Paint It Black

by P J Parrish

  Louis was quiet for a moment. “Well, our guy attacks quickly, but with precision. The killings are methodical and sequential, but not all the scenes are alike so I sure wouldn’t call them ‘organized.’ And victims still don’t have anything in common but sex and race. Could our guy be both types?”

  Emily nodded again. “Sometimes the line blurs.”

  “Great. That’s fucking great.”

  Emily and Louis looked out to where Wainwright stood. He was facing them, shaking his head. He came back onto the patio.

  “So basically, you’re saying you can’t really tell us anything for sure about this motherfucker,” he said.

  “Dan—” Louis said.

  “First Louis says he’s white, then you say he’s black but it can’t be Levon because he didn’t set his pet dog on fire.” He threw up his hands. “Goddamn it, if we can’t even figure out what color he is, what the hell can we figure out?”

  Emily and Louis stared at him.

  “He’s black,” Emily said firmly.

  Wainwright looked down at the file folder in his hand, then tossed it on the table. He went inside the house.

  Emily watched him go, then reached for her wine. She finished it quickly.

  Louis went to the table, opened each file, and scanned the three police reports. One in New Jersey and five in Florida.

  “Why do you think he came to Florida?” Louis asked.

  “These guys often go underground when they feel the heat and resurface someplace new and start over again,” she said. Louis looked closer at the faxed pages. The New Jersey body was found in a place called Barnegat Light, the first Florida body in a place called Coral Springs, and the third in Lauderdale Lakes.

  “Where’s Barnegat Light, New Jersey?”

  “It’s on a barrier island, north of Atlantic City.”

  “And the places in Florida?”

  She paused. “Broward County. It’s over on the East Coast, north of Miami. Both places are suburbs of Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Where were the bodies found?” Louis asked.

  “I know where you’re going with this,” she said. “The Jersey one was right on the beach.” She pulled out a fax. “The second and third ones were found in drainage canals.”

  Louis dropped the file back on the table and turned to look out at Dodie’s boat.

  “What is it?” Emily asked.

  “I just remembered something Dan said when we were over in Captiva,” Louis said. “He was right about something and didn’t realize it.” He turned to face her. “He’s dumped them all in water. It’s water, Farentino. That’s the thread. He likes water.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Louis took a sip of coffee and set the cup on the small patio table. He was sitting forward on a lounge chair, his feet planted on either side of him, the files from the NAACP guys, Mills and Seaver, spread in front of him.

  He could feel the sun climbing up his back, and checked his watch. It was almost seven A.M.

  He picked up another folder, this one thick and banded with fat rubber bands. These were “tips,” names of possible weirdos, offered by their mothers, brothers, sisters, and ex-wives. My old boyfriend has a knife collection and hates black people. My neighbor once threatened to throw acid on the black guy down the block.

  He was trying to find a link—any link—between the NAACP list and the tips. But he wondered if he was wasting time.

  He’s black, Emily had said.

  How could she be so sure?

  He heard the sliding door open and looked up. Margaret was heading his way with a coffeepot. Her hair dangled with loose rollers and her cotton robe fluttered in the morning breeze.

  She refilled his cup and set four sugars on the table.

  “How long have you been up?” she asked.

  He pulled off his reading glasses and rubbed his face. “Since four. Thanks for the refill.”

  “I can throw on a few eggs, if you want.”

  “That’s okay, I can eat later.”

  Louis slipped his glasses back on, but could see her pink slippers out of the corner of his eyes. He looked up at her again.

  “Really, I’m fine, Margaret.”

  “Louis, did it ever occur to you that I like taking care of you? I like cooking for you and Sam.”

  He took off his glasses again. “I don’t want you to fuss, that’s all.”

  She sat down in the chair across from him. “It’s what I do. People have things they just do. You read those awful things and chase killers, I take care of people.”

  He smiled. “Well, then, I will take some eggs.”

  She didn’t move. He started to put his glasses back on, but stopped, afraid she would take it as a dismissal.

  “You need to let people take care of you sometimes, Louis,” she said gently. “I heard you mention your foster mother the other day. I didn’t know you were a foster child. When Sam told me why you went back to Mississippi, I just assumed that’s where you were raised. What was she like, your foster mother?”

  He straightened, setting his glasses on the files. “Her name is Frances. And she did take good care of me, Margaret,” he said.

  “As much as you would let her, right?”

  Louis glanced toward the canal. Suddenly he remembered hanging over a toilet, sicker than a damn dog from the flu. He had locked both his foster parents out of the bathroom and had fallen asleep in his thin pajamas on the cold floor. Phillip had finally removed the lock to get in and carried him to bed.

  There had been other locks, too. Locks that came after the one time Louis tried to run away. He was ten and had been with the Lawrences for less than a year. He took ten dollars from Frances’s purse and jumped out the bedroom window at midnight. When he tried to buy a bus ticket to Mississippi, the clerk had called the police. Hours later, Phillip had shown up at the police station and brought him home. He didn’t know at the time that his actions normally would have sent him straight back into the system. He didn’t know that Phillip had pleaded with child services to give Louis a second chance. All he knew is that there were now locks on his bedroom windows. “We put them there because we want you to stay, Louis,” Frances had told him. He never tried to leave again.

