Moss shook his head. ‘That’s a smart theory but we don’t have a shred of evidence for it, sir. Bilson says Woods kept himself to himself. Worked his shifts, was polite with the customers but never responded to any of their chat-up lines; slept alone in his room, went out now and again to the nearest diner or burger bar. Exactly what you’d expect from a guy who’s jumped bail and wants to lie low for a while.’
‘Hmm . . . I still think we’re missing something, Ben. I reckon I’ll go talk to this Bilson guy myself in the morning. No offence, sergeant.’
‘None taken, sir. He was pretty much in shock when I spoke to him. Maybe he’ll remember something after he’s had a stiff drink or three and a good night’s sleep. I’ll set you up a meet at his bar at ten o’clock. That do?’
‘Fine. Type up your report and then we can both get to bed. I’ll see you back here at eight in the morning and we’ll give the guys a pep talk. Then I’ll go see Bilson and by lunchtime we can decide what our next move should be. I know the roadblock’s working on the top line because I came through it on the way back here and watched things there for a while. Not so much as a mouse could get past those guys. What about the boats?’
Moss laughed. ‘Nothing gets off or on the Key without us knowing about it. It’s not making us the world’s most popular with the boat owners and one rich bastard really lost it when the boys insisted on taking a look round his yacht before he left for the Dry Tortugas. Not surprising really; he had two under-age Mexican hookers below decks and a nice big bag of cocaine to go with. I’d say he’s looking at ten years.’
Lee grinned at him. ‘Well, it’s nice to know we’re getting some side-orders while we wait for the main course,’ he said. ‘One more thing – I’m gonna call Stella Arnold up in Massachusetts tomorrow morning. I’d like to run all of this past her. She’ll have a fresh take on things and it might give us a steer on what to do next.’
Moss cocked his head to one side. ‘Is it true what I heard – you two are more than just friends? That’s pretty fast work there, sir.’
Lee nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s true. God knows when I’ll get to see her again, though.’
‘I’ve only seen her picture in the papers,’ the other man went on. ‘But she’s quite a looker, if you don’t me saying so. So, she’s back in Massachusetts now?’
Lee nodded. ‘Yup, and having a fine old time by the sound of it. Her last letter was quite something – she’d just come back from Washington with her mother over from England. They’d been invited to the White House, met the President and Jackie there, were gonna have dinner and all – it was a thank-you to Stella for what she did down here – but right before the soup the whole thing got called off. Some big political crisis of some kind, apparently. Stella said that the President reckoned he might have to go on TV with it, but he hasn’t, not yet, anyway. Maybe whatever the problem was blew over.’
‘Wow. I’m impressed at all this inside information. D’you think we’ll get an invite to the White House too after we’ve nailed Woods to the wall?’
Both men laughed. ‘I reckon not, don’t you?’ Lee said. ‘You’re pretty cute, Ben, but not as cute as Stella, or her mother, come to that. Stella sent me a photograph of them both. Either one of them would have Elizabeth Taylor running to the powder-room for a freshen-up if they walked into the same room as her . . . Anyway, like I say, I’ll talk to Stella first thing, see what she comes up with.’
But he wouldn’t be talking to her until much later the following day, still less interviewing the owner of the Springfield Tavern.
There were going to be rather more pressing concerns to deal with first.
56
He threw the hammer down and stepped back to look at his handiwork.
Not bad. Not bad at all – pretty crude, but then the originals had been, hadn’t they? They weren’t supposed to be objects of beauty, for Chrisakes. The reflection made him smile. Jesus, he could be a witty guy sometimes.
He wasn’t sure whether to leave the thing lying there on the bedroom floor or prop it up against the wall. In the end he decided on the latter, but it looked a bit unstable like that so he sawed up another of the planks from the bed to make a couple of wedges for the base, and took the largest nail he could see from the tin of mixed screws and nails he’d found with the tools, and hammered it through the very top part of the contraption so it was anchored firmly against the wall. He gave it a good hard shake, but it barely moved. Good. She’d never see it like he was seeing it now; she’d have what you might describe as a different perspective.
The last thing left to do was to cut up some lengths of rope from the coil he’d found in the same cupboard as the other stuff, and toss them into a corner. That was pretty much it. He pushed the cannibalised bed all the way across the room to give him some space for manoeuvre when the time came, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter before two in the morning.
Just time for another scotch on the rocks. Then he needed to get changed.
The hooker standing on the corner of Smith and Coral promised herself she’d quit for home after her next trick. She was getting tired. The last john, a fat little guy with seriously bad breath, had turned out to be a royal pain in the ass. He hadn’t been able to get it up and said that meant he didn’t have to pay her anything. It had been a long night so she didn’t bother arguing with him, just kneed him in the balls and took his wallet as he lay gasping for breath on the sidewalk. The tight-fisted, limp-dicked jerk had ended up parting with four or five times as much as he would have if he’d played her straight. Serve him right.
Annoyingly she’d lost her watch in a particularly frenzied encounter earlier with a madly excited kid she reckoned was on his first time, so she didn’t know what o’clock it was, but it must be close on three. Everything was starting to go quiet now.
