Looking for what? What was motivating him? If only she could figure out what was triggering him. Conventional profiling usually pointed to the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, but this guy was too organized, the intervals between his kills too random. It was as though he was always waiting, but waiting for what? For the right victims?
“But all the victims were different. They had nothing in common,” she said aloud. Great, now she was talking to herself. Bugsy was right. She was so tense that she was losing it.
That was when she’d gone to stare at Rex. Eight and a quarter minutes now. She still did not feel soothed.
“Can you see this?” she said to Rex, and made a face at him. He didn’t seem to notice. “What about this?” sticking her tongue out. No response. Making faces at fishes, that could be soothing. For about a minute.
She gave up relaxing and moved back to the table, flipping through the files until she came to Louisa Greenway’s.
There was the report on the old house where she was found. The two couples living in the apartments on the floor below did not know anything about the girl being held in the attic.
There was the report on Louisa’s movements in the days before she was taken. They painted a portrait of a happy, normal girl about to enter high school as a junior. Gymnastics practice, diving, youth group, staying up too late to talk on the phone. Baby-sitting her twin brothers.
There was the report from the fibers team, which started with a list of her clothes. Like all the victims, she had been fully clothed when she was found, wearing the outfit she was taken in. And, as with all the others, her clothes had been washed. Loverboy dry-cleaned them. They had sent bulletins to all 126 of the laundry and dry-cleaning establishment owners around Vegas with a description of the outfit Rosalind Carnow was taken in, but there had to be hundreds of camel-colored crew-neck sweaters and pants sent to the cleaners each day, and Imogen was not hopeful. Despite the cleaning, Louisa’s clothes had been gone over five times for telltale substances. The only thing not accounted for at the crime scene was a fine polyester thread found under the arm of her light cotton sweater. Reading about it always made Imogen faintly taste oranges.
Finally there was the medical examiner’s report. Imogen skimmed this, not wanting to feel the words, not wanting to taste them. Louisa, the athlete. Louisa, whose flexibility had been—
Imogen stopped and put her hand to her mouth, frozen. The file had somehow gotten jumbled and the crime-scene photos had slipped into the middle of the ME’s report. Oh God, she was not ready to face those yet.
Ha, ha, made you look!
It was that damn voice in her head again. This was how it always started, her connection with the killer. Obliquely, subtly, so that it took her a few days to realize that her reactions to things were not her own. To realize it had begun.
Imogen pushed Louisa Greenway’s file away from her and looked at the wall, but it was too late. That taste, that image was seared into her mind.
Louisa Greenway’s face. Pretty green eyes. Pug nose dotted with freckles. Generous lips. Holes in her cheeks.
Holes the ME assured her had been made while Louisa was alive. A week before she’d died, actually.
With standard scissors.
The ME even knew what size. No, he had not sharpened them. Just stuck them through using brute force. But carefully. The holes were exactly even.
“Why?” she asked Rex. “Why would anyone do a thing like that?”
The fish stared at her.
“Is that soothing for you? Watching me?”
Bugsy didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
CHAPTER 21
“I’ve been waiting for you to interrogate me,” Julia announced, breezing into Imogen’s suite an hour later, her dog, Lancelot, wearing a monogrammed sweater, at her ankles.
Imogen looked up from the forensics report on Rosalind’s room that J.D. had sent over. “I told one of my agents to—”
Julia waved that away. “Dannie? I sent her to see my colorist, Tori, at the salon. You should be arrested for letting that woman walk around with hair that color.”
“She likes red hair,” Imogen protested.
“Her hair was not red, it was orange. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have quite a lot of important information to impart to you, and I propose to do it over a drink at the bar.”
Imogen hesitated.
“You have to talk to me. I am Rosalind’s best friend,” Julia said, and Imogen was struck again by the phrasing. Most people would have said, “Rosalind is my best friend,” but Julia had stated it so that she was more important. A spoiled child needing attention.
“The best thing for Rosalind would probably be—” Imogen began. Julia cut her off.
