Imogen saw white spots as if the flashbulb had gone off in her eyes, and had to reach out her hand for the arm of the chair to steady herself. She knew what the holes in Louisa’s cheeks were for now.
Stuck.
Loverboy had been making Louisa smile. He had used the holes to stick fishing hooks through to make her smile. So she would be a good audience for his jokes.
Back in her room, she took a marker and on the PROFILE list wrote: Needs positive attention. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Something that didn’t sound like personal ad material.
The next day she’d have one of her people start canvassing bait-and-tackle shops.
CHAPTER 22
Loverboy was tired when he got home, but he couldn’t wait to show Ros what he’d brought her.
He displayed them together. “Family value size,” he read from the lasagna package. “And, ta-da, a movie! You and me. Family values. Dinner and a movie. Won’t it be great?”
She was already in her recliner, so while the lasagna was heating, he put the tape in the player. He had to fast-forward and rewind a few times before he found the part he was looking for. It was from the previous day. It showed him going up to the lady’s door, knocking, talking through the keyhole, being let in. Knock, talk, in, knock, talk, in.
The big old-fashioned timer dinged and he went to take the lasagna out of the oven. “Good home cooking,” he said as he carried it in. He put the entire thing, bubbling, on the tray strapped to the front of Rosalind’s recliner. “Eat up,” he said.
Rosalind looked at him. Her eyes were the only things not taped closed on her face. Her hands were bound to the arms of the chair.
But he pretended not to see. He turned and scooted closer to the TV and watched the tape again. He was so gallant in it. Such a loverboy. He could talk his way into any hole.
That thought made him laugh. “Hey, Ros,” he said, turning around to tell her. “Get— Why aren’t you eating?”
Rosalind looked at him with questioning eyes.
“You aren’t going to be ungrateful, are you?”
She shook her head. She’d had a lesson in ingratitude the day before and had Band-Aid- and Bactine-covered arms to show for it. She made herself think about her son, Jason. Her sweet boy. What would make a boy turn into a monster like this?
“I’ve never known you not to finish your dinner,” Loverboy said, and his voice now was more like the man she knew, the man she’d known so many years. The man she’d— Don’t think about that, she told herself.
“Come on, Ros,” he said. He loomed over her. In one motion he ripped the tape off her mouth.
She did not even think to scream. She just put her head down and tried to eat whatever she could of the food in front of her. He stood there, watching her feed.
“Like a pig at a trough,” he said, disgusted. “Look at you.”
But she didn’t care. She needed to eat to keep her strength up, keep her strength up so she could escape, escape so she could hold Jason one more time, so she could—
Eat.
“Is piggy-wiggy finished yet?” he taunted.
Rosalind kept eating.
“That’s enough!” he said finally, jerking the lasagna away from her. “Shouldn’t you be watching your figure?”
Rosalind said, “Could I have some water?”
He looked at her, as if startled by the sound of her voice, and she realized that she hadn’t spoken since they arrived. He was suddenly subdued. He padded to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water that he held to her lips while she drank.
“Was that enough?” he asked tenderly.
Tenderly. Rosalind wanted to throw up.
“Yes. Thank you. That was a very good dinner.”
Something flickered in his eyes for a moment that made him look like an even younger, sweeter boy. It disappeared when he looked at her sideways. “You’re trying to fool me. You’re trying to make me trust you so you can run away.”
“No,” Rosalind said evenly. “I was just giving you a compliment.”
Why did this appear to throw him? Why did he frown, confused, at her? He said, “Knock, knock.”
“Who is there?”
“Tom.”
“Tom who?”
“Tomorrow we’ll have Kentucky Fried Chicken!”
Rosalind didn’t say anything. What could she say?
“You are supposed to laugh. That was a joke. Imogen would have laughed. She’s got a good sense of humor.”
“Who is Imogen?”
“My friend. My girlfriend. Or at least, she will be soon.”
