“Shame on you, Beth, wanting all the details. You’re getting more like me every day. Brad Petersen was just the way you would expect him to be in bed. Couldn’t ask for better. But he is engaged, after all.”
Beth recalled the redhead’s words. There’s engaged, and then there’s engaged. Obviously Brad’s definition of engaged included a quick fling with a more than willing female. Beth wondered if Ingrid was prepared for Brad’s interpretation of commitment, and less kindly, she wondered why Brad, with a gorgeous, talented fiancée, would be interested in a romp with Ginny. Again, she questioned her ability to assess people.
“And speaking of happily ever after, your Jordan Bailey is one helluva guy. I retract my suspicions. He’s crazy about you, too.”
At least he used to be, Beth thought, as she closed the conversation with Ginny. The front of her jersey was covered with dried pink flakes. In the bathroom, the mask took more than a gentle rinse to remove. Now she resembled a tired lobster.
For much of the afternoon, Beth plodded through a romance novel, eventually making her way to the riveting climax promised by the cover blurb. She closed the paperback just as her phone rang for the second time.
It was Jim Kearns. “Any more word from your phantom correspondent?”
“Not since the shredded-picture episode, Jim. Maybe the jerk is tired of the game.” Beth certainly hoped so and knew Jim Kearns had more important things to do than chase down some practical joker. Beth didn’t want to minimize the seriousness of the letters, or how each one made her feel. Still, she hadn’t received one lately, and compared to last night’s fiasco with Jordan, the letters didn’t seem worthy of her attention.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Still, let me know if anything else turns up. Bastards like this deserve a good scare. Exactly what are you doing home on such a fine day? Hope there’s no trouble in Shangri-La.”
“Jordan’s flying to Europe tonight,” she answered, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice, “so he’s got a full day ahead of him.” She couldn’t admit, to either Kearns or herself, that her relationship with Jordan might be over before it had started.
“Has he got a last name, this Jordan?
“Bailey. Why?”
“You know me,” he answered. “A stickler for details.”
“Speaking of which, how’s the investigation going?”
“One potential suspect crawling out of the woodwork,” Kearns said. “It’s more than we had last week.”
Kearns launched into his Spiderman profile again and ended with his credo, Watch the ones you know. Beth worried about Jim, knowing the pressure he was under. Still, long after he’d hung up, she wondered why he’d gone on at such length about the Spiderman. Indeed, she wondered why Kearns had phoned her in the first place.
Beth could hardly sit still. She filled in time by cleaning her bathroom, reorganizing her closet — even Samson’s litter box got a good scrub. A glance at her kitchen clock told her only an hour had passed.
In spite of everything, she missed Jordan already, and half hoped he would call. She could easily fall in love with him. Already she loved what she knew about him, but what about all those things he wouldn’t talk about? There had to be some way she could find out more, but if Jordan wouldn’t tell her, then who?
Late in the day, Beth was hosing down her car in the driveway when Bobby Chandler shuffled by. He wasn’t his usual bubbly self. Instead, he regarded Beth with a quizzical stare.
“Sunday and no skateboard, Bobby?” she said, releasing the trigger on the hose’s nozzle. “It doesn’t seem natural.”
“Didn’t feel like it much,” he replied, still staring at her with a confused expression.
Beth dipped a soft mitt into a bucket of soapy water and began sudsing the car. “Everything okay?” She had to ask, in spite of Tim O’Malley’s warning about being too friendly. If Bobby was her mystery correspondent, perhaps he was feeling guilty, and if she proceeded gently, he might show his hand.
“Sure. Everything’s fine. You got a boyfriend, Beth?”
The abruptness of the question startled her. “Yes, Bobby, I have a boyfriend.”
“Guess you like older guys, huh?”
How would she answer this without hurting his feelings? Or making him angry? She stalled for time and gazed upward. Tim O’Malley was observing them both from a second story window. When Beth looked up, he disappeared back into the room. Beth focused again on Bobby and chose her words carefully. “I like men who have similar interests to mine, Bobby.” She hoped that answer would suffice and that Bobby would pick up on the word “men” and cast his misguided affections in another direction. “Halloween’s just around the corner,” she said, changing to a more comfortable subject. “Is there a dance at school?”
