“Trust me to do what?” The blade of my knife snapped off in the drawer, and I stumbled backward.
“Goddamnit,” I muttered.
“Can I trust you to keep your mouth shut?”
I felt a wrenching in my stomach, anxiety twisted up with hope. I dropped the knife handle on the counter. “Yes, you can trust me. What happened?”
“You’d be surprised at how many of those old cases had some kind of bodily fluid evidence.”
“Yes? And?”
“I sent five samples to be tested. I walked them over to the crime lab myself and asked them to do DNA testing ASAP.”
“You said there was a backlog.”
“Yeah, but you know what? Sometimes a little friendliness can move mountains. The phrase serial killer can do that, too.”
“You got a match, didn’t you?”
“Yup, four of the five matched. One of them was one of the three closed cases.”
“The rest of the women on the list were all killed later than those three closed cases.”
“Right.”
“So that means the guy who confessed couldn’t have killed them.”
“Vernon Smith. Yes, it looks that way. I pulled the other two cases he pled to. I’ve got a blood sample from one, and I’ve got semen and fingernail scrapings from the third. I sent those in for DNA analysis. If they come back a match then we’re looking at a DNA exoneration for Mr. Smith.”
“So you have an innocent man in jail, and a murderer out on the street who killed at least four women, maybe more. Jesus Christ. You’ve got to run that DNA sample against your database.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You already did that. You ran the DNA sample against the general database. You got a hit.”
“If this leaks, it’s as much as my job is worth.”
“Please tell me.”
He was silent for a moment. “Look, you’re the reason I looked into these cases in the first place. But if you go to the papers, or if you tell the victims’ families before brass authorizes, then I’m up a creek.”
“Please, just tell me.”
“We got a live match. Guy name of Charles D. Towne struck a plea on an attempted rape and gave a DNA sample as part of his sentence. It’s him. He’s good for these four murders, and who knows how many others. We’re testing DNA from every open sex murder we’ve had in the past fifteen years.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t limit yourself to the open ones.”
“If those other two cases Vernon Smith pled to match Charles Towne’s DNA, then Vernon will go free, I give you my word. I will move heaven and earth to get Vernon out of jail.”
“Oh thank God,” I said. “When can I tell Violetta’s family?”
He paused. “Violetta Spees?” he said.
“Yes, Violetta Spees. That’s the woman whose family I’m working for. I told you that.”
“That’s the one that didn’t pop.”
“What?”
“We had a decent semen sample from her, more than enough to test, and it showed up different. Charles Towne didn’t kill her.”
I felt the floor fall away under my feet. I sat down heavily on a kitchen stool. “Could there be some mistake?” I said. “Could you have accidentally tested a sample from someone else? What if she’d had sex with more than one person that night? She was a prostitute, maybe there was someone else’s DNA there, too.”
“We found just the one. And there are other things about the Spees case. Things that make it different from the others. She was killed with a blow to the head. The other four, all of them, were raped and strangled. They had much more bruising and tearing. When they autopsied your victim, they did a toluidine stain and there wasn’t any damage.”
“What’s that? What’s a tolu . . . ?”
“Toluidine stain. The medical examiner swabs a blue stain to the entire perineum to see if the skin is damaged or abraded. It only shows up blue if there’s injury.”
“And in Violetta’s case?”
“No blue.”
I couldn’t imagine what I was going to tell Heavenly. We had found a serial killer but we were no closer to finding her sister’s killer than we were before I had begun looking for him.
“Juliet,” Detective Sherman said. “I can’t make the case officer on Violetta’s case do anything, and I can’t officially do anything until she ends up in the cold case unit, but I owe you. You need anything, anything at all, you come to me, okay?”
Cold comfort.
“Thank you. Thanks, Detective Sherman. And thanks for taking me seriously. When are you going to go public with all this?”
“We’re notifying the victims’ families today, and the prosecutors are putting together the charges on the first four cases. We hope to be able to issue a press release by this afternoon.”
Fourteen
I couldn’t bear the idea of Heavenly hearing the local news and rejoicing, even for a moment, in the belief that Violetta’s murderer had been found. I broke my word to the detective. I felt terrible about it, but I would have felt worse if I hadn’t. I did it in person, not on the phone.
Heavenly worked in the back office of a bustling orthodontics practice in Beverly Hills. I waited for her in a large room decorated top to bottom with an astronomy theme. Morose children with mouths full of sapphire blue and violet braces sat kicking their heels against couches upholstered with astrological signs. A boy strapped into medieval-looking headgear stood before a mural of the planets, complaining to his mother that Jupiter was too big; it was all out of proportion. Heavenly came out to get me and was greeted cheerfully by the mothers, one of whom asked after an insurance claim.
“Don’t you worry, Lucy,” Heavenly said. “They’ll pay. Sooner or later they get so sick of hearing my voice on the phone that they put the check in the mail.”
The woman smiled with obvious relief.
Heavenly told me that she was in charge of all the billing, not just for these four doctors, but for half a dozen other practices as well.
