She shook her head furiously. “We can’t. You don’t understand . . .”
“I understand that we’re standing in a kitchen with a dead guy . . . a dead guy you don’t particularly seem too concerned about being dead. A guy who was demanding money from you a few seconds ago, but who isn’t your abusive husband. What is he? A boyfriend? What?”
None of this made any sense.
“Not exactly,” she muttered.
“Look, I don’t mean to sound like an insensitive prick or anything, but considering I just shot a guy to save your life, I’m pretty sure I deserve some fucking details.”
“He’s . . . oh, God. Shit. Yancy, he’s a . . .”
She stopped and closed her eyes. She looked like she might be about to puke.
“He’s a what? A door-to-door encyclopedia salesman? A Sondheim fan? A towel boy for women’s volleyball? What?”
She gulped, opened her eyes, and stared at him. “He’s a pimp, Yancy.”
What the . . .
This nice-looking, all-American girl in front of him in her cozy house with planter boxes out front and a WIPE YOUR PAWS welcome mat in front of the door, a hooker? This just didn’t add up.
Then again, desperate times . . . maybe she was trying to score some money her evil husband wouldn’t know about to stash into a getaway fund? Or was there even a husband at all? Maybe this was the guy who’d been beating her all along. But if he was, why protect him every time? Why say to 911 dispatch he was her husband?
And if she didn’t need to squirrel away cash to escape an abusive home that didn’t exist, then why the hell did a woman like her sell her body to random men?
Don’t ask. Not right now.
“Okay, so he’s a pimp. All the better. No one’s going to lose sleep over someone shooting a pimp in self-defense, right? We just call the police, tell them what happened. We can make up a reason you were involved with him. Maybe he just broke in or something . . . we can keep whatever your relationship is to him out of this . . .”
“Yancy, he’s a cop!”
“What?”
“Yeah. He’s a cop. A group of them are dirty, and they run a . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“A prostitution ring?” Yancy asked, bile rising in his throat. This wasn’t good. Not at all. Oh, Jenna. I need you right now.
“Exactly.” CiCi stared at the tile for a moment, her eyes shifting back and forth. Then she looked at him again. “Why do you think they never do anything about him when the nine-one-one calls happen?”
Yancy took a step back. “Well, I’d assumed it was because you backed off like a lot of women who are in domestic disputes and didn’t have him carted off in cuffs, but seeing as how he isn’t your husband, my next thought was you didn’t want to be hauled off with him on prostitution charges. You mean it’s always him? You said it was your husband—”
Do you even have a husband?
Angry tears bit CiCi’s eyes. “I know what I said, okay! I lied. There! I’ve been lying this whole time. And now . . . oh, God, what are we going to do? They’ll kill me. We’ll both get killed.”
“Oh, damn, oh damn. Okay. It’s okay. We can do something. We have options here. We can go to the state cops instead of the locals. I have . . . contacts . . .” Jenna’s face drifted through Yancy’s mind. What the hell would she say when he told her? How could he possibly even begin that conversation? “It’s going to be okay.”
CiCi wept uncontrollably. She retched, put her hands on her knees. “You don’t understand. It goes high up. I know for a fact a judge is involved. These guys—” She retched again, then spat some excess saliva onto the floor. “These guys are brutal, Yancy. A girl I knew—the girl who sent me to them when I was in trouble—she held out on them one too many times. She was found in an alley, beaten and raped. They cut her throat. Made it look like a gang initiation thing. Even planted evidence on some poor black kid in the projects. Only reason I know for sure it was them was because Denny”—she coughed, hacked—“told me if I didn’t pay up soon I’d end up just like her.”
Oh, Jesus. This is bad. How the fuck do you get yourself into situations like this, cool stuff?
“They have witness protection—”
“We’d be dead before they could hide us away. I know too much about how their operation works, who’s involved. They’d cut my throat before I finished answering the cops’ questions. Besides, I can’t just disappear. I have family to take care of . . .”
