged, but he looked up when she said that. “That’s great news.”
Windy said, “I guess,” closing her eyes and leaning back against the cushions. She felt Bill sit down next to her. He put his arm around her, making her shift her head, her stiff neck, pulling her toward him.
“This means you don’t have to work this weekend, doesn’t it?” he asked, tickling her ear with his finger.
She reached up to still his hand. “I suppose it does.”
She felt him smile. He said, “Then my surprise will be perfect.”
She wished she could do this any other way. She wished she were more rested. She opened her eyes and faced him. “I know what the surprise is and I can’t. I can’t marry you.”
He was astonished. “How did you know?”
“I just did.”
“Well, why not? Because Cate isn’t here? I promise you, she won’t mind. As long as we have a party, the three of us, when she gets back
from camping. She won’t even know she missed anything.”
“Yes she will. And she’s not camping.” She shook her head. “That’s not the reason.”
Bill took her hands in his and smiled at her. “I understand. You have cold feet. After what happened with your first husband it makes sense. I know he hurt you when he left you, but I am not him. I won’t treat you the way he did. I’m not leaving. Bad memories are no reason not to get on with your life. On with our life. They are the reason to start making good memories.”
“This isn’t about Cate or Evan or anyone else. It is about you and me. I can’t be the woman you want me to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to be home at five o’clock for dinner every night. I don’t know if I want to have more children. I’ll never be anyone’s perfect picture of a wife, a mother. I’m not like that. I don’t even want to be.” She paused, then added, “And I hate plain white underwear.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, wear whatever underwear you want.”
“The underwear is just a symptom. The problem is that we don’t want the same things.”
“Yes we do. A nice house. A family.” He looked at her. “Of course you want those things. You’ve always said you wanted them.”
“You’ve always said you wanted them, and I went along because—because I didn’t know how not to. But that isn’t me. That isn’t what I want.”
“Well then, what do you want?”
“I want to stop feeling like I am living in a battleground between my work and my home life. I want to stop feeling guilty all the time, like I’m letting one or the other of them down, doing a bad job at both. It’s not fair to either of us.”
“We can make it work. We’ll both change.”
“How?”
“I could take up a hobby. And that way I wouldn’t miss you so much, because I would be busy. And you could work less.”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 37
