“That’s right. And since we spoke someone else on that list has disappeared.”
Pratt leaned forward in his chair. He wore rimless glasses that caught the light, making it difficult to read his expression.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Kinkaid took out his wallet and removed the newspaper clipping about George Tipton, unfolding it carefully and laying it on the desk where Pratt could read it.
“The police have a fugitive warrant out for him, but he’s disappeared without a trace. So has the car.”
“How do you know?”
“I was in New York City last night and bought an Atlanta paper. There was a follow-up piece buried on page twelve.”
Pratt read the clipping through and then refolded it, holding it up between two fingers.
“Can I keep this?” And then, before Kinkaid had a chance to reply, “Do you think he killed his wife and kid?”
“Did Billinger?”
Pratt did not answer. Instead, he read the clipping through again and then turned it over so that it was face down on his desk. He kept his hand over it, as if afraid it might blow away. He didn’t look happy.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he said at last. “You have a list with eight names on it. Three get crossed off. I’ve seen murder cases with weirder coincidences.”
“Then why are you even talking to me, Lieutenant?” Kinkaid’s voice had dropped to little more than a whisper, as it always did when he wanted to command someone’s attention. “Is it because Billinger wasn’t a local boy?”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Kinkaid repeated. “He was born in New Gilead, Connecticut, my home town. And he played football at the high school. So did Terry Vogel, who blew his head off in Philadelphia on August 27, 1992.”
“And what about our missing husband?” Pratt picked up a corner of the clipping with the tips of two fingers and glanced at it—probably for effect, since he looked like the sort of man who had never forgotten a name in his life. “George Tipton. Did he play football too?”
“Not at New Gilead High. But another George Tipton did. He died in a traffic accident some years ago and thus rendered himself unavailable.”
It was a close as Kinkaid had ever come to a simple declaration of the idea that had been haunting him ever since he had first discovered his father’s list, and even now he could not quite bring himself to say it. He would leave that to Detective Lieutenant Pratt.
But even Pratt seemed reluctant. He turned over the clipping again and stared at the headline for what seemed like a full minute but was probably only a few seconds. Then he looked up at Kinkaid and raised his eyebrows, not necessarily disbelieving, merely preserving a certain professional skepticism.
“So you think all three of these men were murdered,” he said, more stating a fact than asking a question.
Kinkaid felt strangely exhilarated, as if the burden had at last been lifted. It was out now.
“Yes.”
“And you think the same person killed them?”
“I think their deaths are related. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the same thing.”
Pratt appeared to consider the point, then shook his head.
“Let’s assume they are related,” he began. “Then it would follow that our Atlanta victim was some kind of stand-in. Your George Tipton was dead, but the killer wasn’t accepting any excuses. Somebody had to take his place. I don’t see a murder like that coming out of a committee.”
He turned the clipping face down again and then, after the briefest possible hesitation, slipped it into an unmarked manila folder that was lying next to his telephone.
“So we’re left with a choice between a statistical quirk and a nut case who goes around wiping out whole families, sometimes just because the husband has the wrong name. On the whole I think I’d sleep better at night believing in the statistical quirk.”
“Will you at least get in touch with the Atlanta police?” Kinkaid asked, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice—he knew from experience that the more you sound like you want something the less willing people are to give it to you. “With respect to the murders of the families, you have two very similar cases here. If you reviewed the physical evidence couldn’t you at the very least get an idea if you were dealing with the same killer?”
“Mr. Kinkaid . . .” Pratt took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and first finger. He looked tired, or perhaps only bored. “The Billinger homicide is a month old, and the crime scene—in fact, both crime scenes—were remarkably clean. Believe me, we’ve worked the case, and we aren’t any closer to an arrest than we were on Day One. Serial killers that smart are very difficult to catch, especially if they don’t stay in a particular locale. Yes, certainly I’ll phone Atlanta, but I can’t claim to be very hopeful.”
“Then are you going to let a murderer just walk away? Six people are dead, probably seven.”
Kinkaid was on the verge of apologizing when he heard Pratt’s joyless laughter.
“Lots of murderers just walk away. This isn’t the movies.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t like it either, Mr. Kinkaid.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen a lot of bad things in twenty years, but a case like this . . .”
And he didn’t like it. Kinkaid could see it in his eyes. It gave him the beginnings of an idea.
“Mr. Pratt, they tell me you’re about to retire.”
“Yes, finally.” He smiled, and made a little gesture with his left hand that was roughly equivalent to a shrug.
“Any plans?”
Suddenly cautious, Pratt stopped smiling. He looked afraid that Kinkaid might offer him a great deal on some Florida vacation property, but he also betrayed himself. He had no plans. Whatever his reasons for getting out, he wasn’t looking forward to it.
“I want answers, Mr. Pratt,” Kinkaid went on, when he had let a decent interval pass. “I want the truth—or at least as much of it as I can get. But I’m not a criminal lawyer. I don’t know very much about things like this, but you do. Maybe this is one case you’d like to follow through.”
