Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Fortunately, his boss, the DA, was willing to go along with him. “I think you’re wasting your time, Jack,” he’d said bluntly, “but in the three years you’ve been here, your hunches have been damn good. If you can manage to nail Koenig on even one of those homicides, I’ll personally pin a medal on you.”

  Jack got out of the car, locked it and with rapid steps followed the path to the hospital’s main entrance. It was a new facility, deceptively bland with windows that were barely more than slits. There were no bars, but even a monkey couldn’t get through that amount of space, he decided.

  Inside the building, the large reception area was tastefully decorated. He might have been entering an upscale business office. As always when he was here, Jack hoped the fact that tight security wasn’t readily apparent was not a sign that it didn’t exist.

  Koenig was going to meet his new psychiatrist today. Rhoda Morris, the one who had been assigned to him since his commitment eight months ago, had left for the private sector. Jack was not sorry about the change. In his opinion, Koenig had had Dr. Morris buffaloed. He hoped the new psychiatrist, Dr. Sara Stein, would be older and more experienced.

  When he was ushered into her office, he immediately liked what he saw. Dr. Stein was a pleasant-looking, full-figured woman who looked to be in her late fifties, with gray hair and even features in a face dominated by warm and intelligent brown eyes. He felt her scrutiny and hoped her first impression of him was favorable as well.

  He knew she was seeing a twenty-eight-year-old, sandy-haired six-footer with a boyish face. He only hoped she wouldn’t mistake him for a recent college graduate, the way some people did.

  She did not. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Carroll,” she said briskly. “As you know, I haven’t yet met William Koenig. After reading the file and learning of your interest in him, I decided to have my first session with him with you present. Of course, he knows why you are here.”

  Jack drew a deep breath. “Doctor, I’m here because I think William Koenig may be the most dangerous inmate under this roof.”

  “We discussed him at the staff meeting this morning. The consensus is that his psychotic tendencies may have been fueled by his experimenting with past-life regression. But as you may have suspected, my colleagues do not agree with you that Koenig is a multiple killer.”

  “Dr. Stein, he may not be. On the other hand, if I’m right and we can get to the truth, the families of at least four homicide victims will have some sense of closure.”

  He paused for a moment and then continued: “Let me give you an example. Two years ago an elderly woman in Dobbs Ferry was asphyxiated during a fire that had been deliberately set in her home. Her family is making life hell for a twelve-year-old neighborhood kid who had started a campfire in the nearby woods a few days earlier. They’re accusing him of being an arsonist.”

  “They need someone to blame,” she observed. “But that will have a terrible effect on an innocent child. Let’s get Koenig in here.”

  “Doctor, try to get him to talk about other lives he may remember. If we knew about them I believe we could begin to understand why he might have selected other victims for retribution.”

  She nodded and turned on the intercom. “We’re ready for Koenig,” she said.

  • • •

  “William, Assistant District Attorney Carroll wants to talk with you.”

  “I’ve explained to your assistant, Doctor, that I will talk to him only through you,” Koenig said patiently. “I will answer his questions through you. I understand that my answers may be used against me. I do not want to have a lawyer present. I also understand that I can stop answering questions at any point. I do not expect the confidentiality of a doctor-patient relationship in this matter. You are new here, but I have met Mr. Carroll a number of times before. I will not speak to him directly again. Is there anything else?”

  Dr. Stein glanced at Jack Carroll, who shook his head.

  “No, nothing else, William,” she said.

  “Then I think we should proceed. The state is paying you handsomely to probe my mind, Doctor. Why don’t you start earning your money?”

  William Koenig smiled gently to take the sting out of his words. He was quietly counting the hours until this evening but wanted nothing in his demeanor to suggest that this was his last day here. His escape plan was foolproof.

  William hoped that the weather would continue to be gray and rain-filled at least through tomorrow. His manacled hands clasped in his lap, a restraining strap across his waist, the guard studying him through the heavily glassed door, he sat in silent contempt across the desk from his new psychiatrist, Dr. Stein, and his old adversary, Jack Carroll.

