“You are saying I am completely predictable?”
“Yes.”
He clenched his jaw two times, then pulled out his cell phone and started dialing.
“Who are you calling?”
“1-800-Jerkoff,” he said, pressing SEND.
“For you or for me?”
“I figure we can take turns.”
Imogen had to work not to laugh. Then she stopped working. He had been nice, concerned about her, bringing her the napkin, and she had been a bitch. She said, “I was tense about our meeting with Martina, and when I’m like that I am not easy to work with. Or so Bugsy tells me.”
“No way. I’d sue for libel.”
“I know it. He’s just oversensitive.” It got silent. She looked through the fence again at the two-story house, identical to all the other two-story houses that backed up to the county road. She said, “Have you ever seen a bird in a birdbath?”
“Not this time of year.”
“But any time of year? I mean, why do people have them? Do they even like birds?”
She felt Benton staring at her. He said, “I’ve never really thought about it,” making it clear with his tone that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would.
She was used to being looked at like that, even by Sam, like when she went through her phase of having to know how every magic trick they saw on TV was done. How could you cut a lady up in three pieces and then have her come out whole without a single speck of blood on her? It didn’t make sense. Sam asking why she couldn’t just think it was neat without knowing how it was done.
That wasn’t how it worked, she explained. You had to know, keep digging until you understood it, so that no one could trick you.
But that will take all the fun out of it, Sam said.
Not to her. To her, knowing was fun. She’d had no idea back then that it was possible to know too much.
“They should latch their back door,” she said aloud to Benton now, gesturing to the house.
“Okay.”
“We should leave them a note. It’s not safe to have that door unlatched. It’s like an invitation.”
“Why don’t we just climb the fence and go on inside? Maybe carry the shovels. That will get the message across stronger, that there’s something scary out there. Besides the strangers casing their house from the highway.”
Imogen wondered what it felt like not to lock your doors. “Maybe.”
“Was it some object in particular at that house you wanted? Want to point something out to me? I’ll tell you right now, though, I’m not stealing the garden gnome. Not even if you beg.”
She was thinking about it, about how they must not be afraid, when she realized what Benton said. “Why would I want to steal a garden gnome?”
“I don’t know, you’re the one who said to stop the car. No one likes a good side-of-the-rural-highway-in-the-freezing-cold stop more than I do, but if we’re not breaking in, what are we doing here?”
She had to admit it was a good question. Stopping came from the same impulse that had led her to accept Dirk Best’s, the warden’s, invitation to lunch three years earlier. Wow, had that been a mistake. The impulse was okay, though, the need to remember that there were people who had lives that had no daily contact with kindly-looking grandmother types who murdered fifteen girls, sometimes sending their families thank-you cards with inspirational verses and a choice bit of the body as enclosures. People who didn’t read autopsy reports with their breakfast. Who didn’t have breakfast with a goldfish. She said, “I needed some fresh air. Martina Kidd has an unsettling effect on me.”
“Me too. That interview was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Are they always like that?”
Interview now, no longer interrogation, Imogen noticed. Benton Arbor was not exactly as predictable as she had said. Which she was not going to tell him. “Martina’s questions vary, but the style is the same.”
“The strangest thing to me is that even now I’m not sure what we learned. If we learned anything. Did we?”
“Yes. Despite what she tried to claim, the professor has been in touch with Loverboy.”
“Because of what she said about him having killed when he was younger? I mean, she could not have known about that unless he told her himself.”
“No, that’s more a statistical certainty. The kind of thing Professor Kidd would know. He’s too organized for these to have been his first.”
“Then how do you know they have been in contact?”
“What she said at the end, about my coming, how she had known about it for weeks. That was true. She has a tell, a way of tilting her head when she is caught off guard. She did it when I pressed her.”
“I saw that.”
“I’m not sure what her knowing means except that they are communicating, and about me.”
“Martina seems to know a lot about you.”
“She claims I am her hobby. I would only be moderately surprised to learn that Elgin sent her my dossier. They still correspond. And, of course, there’s Dirk Best, the friendly warden.”
She sensed that Benton wanted to press for more information about that, but instead he asked, “Do you think anything else she told us was true?”
“What she said about him not giving Rosalind up unless we find her ourselves feels right to me. It’s part of the game. But the only other time she seemed genuinely interested was when she looked at the photo. I’d like to take it, if you don’t mind, to see if I can figure out why.”
“Sure,” Benton agreed, but he didn’t hand it over. He said, “You seem to know a lot about her too. You made her tilt her head when you said you bought that magazine at the airport.”
“For the airplane,” Imogen corrected. “The plane was the key. Most killers have a hunting ground, a place they go to troll for their victims. Or as Martina called them, her dear children. She went looking for them on airplanes, sitting next to them on flights. You can imagine how she looked, the kindly grandmother reading Chicken Soup for the Geriatric Soul with a big magnifying glass and a bookmark with photos of her grandkids on it.”
