“How’d you find me there on the street?”
“Wasn’t too hard. Heard your boyfriend got the talking to of his life this morning.
“He’s not my boyfriend. I’ve only been here a couple of months.”
“Hell, I heard McKinney took him into his office and practically skinned him alive.”
“And you think I’m the reason.”
“Oh, I’d bet you are. Didn’t take a genius to figure out you’d be the first person he’d call.”
Laura said nothing.
“I bet he begged you to tell them it wasn’t him. Did you do it?”
She shook her head.
“Naw, I didn’t think you would. Still, you’re not totally unfeeling, at least not in my experience. Figured I would find you there at his apartment, making your mea culpas. Did you make up?”
She shook her head again.
“You sorry about that?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Damn, that’s cold.”
She looked up from the tabletop. “You call me here to give me relationship advice?”
“Nothing so simple, I’m afraid.” He pushed the file folder in front of him, then folded his hands on top of it. “I brought you here because I’m going to need your help on this. All hell is about to break loose.”
“Sounds juicy.”
He winced. “Don’t be flippant. You’re more right than you know. This morning, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office received a package.”
Did you get my message? The mystery man’s words pinged off the inside of her skull.
“What kind of package?”
“FedEx,” he said.
“Inside?”
He coughed into his hand. “A human ear, the left ear, along with another section of skin presumed to be from the same person. We believe they belong to Teresa Mitchem.”
Laura thought of that voice leading inexorably to the hands that had wielded the knife. She started to gag.
“It’s okay, let it out if you need to,” Timinski said, and reached over to pat her on the back. She could tell he hadn’t expected her to be so queasy.
She sucked at the hot air and said, “Maybe it’s not her.”
“Maybe not.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Well, there’s an earring in the ear. Angie Mitchem pierced her girl’s ears not a week before she disappeared. Did it with an ice cube and a sterilized sewing needle, then gave her a pair of her own earrings to wear.”
Laura gagged again. She had gotten her ears pierced the same way. It had been a friend holding the needle, and they were under the bleachers after school. She would have been a few years older than Teresa. She pictured the little girl bracing for the pain, fighting through it, smiling with tears in her eyes as she looked in the mirror for the first time. The image smiling back at her suddenly so much older-looking. A grown-up at last.
It was a rite of passage around these parts, one she and Teresa shared. That connection, sudden and unexpected, made the girl so much more real. Laura felt she could reach out and touch her.
“Take a breath,” Timinski said.
“What’s in the file?” she managed.
“Nothing you need to see.”
“You brought it out for me, didn’t you? So let’s play show and tell.”
“It’s pictures,” he said, and let the implication hang between them.
“Show them to me.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Show them to me.” She made herself sit up straight and steeled her face into a mask.
He nodded, then slid out the packet of glossy five-by-sevens. The first depicted the ear, now laid out on a spotless white countertop, a small ruler next to it for scale. It was small. Even absent context, it was clearly the ear of a child. Dangling from the lobe was a small bead of blue glass.
“It came like this?”
“It was in a smaller box within the box, lined with cotton to soak up the excess blood. We think he didn’t want it to leak in transit. Didn’t want to ruin the effect.”
“Still performing for the crowd,” she said, almost to herself.
“Exactly. That is exactly what he’s doing. Why else make contact?”
“And?”
He slid the next two photographs out without a word. She understood his silence; nothing could have prepared her for the images.
The first appeared to be a rectangular section of skin. Based on the ruler in the shot, it was about two inches by three. It was covered in a mass of black scribbles, like ink spilled from a pen.
The second photo was the same section of skin. This time four hands clad in rubber gloves were each holding an edge, pulling and expanding the skin into a rectangle almost twice its original size and stretching the black ink in the process.
It wasn’t random scribbling.
It was numbers.
She put a hand to her mouth. “My god.”
“You aren’t the first one to say that.”
Row after row of tiny black numbers, etched meticulously into the skin. She reached out and ran her fingertips across them.
8
27
4
4
3
5
4
9
4
4
8
2
3
6
3
7
11
17
3
6
3
3
8
27
3
6
3
7
8
27
8
27
11
51
11
37
“What are they?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
Timinski sighed. “If you’re asking what they mean, I have no idea. As for what they are, it’s a tattoo.”
“As in, a heart with mom’s name across it?”
“Pretty much. Simpler. One type of needle, one color of ink. One very steady hand. They’re small, as you can see.”
“He tattooed her.” It didn’t make any sense.
“Yes.”
The necessary stretching of the skin and the comment Tim had made about the cotton in the box purposed to soak up blood—both came into sharp relief. Her head snapped up to look at him, her eyes wide.
“She’s alive. Isn’t she?”