“—for you to stay here. Yes, of course. But I have ulterior motives. Cal and Wrightly and Benton are at the Garden and they’ll be there forever, and Sadie and Eros are locked away doing I can’t even imagine what. That leaves me suffocating with Benton’s mother, Theresa, and her husband Insipid Pierre. If you abandon me to them you might have another homicide on your hands. And you would not want that, would you?”
Imogen admitted that she would not. And she was intrigued by the subtle taste of sour cherries—loneliness—she picked up from Julia’s tone.
“Excellent. Then you see the only thing for it is to come have a drink.”
“Do you ever not get your way?” Imogen asked as they waited for the elevator.
“It happens,” Julia admitted, examining her reflection critically in the polished brass doors as they opened. “But most of the time, I do. I am very persuasive.” She nuzzled her face into Lancelot’s sweater. “Isn’t that right, Little Ugly?”
“Is that what you call him?”
“Only when Cal isn’t around. It makes him feel guilty. I wanted a dog but he’s allergic to the hair, so we had to settle for Little Ugly. They say dog owners resemble their pets.” She held the dog’s smashed face up to hers and bared her teeth like it was doing. “What do you think?”
“Twins,” Imogen confirmed.
Julia kept Lancelot under her arm as they made their way through the casino toward one of the lounges. They sat down, Julia on a wide couch with Lancelot in her lap, Imogen on a chair angled next to them. Behind them, Imogen could see the roulette wheel and some blackjack tables.
“You are younger than I am,” Julia told Imogen, pulling her attention back. “Younger than me and Rosalind. Ros is two years older than I am, so she’s thirty-six.”
Imogen seized what she knew was a deliberate opening. “How did you and Rosalind become friends?”
“It was when I was dating J.D., at the end of my sophomore year of college. Ros and Benton were already an item then, and the four of us would go out sometimes. She was a little behind, because of having Jason, so she and I finished after J.D. and Benton left. We lived together for a year, the two of us and Jason. But that’s not the important part. Don’t ask me about that. Ask me when the last time was that I saw her.”
“When was the last time you saw Rosalind?” Imogen repeated dutifully.
“Noon on Tuesday,” Julia announced. “After that chambermaid says she saw her. So I was the last one.”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen. I went to pour coffee for me and Cal, and she was there, throwing away the two bottles of champagne she’d drunk the night before.”
“Did she usually drink that much on Monday nights?”
“Sometimes.” Julia’s eyes glittered. “This is the part you don’t know yet. She liked to drink champagne when she was with someone.”
“Wrightly Waring,” Imogen said.
Julia looked crestfallen. “How did you know?”
Imogen shook her head. Julia did not need to hear that the crime-scene team had recovered fibers from Wrightly’s tweed jacket in Rosalind’s room. She said, “I thought Rosalind and Benton were a couple. How long had Rosalind and Wrightly been seeing
each other?”
“I can’t believe you knew.” Julia pouted, trying to get the waitress’s eye. “Rosalind started dating Wrightly about four months ago. Since then it’s been—” Julia interrupted herself to order a bottle of champagne.
Imogen ordered a Shirley Temple with extra cherries and turned back to Julia.
Julia said, “You ordered a Shirley Temple.”
“So?”
“No one does that.”
“I like pink drinks.”
Julia shook her head and stroked Lancelot’s sweater. “Rosalind would like you,” Julia said after a moment. “She wouldn’t like the way Benton looks at you, but she’d like you.”
Imogen ignored that. “Tell me about her relationships with Benton and Wrightly.”
“Benton and Rosalind haven’t been an item in ages. They let the press go on thinking it because it’s convenient for both of them, but they haven’t really been intimate since just after college. Not that she wouldn’t want more.”
“Then why won’t she marry him?” Benton’s mania for proposing to Rosalind made up the bulk of his FBI file.
