“Maybe,” Zoe agreed under her breath.
Settling in, Zoe got started.
* * *
She decided a couple of hours later it was, all in all, like exploring the underbelly of the social misfits and depraved.
She read letters written by clearly troubled women who vividly described fantasies they created in their minds about what they either wanted to do to Matthew, or have him do to them. Some of the things were pretty graphic. All were appalling. Each woman ended her letter declaring undivided love and the hope that she and Matthew would someday be united by the bonds of matrimony.
Each and every one of them left a terrible taste in her mouth.
Sam was far more vocal about the ones he read than she was.
“What kind of a crazy woman wants to marry a serial killer?” he demanded, having to restrain himself from balling up and throwing the letter he had just read into the trash.
“A lonely one,” Zoe answered simply.
He raised his eyes to her, surprised she would say anything in the writer’s defense. “Doesn’t this revolt you?” he wanted to know.
“Yes,” Zoe readily admitted with feeling. There was no doubt about that. However, she had something to add. “But it also makes me sad.”
“Sad?” he questioned incredulously. “Why?”
“Because it takes a deep, penetrating loneliness to want to be with someone who’s killed so many people. It’s like the women who write these letters feel they don’t deserve any better.” She sighed and then looked at Sam. “Think how awful they must feel inside.”
“So you feel for them?” he questioned. He couldn’t begin to understand how someone as normal as Zoe could empathize with the unhinged women who were writing these letters.
Zoe didn’t give him a direct reply. Instead, she said, “Think how terrible it is to get to that state, where you feel no one cares, no one will ever care, and this is the best you can hope for, to get a convicted, insane serial killer to marry you.”
Sam snorted. Her heart was too soft. “You ask me, they should all be locked up.”
“It would probably be safer that way,” she agreed. “But maybe if someone had just taken the time to listen to them years ago—”
He had an entirely different suggestion in mind. Leaning across his desk, he reached for the remaining pile of letters in front of Zoe. “Maybe you shouldn’t read any more.”
Zoe drew the stacks back out of his reach before he could take them away. “You asked me a question. I just answered it. From now on, I’ll keep my opinion to myself,” she promised, picking up another letter.
Sam shook his head and sank down in his chair. He moved it so the chair was back to its original position. After a minute, he got back to the business of reading.
But he had to admit, despite everything else going on, Zoe continued to intrigue him.
Chapter 12
Sam leaned back in his chair. It creaked in protest even as he rotated his neck from side to side, trying to loosen the stiffness he felt.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had put in so many hours sitting at his desk, surrounded by paper. His body felt tense and his state of mind was in an even worse place.
Feeling as if he couldn’t read another sentence, much less another letter today, Sam pushed himself back from his desk, as if putting space between himself and the letters would somehow help both his state of mind and his body.
“I don’t know about you, but I could certainly stand to take a long, cleansing shower right about now. Reading these letters dissolved any lingering shred of hope I had left for humanity.”
Not that there had exactly been an abundance of hope in his life to begin with, he thought.
When he received no response from Zoe, he looked up in her direction.
“Zoe?”
When he actually focused in on her face, he was surprised to see there were tears spilling down her cheeks.
She was crying.
Sam bit off a curse, refraining from saying out loud the words that instantly sprang to his tongue. No matter how annoyed or angry he was, gut instincts curbed his tongue. Zoe wasn’t the kind of person people cursed around. It just didn’t seem right.
But there was nothing preventing him from letting his anger come through.
“I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have let you help read these letters.”
Getting up, he circumvented his own desk and came around to the long table on her side.
But when he tried to take the letter she was reading away from her, Zoe wouldn’t let him. She surprised him by holding on to it.
“Zoe, give me the letter,” he told her. It was an order not a request, even though he tried not to bark out the words.
Instead of surrendering the letter, Zoe looked up at him, tears still shimmering in her eyes.
He felt something tighten in his stomach. Hard. He’d long since stopped being aware of any protective instinct he might have once possessed. That was gone, except perhaps, in some small way, in the case of his family. But even that occurred in moderation.
However, there was something about Zoe, about the deeply sad look he saw in her eyes, that seemed to rouse that dormant gut feeling, woke it up and brought it to the surface.
“Zoe?”
There were a hundred questions woven into that one salutation and he waited for her to respond to at least one of them. That he could wait and not just forge ahead to do what he wanted to surprised him. Zoe seemed to draw out responses from him that he had no idea even existed within him.
She drew in a very shaky breath and, being Zoe, the first thing she did was apologize. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry, it’s just that...”
“That what?” he prodded, trying his best not to sound as impatient as he was to get some kind of an answer that made sense out of her.
Impatient with herself—she didn’t want to add to the burden that Sam was carrying by acting like a scatterbrained, weepy woman—Zoe wiped away the telltale streaks on her cheeks with the back of her hand and did her best to answer him in a normal voice, not one choked with tears that had welled up in her throat.