Slowly, he nodded. “As of six or eight hours ago, yes. The blood had barely congealed when the package reached us. And this”—he tapped the tattoo photo—“is recent as well. Teresa was alive when he tattooed her, and she was still breathing when he harvested his work.” His voice sounded flat, like he was ordering off a menu at a restaurant.
“He cut it off her.”
“It’s why it had to be stretched so that we could read it.”
“Jesus, listen to yourself. Does it even bother you?”
He reached out, tried to put a hand on top of hers, but she recoiled away from him. “Of course it does. But I have to put all that aside, at least for now. At least until we catch him.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because in helping you, I’m also earning your silence.”
He reached out and took her hand again. She tried to jerk away but he snagged her by the wrist, then squeezed hard and pulled her close.
“You’re hurting me.”
“Look at my face, Laura. I don’t care if I’m hurting you.” He let go of her arm. “I showed you all this so you understand exactly what we’re dealing with. This sick fuck is keeping that little girl alive and flaying her bit by bit. I showed you all this so you can remember it. The first time you even consider deviating from the plan, the first time you so much as muse about doing something other than exactly what I tell you, think of these photos, and of Teresa Mitchem, and hopefully it will
convince you to do the goddamned right thing.”
“Maybe we’ll disagree on the right thing to do.”
“This isn’t a democracy. You don’t get a vote. I need you to write an article for me, so you will. You’ve been talking to the local psychologist, right?”
“How do you know about that?”
He snorted. “Please. I do this for a living.”
Laura didn’t see an advantage in denying it. She nodded.
“That’s good. Perfect, in fact. You two are going to produce an article for me, pretty much the one I’m sure you’re already planning to write, and you’re going to add a few things.”
“Or what?”
He smacked the tabletop. “The girl’s alive, Laura. It’s different now. Besides, nothing I’m asking you to print is incorrect.”
“What is it then?”
“Inflammatory—that might be the best word.”
“You’re trying to make him angry.”
“I’m trying to communicate with him. Emotionally.”
“And you want to use my paper, my byline, to do it.”
“That’s our only shot. Right now they’re working over that entire package and looking for physical evidence, but I don’t have high hopes. And believe it or not, he didn’t leave a return address. This is it, Laura. This is the only way I have to reach him.”
She gritted her teeth some more, blew air out between them.
“Will you help me?” he asked.
She looked down at the tabletop, then back up at him.
“That depends. Can I keep the pictures?”
CHAPTER
16
BASS HERMAN HAD never paced before, not to her knowledge. But he was doing it now, racing up and down the length of his office like he’d been stung in the ass by a hornet.
“What a response! Do you know what this means for us?”
“More exposure?” Laura said. She didn’t bother to look up and kept jotting notes in the margins of a half-written article.
“Of course, more exposure. Hey, up here.”
She finished writing and then raised her head.
He had his hands on his hips, feet shoulder-width apart and planted dead center in the room. “Are you listening?”
“Of course,” she said.
Which was a lie. It was Monday afternoon, almost twenty-four hours since Timinski had shown her those pieces of Teresa Mitchem. Laura had expected they would keep her up nights, and it turned out she’d been half right. The previous night had been spent tossing and turning and sweating through her sheets. But it wasn’t the photos keeping her awake.
It was the phone call.
She couldn’t get his voice out of her head. Every time her eyelids had started to flutter, she heard it like a whisper just behind her.
I’m watching you.
She’d jump and turn around and, when she was sure there was no one behind her, start the process all over again. That meant triple-checking the lock on the farmhouse door, nudging all the windows deeper into their sockets, peering behind curtains and under beds. Satisfied there was no intruder, she’d sprawl on top of her covers, hands behind her head, and try to go to sleep.
I’m watching you right now.
At five in the morning she deemed it hopeless, ate an early breakfast, picked up a copy of the Gazette, and arrived at the office a full two hours before anyone else.
Now the lack of sleep was catching up with her.
“Are you listening?” Bass asked again.
She jumped at the sound of his voice. “Sorry, just a little tired.”
“Well, you worked hard. You earned it. You know how many calls I’ve gotten this morning? You should see the list. Just the ones with Times in the title—New York Times, LA Times, Times-Picayune, Sun-Times, it goes on. They’re all picking up the story, Laura.”
She yawned. “It’s a good story.”
He sat down behind the desk, looking perplexed. “I thought this was what you wanted, your name on the front page.”
“They’re all printing it on the front page?”
He scowled. “Don’t be glib.”
He was right, of course. This was exactly what she had been working for. Since the beginning, something in her gut had alerted her that this was the story, the one that could pick her up and fly her to wherever she wanted to go. Not that it had been a difficult distinction to make—stories set in Hillsborough weren’t exactly famous for being noteworthy.