“Where did you meet her?” How many times had she had conversations like this with Jason?
“She came to see me. She works for the FBI.”
Rosalind’s throat went dry. The FBI. They were looking for her. Oh thank God. “What does she do?”
“She is very important. She’s looking for me. But she doesn’t know it. She won’t find me, will she, Ros? Because I’m only Loverboy for you. Only in here. I’m someone else for all the other ladies, and no one will ever figure it out.”
Rosalind realized what was going on. Realized the futility of having the FBI there. No one would figure this out. No one could imagine it. “No, they won’t,” she said.
“Don’t look like that,” Loverboy scolded her. “It’s funny. You are supposed to laugh.”
Rosalind didn’t move.
“Come on, Ros. Let us have a smile.”
She couldn’t. All she could think was how hopeless it was. How even the FBI would never guess.
“Do it,” he said. His voice had changed. “Smile. Now.”
She made herself think about Jason. About how when she got out of here she was going to hug him for three months. About the trips they were going to take together. About how many times she was going to tell him she loved him. Her lips curved up.
“Oh, that’s so pretty,” Loverboy said. “Soooo pretty.” His hand snaked out and slapped her. “Bitch. I know you weren’t thinking about me. You were thinking about that other boy. You can’t fake me out. I don’t want his smile. Next time I want one of my own.”
He got out the roll of duct tape and slapped some over her mouth again. Then he went back to watching himself on TV. Soon he was smiling again. He looked so good.
CHAPTER 23
11 days left!
The garbage truck inched like a snail up Melville Drive, leaving a trail of slime. The two men tossing in the trash weren’t very good at it.
“Must be training day,” Elise Herbert commented to her sister as she watched them from the window of their bungalow.
“What?” Betsy Herbert asked. She was ninety percent deaf.
“I said”—louder this time—“it must be training day.”
“Oh.” Betsy nodded. “I’d like that.”
Elise rolled her eyes at her sister and continued to peer at the two men. She didn’t like the way they were going about things. Salvador and José, the regular men, were tidy and courteous. These two were horribly noisy.
Seated in the beat-up purple Nissan with the self-tinted windows that Bugsy had borrowed from one of the valets at the hotel, Imogen spotted Elise frowning in the window of the house to the left of 1112 Melville. Melville was a street of modest one-story houses, nearly identical except for the colors and whatever “improvements” had been made by their owners to the front yards. Elise Herbert’s lawn had a white windmill in the middle and a collection of terra-cotta rabbits, posed in well-tended flower beds. The front yard of 1112, by contrast, consisted of a rusted wheel, a chain-link fence, and clumps of dry grass. The house was painted beige with dingy yellow trim, and the windows were dark, whether because its inhabitants weren’t up yet or because their curtains were drawn was impossible to tell. How anyone could sleep through the racket the two Metro officers dressed as garbage men were making was a mystery to Imogen, but she’d been up for three hours and was jittery with excitement and convenience-store coff
ee.
It was now 7:23.
“Hi, Gigi,” Sally Tagashi had said too jovially when she called at 4:14 A.M. from Washington, D.C. “I hope I’m waking you.”
Sally was one of Imogen’s closest friends at the Bureau, one of the few people she tolerated calling her Gigi, and a visual-materials specialist. Imogen adored her. But not at four A.M. “It’s your lucky day,” she said into the phone, pushing herself into a somewhat upright position. “I went to bed an hour ago.”
“Good, that means I beat the cops out there.”
“On what?”
“The text of your killer’s book,” Sally said. “In the collage. I’ve got it. I know what it is. Moby Dick. I’ve got the edition and the publisher too. I’m faxing you focused copies of the two pages.”
“How did you do it?”
“Magic. But I’ve got a friend in the Metro imaging department and he said they were close, so I was afraid they’d beat me. I could barely wait to call.”
“Did you wait to call?”
“Fifteen minutes. But now I’m going home to bed. I worked on it all night.”
