Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  Rosalind did not say anything, did not move. She was trembling inside, but worked to keep herself steady.

  “ANSWER ME!” he yelled.

  She did not move.

  “LOVERBOY SAYS ANSWER ME!”

  “Please don’t cut my lips off,” Rosalind pleaded.

  The knife moved away. “I don’t think I will. Not this time. That was a practice round. But you’d better be very careful from now on. From now on anything can happen.”

  CHAPTER 81

  At 7:36 A.M. Imogen was pretty sure she knew Loverboy’s identity, but she could not get it confirmed for seven hours.

  Unable to sleep at three A.M., she had started doing one of Martina Kidd’s book of crossword puzzles. By six she had finished both of them and gone to take a shower.

  That was where she remembered what Martina had asked her. At the end of their first visit with her. She’d sat down at the table, glanced at her crossword puzzle and said, “What is a six-letter word for ‘plagiarize’?”

  But that hadn’t been a clue in any of the crossword puzzles. Imogen spent fifteen minutes making sure before she called the FBI research library.

  “The definition of plagiarize is—”

  Imogen interrupted the librarian. “I don’t need the definition. I need the etymology.”

  “Plagiarize. From the Latin plagiare, meaning, ‘to kidnap.’ ”

  Kidnap. Martina had wanted her to get to the word kidnap. The connection seemed obvious—both to her last name, Kidd, and to a case where the killer kidnaps his victims and holds them for two weeks—but Martina was usually more subtle than that.

  At 7:29 Benton called. “Breakfast time,” he said, and as he spoke there was a knock on her door. “I took the liberty of ordering for you, ma’am, because I figured you would forget otherwise. You sound distracted.”

  “I am,” Imogen said, shutting the door behind the room service waiter. “I’m chewing on something.”

  “I’ll let you get to it. I’m sorry I’m not there to help.”

  “Me too. I feel like I’m in a race. I could use some of your expertise.”

  “Concentrate, keep your eyes on the track, and don’t think about how much you have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Go to the bathroom?”

  “It always happens in the middle of a race.”

  Imogen laughed. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Anytime. Hey, is there any chance you could send that bridge problem I was working on to my computer fax? I haven’t been able to solve it and it’s nagging at me. It doesn’t help that I don’t seem to have anything else to do.”

  “I’ll send it right now.”

  “Thanks. If you need any more driving lessons, just call.”

  Imogen was smiling as she poured her coffee and turned on the fax machine, and she smiled more when she lifted the lid on one of the two plates Benton had sent up and saw beneath it a pack of Juicy Fruit gum.

  Don’t forget about me, okay? Could anyone, ever?

  It was 7:33.

  As she fed the bridge newsletter into the fax machine, she looked up at the maps of family amusement sites tacked above it. Concentrate, keep your eyes on the track. Her eyes went to the blue and green circles that marked racetracks on each of the layouts. There were circles near the site of every killing. They were the only constant, the only type of family fun center that appeared everywhere. But they did not matter, she told herself, because the killer never kidnapped his victims from them.

  She picked up the pack of Juicy Fruit and sniffed it, smelling Benton, as she let her mind wander.

  Kidnap. She rolled the word around searching for a connection to something more substantial. Had the killer himself been kidnapped once? Taken from his family? Had someone in the case gone missing as a child? Could that be why he wanted to make a new family, destroy old ones?

  Where had that idea come from, about families? It had come from—

  “You can survive on Juicy Fruit gum for a week.”

  “The Greenways were not what I expected.”

  “I was trapped in an elevator once.”

  “Don’t forget about me, okay?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  KIDNAPPED.

  —Benton.

  At 7:36 A.M. Imogen’s mouth filled with the sick-sweet taste of Juicy Fruit. She dialed Bugsy’s phone. “Is Sadie still here?”

  “Good morning, boss.”

  “We don’t have time for that.” Her hands, her whole body, were shaking. “Is Sadie, Benton’s grandmother, still here?”

  “I think so.”