As though he could read her mind, Bass Herman echoed the same sentiment.
“You should be thankful.”
“To you?”
“Sure as hell should be thankful to me,” he muttered. “Not that I’m holding my breath. But I didn’t mean it like that. A story that can capture national interest doesn’t come along every day. You got lucky.”
You got lucky.
The same phrase that had been echoing around inside her head since day one, since the very first time she’d heard about Olive Hanson laying out in that field. Somewhere between her initial excitement and the moment in the motel room last night, holding a picture of a girl’s severed ear, her enthusiasm had evaporated. All she had left was a dry mouth with a sour taste in it, one she couldn’t get rid of. How long would that last? she wondered.
“Let’s talk about the new article,” he said.
She’d briefed him on Timinski’s plan, careful to avoid naming her secret source, and presented the psychological workup as the natural progression of a story people were hungry to consume. She’d expected him to put up a fight. But Bass, a man she’d heard pontificate on journalistic ethics more times than she could count, had only one thing to say about printing wild speculation under the banner of news.
“We can run it this week—it’ll sell a lot of papers.”
And now the story had exploded even further, was getting picked up by dailies all over the country. She stared at him, wondering how long it would be until she could actually see the dollar signs in his eyes.
“Dr. DeVane has agreed to put in her two cents. The two of us can work something up that walks a fine line. We can minimize our exposure, keep it circumspect. We’ll cover the serial killer thing in general, do a walkthrough of some of the greats, what made them tick, stuff like that.”
“Keep talking.”
“It’s a psychological profile piece. You know, an attempt to answer the question, what kind of person could do this?”
“And what’s the answer?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know yet. Based on my conversations with Dr. DeVane, it’s a simple question with a very complicated answer. Really, there is no answer, which makes it all the more terrible if you ask me.”
Bass tapped a fingernail against one of his front teeth. “People don’t like complicated.”
“No, they generally don’t.”
“Maybe we can simplify it?” he asked hopefully.
“Human psychology? Like you said, don’t hold your breath. But the thing is, Bass, it doesn’t matter. It’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind: Who could do this? What kind of person? How did he get like this?”
“And if we want an article, we need an answer.”
“Sure, but you’re missing the point. The answer doesn’t matter. What matters is that people are asking the question. All we have to do is claim to have the answer, claim to know the truth, even just a version of it. We print that in big, black letters at the top of the front page and they’ll come running. Agree with us, disagree with us, it won’t matter—they’ll buy all the same. Asking those kinds of questions leaves a kind of hole in the world that people can’t explain. They’ll fill it any way they can.”
“Agree or disagree has nothing to do with it. We’re talking about news, after all.”
She stood to go. “Sure we are, Bass,” she said. “Sure we are.”
* * *
The oppressive heat broke late Monday night and by Tuesday morning the mercury had returned to the eighties, but
the coolness of Jasmine DeVane’s office was as welcome as ever. Laura rested her head against the wall and let the air of the waiting room suck the sweat off her skin.
The inner door opened and Jasmine entered next to a tall, lanky woman with sun-blasted features that marked a lifetime on a farm. Wet tracks streaked through the dust on her cheeks; a damp tissue jutted out of one hand.
“Same time next week, Rhonda?” Jasmine said.
Rhonda nodded and her features crumpled, threatening tears again.
The doctor put a hand on her shoulder. “Just remember, it’s okay to be your own person. Talk with your friends, get out of the house.”
Rhonda nodded again and pushed out through the door, sniffling.
Jasmine gestured and Laura followed her into the office.
“Difficult patient?”
Jasmine let herself tip into one of the overstuffed armchairs. “Hardly.”
“You look tired, though.”
“Oh, I am. Tired like a woman working an assembly line. This must be what it feels like to put together lipsticks all day. Slide the lipstick in the tube, screw the top on, repeat. Again and again.”
“A machine probably does that.”
Jasmine threw her hands up into the air. “If there’s any justice in the world.”
“So, not a difficult patient.”
“When it comes to difficulty, most people linger near the center of the bell curve. It’s like I told you, seven thousand people and not a single mental health professional. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to deal with. But we shouldn’t talk about that.”
“It’s okay to tell me that kind of thing. I won’t go spreading it around town.”
“I’m not saying you would, but that still doesn’t make it appropriate to the doctor–patient relationship.”
“What is—getting drunk and starting bar fights?”
She regretted it the minute she said it. The attempt at levity fell flat. A darkness descended over Jasmine’s face like a storm cloud.
“That was a mistake.”
“I thought we went over this already,” Laura said.
In the wake of Timinski’s revelations, she’d made a few phone calls to Jasmine shoring up her agreement to do the article.
“We went over it, but it doesn’t change anything. I was way out of line to even end up in that situation.”
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