Julia waited for the waitress to put down Imogen’s drink and open her bottle of champagne and pour. She took a sip, nodded approvingly, and said, “She doesn’t marry him because she is not a fool. Benton’s got this problem with confusing being needed with love. It’s not his fault—all the women in our family have perpetuated it. But Rosalind wants more than that. She wants someone who will share with her—share responsibility, share everything. What anyone would want. Benton sucks at sharing. He can’t stand not being in control.” Julia gulped champagne.
“I noticed. I almost had to wrestle him for the car keys this afternoon.”
Julia put down her glass and stared at Imogen. “He let you drive? While he was in the car?”
“Not his car. Just a rental.”
“No, no, no. You don’t understand. That is historic. Benton never lets someone else drive. He won’t do anything where he’s not in control. No roller coasters. Not even elevators. That’s why he flies his helicopter to work in Detroit and NYC, so he can take the roof stairs to our penthouse offices rather than having to ride the elevator up from the lobby.” Imogen tasted a subtle shift in the other woman’s posture and tone. The sour-cherry loneliness was back, but along with it Imogen tasted burned sugar. Tension, hostility. Julia said, “The tabloids all think it’s glamour, but it’s like some sort of sickness. An inability to let anyone else do anything. Anyone else have their own lives. I shouldn’t complain. He’s great for publicity, which makes my job easier. And I have a lot of respect for him. Sometimes, though . . .”
Imogen waited, but Julia left her thought hanging, saying instead, “Did you know he built Arbor Motors from scratch?” The burned sugar was gone.
“I thought it was America’s second-oldest automobile company, and its proudest.”
“You’ve read my press releases. What they leave out is the fifteen-year period where Benton’s father Malcolm ran the company into the ground. Benton rebuilt it by sheer force of will and personality. But we are only barely holding on now—that is why this race is so important. If Benton and the cars show well, the company floats. If they don’t . . .” She shrugged as she poured more champagne for herself, then settled back into the cushions.
“How did he react when Rosalind refused to marry him? For someone as used to getting his way as he is, that must have been hard.”
“He understood. Tried to change. That was funny.” Julia sat forward, confidentially. “Benton’s idea of changing is to buy a new wardrobe. You know, ‘Maybe if I wear navy blue I’ll seem more open, more relaxed, less controlling.’ ”
“Did it work?”
Julia rolled her eyes. “I told you that you and Rosalind would get along, Imogen. She is not an idiot. Of course it didn’t work. It probably prolonged their relationship a little because there was no way for Rosalind not to feel touched. But it didn’t address the real problem.”
“What are Rosalind and Wrightly like together?”
“Sweet. Wrightly doesn’t just look like an overgrown boarding-school student, he is one, at least in love. And he’s been in love with her since college. He and Cal were roommates at MIT, and the first time Wrightly met Rosalind, at a party, his mouth literally gaped open, like in a movie. They are really cute together. The day before she disappeared we’d all been out together, and there was a certain tenderness between them I hadn’t seen before.”
“Where were you?”
Julia smiled to herself. “We went to the Stratosphere. The tall hotel at the end of the Strip? Someone had told Rosalind that they have the world’s highest roller coaster on the top, so she was determined to ride it. And Wrightly wanted to take a try on the bucking bronco they have in their arcade.”
Imogen caught a taste of oranges. It disappeared. “Did you see anyone odd? Did Rosalind seem nervous or tense?”
“Anything but. She was happy. Well, a little nervous, but that was because she had decided she was going to tell Benton about Wrightly and she was worried about his reaction.”
“Should she have been nervous?”
“I’m pretty sure Benton already knew. He and Wrightly had a meeting together last week and Wrightly came out muttering to himself. I could have killed Benton, because we need Wrightly to print reams of praise about our new line, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Did you ask either of them what they discussed?”
“Not Benton. He would have gone all strong and silent. Wrightly moped a lot about how Benton didn’t deserve Rosalind and suggested that Benton had said a few things, mostly about Rosalind’s son, Jason, and making sure that Wrightly knew what he was getting into. Typical caveman stuff.” Julia gave Imogen one of her disconcertingly direct gazes. “Benton’s not a bad guy, though. Are you involved with anyone?”