  “Get her up to my room as soon as possible. And get me a copy of the Arbor Motors race and test schedule and locations for the past two years.”

  At 8:26 A.M. Sadie settled into the cushions of Imogen’s couch with a luxuriant yawn and said, “I am sorry, Ms. Page, but that is not for me to tell you.”

  “Who can tell me?” Imogen demanded.

  “Ask his mother.”

  “Bugsy, go get Theresa Arbor.”

  At 9:15 A.M. Theresa sat nervously twisting the gold stud earring in her ear as she listened to Imogen’s question. She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I’m really not sure I should tell you about this.”

  “Why not?” Imogen asked, struggling to keep from shouting. Deny it, she wanted to beg. She felt like she was holding her breath with her entire body.

  “Well, we tried to keep it from the FBI at the time, and now . . . after all these years . . . The rest of the family, Julia, her sister, they don’t even know.”

  “After all these years, it won’t matter,” Imogen said. It was almost impossible for her to stay sitting on the chair facing the couch. “Please, Theresa. Please tell me about when Benton was kidnapped.”

  Theresa looked at Sadie, who did not seem to be paying attention, then at her lap. “Since you already seem to know about it, there’s no harm, I guess.”

  You are wrong, Imogen’s mind screamed. There is more harm than you can possibly imagine.

  By the time Theresa looked up at her, Imogen had her face back under control. She spoke softly, as if someone might overhear. “It happened on his tenth birthday,” she began. “As a surprise, Malcolm, his father, took him to work with him. He had promised to get Benji—that was his nickname—a pack of gum, but they forgot on the way up and Malcolm got caught on a phone call. But Benji—Benton—was so eager, such a big boy, that Malcolm let him go by himself. He bought a packet of Juicy Fruit. The woman who worked at the newsstand said he already had three pieces in his mouth by the time she gave him the change. He was such a funny boy.” Theresa disappeared into the memory for a moment, then came back. “That woman was the last person to see Benton for a week.

  “It was Malcolm’s secretary who did it. Kidnapped him. Of course we did not know that at first. We never would have guessed—she seemed so faithful. She’d been with Malcolm forever. She was amazingly competent too. At everything. Even kidnapping. She kept Benton in an unused service elevator in the Arbor Motors building for five days. She gave him only a little food and water and told him it had to last until we paid her—or until the air ran out, whichever came first. She called him horrible names—disgusting S-word, freak—and told him that no one loved him, that we didn’t care about him. She had told us that if we went to the police or the press she would kill Benton, so of course we did everything we could to keep the story quiet. But she used the newspapers, the fact that they did not say anything about him, to torture him. To convince my baby boy that we didn’t love him.”

  She touched her eyes with a Kleenex. “At first the woman did not even set a ransom. She was crazy, you see. And when she did set a ransom, it was more than we could raise. We went to the family and asked them for help, and of course they came through with it, but—” She broke off and looked at Sadie.

  Sadie said, “The story was leaked to the press. ‘The sins of the fathers,’ that was the headline. It was about how Malcolm was such a
n asshole that someone had taken his son to punish him. Which was not exactly true, because the motive was money. But Malcolm was an asshole. Anyway, he went berserk. Totally over the top. He accused all of us of having leaked the story, of trying to get rid of his dynasty, of—”

  “We thought she was going to kill Benton,” Theresa interjected. “Because of the story. He was scared.” She looked at Imogen. “She probably would have killed Benton, too, but we managed to stop them from printing it in time. And the woman’s husband, the dear, dear man, he just could not bear to have Malcolm in the back of his car weeping on his way back and forth to the office, so one morning he stopped the car by the side of the road and came forward and told us where to find my boy.” She smiled radiantly. “Do you know, Benton lived on Juicy Fruit gum all that time. Gum. That’s what he lived on!”

  “I had some idea,” Imogen said coolly. “You and Benton’s father divorced after that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Theresa said, flapping a well-ringed hand. “You can imagine how it was. The constant bickering, the blame. It was too much for me.”