“Yeah, but I’m not going. Halloween’s for kids. Costumes are silly.”
“When I was your age, I still enjoyed dressing up. My mother and father would have the inn decorated, and we’d greet trick-or-treaters dressed as the Three Musketeers.”
Beth was relieved to hear the faint ringing of her telephone; the conversation with Bobby was growing more difficult by the minute.
“Go ahead and get that,” Bobby said. “I’ll finish doing your car.”
“Jordan?” she breathed into the wall phone in the kitchen.
It was Rex McKenna. “Had to call you at home. Won’t be coming in for a few days. Wonder if you could see your way to loosening up the deadline for November’s rent.”
The first of the month was still two weeks away, and Rex already knew he couldn’t make the payment. Beth sighed. “How much time do you need, Rex?”
“I’ll double up in December, I swear. Things are a little slow right now, that’s all.”
Beth could almost hear Ginny’s voice admonishing her for being a pushover, especially since Rex’s last cheque had bounced. “Rex, the best I can do is to give you an extra seven days. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s more than fair.”
She heard him mumble something, but she couldn’t make it out. Then he hung up.
At least Rex was behaving predictably, Beth thought, and wondered why her conversations with Jim Kearns, Ginny, and Bobby Chandler had left her feeling confused. Had everyone changed, or were they reacting to changes they’d noticed in her? She shook her head. Exhaustion hadn’t done her brain any favours.
By the time she got outside again, Bobby Chandler had finished rinsing her car and had disappeared.
For the remainder of the day, Beth’s phone didn’t ring.
On Thursday evening of that week, Beth knew Jordan was back from Europe.
On Friday, Patricia Mowatt’s body was found in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the children’s slide in Alta Plaza.
28
Yellow tape sectioned off the four square blocks of Alta Plaza, a place where nannies frequently wheeled young charges from the mansions of Pacific Heights. Sunbathers sometimes gathered on a treeless section near the Jackson and Scott corner, glancing up occasionally to look at Twin Peaks off in the distance. Now, until the investigation was complete, the only people frequenting the park would be Jim Kearns, Manuel Fuentes, and a crew of investigators toting tweezers and plastic bags. Kearns ducked under the tape at the Steiner entrance to the park and climbed the curved steps two at a time.
In the centre of Alta Plaza was a children’s playground. Patricia Mowatt had been found here, apparently set at the top of the slide, then pushed down, like so much trash down a chute. She was clad in a white tank top, shocking pink nylon track pants, gym socks and Reeboks. Her streaked hair was fashionably cut, though now it was littered with clumps of dirt and debris. In life, Kearns supposed Mowatt might have been described as perky. Or pert. She was a small woman, but not scrawny, as Kearns could see from lean but well-defined biceps. Her right wrist bore the Chi Rho monogram.
Kearns squatted beside the body, drinking in Patricia Mowatt as she was now, before the medical examiner took the Stryker saw to her. By t
omorrow, a Y incision would reduce her to an organless mass of tissue and statistics. Her fingernails were perfect ovals, polished a pale pink. There were sooty blue smudges below her eyes. Her mascara had run with her tears. She wore tiny pearl studs. With a gloved hand, Kearns gingerly spread the elasticized cuff of one pant leg and noticed the three pink stripes of her socks matched her track pants perfectly.
“You liked being a woman, didn’t you, Patricia? You looked after yourself. Took that extra time, made an effort, even if you were only going jogging.”
Those who had examined crime scenes with Kearns before were used to his dialogue with the dead and gave him room. He heard their murmurs in the background, the occasional intelligible word revealing they were talking about everything but the murder. He heard muffled laughter. Kearns recognized the others’ need for detachment, knew how gallows humour could help shut out the horrors his squad faced.
Coping strategies were so personal. Nothing right or wrong here. Still, he left his task force to theirs, and they would wait until Kearns was through with his. The measuring, plucking, and pawing in the dirt could wait a few minutes, and so could the Crime Scenes Inspector. Death, Kearns reminded himself, wasn’t about numbers. It was about people.