“She has grandchildren?”
“No, it was part of the act. To get people to trust her. Not seem suspicious. She always requested the middle seat, though, which should have seemed suspicious, a tip-off right there. Anyway, she would strike up a conversation, form a bond, invite them to her house for tea. They would go because she had a wonderful collection of whatever happened to be their personal hobby to share with them. She said. And then she would kill them.”
“I’ll have to remember never to speak with my seatmate on an airplane again,” Benton said. “That is really sick.”
“You don’t even know what she did to them.”
“I remember reading about it, but I can’t recall the particulars.”
“We didn’t release any, but since you’re fortunate enough to be part of this official investigation, I think I can divulge them.” Imogen’s gaze moved back to the fence. “She sliced away their eyes, tongues, and hands and then made a mold of their bodies and filled it with plaster to use as statuary in her garden. She discarded the bodies and the other pieces all over town. Except the pieces she popped into envelopes with thank-you notes and sent back to the families. She loves beauty but said those women had sullied theirs by their stupidity. Her way, they would be preserved for all time.”
“How did you find her?”
“Through her lifelong friendship with Elgin. When we started working on the Connoisseur case, Elgin had an agent get in touch with Professor Kidd because the removal of the eyes, hands, and tongue gave the killings a sort of ritual feeling, and the professor’s specialty was burial rites. Later, when I was put on the case, I went to follow up on something she had said. That was when we figured it out.”
“How?”
“I went to her house to ask her to clarify something she had suggested about the killer, and we had our interview in her garden. She lived in her family’s old hou
se, it’s really a mansion, and it has a sort of park around it. As we were talking, I remembered that she had misquoted an e. e. cummings poem to the last agent who interviewed her. The misquote had stuck with me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. That happens to me sometimes. I was about to ask her what she’d meant and then I understood that she was the killer.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. She and the other agent had been discussing idols and the development of rituals around them, particularly death rituals, and Martina quoted, ‘A pretty girl who naked is/is not worth a million statues.’ But the line actually goes, ‘A pretty girl who naked is/is worth a million statues.’ She had inverted the meaning to make statues more valuable than live girls. I should have seen it earlier—we were sitting in a garden filled with statuary, all of female nudes. She had grown so cocky that she liked to show off. Anyway, she saw my eyes move and—” She stopped, her hand going to her temple. “I got away.”
Benton said, “In the end, was it a ritual? The eyes, tongues, and hands?”
“No. That was only for convenience. Those are the body parts that really make a mess of things when you are covering a live person with molding compound. Everything else you can pretty much staple down without ruining the lines.”
She saw the color drain from Benton’s face. She offered him the napkin he’d given her. “Want this?”
He shook his head, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. He peeled off four pieces and handed her the pack. “Have as many as you need.”
She supposed that in certain circumstances everyone got a bad taste in their mouth. She took one, hoping it would at least cover the taste of chlorine that had resurfaced. It didn’t. “Wow, this is really not subtle. The sweetness.”
“Yep, it’s a great product. Did you know you can live on Juicy Fruit gum for a week if you’re ever stranded without food? You can.”
“Is that how you make all your gum decisions? Nutritional value?”
“No decisions. Always Juicy Fruit.” He must have seen something in her expression because he said, “Got you. You didn’t expect me to be a confirmed Juicy Fruit chewer. You see, I’m not as predictable as you think.”
She rolled her eyes. “Would you like more proof of how predictable you are?”
“More than anything.”
“Okay, I can predict your exact reaction to my next question.”
“What will my exact reaction be?”
“You’ll balk.”
“I can already tell you you’re wrong. I’ve never balked in my life.”
She held out her hand and said, “May I please have the car keys? I’m driving.”
CHAPTER 19
“Saying no is not balking,” he told her.
“Why can’t I drive? Is this some caveman thing about female drivers?”
“No, I just—I just don’t like it when someone else is driving. Why do you need to drive?”
“The same reason you do, to feel in control. Besides, I want to get out of here and you drive too slow.”
“I drive the speed limit.”
“You drive like an old lady. I thought you were a race-car driver.”
“I am. On a racetrack. This is a county road. In the snow. And a Ford Focus is not exactly— Where are you going?”
She had marched to the side of the road and put her thumb out.
Two minutes later the key chain flew through the air and landed with a clang over her thumb.
“Nice toss,” she said.
“I spent a lot of time at carnivals as a kid. I’m freezing my ass off. Can we go?”
“Of course. I was just waiting for you.”
They didn’t talk much on the flight back, except when he turned to her and said, “You know, old ladies get to be old ladies because they drive the way they do,” and she’d said, “In all this time, that’s the best you could come up with?” But he’d made her laugh again, and she had to admit that Benton Arbor really was not that bad.
Imogen decided she’d let Benton drive once they landed in Vegas.