  Behind his seemingly anxious-to-please smile, he was thinking that Stein was dowdy, with her hair slipping from where she’d twisted it into a bun. She didn’t wear makeup, either. His last psychiatrist had been pretty. He’d liked her—she was so engagingly naive.

  Carroll was a nice-looking guy, the kind who probably had all the girls after him in school. He was smart too, the only one smart enough to wonder if maybe he, William Koenig, was responsible for a string of unsolved homicides.

  But all they could prove was that last February he had tried to strangle Emily Winters.

  “William, I hope you’ll be comfortable with me and help me to understand you. In your own words, will you tell me why you attacked Emily Winters?”

  William knew perfectly well that Stein had studied his file backward and forward. Even so, it was flattering to see the interest in her eyes when he told her—in his own words, as she put it—that in 1708, in his life as Simon Guiness, he had been hanged in London because of the false testimony of Kate Fallow, a woman who had become obsessed with him.

  “She killed her husband, then made it look as though he had been a victim of a random attack on the road to their estate,” William explained gravely. “Then, when I rejected her, she went to the magistrate and claimed that I had stabbed her husband because I coveted her.”

  He shivered as he spoke, remembering the misery that followed. They had believed Kate Fallow. For months he had rotted in a damp and dirty prison until execution ended his life as Simon Guiness.

  “When did you first know that you had a past life, William?”

  “I learned that about myself when I was in high school. I became interested in parapsychology and succeeded in hypnotizing myself and finding my own path into all that had gone before.”

  William realized that Dr. Stein did not believe that he had the power to hypnotize himself. “It’s not hard if you concentrate,” he said impatiently. “You sit in front of a mirror in a dark room with just one candle burning. With a pen or crayon, put a dot in the center of your forehead to indicate your third eye. Then stare at that dot in the mirror.” His voice lowered. “You will see the change beginning as you find your way into the past.”

  “Change, William?”

  “You will see it in the mirror,” he whispered. “Your present image will dissolve and disappear, as mine did. Other faces will appear, faces of the people you were in previous lives.”

  He glanced over at Jack Carroll. “I’ve explained all this to him,” he told the doctor. “I bet he’s tried to see if he could hypnotize himself. Tried and failed. He’s too sensible. He doesn’t get it.”

  “Will I know what happened to those people in my past lives if I am able to hypnotize myself?” Dr. Stein asked.

  “Oh, yes, Doctor, you will remember all the details.”

  “How many lives do you remember, William?”

  William stared at the green wall behind Dr. Stein’s desk. Moss green. He was very proud that he understood shades, not just colors. They all tried to trick him into telling about the other lives he had lived, about punishments he had meted out to people who had hurt him in the past.

  If you only knew, William thought. There were eleven others. A smile played around his lips as he recalled the first, the old woman he’d followed home from the
railroad station because he realized she was the witch who had put a curse on him in Salem. He had waited until he was sure she was asleep and then set fire to her house. Fire for fire.

  He chose his words carefully. “The face that was clear to me at the time I happened to come across the woman you call Emily Winters was that of Simon Guiness. Knowing the terrible fate I suffered as Simon, you can understand why the sight of a young woman with red-gold hair and wide blue eyes upset me so much.”

  “Did seeing a woman with that appearance always upset you, William?”

  “Oh, no, it began a little over three years ago—after I had relived my life as Simon Guiness.”

  “Tell me about finding Emily.”

  He remembered how he had spotted her from the street. She was waiting on a window table in the restaurant. “I studied her, to be absolutely sure it was Kate,” he reminisced. “Then I went into the restaurant. It wasn’t very crowded, so I was able to observed her very carefully. . . .”

  William’s voice trailed off as he remembered the thrill of realizing he had finally tracked down Kate Fallow. “When she passed my table, I touched her arm,” he confided. “She looked terrified, then frightened. I’m certain that she sensed danger, even though I apologized.”