After a few more minutes she made up her mind to call it a night and was just about to head back to her apartment where her sister was minding her kid for her – Lucy always stepped into the breach like this when she was let down by her flaky babysitter – when a soft voice behind her said: ‘Ma’am? Excuse me?’
She jumped – she hadn’t heard anyone approach – and spun around.
‘Jesus, you scared me . . . um . . . sir?’
It was a freakin’ tranny. She could see that, even though the streetlights on this particular junction were unusually dim – they were pre-war and long overdue for replacement. What a way to close the night.
She’d only had a couple of transvestites before and she never quite knew how they liked to be addressed, as a man or a woman, so she just waited. The guy would spell out exactly what he wanted soon enough.
His make-up was awful – lipstick smeared clumsily across his mouth and deep into the corners; rouge painted with a heavy hand on both cheeks, and powder way too thick and hopelessly unevenly applied. It was hard to tell the colour of his wig in the bad light but she thought it might be a brassy red. He was dressed in a long plaid skirt and a creased cream blouse with a pale shawl thrown over his shoulders.
He looked like a circus clown’s comedy sidekick.
‘C’mon, hon,’ she said when he remained silent, staring at her. ‘You’re my last of the night. I wanna be tucked up in bed in half an hour at most. What do you want to do, sugar?’ Sugar, she thought, should cover it both ways.
When he spoke, it was in the same soft voice that he’d first addressed her.
‘I want to do it to you from behind,’ he said simply. ‘I know the way I look but I can only do it when I’m . . . when I’m dressed like this. My wife won’t accommodate me, so that’s why I’m . . . that’s why I’m . . .’ he tailed off a moment, before continuing: ‘Where can we go? How much will you want?’
‘Fifty dollars, hon,’ she said flatly. ‘Sorry, it’s double rate for the weird stuff. I’ve had a coupla experiences this evening that have pissed me off so if you don’t mind I’ll ask for the money up front. Want to go ahead or shall we both just go home?�
�
His answer was to fish somewhere inside the skirt and hand over three crumpled bills. ‘I only have twenties,’ he explained.
‘Sorry, sugar, this store don’t give change. Still want to play?’
‘Of course. Where do we go?’
‘Over here.’
She took his hand and led him around the corner to a scrap of empty ground next to a disused gas station.
‘See that wall over there? We’ll do it behind that, OK? Do you want me standing up or lying down?’
‘Standing up, please.’
‘OK, let’s go. Jeez, what’s that smell on you? Reminds me of the dentist’s. You’re not a dentist, are you?’
He nodded. ‘As a matter of fact, I am.’
She laughed. ‘Takes all sorts, I guess. Now, when you come, keep the noise down. We don’t want the neighbours complaining.’
She went behind the wall first with him following close behind, and faced towards the brickwork, placing her hands against it and setting her legs apart.
‘I’m not wearing panties, hon, so you just have to lift my skirt. Knock yourself out.’
They were the last words she would ever say. Next moment the chloroform-soaked pad was forced against her mouth and nose and after a moment’s desperate struggle, she collapsed backwards into his arms, twitching slightly.
He took out his knife, carefully cut off all her clothes, and got to work.
57
It was Diana’s last day in the house on Bancroft Road. She was due to fly back to London that afternoon, and after her morning shower she decided to finish packing before joining the others for a late breakfast.
As she crossed the downstairs hall a couple of minutes after snapping shut the latches of her suitcase, the telephone on the table near the front door began to ring. She could hear the muffled voices of Stella and the family coming from the breakfast room, so Diana picked up the receiver.
‘Rockfair residence. Who’s calling?’
There was a distinct pause at the other end before she heard a chuckle followed by the words: ‘Judging by that wonderful accent I’m either talking to the Queen of England or Stella’s mother.’
Diana laughed in her turn. ‘Diana Arnold speaking, without a speck of blue blood in her veins. Who is this?’
‘Agent Lee Foster. Good morning to you, Mrs Arnold.’
Diana laughed again. ‘As my hosts here would say, “right back-atcha”, Lee . . . I may call you Lee? You must certainly call me Diana. No more Mrs Arnold, please. That’s strictly for my bank manager.’
‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d left for England, Diana?’
‘I go later today, more’s the pity – it’s such a shame we couldn’t meet before I went back. But Stella’s told me so much about you. It’s obvious to me that she thinks the world of you.’
‘As I do her. In fact I’ve never met anyone quite like Stella. She’s very, very special. Look . . . please don’t think I’m being rude, but I haven’t much time to talk right now. Something real bad happened down here in the Keys last night to do with the investigation. I need to talk to Stella, not as my girlfriend but as a special advisor to the FBI. It’s pretty urgent; in fact I may ask her to fly down here today, so maybe you’ll be sharing a ride to Logan Airport later. Would you put her on to me, please?’
Diana raised her eyebrows. ‘Hold the line, Lee, I’ll go and get her. And goodbye for now.’
‘Goodbye, Diana. We’ll meet soon, I’m sure.’
In the breakfast room Stella was laughing with Sylvia over a cartoon on the front page of the Boston Globe.