Jenna. Vern. Charley. Ayana.
They can come after them, too.
“Okay,” Yancy said, steeling himself. Before he’d lost his leg, he’d trained to go after these fuckers. Now he couldn’t do anything about them except try with everything he had to think like they did. He could figure out whether or not she ever had a real husband later. Right now, he needed to move fast. “But starting right this second, every single move we make has to be perfect, or else we’re as dead as he is.”
22
Jenna rode in the passenger’s seat of the SUV, quiet, as Dodd navigated them through the roads near the Clairefall Heights neighborhood. So much about this entire situation didn’t make sense.
She had paced the hallway outside Sheila Maxwell’s living room until her phone vibrated. She’d picked up.
“Buzz, buzz,” Irv had said. “I have one name and address of a gal whose phone number crosses with records of students in Brooklyn Satterhorne’s college classes. Diana Delmont. Real name, not stripper name.”
“Thanks for the qualifier,” Jenna had replied.
She had extracted Dodd from his questioning as soon as she could. Sheila wasn’t recounting anything else useful anyway. The witness had started telling him her opinions on who might’ve done this to poor Brooklyn, speculations that ranged from wild to wilder.
Now Jenna glanced out the window, watching the roadside swish beneath them like a conveyor belt. Something wasn’t adding up.
“The Triple Shooter—”
“The UNSUB,” Dodd said, cutting her off.
Jenna blinked. This thing with his old case must be getting to him. Still, he was probably right. The killer was the Unidentified Subject until they caught his ass, at which point they’d plainly see he was the Triple Shooter. Still, no one else had been a stickler about this rule until now, and Jenna could only assume Dodd’s correction was out of an overabundance of caution. Hell, she’d be cautious, too, if she had any hint her prize case might have ended with locking up the wrong guy for years.
“Right. So, the UNSUB, who is likely the Triple Shooter, kills seven people in a grocery store. This deviates extremely from every single aspect of the known Triple Shooter’s MO except for the lining up of the threes. No covering eyes, each body with varying numbers of bullet wounds instead of a characteristic three. What do you make of that?” Jenna asked. She wasn’t even really sure she wanted Dodd’s answer, but she had to bat ideas with someone. Unfortunately, he was the only option.
He sighed. “A lot of scenarios have crossed my mind. Each is as unlikely as the next.”
“Let’s hear some.”
“If he is the Triple Shooter, which I think he probably is, could be he’s breaking down. Flying into a rage, unable to control himself as well,” Dodd said.
“But the return to the pattern . . . kind of . . .” Jenna replied. The latest murder hadn’t been exactly like his others, but it was a lot closer to his normal standards. Still, why the difference at all? And how did the grocery store fit?
Not to mention, Brooklyn Satterhorne’s murder immediately registered in Jenna’s mind as green, the same color she associated with the other Triple Shooter killings. Except the grocery store, that was. Purple.
“Exactly. The pattern, as you said, is ‘kind of’ back. Plus, even if it is a rage, schizophrenic killers like the Triple Shooter—at least what we have guessed abo
ut him—have a sort of method to their madness. They kill because something tells them to, and thus, there’s a reason for the pattern. He wouldn’t devolve and then spiral back up. We’re not seeing something we should be,” Dodd said.
“You can say that again,” Jenna mumbled.
Her phone vibrated, and she pressed the button to open the text. It was from Charley.
Hey, Rain Man, when you get a minute, you should really come watch cartoons with us. Not because we need you or anything, but I think you could do some cool color associations with the characters on Clifford the Big Red Dog.
She breathed in slowly, then out. Ayana wasn’t getting any younger. So many of these things she missed out on that her dad and Charley shared with her daughter every day.
And Ayana doesn’t have a dad anymore. You’re all the parent she has left.
She hit the reply button:
Definitely see Clifford as blue.