Imogen ripped the pages from her fax machine as they came in, and read them waiting for her room-service coffee to arrive. After two passes, she was disappointed. Pages eleven and twelve of this edition weren’t even the text of the novel. They were the middle of a scholarly introduction to Melville.
Maybe he hadn’t intended for them to read the words. It seemed like such a deliberately taunting clue, but maybe he was only interested in the rubber-stamped markings that said Ford County Library. To confirm the car theme. Or—
Imogen went and stood in front of the map of Vegas. She became so engrossed that the room-service waiter had to knock three times before she heard him. Her eyes roved over the streets and street names, now almost as familiar to her as her résumé. Sahara, Riviera, Desert Inn, Sands, Flamingo, Tropicana, the names of famous hotels, some of them still there, others long gone. Then others, names of early settlers and where they were from, Swenson, Maryland, Oakey, Mead, Melville, Charleston—
Melville. Her eye circled back to it. Moby Dick. By Herman Melville.
She picked up the phone. “Hi, Bugsy, did I wake you?” she said, too excited to care that she was repeating the dialogue she’d just had. “I need a car. Inconspicuous, quick.”
Bugsy was a more polite audience than she had been. He said simply, “Got it, boss. Meet me downstairs in half an hour.”
Getting Benton was harder. She got no answer on his cell phone. When she called the villa, Sadie answered.
“I’m sorry to wake you, but I urgently need to speak to Benton.”
“Oh, you didn’t wake me, love,” Sadie assured her. “We haven’t been to sleep yet. But I don’t know—”
“Tell them you’re busy, honey,” a male voice suggested throatily in the background.
Sadie gave a low laugh and said into the phone, “Ms. Page, I’m not—”
“Sadie is occupied right now,” Eros said, taking the phone. “She must make love to me. Good-bye, person.”
Click.
Imogen decided she would stop at the villa on her way to the car. She dialed J.D.’s cell phone as she waited for the elevator, got forwarded to his police department voice mail, and left a message. Was she the only one working on the case who answered her damn phone? Glancing at her watch she saw it was only 4:45 A.M. But still.
Benton himself opened the door of the villa on the first ring. He was wearing the clothes he’d worn the day before and did not look like he’d changed out of them. “What are you doing here?” he asked, sounding more surprised than upset, blinking at Imogen through a pair of small glasses.
She’d never seen him in glasses before.
“We have a good lead on Rosalind’s location,” she told him, explaining about the book. “I obviously want more than that before we go ahead, but it’s the most exciting news we’ve gotten. I—” Why had she come barreling into his room before five A.M., before she’d even confirmed that there was a house at that address? She was like a television-commercial child on Christmas morning. “I just wanted to keep you in the loop.”
Benton rubbed his hand over his chin and its day’s growth of beard. “Are you going there now?”
“Yes. I want to see what it’s like. If it could work.”
“I just got home from the Garden, but the valet should still have my car up. Come—”
Imogen interrupted him. “I don’t want too many people over there yet in case he is watching. Actually, what would be more helpful is if you could try to reach J.D. and his team. I’d like to have everyone in my room in forty minutes for a meeting.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” Benton said, saluting her.
She blushed. “I didn’t mean—”
He waved it aside. “Forty minutes. Go find Rosalind.”
Imogen’s first impression of the house at 1112 Melville was that it was perfect—for Loverboy anyway—and that was only confirmed as the morning went on and information filtered in.
By 5:20 A.M. J.D. had found out that 1112 Melville was privately owned but managed by a company whose secretary wanted nothing more than to do him favors. It turned over a lot, she told him, but they’d rented the place a month before to Mr. Joe Smith.
“Not John Smith, anyway,” one of J.D.’s men pointed out. “This guy has a real imagination.”
As in Boston, the neighbors on either side were elderly, and two of them were hard of hearing.
But as Imogen discovered after the meeting, while she was watching the garbage truck lumber by the house, at least one of the neighbors was very much alert.