  “Did you say anything to her, William?”

  “I asked, ‘Haven’t we met before?’ ”

  “Then you waited outside until she left the restaurant?”

  “Yes, she began to walk home. I followed her from a distance. I saw her turn into a gated area. It was easy to climb the fence out of sight of the guard. I caught up with her at the driveway of a lovely home not unlike the mansion I lived in as Simon Guiness. I thought it was a rather inappropriate dwelling for a woman who makes her living as a waitress. Later I learned that she is a law-school student who works evenings and house-sits for a couple named Adamson, the absent owners of that dwelling.”

  “You broke into the house.”

  “That is too crude a word. I waited for hours and observed that an upstairs bedroom had an open window, which meant it would not be alarmed. It was easy to climb the tree nearby and slip inside from there.”

  “It was Emily’s bedroom?”

  “Yes. She was asleep. The moon was quite bright, and I was able to study her for a long time. The memories came flooding back of her persistent efforts to win my attention when we lived on neighboring estates in England.”

  Jack Carroll listened with mounting fury. Emily had told him that she’d sensed Koenig when he came in the window. She knew she couldn’t get away in time, that her only hope was to push the panic button on the side of the bed. The security-conscious Mr. Adamson had ordered that each bed be equipped with one. It was wired into the station of the private guards who patrolled the gated community. They knew instantly what room she was in, and they had a key to the house.

  “I was so afraid, Jack,” she’d told him, her voice a monotone. “I sleep with the lights on now, and I’m afraid to open the windows. I could tell he was going to kill me when he bent over and whispered, ‘Haven’t we met before?’—the same question he’d asked me in the restaurant.”

  Somehow Emily had managed to stay coolheaded, Jack thought. She’d told Koenig that she was sure they had met, but wouldn’t he talk to her about it and refresh her memory?

  “He was so scary,” Emily had recalled. “His face got all red, the veins of his neck stood out. He told me how I’d tried to waylay him in the fields, how I’d bragged to him about killing my husband for him. Then he said it was time—and put his hands around my throat.”

  The security guards had burst in just as Koenig had begun to squeeze her throat. “His fingers were so powerful,” Emily had whispered. “So many nights now I wake up feeling them.”

  At his arrest, William’s hysterical rantings that Emily had caused his death in another life had resulted in a media circus.

  “You attacked Emily Winters because she looked like Kate Fallow?” Dr. Stein prodded.

  “She didn’t look like her,” William said with a touch of irritation. “She was Kate Fallow. I recognized her and immediately became my former self, Simon Guiness. Simon had a right to be angry—you should see the justice of that, Dr. Stein. How would you feel about someone who caused you to be executed?

  “I will tell you that I regret I did not awaken Emily sooner. If I were doing it again, I would wrap a noose around her neck so I could enjoy seeing her experience the fear and anguish I experienced at my own execution. As I tightened the rope, I would explain to her exactly why she had to die.”

  He was rewarded by the visible tensing of Jack Carroll’s body. He sensed that a personal relationship had developed between Carroll and the woman they called Emily Winters.

  “Was Emily the only woman you saw who was Kate?” Dr. Stein asked.

  “A few times after I recalled my life as Simon Guiness, I saw women with red hair and I got close to them. But one of them had dyed hair. Another didn’t have the same shade of eyes. Kate’s were very blue. A particular shade of blue. There’s a name for it: periwinkle, a sort of blue-violet shade.

  “You may be interested to learn that Kate has reappeared in other lifetimes, but obviously has managed to evade judgment. When I studied her that night, I knew she was Kate Fallow, but another name also kept running through my mind. Eliza Jackson. As that lifetime becomes clearer to me, Doctor, I will discuss it with you.”

  He’s playing games with her, Jack Carroll thought. He’s managed to convince everyone here that he’s crazy, and he is—but crazy like a fox. If we just had some indication of who he believes he was in other lives, we might be able to start matching victims to him.