“Do you enjoy asking indiscreet questions?”
“Don’t you?”
Imogen worked to spear the ice in her glass with her straw. “No. I’ve found questions aren’t usually the best ways to get answers.”
“Oh.” Julia paused, stymied. Said, “Well, you can ask me any you want. Go ahead—oh, here’s one: ask me why I married Cal when I am still in love with J. D. Eastly.”
“You’re not in love with J.D. You care what he thinks of you, but you don’t want to be with him.” She did not add that Julia seemed almost afraid of him.
“You’re right. But most people don’t see that. Cal does, of course. Aunt Theresa, Benton’s mother, and my grandmother think I married Cal to upset them, and I let them go on believing that because it’s delightful to confirm their opinion of me. It’s a little disappointing that Cal has turned out so well, actually.”
“But that isn’t why you married him,” Imogen prompted.
“No. I married him because he was the opposite of J.D. I’d known Cal forever, he was always around when we were growing up, since his parents worked for the company. But it was only once things with J.D. ended that I even looked at him sideways. And I’ve never been sorry.” There was an almost rehearsed quality to Julia’s words, but they did not taste like lies. And for the first time in the conversation, Imogen did not taste any loneliness. “Cal is lovely and uncomplicated, whereas J.D.—for one thing, he’s too damn self-sufficient. Secretive. The way he wears those dark glasses all the time so you can’t see what he’s thinking. He can’t open up or trust people. And he never laughs. No sense of humor. Especially not about himself. I’m probably partially responsible for that.” Julia tipped the last of the champagne into her glass and said, “There are better ways to end an engagement than by phoning the groom on your wedding day from the Air France departure lounge.”
Imogen was agog. “That is what you did?”
“Yes. You can dress it up pretty, but underneath it’s still ugly.” Julia stroked Lancelot’s sweater. “Not that it mattered. I had this speech all ready, I’d been practicing it, but I didn�
��t get more than two sentences into it before he said, ‘That’s okay, Jules. No problem.’ No problem! Like I was breaking a date to go to the movies, not our wedding. The bastard.” Julia picked up her glass to take a sip, then set it down hard. “Ah, speak of the devil—and I use the term advisedly.”
Imogen followed Julia’s gaze and saw J.D., Wrightly Waring, Cal, and Benton walk into the bar.
A man walks into a bar and says, “Ouch,” a voice cut into Imogen’s mind. She went very still, waiting. But there was nothing more. Just that one snippet, another bad joke.
A blond woman in a clinging peach dress walked toward the men. She might not have been pretty—it was hard to tell—but she moved in a way that made Imogen think of brash confidence, a way she’d always admired. As the blonde reached the group, she paused, smiled at Benton, and winked.
Imogen choked on an ice cube.
While she was coughing—boy, was she smooth—she saw J.D. look at his watch and veer away. The three others started toward the table she was sharing with Julia.
What do you call three men in a doorway? the voice cut in again.
At first there was nothing. No punch line. Then the voice said, Stuck.
It was a lousy riddle, but it made a good subtitle to where she was on the case. Stuck. Nowhere. And being a sop to the loneliness of the victim’s purported best friend wasn’t going to change that. She decided it was time for her to get back to her room.
Standing to leave she saw a man stop Benton, Cal, and Wrightly on the way to the table. He pointed at his two female companions, then at Benton. Benton nodded, knelt between the two women, and said something that caused them to giggle and beam at him while the man searched his pockets for a camera.
He was loving it, Imogen thought, a little disgusted. Was the man who had seemed so upset about Rosalind’s abduction earlier that day in there somewhere, behind the smile? The winking women? She watched him pose, giving a perfect toothpaste-ad grin, and could tell he loved the attention, the adulation, the audience. The one-two-three smile for the camera, Mr. Arbor.
One-two-three smile!
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 51