Kearns’s practice of keeping the victims human hurt like hell, but he had to feel their pain. He needed that incentive, that motivation. His therapist warned him about it, saying that Kearns wasn’t allowing his medication to reach its full effect. The antidepressant, while keeping him from breaking into tears or flying into a rage, still wasn’t leveling him out the way it should. His body, rubbery with fatigue, was often at odds with his mind, which still raced from thought to unconnected thought.
He bent over Patricia Mowatt’s body and closed his eyes. He imagined her, lacing up sneakers, fluffing her hair with her fingers and checking her appearance in a mirror before venturing out on her run. In Kearns’s mind, Patricia was rosy-cheeked, wholesome.
“You were running, Patricia,” he whispered. “Were you getting tired, out of breath? Were you cold? Wet? Is that why you went with him?”
Kearns opened his eyes and cast a quick glance to where the ambulance crew, the woman from the photo lab, the two patrol officers, and their supervising sergeant still stood. No one was looking at him. Junior Inspectors Bauer and Weems kept a respectful distance, too. Most had grown accustomed to Kearns’s methods, and if anyone thought him odd, they’d never say. He leaned closer to Mowatt. “Your roommate told us you were smart, that you’d never go off with a stranger. You knew the guy, right? Trusted him. Where did you meet?”
Patricia Mowatt had no answer for Kearns.
Gently, he took hold of Patricia Mowatt’s hand, pressing the flesh through the plastic bag covering it. Not long ago, he had thought another death would yield more information. “I didn’t mean for it to be you,” he whispered to her. “I didn’t mean for it to be anybody.” He released her hand and stood up.
Even in wide-open spaces, there was a stink to death. To Vicks or not to Vicks. Each investigator had his preference. Kearns thought about the Spiderman’s first victim, Carole Van Horne. With the passage of too much time and the buildup of gases, Carole’s body had bloated and split open. He’d needed a gas mask for that one. Olfactory senses were supposed to be rendered numb after a few minutes in the company of a rotten stench, but Kearns knew once you smelled a popper, there was no going back. Tonight, Kearns would shower, rinse his hair with vinegar, and go to Henry Ng’s for Szechwan food. With any luck, by morning, the smell would be gone.
The ME, Janos Horvath, stout from too many servings of chicken paprikash, checked Mowatt’s body for usable evidence. Eventually, he shook his head, muttered something in Hungarian, then retreated from the body. Kearns could hear him setting up a golf date with one of the ambulance drivers.
The area around Mowatt’s body was free of blood, though there must have been buckets of it flowing when she died. Kearns was sure once Horvath put Mowatt on the slab, he would discover fixed lividity, the deep purple settling of blood on Mowatt’s dorsal side, not the front. Mowatt, some kid’s future gym teacher, had been killed while lying face up, then moved. The killer wanted to see her face, to watch her as she died. There would be bruising too, neither from the fall nor from a physical confrontation with the killer, but from internal hemorrhaging brought on by megadoses of an anticoagulant. Kearns could predict Horvath’s report — jaundice, enlarged liver — death due to massive bleeding. He didn’t envy Horvath his job, staring into those cloudy, flattened eyes, x-raying, dissecting, recording every scar, mole, and filled tooth. At least Kearns could return to the land of the living. Horvath didn’t have that luxury.
Kearns gazed at the homes surrounding the park, quaint Victorians that were now being invaded by Kearns’s investigators, searching for potential witnesses. Someone must have seen something. The killer was becoming increasingly brazen. Surely he couldn’t lug the body up the curved steps at the Steiner Street entrance without being seen, nor would any of the other accesses afford him the shelter of treed cover. Dammit. Kearns refused to believe Patricia Mowatt had died in vain. They had to learn something this time.
“Quite a challenge you’ve got, Jim,” Janos Horvath said, clapping him on the back.
“In a crossword puzzle, I appreciate a challenge, öreg ember,” Kearns replied, using his limited knowledge of Hungarian. “This I can do without. When did she die?” He knew Horvath couldn’t be specific — that happened only on television, but a ballpark figure was all Kearns needed. The ME would have already checked the body’s temperature, noted the onset or the absence of rigor, assessed the parade of insects.