‘Come and look at this, Mummy,’ she called as Diana entered the room. ‘It’s so funny. Sylvia says—’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, dear, but Lee is on the phone for you from Key West. He says something bad happened down there last night.’
Stella got up from the table and hurried into the hall, snatching the receiver from the table.
‘Lee? What’s happened?’
He told her.
Three hours later, as Lee had predicted to Diana, mother and daughter found themselves in a car together, headed for Boston’s Logan Airport. It wasn’t a cab; the shiny black Chrysler that had pulled up outside the Rockfairs’ house was an FBI cruiser. Its driver sported the inevitable crew-cut: Stella wondered if Lee was in breach of some agency regulation by wearing his hair in a short-back-and-sides and that floppy fringe.
Stella had provided the rest of them with the latest headlines from Key West before running to her room to pack again for Florida. As she folded her clothes into the same bag that she’d so recently emptied, she could hear Jeb on the phone downstairs making excuses on her behalf to the head of her college. Today was meant to be her induction day and she’d been looking forward to exploring the campus and meeting her tutors. All that had been torpedoed by events taking place over a thousand miles away. She began to wonder if she’d ever get around to studying for her doctorate.
As Stella was now explaining to her mother, the latest body had been found shortly after six o’clock that morning. Lee said that a woman hotel cleaner taking a short-cut to work across a patch of waste ground had seen the blood first; a great pool of it that had flowed out from behind a wall before congealing into a waxy puddle already half-covered in a black swarm of flies.
When she had timidly poked her head around the brickwork and seen what lay on the other side, the cleaner had promptly vomited her breakfast all over the crime scene, much to the later annoyance of the forensics examiner who had been flown by helicopter down from Miami.
‘Same M.O. as the others?’ Stella had asked Lee over the phone.
‘Yes and no. It’s definitely him: the torture wounds are typical – long slashes and puncture wounds in all the usual places, the knife buried up to the hilt in the left eye. The handle’s already tested positive for his fingerprints.’
‘So what’s different about this one?’ she asked him.
She could practically hear him thinking during the pause before he answered her.
‘Well, for a start . . . I used the word torture – but I don’t think this woman felt a thing. There were no signs that her hands and feet had been bound; none of the usual burn-marks from struggling against the ropes.’
‘That is odd. So she was killed before he did his stuff?’
‘No – there was far too much blood on the ground. The pathologist reckons the body may have only had a couple of pints left in it by the time he did his party trick with the knife to the eye. As a working hypothesis, I’m thinking he drugged her in the usual way with chloroform – we found traces of it on her – and cut her in the usual way while she was unconscious. I don’t believe she ever woke up again.’
Stella was deep in thought for so long after hearing this that eventually Lee said: ‘Honey? You still there?’
‘Mmm? Yes, sorry . . . just thinking . . . Did you say there are other aspects here that vary from the norm?’
‘Yup. The victim herself, for a start. We know he likes them young – late teens, early twenties, good girls. This was a 43-year-old prostitute, name of Mary Strimmer, string of convictions for soliciting and a couple for assault with a deadly weapon – if clients didn’t pay her for services rendered, she was quite capable of sticking a switchblade into them.
‘The other aberration is that there was no prior interception and abduction. He took Mary just a few yards around the corner from her usual pitch and butchered her. We have one witness who saw her alive and touting at about two o’clock this morning. Body temperature and rigor mortis indicate she died sometime between three and four. So this was a totally uncharacteristic, opportunistic, even rushed hit. He must have crept out of wherever he’s holed up – in disguise, one assumes – and grabbed the first woman he came across. No real preparation. High-risk stuff, with the sadistic element entirely missing. It doesn’t make sense.’
Stella nodded to herself. ‘It certainly doesn’t. I was going to say that
maybe he’s become sexually frustrated since going into hiding and he couldn’t resist the urge to kill again . . . but the whole point of these attacks for him was always to inflict unimaginable pain on women, and listen to their suffering. Why go through the motions while she was comatose?’
She paused again, and this time Lee allowed her thought process to go uninterrupted.
After almost a full minute’s silence, she spoke again. ‘As I say, we know he likes to listen to them, that’s why in the past he’s taken them right out into the mangroves where no one else can hear. So I can see he might have been worried last night that people living nearby might have heard screaming and come running or called the police . . . so why not just gag her or stick some tape over her mouth? There’s a totally different motive here, Lee. He’s up to something.’
She heard him sigh deeply before saying: ‘Could it be he’s just taunting us? Showing he can pretty much do what he likes, right under our noses? You know, “I’m the king of the hill, you can’t catch me”, kinda thing?’
‘Possibly. But he probably thinks he’s already shown that, merely by staying one step ahead of the investigation. Look, Lee, I’m going to have to give this a lot more thought. Would you like me to fly down there? He might do this again before you find him, you know. I can be there by this evening. Shall I come?’
‘My sweetest, dearest Stella. I thought you’d never ask.’
When she’d finished her account of the conversation with Lee, Diana smiled at her.
‘Doesn’t it a feel a little odd to be working on a murder case alongside a man you say you’re in love with?’ she asked.
The Way You Look Tonight Page 22