  He looked back at Margaret. “Yeah, she took care of me. As much as I would let her, yes.”

  Margaret smiled. “You know, Sam and I talked about taking in foster kids, but I didn’t think I could bear to let them go home,” she said. “Plus, Black Pool didn’t have much of that kind of thing.”

  She paused. “Did you have lots of brothers and sisters coming and going through the house?”

  He knew she meant foster kids, kids he refused to make friends with, because even after he realized he wasn’t going anywhere, he knew they were. But two others came to mind, too. A skinny kid with skin as dark as coffee beans and a big girl with a stiff ponytail and bright red lipstick—lipstick stolen from his mother’s purse.

  “I have a brother and sister,” he said, immediately surprised that he had said anything. “When my family was split up, they stayed in Black Pool. They went to relatives.”

  Margaret didn’t ask why.

  “You should look them up,” she said instead. “You can’t ever replace family or friends.”

  He nodded. Another image came to mind. He was small, very small, and his sister Yolanda was putting curlers in his hair. He smiled. God, she’d be what . . . thirty-five now? Hell, he probably had nephews or nieces somewhere. And Robert would be thirty-one. Gulfport. That’s where he’d heard they’d gone.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I should.”

  Issy strolled over to them and hopped onto Margaret’s lap. The cat stared at Louis and he thought he detected a smirk.

  “What about your friend who gave you the cat?” Margaret asking, stroking Issy.

  She was fishing, he knew that. She was trying so hard to find out if there was a woman in his life—or had been.

  “It didn’t work out,” he said
simply.

  “But you kept her cat,” Margaret said.

  He didn’t answer.

  Margaret smiled. “Well, it’s nice to keep a part of something you lost,” she said. “I have a baby blanket my grandmother gave me when I was pregnant. We lost the baby, but I couldn’t get rid of the blanket, even after the doctor told me I wouldn’t ever have more babies. What he said was just words. The blanket was something real.”

  Louis sensed she expected him to say something. “It must have been hard,” he said. “I mean, as much as you wanted children.”

  “We were lucky,” Margaret said. “We had enough of each other to keep going. But there are still nights we talk about how our lives might have been different.”

  He was silent. He wasn’t thinking about Margaret and Sam now, or even about about Zoe and Michigan. He was thinking about Kyla, the girl he had gotten pregnant in college.

  How can you say it’s not yours, Louis?

  It can’t be, he had told her. But he was thinking, It ruins everything. I’m twenty years old and I don’t want this.

  I’ll leave then, Louis. I’ll get rid of it.

  Go, he had thought.

  “Louis?”

  Margaret was talking to him, bringing him back. “That’s why Sam likes you here,” she said.

  He looked at her. “I’m sorry?”

  She touched his arm. “Sam,” she said. “He likes having you here.”

  Louis didn’t trust himself to say anything.

  She rose, setting Issy aside. “I’ll go get your eggs going now,” she said.

  The cat sat on the floor for a moment, staring up at him, then trotted after Margaret.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Louis rubbed his eyes and looked up at the wall clock. Twelve-ten in the morning.

  “Well, it’s officially Wednesday,” he said quietly.

  Farentino glanced up at him, then went back to the notes she was making. The table between them was littered with papers, files, photographs, Styrofoam cups, and half-empty cartons of Chinese take-out. They had been at it for fourteen hours straight, going through copies of police reports that had been flowing in since yesterday.

  Louis took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes. His thoughts drifted back to the other night on Dodie’s patio. Dinner had been just a continuation of what had gone on before—Wainwright drinking too much, Farentino bristling with indignation, Margaret and Dodie furiously refilling the wineglasses. And he himself sitting there not having the slightest idea of how to get Wainwright and Emily to pull together.

  But by the end of the evening, even Wainwright had begun to come around to Emily’s assertion that the killer was black. There was no choice really; they had to believe her. There was no evidence to the contrary.

  When Louis had arrived at the station early the next morning, Emily was already at work. She had tapped back into VI-CAP searching for any other cases up in New Jersey with MO’s similar to the Broward County and Ocean County cases—black victims who had been beaten, stabbed, and painted. When she found none, she had expanded her search to all East Coast states, specifically jurisdictions near water. Still drawing a blank, she expanded the MO to victims who matched any of the three criteria—stabbed, beaten, or painted. She was looking specifically for bodies that had been left in water.

  They had pored over the faxes, looking for red flags. But so far, they had uncovered only a handful of cases that were similar to the six they already had. There were no more exact fits. There were a half dozen middle-aged black victims who had been stabbed to death, four who had beaten to death. Some had been left in lakes or rivers, one even in a swimming pool. But none had been painted.

  Louis tossed the fax he was reading on the table. His ass ached from sitting, his eyes were fuzzy from reading. He pulled his legs off the table and slowly got up, stretching.

  “We’re never going to get through all this shit,” he muttered, taking off his glasses.

  She didn’t look up.

  “Farentino,” he said, “shouldn’t we be concentrating on evidence we have instead of evidence we don’t have?”