  “So you left the two of them.”

  Theresa sat forward. “Don’t judge me, Ms. Page. I saved myself. Malcolm was entombing himself. He alienated the entire family and became strange. Erratic. Benton had to put his father on an allowance—the son putting the father on one. Can you imagine, a boy having to do that to his parent? Pay him an allowance every two weeks?”

  Imogen tried not to let anything register on her face. “What about Benton? Did you worry about leaving him behind?”

  “Oh no. I knew he would be fine. He was a divine little boy. He did not need me.”

  Imogen stared at the woman and wondered if she could really mean what she said.

  “I was fairly useless as a mother anyway,” Theresa went on. “I’m much better as a wife. You wouldn’t understand. You’re much more independent. But I was not made to be relied on. I was made to rely on others. That’s just the way I am.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “You’re full of it, Theresa. You were made to have a lot of money and you’ve used that Southern-belle excuse to cover up what amounts to prostitution.”

  Theresa turned on her. “What about you? You’ve used your money to buy a boy for you to play with.”

  “You’d like to reduce my relationship with Eros to that, wouldn’t you? It would justify your own. But actually it’s much more complicated—and more wicked. He says I remind him of his mother.”

  Theresa gave her a disapproving look so Sadie went on. “His mother died when he was very young and he’s longed for her ever since. It’s like a novel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Imogen agreed. Or a nightmare. She had not even considered Eros as a suspect. Eros. The god of love. Could he—

  “But you did not want to talk about Eros. You were asking about Benton,” Sadie put in. “So now you’ve met the family skeleton. But Benton got over it all beautifully—look at how he joined the Army Rangers hostage rescue squad, so he could help others who were in the position he’d been in. I have to say, really, I think it did more good than harm to the boy. He was pretty quiet before that, and afterward he became much more outgoing.”

  Outgoing. Imogen looked at the two women. Stood up. Smiled. “Thank you for telling me about that.”

  “I can’t see that it has any bearing on the case,” Theresa said.

  Sadie winked at Imogen. “I think Ms. Page’s interest in our Benton goes beyond the case, doesn’t it?”

  Imogen said, “I’m just trying to get all the pieces of the puzzle in place.”

  As they were leaving, Imogen said to Theresa, “What is the name of your perfume?”

  “Poison,” Theresa said. “It’s my signature scent. Malcolm’s favorite.”

  Of course it is, Imogen thought. She was calling Bugsy before the door had even shut. “I need the entire file every agency has on Benton Arbor and every press clipping ever printed. Everything. Now.”

  “What are you—”

  “And also run ‘Benji Arbor.’ ”

  “Okay, but—”

  “NOW.”

  She scooped Rex out of the fish tank and put him back in the fishbowl. He was looking as bad as she felt.

  CHAPTER 82

  It was after two when Imogen stood in front of the Loverboy profile—

  Charming

  Good-looking

  Sense of humor

  White male

  Organized

  Educated

  Poor family in a rich neighborhood

  Sick fuck

  Between thirty and forty

  Thrives on attention

  —with a pen in her hand. She was not actually looking at the list. She was looking at the two blank categories below it:

  Trigger?

  Identity?

  Her hand hovered over them. It fell to her side. She should write the answers. She knew them now.

  Time to fill in the blanks.

  She looked to her left, at the fax headed ARBOR MOTORS TEST SCHEDULE. Is Imogen considering a purchase or merely curious? Julia had written on the cover sheet. Want to have a drink later, Bugs? Imogen stared at her notes so she would not have to look at the sheets underneath. But she already knew what they said. There had been a race or a series of tests or both at a track near the site of each Loverboy murder in the weeks before it happened.

  Finally, she moved her gaze to her right. She picked up the Xerox copy of the front cover of the Inquisitor that had come in one of the files, but her fingers refused to hold on to it. It slipped out and skidded to the floor.

  She made her eyes follow it. She made herself look at it, hard, again. Look at the picture of Benton, dressed all in black, escorting Princess Artemis into a nightclub. Look at the date, two years earlier, a month before the first killing.