That was part of what they’d hoped to learn with the noisy garbage truck, who was in the house, who was paying attention. Elise Hubert could be a useful source of information on the people next door.
And, of course, there was the trash itself.
The truck had reached the end of the street. Imogen looked over at Benton, who was slouched in the driver’s seat of the Nissan. He was wearing sunglasses, and he looked like he was asleep.
“Great,” she muttered to herself.
He sat straight up and his jaw came unclenched and she realized he had not been sleeping. He had been struggling with being locked inside the car instead of outside doing things.
“I hate this,” he told her.
“I know. But we can’t do anything—”
“Right, right. The truck is finished. Can we get the hell out of here now?”
Imogen nodded and he pulled the car away from the curb. There was no way to know what would happen if Loverboy identified them. Her team was already being fitted with red “Census Taker” windbreakers for their canvass of the neighbors.
If they were going to do this right, if they were going to get Rosalind out alive, they would need a SWAT team and a warrant. And before they could have either of those, they needed evidence that this really was Loverboy’s hideout, and that Rosalind was there.
Benton followed the garbage truck to a minimart parking lot, where the cops handed the keys back to Salvador and José to continue their route, and gave Imogen five bags of trash.
Four of them were easily eliminated as coming from the neighbors’ houses. The remaining one was the smallest, and contained a receipt from a drugstore for makeup, a video rental coupon, two empty bottles of soda, a box of Marani’s Best Family-style macaroni and cheese, and the wrappers from two McDonald’s Happy Meals.
The Hide-and-Seek Killer had fed his third victim, Kaylee, McDonald’s Happy Meals.
It wasn’t proof, but it was something.
By ten A.M. they had more bits and pieces in place. Yes, Joe Smith was a youngish man, not younger than twenty-three, not older than forty. No one had seen a girl with him, but Elsie had occasionally heard “girlish noises” from the house next door upon which she did not wish to elaborate.
“Talking?”
“Sometimes.”
“Screams?”
“Not exactly.”
“Groans?”
“I would not know anything about that.”
“Did it sound like the person was suffering?”
“I’ll say.”
“How long did this go on?”
“An hour or two at a time. Usually at night. It only started recently.”
“Visitors?”
“I couldn’t say for certain. They could go around the other side of the house. There is a gate in the fence over there.”
Benton, J.D., and Imogen sat around the table in her suite and reviewed what they had. Imogen was sucking on a Tootsie Pop, using the candy to blot out minor tastes so the major ones would be easier to distinguish. That morning she wanted desperately to taste hickory, the taste she’d had when she got the other clues right, when she’d found the other Loverboy houses. But rather than bringing it into focus, the Tootsie Pop was just making its absence more obvious. There wasn’t even a glimmer. Something was not right.
Reports from agents in surveillance positions said that there was definitely a woman in the house, that she was not moving but seemed to be seated or bound into a chair. So far they hadn’t glimpsed “Joe Smith,” but there was one room they couldn’t see into.
J.D. said, “I’m not sure I can get a warrant for the SWAT team with only this to go on.”
“Did you really try?” Benton challenged him. “Don’t you have any pull? What the hell good does it do to be the head of the violent crimes task force if you can’t even get a warrant?”
Imogen saw J.D.’s jaw clench. Very slowly, he reached up and slid his dark glasses off. It was the first time she’d seen him without them and she was surprised. Without them he looked about ten years younger and incredibly vulnerable, had the most open, candid eyes she’d ever seen. It was as though you could see clear into his mind. And what Imogen saw was pain. He looked right at Benton and said, “You are not the only person who cares about Rosalind, and you are not the only one working his ass off on this case. I don’t give a fuck if you respect me, but you have got to trust that I am doing everything I can. For Rosalind.”
Benton didn’t say anything. He nodded slowly.
J.D. put his glasses back on and turned to Imogen. “Can you get a warrant?”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 52