Pratt didn’t say anything, but at least he was listening. That was encouragement enough.
“Could you look into this Atlanta thing for me? If there’s nothing to it, then fine. At least I’ll know. I’ll pay you whatever you consider reasonable and I’ll cover your expenses, in advance. I can write you a check right now.”
For a moment Pratt remained silent. And then he allowed himself a short, astonished syllable of laughter.
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you.”
“I’m really serious. Will you do it?”
“I’ll think about it. But first I’d like to know why it matters so much to you.”
“Because it mattered so much to my father that it killed him. I have to know why.”
“And the killer?”
“I have no idea who he could be.”
Something in Pratt’s face changed. He was silent for a moment, as if collecting himself, and then he cleaned his glasses with a pocket handkerchief and put them back on, making a little ceremony of it. The glasses somehow rendered his face masklike and unreadable, which was perhaps the point.
“There isn’t any way you could have known,” he began, with a shade of regret in his voice. “We kept it out of the newspapers. Billinger checked into that motel with a woman. She was blond and very beautiful, according to the manager’s wife, and we haven’t heard from her since. Either she’s dead or she did it. We think she did it.”
With an effort that was almost physically painful, Kinkaid tried to keep from letting the thought enter his brain. But it would come—it could not be kept out.
“Oh Jesus,” he whispered. “It can’t be. It isn’t possible.”
. . . . .
“Sir? Sir, are you all right?”
Her voice seemed to come from somewhe
re far away. When he turned his head he was surprised to see the stewardess, her face only a few inches from his own. She looked worried.
Kinkaid tried to smile.
“I’m fine,” he said, lying. “I’m always a little motion sick on planes.”
“Would you like something?”
“I’d like a good stiff drink.”
It was clear that the stewardess didn’t think that was such a terrific idea, but she took his order for a double vodka martini.
And she was right. He tossed the drink back in a couple of quick swallows, so that he could feel the precise instant in which the alcohol went into his bloodstream, but it didn’t help. Because it wasn’t the movement of the plane that was giving him a hard time, it was life.
He had no proof. He had nothing to direct him but the gathering sense of dread that tore at his bowels like splinters of ice. A woman glimpsed in the doorway of a seedy motel room—the world was full of blondes and probably half of them fit somebody’s idea of beautiful. She didn’t have to be the killer and she sure as hell didn’t have to be Angel. The girl he had been in love with ten years ago wasn’t a murderess.
Pratt had shown him the photographs. The skin stripped off Billinger’s face like old wallpaper. His wife a crumpled mound on the stairway, half her head gone from a hollow-point bullet that caught her just under the right eye. The two boys, shot to death as they slept in their upstairs bedroom. Who could do such things? Not the girl he had known ten years ago.
But had he really known her at all? “From what I hear, she’s been fucked by every guy on the football team.” He hadn’t been able to believe that either.
He had made his confession to his father on a Sunday evening, just before driving back to Yale. The following Friday he came home and was invited into his father’s office, where he was told that Mrs. Wyman had rendered her decision. It was impossible. Angel was forbidden ever to see him again, for his own sake.
“We’ll see about that,” he had shouted, getting up out of the chair his father called the Inquisition Seat and clawing his way back into his coat. “We’ll just see. Who the hell does she think I am anyway, the Boston Strangler?”
“Don’t go up there, Jimmy. Just don’t.”
“Fuck that, Dad—and fuck you.”
He slammed out of the house and took off in his car. Six minutes later, having broken every speed law known to man, he was in front of the entrance to Five Miles, bellowing at the intercom.
“The family is not at home,” he was told.
“I’m coming up to see for myself. You can open the gates or I can drive over them, you please yourself.”
He slid in behind the wheel and waited. He would give them thirty seconds and then his car would probably need a new front end—he was as close to crazy as he would ever come. But apparently Mrs. Wyman wasn’t crazy because after about fifteen seconds there was a loud click as the electric motor snapped on and the gates slid quietly open.
The old woman was waiting for him at the front door, which seemed odd. She was using a stick and she looked ancient. She gave no indication of being either surprised or angry that he should have forced his way into her home.
“You’d better come this way.”
She turned to her left, apparently expecting him to trot along behind her.
“Where’s Angela?”
“You won’t see her,” she said, without stopping to glance back at him. “She isn’t here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It makes little difference what you believe, young man. Nevertheless, Angela is not here. At my age one does not often take the trouble to lie. Now come along.”
Mrs. Wyman’s progress toward the principal drawing room was rather slow and she really seemed to need her stick. She took her place on a sofa and did not invite him to sit down.
“I will not resent this intrusion,” she began, looking down at her lap as she smoothed out the folds of her dress. “Since it is so obvious that you have no thought of ingratiating yourself, I must assume that you fancy yourself in love. You may actually be in love. If that is the case, then I pity you.”
“Where is Angela?”
She lifted her gaze to his face and seemed for a moment to consider whether he warranted an answer.