The joke about blue—the color she picked at random for that very reason—triggered a color from that family to flash in. Blue—very similar to the cornflower she had earlier associated with the killer’s disorganization. His sloppiness. No wonder she hadn’t noticed this particular shade before when it had appeared. It was the sky blue she associated with randomness.
“He chose the singular victims very carefully. Each had some reason we haven’t found yet, though right now we’re assuming Greek mythology plays a big part. The group of seven, though . . .”
“They were at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Dodd finished.
Jenna nodded. “Random. The threes of the date and time aligned, but why seven people? If they were like his other victims, the numbers would line up, he’d follow a person to a place where he wouldn’t be seen, shoot them three times, then leave pay for the boatman on their eyes in the form of evidence. The seven victims at Lowman’s were shot with wild abandon just because they were there. And he showed them no remorse by tipping the ferry to take them away.”
“Theories?” Dodd asked.
Not yet. “This last one has thrown me even worse, to be honest.”
“The pennies,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“No trace of threes yet, and the pennies don’t point to anything I can fathom yet. But he understands them. That’s one thing I’m sure of. To him, they make perfect sense, just like the keys and receipts and all the other little prizes he’s left over his victims’ eyes,” Jenna said. Her conversation with Calliope Jones burned in her mind, and pieces of the bizarre puzzle flitted around like they had minds of their own.
He doesn’t know the boatman was always said to have taken payments under the tongue.
Her phone flashed again. She read the text from Charley:
Very funny. But seriously, come home soon. Missing Mommy is one thing duct tape can’t fix.
Heat prickled up Jenna’s neck, and tears bit the corners of her eyes. Charley didn’t mean it to hurt, but damn, did it sting. Then again, maybe that’s exactly how he meant it to feel.
She typed back, then hit send.
I’ve never let you down yet, have I? Home soon. Promise.
Jenna and Dodd rode in silence, and Jenna knew they were both racking their brains for that one detail they hadn’t noticed that could break this case wide open. If only it would come before another girl—or seven—were killed.
“That’s another thing,” Jenna blurted. “All the singular victims were female.”
Dodd let out a grunt. “Touché. More proof the grocery store shooting was different. Maybe it wasn’t him at all.”
Jenna turned away from Dodd to look back out the window. It was him. She knew it. The colors didn’t match perfectly—that purple was so odd—but still, she knew it all the same.
Her phone vibrated again.
She looked at the screen, expecting it to be Charley, taking his guilt trip to a new level by calling. However, the number wasn’t familiar.
“Dr. Jenna Ramey,” she answered.
“Dr. Ramey? My name is Eldred Beasley. I need to tell you some things I remember.”
23
Jenna gripped the phone tighter, trying to hear the faint voice on the other end. “Mr. Beasley?”
He coughed. “Call me Eldred. I have to tell you before I forget. If we lose the connection, call my daughter, Nancy. You can reach me at the home. I was at the grocery store.”
Jenna’s heart sped up. She didn’t remember reading this witness’s statement. “What is it you remember, Eldred?”
“A couple of things,” the man said. His voice was so shaky. “First is the cereal row. I was in the cereal row, and I saw the shooter coming.”
“Eldred, you saw the shooter? Is there anything you can tell me about him—”
“Don’t get ahead of me now!” he barked.
Anger. Maybe frustration.
Still, Jenna didn’t apologize. Clearly, this man had some kind of memory issue. He was so worried about forgetting. She made a mental note to contact the daughter to follow up but was silent, lest she interrupt his train of thought again.
“The shooter hit the guy he hit, but he didn’t mean to,” Eldred Beasley said.
“What do you mean?” Jenna whispered, her blood pulsing through her veins.
“What do you mean, what do I mean? I was as clear as day!”
Again, Jenna went silent, hoping the man would get back on track. The hair on her arms prickled. Something was about to come out. She knew it.
Eldred Beasley coughed again. “Took my pill last night, I think. Might not’ve taken the medicine this morning, though.”