“They’re only streets,” she told him, informing him of her decision. “There’s no danger of you getting mowed over.”
“Gee, thanks.” He pointed his ‘sixty-six Thunderbird up Swenson, took a left on Flamingo, and headed for the side entrance of the Bellagio to avoid any reporters who might be waiting out front.
A valet parker came over as they pulled into the driveway, but Benton waved him away.
“Aren’t you coming in?” she said.
“Later. I want to get over to the Garden to check on a few things.”
“The Garden?”
“Our race-prep facility here. We had some problems a few months ago at the Speedway, so we moved into an old skating rink, the Ice Garden.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Some sabotage. Someone tried to screw with one of our cars, which wouldn’t have been a problem, if they hadn’t also tried to screw with Cal. They didn’t hurt him too badly, thank God, but we decided not to take any more chances. Besides the hysterics from Julia we’d have to deal with if anything happened to her precious husband, he is by far Arbor Motors’ most valuable asset. Without him in engineering, our cars wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“I’d completely forgotten you were supposed to be here for the invitational. It’s in two days, isn’t it? And I’ve had you running all around the country.”
“I offered. Actually, I think I insisted.”
“There may be something to that. Still, you must have a lot to do.”
“I just want to make sure the equipment is in top shape, since it’s going to be a struggle for me to stay focused on the driving. It feels crazy to think of the race, with what Rosalind must be going through.” Imogen saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He said, “Martina said Loverboy was going to torture Rosalind. Was that just a guess too? Like about him having killed when he was younger? Would he—”
Imogen reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Whatever he might be planning, he does not seem to harm his victims until just before he kills them. We’re going to find her before that.”
Her voice sounded tinny in her ears, wishful, but it must have sounded better to Benton. His grip on the steering wheel eased up and he nodded his head. “Right. We’re going to find him before that.”
It was amazing what people could believe when they needed to, Imogen thought.
CHAPTER 20
Imogen sat in the living room of her suite and stared at Rex in his fishbowl. Bugsy said that she needed to relax, that watching fish was supposed to be soothing. She checked the clock on the VCR. She’d been looking at him for three minutes and didn’t feel soothed yet. She felt tense and pissed-off and worried. Scared. And a little sad.
Going up in the elevator to her room two hours earlier, her head had still been pounding from her conversation with Benton. What she’d told him about Loverboy not torturing his victims until just before he killed them was mostly true. Physically.
Or at least it had been until Louisa Greenway, his most recent victim. The one whose treatment was probably closest to what they could expect for Rosalind. The one whose torture appeared to have started a bit earlier in the cycle. Eight days earlier.
Which was four days from now, in Rosalind’s case. Unless he was accelerating.
This was in Imogen’s mind when she walked into her room, her mouth tasting like chlorine and lime, and found her team there, sitting in front of a whiteboard. On it they had made a list under the heading LOVERBOY PROFILE. It said:
Charming
Good-looking
Sense of humor
White male
Organized
Educated
Between thirty and forty
Sick fuck
She agreed with the last one unequivocally. The rest of the list, while probably true, didn’t tell them anything, it was so general. Seeing how little t
hey had to go on, all laid out nice and neat, made her feel like someone had punched her in the stomach.
“You forgot ‘Good with glue and scissors’ and ‘Doesn’t play well with other children,’ ” she’d said as she put her bag down, and was stupefied when Dannie rushed to write her suggestions on the board.
She’d had to explain to Dannie and the team that she was just kidding, trying to make a point. That while their profile was too generic to narrow the field, it could also be dangerous, creating blind spots in their thinking, making it too easy to overlook certain kinds of suspects who didn’t fit any of the things they’d written down. Going on to explain that she didn’t really believe in profiling, didn’t see how a list would help them find the killer, this white male, thirty to forty, who had killed five people over eighteen months, who tortured them before they died, who was escalating and could right now be— She never got to say what he could be doing, because at that point Bugsy dragged her into the bedroom and closed the door and told her she needed to relax. And she’d asked how could she relax with a killer out there and a team of agents staring at her like they expected her to pull his name out of her armpit? What if she couldn’t? What if she failed? What if they were too late?
So many people die on your watch, she heard Martina saying. You remind me so much of myself, in my heyday.
“We have twelve days,” Bugsy reminded her.
“Do we?”
Bugsy had quickly assigned interviews to Tom, Dannie, and Harold, and hustled them out of the room. He’d asked if he could bring Imogen anything and she had said yes, the forensics report from Metro. And information about the Arbor Motors sabotage at the Speedway the previous year.
Bugsy shook his head. “I meant food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Look, boss, you don’t think well when you are this tense. Spend some time staring at the fish,” he said as he closed the door. “Talk to the fish. It will soothe you.”
She’d sat and eaten Tootsie Pops and stared at the list instead. A list that read like a personals ad: “LOVERBOY: charming, good-looking white male, educated, successful, with a great sense of humor looking for . . .”
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