  “You’ve seen yourself in other past lives?” Dr. Stein asked.

  “I’ve seen faces and sensed that I lived as a knight in King Arthur’s time, and in Egypt during the Roman occupation, and as a minister in sixteenth-century Germany, but none of those lives was filled with detail. I am sure that means that only my life as Simon Guiness was unjustly terminated.”

  William Koenig smiled to himself. His other lives had been very clear, and in all of them the people who had caused him injustices had been punished. Except for the woman they called Emily Winters, but he knew where to find her tonight. When his cousin had visited him in prison, Koenig had told him that he wanted to write a letter of apology to Emily. The cousin had checked and discovered she was in her last year of law school, still working at the restaurant, still living at the Adamsons’.

  He felt Dr. Stein’s eyes studying him. Jack Carroll’s eyes were always impassive, but he knew that under the bland exterior Carroll was furious. Carroll wanted answers. Koenig wondered if Carroll would have Dr. Stein ask the usual questions:

  “Did you have anything to do with the fire in Rosedale that killed an elderly woman eight years ago?”

  “Five years ago in March, someone of your description was seen leaving the York Cinema in Mamaroneck, where a cashier was later found murdered. Did you ever encounter that cashier in another life?”

  “Did you ever call yourself Samuel Esinger and make an appointment with Jeffrey Lane, a real estate agent in Rye?”

  The old woman was the witch from Salem. He’d recognized the cashier as the seventeenth-century pirate who had set him adrift in 1603. Lane had been his younger brother in Glasgow in 1790 and murdered him for the estate.

  Dr. Stein could sense Carroll’s frustration. As he had explained, “I refuse to believe it’s sheer coincidence that someone of Koenig’s general description was seen in the area where homicides of totally unconnected people took place.”

  General description, the doctor thought. That suits him. Medium height, medium build, plain features, dirty-blond hair. As Carroll had pointed out, different glasses, a wig, or even a cap or ski hat could alter Koenig’s appearance. Only his eyes were compelling: not so much blue as almost colorless. And he was strong. Cords of muscles bulged in his neck and hands. He worked out in his cell for hours at a tim
e.

  According to his file, both his mother and his father had been brooding and reclusive. When he was growing up, other children were forbidden to play with him. There were too many accidents when he was around. He’d gone to high school in White Plains and been considered a creep by his classmates.

  William had graduated from high school, left Westchester County, and drifted from job to job around the country. His records showed him to be highly intelligent but unable to control his temper. Outbursts of violence against coworkers had led to several brief confinements in mental hospitals. He had returned to White Plains, a time bomb ready to explode, and he did explode the night he attacked Emily Winters.

  Dr. Stein noted that William was a voracious reader. Several of the psychiatrists believed that Simon Guiness, the person he claimed to have been in a past life, was a fictional character he had read about. But except for Assistant DA Carroll, no one believed that William was a serial killer.

  It was obvious there was no information to be gleaned from him today. It was also obvious that he was baiting Carroll.

  “Our time is just about up, William,” Dr. Stein said. “I’ll see you on Thursday.”

  “I look forward to it. You seem to be very kind. Who knows? Maybe in another incarnation you were my friend. I’ll try to find out if that might be true. I wish you would try as well.”

  • • •

  “How is Emily Winters doing?” Dr. Stein asked Jack after Koenig had been removed.

  “She’s gone to counseling a few times, but I think she should go regularly. Recently, she did something that I thought was dangerous. She went to a parapsychologist and had herself regressed to a former lifetime.”

  “She wanted to see if she really was Kate Fallow?”

  “Yes.”

  “The power of suggestion would play a great role in any memory like that.”

  “She didn’t remember being Kate Fallow. But she tells me she has a tape of a life she described under hypnosis—when she lived in the South during the Civil War.”

  “Did she play the tape for you?”

  Jack shook his head. “I told her I thought it was absolute nonsense and that she should stick with the trauma counselor and not mess up her head.”