“Killed last night. Sometime between the six o’clock news and Leno. Dumped here long after the neighbours over there were tucked in their beds.”
Enough time for the scene to become contaminated, Kearns thought.
A car door slammed, and Kearns saw Fuentes emerge from a black Taurus parked on Clay Street. He could hear his friend report to a patrol officer who was recording his name in a Crime Scenes log.
Then Fuentes was beside him. Instinctively, both men jammed their hands in their pockets for the initial walk-through, aware that cops could contaminate a scene as inadvertently as anybody. Kearns knew others would be in Mowatt’s company for the better part of the day, bagging evidence, measuring, taking pictures. Another downside? It looked like rain.
He took another look at Mowatt’s body, knowing the kabuki pallor of her skin would haunt him tonight. “Manny? This girl disappeared on October 12.”
“Right. Her roomie Ellen Sims said she went out after supper, remember? Never came back.”
“Did she have a regular jogging route?”
Fuentes nodded. “Usually made her way from their apartment on Russian Hill down to the bay, then she’d either cut east and hook up with the Embarcadero or go west along Marina Green and into the Presidio.”
“Ambitious girl,” Kearns remarked, wondering why anyone in her right mind would run anywhere if she didn’t have to. “Pretty breezy down by the bay on an autumn evening. Seems to me, if I remember that night correctly, it rained.”
“She’s wearing weather-resistant pants.”
He stared at the bright pink pants, mottled with muddy splash marks, then at Mowatt’s muscular bare arms. “So … where’s the jacket?”
29
Inspector Bauer’s visit to Ellen Sims’s apartment on Leavenworth near the Art Institute confirmed what Kearns had already surmised — Patricia Mowatt did indeed own a pink water-resistant running suit. Though she couldn’t swear to it, Ellen was fairly certain Patricia had worn the jacket jogging the night she’d disappeared. Ellen remembered the drizzle that had fallen around the supper hour — she had just recovered from a cold herself and had intended to take a walk, but the rain made her change her mind. Patricia though, craved her evening run and would most likely have worn the pink jacket with the hood up. There was no sign of the jacket anywhere in th
e apartment, in Mowatt’s car, or at her parents’ place in Sausalito.
Natalie Gorman’s missing brooch was no fluke. It, along with Patricia Mowatt’s jacket, belonged to the Spiderman museum collection, the killer’s own Academy Award for outstanding performance in a role. To Kearns, though, the taking of trophies signalled the opposite. This guy was ordinary, not the first killer to remove possessions from the victim and not the last.
Perfect. This was his excuse for making a lunch date with Beth Wells. He could question her about Anne Spalding’s possessions, not that she’d be able to tell him anything, but the conversation would segue nicely to Kearns’s real agenda.
When he’d last spoken to Beth on the phone, he suspected she was still too infatuated to hear him clearly. His reciting the killer’s profile had left her bored rather than wary. This time, he wouldn’t be quite so circumspect. Regardless of how she felt about him at the end of the conversation, Kearns had to let Beth know that the man she’d fallen for might be a murderer.
Ten days before Halloween, Nora Prescott turned fifty-five. So she wasn’t surprised when the Westminster chimes announced the arrival of an enormous bouquet of Stargazer lilies at noon. The flowers were accompanied by a card from Phillip, instructing her to remain home for the day; at one o’clock, a cashmere sweater in her favourite colour arrived, followed at two by a bottle of Cristal champagne. The three o’clock gift was her trademark perfume and a box of Godiva chocolates. So unlike Phillip to be this extravagant or this imaginative, then she remembered the creative session she’d treated him to in bed last night. Men were so grateful for sexual favours, and Phillip was endowed with as many brain cells between his legs as any other male. Later, she’d protest his spending so much money, then spank him for it.
When the doorbell rang again at four o’clock, she sprang from the sofa. At the front door she paused, wondering what the next package contained. She had seen a lovely antique silver dresser set last week. Perhaps Phillip had remembered her talking about it.
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