  Look at the banner headline that screamed out across the top in all caps: “AMERICA’S LOVERBOY!”

  Look at the face of the man she had thought she had so much in common with. The man she was so comfortable with. The man who made her feel so at home.

  Look at the face of a serial killer.

  She stood tapping the pen against the table, unable to make herself write, thinking, Thank God he is in Detroit.

  That gave her time to find Rosalind before he got back.

  CHAPTER 83

  Roses are red . . .

  Loverboy came into the room, whistling a new tune. He carried two hangers covered with plastic dry-cleaning bags.

  “Do you know what these are?” He held them in front of Rosalind.

  She did not say anything. She did not move. Not even her eyes.

  He stared at her, holding her gaze. She knew that if she blinked first he would cut off her eyelids. He had told her so earlier that morning. Her eyes started to water.

  He bent toward her. His nose was touching hers. He screamed: “LOVERBOY SAYS, TELL HIM WHAT THESE ARE.”

  Every muscle in Rosalind’s body was tensed. She said, “My clothes.”

  He turned away and moved to the desk, draping her clothes over it. “Good. Now, what do you say when someone picks up your clothes from the dry cleaners?”

  His back was to her. Rosalind swallowed hard and fast, blinking almost obsessively, but kept her mouth closed.

  “What do you say, Ros?” he asked again, this time with menace. He turned around slowly and moved toward her.

  She pressed her lips closed.

  “What do you say?” He was in her face again. His arms were on either side of the recliner and he was looming over her. “WHAT DO YOU SAY, YOU DISGUSTING BITCH? PAY ATTENTION TO ME WHEN I TALK TO YOU. TELL ME WHAT YOU SAY!”

  Rosalind did not move. Tears streamed down her face.

  He stood up, smiling. “Very good, Rosalind. Excellent. Now, Loverboy says, tell me what you say.”

  “Thank you,” Rosalind whispered. “You say thank you.”

  CHAPTER 84

  . . . Violets are blue . . .

&
nbsp; Imogen did not need or even want more proof, but she got it anyhow when she reached the bottom of the clippings file at 10:21 P.M. It started innocently with a small clipping, one inch by one inch, on yellowing newsprint, nineteen years old.

  The Big Bess derailment took the maintenance staff of the seasonal carnival entirely by surprise. Chet Black, the head of the crew, gave this statement: “I can’t even believe it. Me and Benji Arbor, we just looked Big Bess over yesterday. There’s no way there was anything wrong with it.”

  Only one young man, C.H., was willing to hazard a guess of what might have happened: “Looked to me like an act of God,” he said, and from the paleness of his face, this reporter did not think he was joking.

  Bethany Samson remains in critical condition at Briggs Hospital.

  Three phone calls and forty-five minutes was all it took for Imogen to learn what she already knew.

  The night nurse at the rehab center outside of Boston where paralyzed Bethany Samson had spent the past two decades of her life was not thrilled to get a call at 11:10 P.M., but the words FBI investigation perked her up.

  “Hold on, I’ll check,” she said. Imogen listened to her shoes squeak away on the vinyl flooring. She listened to two other nurses have a conversation about the relative size of their sister-in-laws’ engagement rings. She listened to the sound of her stomach rumbling.

  The squishing returned, followed by the hiss of a body being lowered into an adjustable chair. “You were right, Bethany does have a stuffed animal, a big cat. You know, like Tom from the cartoon Tom and Jerry? One of those sort of hard ones that you’d win at a fair? She’s had it a while too, at least six months.

  “I checked the visitors’ log while I was up,” the nurse added, and Imogen was not sure whether she wanted to bless or curse her.

  She held her breath.

  “Not too many visitors. Her father’s gone to live somewhere else.” Imogen knew that. Part of what had taken her so long was getting him out of his golf game on Maui.

  “In fact,” the nurse went on, “there have only been three in the past year and a half.”