“I started out as a medical receptionist,” she said, showing me to a large office full of computer equipment and file cabinets. “Within a year they had me doing billing. Pretty soon I realized that I could streamline the whole system and take on additional clients. I’ve got a nice deal worked out here. I’m employed by this office, so I get a good benefits package, and office space for me and my two clerks, but then I do outside work, which I charge other doctors for directly. It’s worked out real well, so far, and we’re going on five years.”
“That’s terrific, Heavenly. It really is.” I was going to have to reconsider the discount I gave her.
She made room for me on a low chair, piling a few files and a large stuffed bear onto a credenza pushed up against the wall. “Isn’t that the silliest thing?” she said, pointing to the purple bear. “One of the dental supply reps gave that to me last Easter. He’s got a crush on me, don’t you know.”
“I’ve got some hard news, Heavenly.”
Her smile faded.
I told her about Charles D. Towne and about the DNA test that showed he hadn’t been Violetta’s killer. She grew very still, her manicured fingers resting lightly on her desktop, the tip of her red tongue just visible behind her slightly open lips.
“They caught this man?” she said. “He’s under arrest?”
“Yes. They’re notifying the families of the victims right now, which is why we’re not even supposed to know anything about it yet. But they’ll go public later today or tomorrow. It’s all still confidential, but the cold case detective who solved the case let me know what was going on. I couldn’t let you hear about it on the local news.”
“How many girls did this man kill?”
“Four for sure, but they’re testing other cases. I gave Detective Sherman eleven names, in addition to Violetta’s. And there are others. Lots of others.”
Air hissed through her nose. “He killed more than ele
ven women?”
“He killed a lot of women. I don’t know how many. We’ll probably never know how many, unless he confesses.”
“All those women, disappearing off the street, getting raped and murdered, and nobody cared. Nobody cared at all.”
Tears gathered on the tips of her eyelashes, and she tilted her head back, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her index fingers, protecting her makeup just like she had the last time I saw her cry.
“I’m not finished with this case, Heavenly,” I said. “Violetta was someone’s victim, even if she wasn’t Charles Towne’s. If you’ll allow me to, I’d like to keep looking. I haven’t even begun to investigate old boyfriends, friends. That pimp Baby Richard, maybe he had something to do with it.”
Her eyes focused on mine. “You want to keep on?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Okay, you keep on. You keep on. I want to know who killed my sister. My mother deserves to know that the man who did this will be punished. Violetta’s child deserves that.”
Fifteen
WHEN Sadie sleeps, she rolls onto her belly and sticks her little butt up in the air. She reminds me of a turtle, with a humped middle and dainty little feet poking out. I stood in the open doorway of her room, my eyes slowly growing used to the dark. The yellow of the hallway light faded to orange as it crept into her room, bathing her small body in a faint glow. I stilled my breath so I could hear the muffled rumble of hers.
“Hey,” Peter whispered, coming up behind me. He slid his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. “Sweet, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
While we watched, her budded mouth pursed and her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. She was dreaming of nursing, I thought. She was dreaming of me.
“Should I turn her over?” I asked in a low voice.
“Why? You’ll just wake her up.”
“She’s not supposed to sleep on her stomach. She’s supposed to be on her back.”
At every appointment with the pediatrician for the first few months of Sadie’s life we were reminded to never, ever, put her down on her stomach, that if we did we would lose her to too deep a sleep, a sleep in which she stopped the rumbling breath that was at once so clear and alive, and yet so tenuous. They don’t tell you what to do when the baby begins rolling over by herself, flipping from that splayed and awkward turtle-on-its-back pose to this more natural-looking one.
“If she’s strong enough to turn herself over, she won’t stop breathing,” Peter said. “Anyway, aren’t we beyond the SIDS age?”
“It could still happen,” I whispered. “Anything can happen.”
Peter turned me gently away from the doorway and closed the door quietly behind us. We walked down the hall past the bedroom where Isaac sang to himself in the dark, and the room where Ruby lay, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, or sneaking a book under the covers with the flashlight I left on her bedside table, knowing she would do this, remembering myself at her age. She was plagued by the same insomnia I had suffered as a child, and my memories of it were too vivid to do what my mother did. I would never lurk outside my daughter’s bedroom door waiting to hear the rifling of pages so that I could catch her in the act.
We lay side by side on the living room couch, the couch I chose expressly for this purpose, so that my whole family could loll around on it.
“What’s going on with you?” my husband said. He was winding a lock of my hair around his finger, making a sausage curl.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not acting like yourself. Sadie’s been rolling over onto her stomach since she was four months old. You’ve never once even considered flipping her back.”
“Yes I have. I think of it every time I see her on her tummy. The first thing I think of when I see her like that is that her risk of SIDS is doubled.”
“Do you really?” he said doubtfully.
I sat up, crossed my legs and stared at him. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Are you trying to tell me that when you wake up before she does in the morning, you don’t immediately think that she died in the night?”
He shook his head. “No. I mean, I almost never wake up before her, but I wouldn’t think that even if I did.”