“There are letters from the relatives of the victims mixed in with the so-called ‘fan’ letters and marriage proposals,” she explained.
Those had to be what Matthew had been referring to when he’d said that some of the letters were “ugly,” Sam thought. Matthew would have regarded anything that would have made an attempt to make him feel guilty or cowardly as “ugly.”
“Those are so heartbreaking,” Zoe told him, her voice swelling with emotion again. “Some of the people writing to him are clearly trying to make Matthew feel guilty, but mostly the people writing the letters talk about how the world is an emptier place now that he’s taken away the most important person in their lives.” There was an innocent need to know in her eyes as she raised them to his, Sam thought. “How can he live with himself, Sam? Knowing he’s responsible for so much misery, how can that man live with himself?”
Sam shrugged. He really wished he had a good answer for that, but all he could do was tell her the only thing that occurred to him.
“Easy,” he replied, his voice flat, scrubbed free of any feeling. “It’s the only way Matthew could have gotten any sort of notoriety and being famous seems to be extremely important to him, never mind for what,” Sam concluded.
Zoe couldn’t begin to understand someone like that. And because she couldn’t relate, the serial killer’s actions made no sense to her.
“He’s as empty and as broken as all these other people who have been writing to him,” Zoe said.
“That’s dear old Dad,” Sam said, a sharp bitterness slicing through his tone. And then he looked at her, a slight smile forming on his lips. “You catch on fast, ki
d,” he told her, nodding his approval. He got back to what he’d started to say earlier. “Tell you what, we’ve been at this way too long today. I think we both need to take a major break before I bring you home.”
He planned to pick up something to eat on his way home and he didn’t think it fair that Zoe should have to cook for herself after all the time she’d put in working with him today.
“What do you say to grabbing some dinner at the Blackthorn County All Night Diner?” he proposed.
She would have said yes to standing on a corner, eating day-old earthworms as long as it was with him. It wasn’t the food, it was the company that meant everything to her.
So, in response to his question, Zoe flashed a quick smile of thanks and answered, “Sure,” not trusting herself to say anything further at the moment without gracelessly putting her foot in her mouth. “Sounds like a good idea,” she agreed.
But before they left the station, Sam took the stacks of letters from her desk and his and placed the ones that had already been read into the box, while the others that still needed to be read were placed into the drawer by themselves.
Putting the box into a deeper side drawer, Sam locked both drawers, testing them to make sure they were secure before he pocketed the keys.
“Keeping your word to your father?” she asked, clearly surprised as well as pleased to see what he was doing. Sam was one of the good guys despite his hardened facade, she thought.
“Keeping the evidence from being stolen and posted on the internet by some half-witted, enterprising idiot out to make a buck,” Sam corrected. He wasn’t one of those people who took credit where none was due.
“Here?” she asked, looking at Sam incredulously. They were at the police station. She would have thought things would have been safe here.
He was surprised that he found her naïveté almost sweet. Under ordinary circumstances, it should have irritated him.
“One thing I learned a long time ago,” he told her as they walked out of the building, “you never know where temptation will take a person.”
He was just finding that out on a personal level and he was doing what he could to keep that very new, very untried feeling that had reared its head in his chest under wraps as well as lock and key. He had a crime to solve and a riddle to unravel. That left him absolutely no time to explore anything outside of that, especially something that had come up out of nowhere and in such an untimely fashion.
* * *
“I think we can rule out the victims’ relatives who wrote to him,” Zoe said as they walked into the diner a few minutes later. “I don’t see any one of them going on a rampage, killing innocent girls as a way of getting even with Matthew. I think if any of them had actually wanted to use murder as a way of getting even with the old man, they wouldn’t have killed a bunch of strangers, they would have tried to kill someone in his family.”
Sam laughed, shaking his head at her theory. Spotting an empty booth at the rear of the diner, he led the way there.
“If they’d done that,” he said once he and Zoe had reached the booth, “they would have been sorely disappointed.” Sam waited until she took her seat, then he slid into the booth on his side. “The old man doesn’t give a—flying fig,” he said, substituting the term at the last minute for the one he would have ordinarily used, “about any one of us.”
“Maybe not then,” Zoe qualified, slanting a glance at him as she let her sentence drift off.
“Maybe not ever,” he corrected sharply.
Zoe held fast to her theory of why Matthew was dispensing clues in the manner he’d chosen. She was convinced she was right.
“If that was true, he wouldn’t be spreading the clues out the way he is, saying he’s going to dole out one each to you and your brothers and sister if you came to see him one at a time. My guess is that seeing you all at once would probably overwhelm him and he wouldn’t be able to make amends—”
She was a sweet and apparently innocent kid, but she had this all wrong, Sam thought.
He had to take the air out of her balloon, he decided, before she let it carry her away too far.