She heard rustling on the other end of the phone, then something rattling, like a canister of pills.
“Gotta get me a glass of water,” Eldred said.
His voice sounded different—foggy. Like it was blurred at the edges, more an inner monologue than a telephone conversation.
He’s forgotten he’s talking to me.
“Mr. Beasley?”
“Wha—who’re you? Who is this? Sarah?”
Oh, boy. “Um, no sir, this is Dr. Jenna Ramey. You called me about the grocery store . . .”
“Called you? I didn’t call anyone!” Eldred growled.
Uh-oh. Better, maybe, to follow up with the daughter. Maybe if he recalled something once, his clarity would return again. Dementia? Alzheimer’s?
“I’m sorry to have bothered you, sir. Good-bye.”
When she had hung up the phone, Dodd was stopped in the driveway belonging to the family of Diana Delmont, the friend who’d been shopping with Brooklyn. He was staring at her, but she couldn’t get any words to come out.
The shooter hadn’t meant to shoot the last victim he had. This insinuated that he had been trying to shoot someone else. They’d started out by disproving the idea that the killer had been there to kill a politician, be it the Virginia governor, Miriam Holman, or Frank Kuncaitis, the mayor of the town they’d been in. Maybe he had been there to kill someone else entirely. Maybe the victims were important, and the reason no remorse was shown was because he hadn’t killed the person he’d intended.
Again, purple crept into Jenna’s psyche, but she pushed it away. She couldn’t embrace it yet. She didn’t have a good enough grasp on its exact shade to rein in the color’s meaning. Sure, she could try to delve into everything any purple had ever meant to her and use the process of elimination, but there were so many definitions it seemed futile. Wait for it.
“I think we need to do this interview, but tomorrow we start fresh looking at other people in the grocery store at the time of the shootings. I think someone else might be the target.”
• • •
As Jenna followed Diana Delmont’s stout mother through the upstairs hallway toward the room belonging to Brooklyn’s friend, she took in what she could about the home, even though
profiling the friend wouldn’t go a long way toward telling her anything about the killer. After all, the shooter had targeted Brooklyn, not Diana.
The hallway carpet was a deep mud-colored shag straight out of the sixties. Maybe the best thing about it was that it hid any signs of dirt, but dang, was it ugly. The walls were lined with cartoonish paintings of fruit. Apples in a basket, pears on a table. A cut-open kiwi here, oranges in a bowl there.
Mrs. Delmont stopped in front of a closed door. She tapped on it with her knuckles. “Diana, honey? Are you dressed?”
A sniff, a muffled sound like a nose blowing. Another sniff. “Yes. Come in.”
If only my mother had been that polite.
Mrs. Delmont opened the door to reveal Diana, a skinny girl in pajamas, lying on her bed and clutching a box of tissues as though it were her teddy bear. Her recent tears were obvious, and unlike Sheila Maxwell, she probably hadn’t been sedated nearly enough for having found out her friend was murdered right after she left her. Survivor’s guilt was a bitch.
“Diana, these are Agents Dodd and Ramey. They need to ask you some questions.”
Diana frowned, clearly dreading what was coming, though her eyes were set. Resigned. She glanced back and forth from Jenna to Dodd, skittish, nervous. Man, this was going to suck.
“Hi. I’m Dr. Ramey. I’m with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit,” Jenna said, stepping forward to offer Diana her hand. In some cases like this, she didn’t do that. Sometimes people recently traumatized by something like this didn’t want to be touched or were nervous to be approached. But in this instance, the blush pink that rushed forth in Jenna’s mind when Diana had looked uneasily back and forth between her and Dodd was the same color Jenna remembered from the time she had sat in the police station to be questioned about the journal she’d kept about her mother. She’d known she hadn’t done anything wrong, but at the same time, the anxiety had been intense. And it hadn’t been just the guilt of turning her mother over to the police. It had been every bit as much about what the police themselves would think about her if her mother was such a monster.
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