“Not even when she was a newborn? Or how about Ruby, before we knew anything at all about babies? Don’t you remember the first night she slept through the night? We woke up at five in the morning and were positive she was dead. We even agreed you should go get her because I wouldn’t have been able to stand seeing her body.” I shuddered.
Peter folded his arms behind his head and gave me a look that seemed far too akin to pity. “I remember you woke me up and told me to check on her. I remember how freaked out you were. I didn’t come to the same conclusion. It’s just not the way I think. I don’t know, maybe it’s a maternal thing.”
“Okay, well how about this. What’s your first thought when Isaac is late coming home from a playdate, if he’s being driven home by another kid’s mom? What’s your immediate explanation for their delay?”
Peter shrugged. “I don’t know, that they hit traffic or something.”
“You see, I immediately assume that they had an accident, and that the car seat she used for Isaac was an old one, and it didn’t work, and that he’s lying in a puddle of blood on the 405.”
Peter sat up and took my hands in his. “Juliet, sweetie. That’s insane. You realize you’re a crazy person, right?”
“I can’t help it. I see this incredibly dangerous world, full of all these possible disasters, and I’m terrified. Even by things I know are crazy. I know that Ruby isn’t going to be snatched by a pedophile; I know that the chances of that are exactly zero. But when I see those big Amber Alert signs on the freeway I get this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I see her name and description up in those lights, with the description of some nightmare killer’s car, and, like, half a license plate number or something. Not enough for the cops to trace . . .”
“Stop it,” he said. “Don’t you realize you’ve taken this fantasy way too far? You’ve worked out the details. That’s just . . . I don’t know. Insane. It’s insane.”
I fell forward onto his chest. “I know. I know it’s insane. It’s worse now, because of Violetta, and that evil Charles Towne.”
“But he didn’t kill Violetta. Charles Towne had nothing to do with Violetta’s murder.”
I sat up again and said, “Right. That’s exactly the thing. There’s some other horrible killer out there. Some other guy smashing women’s heads in. That makes it all so much worse. It’s not just one serial killer who got caught because he was too stupid to use a condom. Who knows how many there are lurking out there?”
“Juliet, now you’re talking like one of those neurotic, crazy mothers. Like that one who wanted to LoJack her kid. That’s not you.”
“But it is. It is me. I’m just like that LoJack nut. I am a LoJack nut! I’m just as worried that something terrible will happen to one of them as she is. I’m just as worried that Isaac will drink bleach, or get hit by a car, or that Ruby will get leukemia, or that they’ll become retarded from mercury poisoning because they eat canned tuna. I’m terrified that Sadie will fall off her changing table and hit her neck at just the right angle to paralyze her for the rest of her life. I’m just as crazy as the rest of the moms—the only difference is that I do a better job of faking it. I do such a good job that I even convince myself.”
I collapsed again, and waited until I felt his arms around me. He didn’t say anything, and then, softly, almost inaudibly, he murmured into my hair, “Maybe you need a new job.”
I sat up. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I love my job. I love working with Al, and I love investigative work. Plus, what else could I do for only three or four hours a day? I couldn’t go back to being a lawyer.”
In a voice so tentative it was clear that even he knew this idea wasn’t going to fly
, he said, “You could just be with the kids.”
I thought of the confidence with which I’d left the Federal Public Defender’s Office when Ruby was a baby, how sure I’d been that staying home, being a full-time mom, was not just what was right for my daughter, but what was right for me. I thought of the hours of playing Candy Land, walking to the park, pushing her on the swing. I had been unprepared for how slowly the time would creep along, how interminable a day would feel. I’d been unprepared for how lonely and bored I would be.
But I’d also been unprepared for the intensity of my passion for my children, how their lives would consume and subsume my own, just as their bodies had irrevocably altered mine. The physical self that looks back at me from the mirror is a perfect metaphor for how they have altered my entire life. My breasts, about which I used to be so proud, now pointed south, nipples stretched, elongated beyond all recognition by three voracious mouths. My belly, once smooth and firm, rounded, yes, but with unmarked milky skin, now hung, a loose and crepey expanse, striped with shiny silver lines. It requires an elaborate origami just to button my pants, and when I take off my bra, I swear I can polish the tops of my shoes. They’ve done the same to my life, these three. I used to run from courthouse to jail, from oral argument to crime-scene investigation, my whole focus on my clients, those poor men for whom mine was the only voice. With Peter I played. We went out to dinner, we saw movies, we spent long languid evenings talking about ourselves, about each other, about the world. But once the babies came, they filled every space. Not just their needs, manifold though those are. It’s their breath, their presence. They fill my field of vision from end to end. There’s so little recognizable now, either of my physical self or my old life.
It’s difficult to figure out how to move them aside, even just a little, to make a small nook for myself. Even those few hours a day, hours in which I have Sadie with me as often as not, give me something. They give me the chance to look outward, beyond them and me. They broaden my focus just enough to keep me from going out of my mind.
“I can’t quit my job,” I said.
Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Page 8