  “You don’t have any evidence,” she said, still not looking up. “You don’t have prints, hairs, fibers, or witnesses, for God’s sake.”

  “We could be trying to match the blade.”

  “You want to go visit pawnshops, be my guest.”

  “We could be looking for an expert, or a knife show or something. There’s lots of things we could be doing besides sitting here looking at paper.”

  She looked up at him. “He’s in here. I know he is.” She paused. “I got the impression the other night you were interested in this.”

  He stared glumly at the mess of faxes that they hadn’t even looked at yet. “I am,” he said.

  She smiled slightly. “But you want to be out there. You’re a cop. You can’t help it.”

  He heard the low murmur of the dispatcher’s radio behind him. It was Candy, reporting in from the Sereno causeway. He heard Wainwright answer from his post out on Captiva. There were thirty men out tonight, counting the sheriff’s department and extras from Fort Myers. Cruising, watching the beaches and the causeways. And she was right; he wanted to be out there with them, even though he knew they had no chance of catching him in the act.

  There was really nothing to do now but wait for the next body to be found.

  Louis went to the map on the bulletin board, staring at the pins that marked the places of the abductions and crime scenes. Yesterday, they had added maps of Ocean County, New Jersey, and Broward County, Florida.

  “Maybe it’s got something to do with his job,” he said, staring at the pins.

  “What does?”

  “The water. Maybe it’s part of his job.”

  She let out a sigh. “Possibly. Or maybe it’s just part of his hunting ground. Bundy liked college campuses.”

  Louis fell quiet again. He could hear the scratch of Emily’s pencil on paper.

  “Why the gap?” he said quietly.

  Farentino looked up at him.

  “I mean, why did he kill up in Jersey, then wait almost nine months before he killed again in Fort Lauderdale? Then wait some more before he killed three men here?”

  Emily gave a weary shrug. “It’s common. Sometimes these guys can go for months or years without killing but then the stressor kicks in and sets them off.”

  Louis turned to look at her. “Stressor?”

  “Yeah, it’s like a trigger. Something that sets him off, some crisis in his life that he can’t cope with.”

  “So something down here triggered him to kill Tatum?” Louis asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe there are cases in between we haven’t found yet.” She dropped the pencil and ran her hands roughly over her face. “What we really need to do is find the first case. You can usually tell a lot about the killer from that.”

  “You don’t think the one up in New Jersey was the first?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No, it was too much like all the others. Serial killers aren’t usually perfect on the first try. They get better at what they do. If we find earlier cases, I’ll bet they are not as . . . refined.”

  “Strange choice of words, Farentino.”

  She shrugged.

  He picked up the files again, opening to the personal report on the Barnegat Light, New Jersey, victim. He was fifty-five years old, a high school geography teacher with a son. No known enemies, no odd lifestyle patterns, just didn’t return home from work one night after coaching a Little League game. He looked at the black-and-white Xerox of the autopsy photograph. Specks of black paint could be seen on the man’s face, but at least he had a face.

  Louis opened the other two files from Broward County. One was a fifty-year-old janitor whose service truck was found in a bank parking lot, door open. The other was a forty-eight-year-old X-ray technician who walked five blocks to a store for a pack of cigarettes and never made it home.

  Louis turned to the ph
otographs. The same. The faces were beaten but intact.

  “He didn’t beat these men as badly,” Louis said, sliding the photos over to Emily.

  She didn’t even look at them. “Like I said, he’s getting better at his work.”

  They were silent again. The radio traffic hummed in the background. It was too quiet.

  “Why does he leave the bodies out in the open? Why not hide them?” Louis asked.

  Emily looked up again and gave him a small smile. “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I have a lot to learn about this,” he said.

  She leaned back, stretching her arms above her head. “Some of these guys want their victims found because they are taunting police or—this is sick—they are really proud of their work.” She paused. “Then there are some who want to be caught.” She hunched back over the files and put her glasses back on. “But those are few and far between.”

  Louis remembered the debris on the causeway where Tatum was found. “I think he just thinks they’re garbage,” he said, tossing the photos back on the table.

  Emily nodded thoughtfully. “I think you’re right. How a killer disposes of the body is crucial to understanding him. This killer has no use for his victims, takes no souvenirs, and makes no effort to hide the bodies from us. When he’s done, he’s done.”

  The phone rang. It was Wainwright’s line. Louis punched the button.

  “Sereno Police Department.”

  “Dan?”

  “No, this is Kincaid. Louis Kincaid.”

  “Shit. This is Chief Horton over in Fort Myers. Where’s Dan?”

  “On stakeout, Chief. I’m—”

  “Get Dan on the radio. Now.”

  “What’s—”

  “We got another victim.”

  “Same MO?”

  “Yeah. Except this one’s alive.”

  Louis yanked open the door to the Fort Myers Police Station, and was met in the lobby by a short, muscular man with a brush cut and intense brown eyes. He wore gray uniform pants and a white shirt that stretched tightly across his chest. He thrust out his hand.

  “Chief Horton,” he said, pumping Louis’s hand as he pulled him through a door. “You must be Kincaid.”