“The end of the world’ll come before that man tries to make amends,” he told her flatly.
“All right, not amends,” Zoe conceded. “A connection, then. The man’s broken inside, Sam, and reconnecting with his kids—”
Again, he had to put her straight. He really wished the world was as pure, as sugarcoated as Zoe saw it, but it wasn’t.
“To reconnect, Matthew would have had to have been connected to us at some point, and that man never made any attempt to connect with any one of us at any time and that includes before, and during, his serial killer spree. The old man was always a lone wolf, an island unto himself. Other than his DNA, we never shared any part of him at any time.”
She looked at Sam for a long moment. He might not look it, but right now, the man was like a stone wall and beating her head against it wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
“You’re determined not to let him in, aren’t you?” she said quietly.
About to answer, Sam paused as the waitress came to take their order. He knew his by heart. This was where he came when hunger interfered with his work. Here and the Granite Gulch Bar and Saloon, but he only hit the latter after his shift was over.
Before giving his order to the waitress, he paused and looked at Zoe. “You know what you want, or do you need some more time?”
Zoe surrendered the menu to the waitress. “I know what I want,” she said, looking at Sam rather than the woman.
After the waitress left, promising to return with their meals shortly, Sam resumed the conversation that had been put on hold.
“I’m more open to letting lice into my life than letting in that old man. I’m playing his game to find my mother and to find a killer, not to find some kind of so-called resolution. I realized a long time ago that with him, there’s no such thing.”
She wasn’t nearly as sure as he was, but then, she hadn’t lived through what he had, either. So all she allowed herself to ask Sam was a strictly neutral question. “And you’re okay with that?”
Incredibly, the waitress was back, placing their orders before them. They’d both ordered the same thing: cheeseburgers with fries. The only difference was that Zoe’s came with a slice of tomato, as well.
“I’m more than okay with that,” Sam said once they were alone again. “Now eat that damn hamburger before it gets cold, hard and tasteless. This place isn’t exactly at the top of the list for home cooking,” he commented darkly.
He came here because it was familiar, it was close and the prices were reasonable. What it amounted to, he knew, was that he came here by default, but he had never been one to be picky.
She’d struck a nerve and she knew it. She deliberately backed down. If Sam didn’t care about his father the way he claimed he didn’t, he wouldn’t have reacted as quickly as he had to her suggestion about the man’s motives.
There was still that little boy living somewhere within the gruff, tough man sitting opposite her in the dingy diner, she was sure of it.
Zoe told herself that somehow, some way, she had to find a way to reach him and help him heal, if only because of the fact that she couldn’t stand to see Sam in pain. Even if she didn’t see it in the way he conducted himself, there would have been no other conclusion to reach. Anyone who had lived through what he had clearly had to be in ongoing pain.
* * *
It wasn’t until he brought Zoe home an hour later that another idea, completely out of left field, occurred to him.
He paused by her front door, examining the idea. “We’ve been going at this as if the person who killed Celia was a disciple of Matthew’s,” he told her, his voice growing more agitated as he spoke each word. “What if we’re wrong?”
; “Wrong?” she echoed. Since when did he admit to being wrong? “What do you mean?”
“What if whoever killed her was someone Celia knew?” Sam asked. The more he spoke, the more plausible his theory seemed to him. “Maybe a jealous ex-boyfriend getting revenge because she dumped him.”
“Why the red bull’s-eye?” Zoe wanted to know before she even commented on his initial idea. “How does that fit in?”
Sam shrugged. He certainly hadn’t worked out any of the details. He was still feeling his way around.
“Maybe to throw us off,” he guessed. As he talked out his theory, bits and pieces began to come together for him. “She was supposed to be marrying me. It wouldn’t have taken much for someone to find out about the rotten branch on my family tree. Matthew created one hell of a stir in his day. Made life a living hell for the rest of us,” he couldn’t help commenting. “His story followed us no matter where we went.
“It took a lot of hard work to live that down,” he recalled bitterly. “Maybe whoever killed Celia did a little digging and came up with this sick plot to throw the investigation off his trail.” It didn’t sound all that farfetched to him.
Zoe apparently agreed. “It’s certainly worth looking into,” she said. “But what about the other two victims? Why would he kill them?”
Those were some of the details he still needed to work out. “Maybe to throw us off—or maybe he didn’t kill them. Someone else did and Celia’s killer just took advantage of the pattern that was emerging.” He looked at Zoe to see if she had any glaring objections to that. “There’re lots of ways to play this.”
And they were only multiplying by the moment, he couldn’t help adding silently.
“You’re going to need more help,” Zoe concluded quietly, even as her mind raced to make plans and get things to fall into place. “I’ll take a leave of absence from the library. In light of what’s happened to my sister, they can’t exactly turn me down. Besides, I do have a lot of vacation coming to me if they try to be sticklers about the request.”
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