“I have sent her away,” she said at last. “I can see now that it was folly to bring her here. She will not be coming back.”
“Did you think me so little worthy of her, Mrs. Wyman?”
He remembered how humiliated he felt that his voice shook with emotion as he asked the question. Yet he could not help himself. If he had been alone he might have wept.
“Was the thought that she could love someone like me so very distasteful to you?”
He would always remember the way she looked at him in that moment. For years he had believed that she was mocking him, but now he began to understand that the expression in her eyes might have been one of pain rather than contempt, and that the wound had been to more than simply family pride, that its sources would probably be hidden from him forever but that her suffering might indeed have made his own seem less than nothing.
“I know you will not believe me, young man,” she had answered, “but I have acted more for your sake than for hers.”
Ten years after their conversation, alone with his double vodka martini on the shuttle flight from Columbus, Ohio to New York, with Mrs. Wyman long in her grave, James Kinkaid IV, no longer quite so young, was prepared to believe it possible she had been telling the truth.
15
“What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”
“I’m fine. Well—tired maybe. Maybe it’s jet lag. I don’t like air travel.”
He was lying. And even if he wasn’t lying he wasn’t telling the truth. Whatever was wrong with him had nothing to do with airplanes.
But Lisa decided she wasn’t going to get insulted. After all, whatever it was it hadn’t diminished his ardor, which had about it a certain flattering desperation. He even stayed the night, and to hell with his housekeeper.
She woke up once in the small hours of the morning. Jim was asleep but restless. He seemed in the thrall of some terrible dream. She put her arm over him and pressed herself against his back, and after a while he quieted down.
So what happened in Denver, she wondered. She couldn’t very well ask him, so she probably wasn’t going to find out any time soon. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Maybe it did.
Lying there with him in the darkness, comforting him in a way he would never know anything about, Lisa Milano recognized that she had fallen in love. She had had a few casual lovers—okay, to be perfectly honest, more than a few—but none of them had ever touched her soul. Jim Kinkaid was different. He was the smartest man she had ever known and the most vulnerable. It was the vulnerability that appealed to her. It was an unusual experience to really matter to someone.
After a while she fell asleep again, protecting him from the terrors of the night.
. . . . .
“I think it’s the same shooter. The locals still want to go with the husband.”
Warren Pratt, now a private citizen, was calling from a hotel room in Atlanta. He had flown down the morning after his retirement party.
“So where are we?” Kinkaid asked, sitting in his office in New Gilead, doodling on a yellow legal pad and wondering why he felt relieved. “There’s no way to be sure, one way or the other?”
“Not yet. If two months from now we find Tipton’s Honda sitting in a used car lot in Newark it’ll probably mean that they’re right and I’m wrong. I can understand why they like him as a suspect. It wasn’t a very harmonious marriage. In the meantime, though, I think our blonde did it.”
Kinkaid restrained the impulse to point out that our blonde might not be his blond, that the fair-haired, elegant woman seen by Mrs. Daniels might not be, probably was not, the elegant, fair-haired Angela Wyman he had known ten years before. He wanted to, but he did not. Instead,
he asked for an explanation. Why the blonde?
“It’s a question of pattern,” Pratt answered. “I don’t have any hard evidence. The bullets that killed Mrs. Tipton and her little girl don’t match up with the ones we took out of the Billinger family, and I didn’t expect them to. Our killer is much too clever to use the same weapon twice. Both guns were about the same caliber, but that doesn’t mean anything.
“What strikes me about both crimes is their sheer efficiency. In Dayton there was no forced entry, so we presume our perpetrator used Billinger’s keys to come in the back door, since the front had a dead bolt. Then she went through the kitchen and dining room to the hallway, where she caught Mrs. Billinger on the stairs. Then she went up the stairs past of the body, being careful not to step in any blood, and topped the two boys. Three shots, three corpses. Nothing was disturbed, nothing was touched, nothing was left behind. I think she was in and out in less than five minutes. Atlanta was exactly the same way.
“These murders were meticulous. As crimes they were works of art. Someone gave a lot of thought to the details and then just went through and did it like it was ballet. Domestic murders aren’t like that. They’re generally spontaneous explosions. Husbands who go berserk and wipe out their significant others just aren’t that cool about it. If our blonde did both families she’s a real ice queen.
“What do you want me to do now?”
It was a good question. In the end Pratt had simply not been able to relinquish the Billinger murders. “This is one of those cases that are always remembered,” he had said. “I don’t want to be remembered as the cop who came up empty. I’ll clear this one, and then I can spend my twilight years chasing butterflies. If you’re prepared to pay the tab I’ll go on hunting.”
But what now?
“Are you finished in Atlanta?” Kinkaid asked.
“I could use another day. I want to find out a little more about Tipton, and I’d like to have a look at the crime scene.”
“Take whatever time you need. When you’re done, go up to Philadelphia and see what you can find out about Terry Vogel’s suicide. When you’re done with that you can take the train up here. I’ll meet you in New York.”
Angel Page 15