by Jo Macgregor
I found the glasses inside a book, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, lying on the recliner and hurried out of the hothouse so fast I forgot to shut and lock the door and had to go back once I realized. Back in Henry’s study, I handed him his spectacles. “Here you go.”
Perching them on his nose, he peered over the rim at me. “Did you remember to lock the door?”
“Of course. And you’re welcome.” Clearly, I was going to have to teach him how to say thank you too.
“Hand me that folder over there. Not that one, the blue one,” he said.
This time, I held onto the item he wanted until he uttered a grudging “Thanks.”
“What’s that on your hand?” he demanded, pointing at the scab at the base of my thumb, a vestige of my skin-picking the day before. “Do you have a disease?”
“No. Do you?” I cast a significant look at his swollen foot.
He moved it an inch and winced. “I have an excess of uric acid in the bloodstream.”
“I guess that explains your mood,” I said but added more kindly, “Chronic pain is enough to make anyone miserable.”
“You have chronic pain?” he asked. “Or your parents?”
“Luckily not. My father’s fairly healthy, but my mother has high blood pressure.”
He checked something in the file, then had me return it to the desk. Next, he asked me to pass him his medicine and a glass of water. “Gout won’t kill you, but it will make you wish you were dead. Gout,” he said in the tone of someone stating an important universal truth, “is a bastard.”
I nodded sympathetically. “It’s enough to give anyone a chronic case of PLOM.”
“Plom? What’s that?”
“It’s a common psychological diagnosis. PLOM stands for ‘poor little old me.’”
Henry glowered at me and began issuing a steady stream of orders, clearly getting a kick out of keeping me on the hop. The worst part of the job, I soon discovered, was filing the papers that overflowed his in-basket. It should have been a mindless task, freeing my mind to think about serial killers and attractive cops and other fascinating things, but it wasn’t.
Instead of arranging his files alphabetically in the cabinet, like any sane person would do, Henry had stored them according to categories — criminal, civil, estates, divorce — and beneath that, he’d put them behind tabs which related to how much he liked the client. These were then arranged with no respect for the virtues of alphabetical order. A bunch of thick folders were filed under A (for “Annoying,” according to Henry) and D (“Dreadful”), and shoved into the back of the drawer, while far fewer files were stored under S (for “Sheer delight to deal with”) and stowed in the front. All his banking and insurance documents were stored under F (for “finance”) and his software manuals, cell phone instruction booklet, and a handwritten list of pins and passwords was filed under U — for “Unpleasantness and confusion.”
“This whole cabinet needs reorganizing,” I said after a frustrating two hours of asking him where every single paper needed to be filed. “It’s chaos!”
“It most certainly is not,” he said hotly.
“Then tell me where I found this.” I held up a slim bar of Swiss chocolate.
“Under V in the criminal drawer,” he said smugly. He was right.
“But why?” I pleaded.
“For Verboten and because Gwyneth considers it a crime.”
“And this? It’s a divorce contract for one Mary-Anne Applequist.”
“Under N.”
“What’s that stand for?”
Henry blushed. “None of your business. You can test me all you want. You won’t catch me out, Missy.”
“Garnet.”
“Garnet,” he said. “What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
“You’ll have to take that one up with my parents. I didn’t choose it. What I want to know is how you expect me to do your filing when you alone know the secret location of every document?”
“You’ll learn. It’s easy once you get the hang of the system.”
“There’s a method in this madness?” I swung a hip into a drawer, slamming it shut.
“There’s a very sound set of organizing principles that make complete sense to me. I have systematized the raw data so that I have relevant and useful information. What use is it to know that LeBron George’s surname starts with G? Instead, his position in that top drawer reminds me that he’s particular and pedantic about every last detail of his contracts.”
I checked. The third file under P in the top drawer belonged to Mr. L.K. George. Henry’s system was an interesting insight into how his mind worked. My own filing system consisted of a tote bin stuffed with every piece of paper I worried I might ever need again. What did that say about my brain? Confused and cluttered but reasonably watertight? I made no more complaints about the filing, and when I finished at lunchtime, I was pleased to see that his office looked a lot neater. Henry had grown marginally less grouchy over the course of the morning, but he got in one last jab before I left.
“Your eyes,” he said as I slipped on my fleecy hoodie.
“What about them?”
“In certain Native American cultures, they’re called ‘ghost eyes.’”
I snorted a laugh. How, with all her speculations on the meaning of my near-death experience and everything that followed, had my mother missed that gem?
“Those who possess ghost eyes are believed to be natural guardians of the tribe because the different eyes can see on earth and into heaven simultaneously.”
I blinked in astonishment.
“Although,” Henry amended, “this belief is primarily attributed to dogs with the condition.”
In revenge, I refiled his chocolate bar, telling him, “If you’re so smart and your organizing principles are so logical, you should have no problem at all finding it again.”
With that, I left, leaving him looking a lot less PLOM and a lot more I-for-irritated-but-invigorated than he had been all morning.
– 22 –
The bananas in the bowl on top of the fridge were turning black, and the apples were sagging into wrinkled balls. If my father had bought me wasabi peas and Doritos instead — and why the heck hadn’t he? He knew my fraught relationship with fresh produce — the bowl would’ve been empty by now. I made a cheese and pickle sandwich and sat down at the table with my laptop and the New England state maps I’d printed out.
Henry had been spot-on about the difference between data and information. There was useful and relevant information hidden somewhere in the maps in front of me, but it was lost in the mass of data. I frowned at the circled round barns sites in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. Like Henry, I needed an organizing principle. Or at least, I needed a better one than merely checking out the sites located nearest to Pitchford because that was easiest.
I didn’t know exactly how my visions about the house and the angry man related to the Button Man killer, but I did, thanks to the Stakeout TV program, know roughly where at least some of his snatch and dumpsites had been. I plotted those places on the maps, too, scoring deep circles around Randolph, where Jacob Wertheimer had last been seen, and Pitchford, where his remains had been found. Then I studied the maps, searching for any overlap between victim abduction and disposal sites and the locations of round barns. There were no precisely matching correlations, and none of the sites were within a couple of miles of each other. But as I widened the circle of overlap, there were more and more, and I had no clue which ones to check out first.
Damnit, I’d wasted my precious time with Agent Washington. I should’ve extracted some solid facts out of him when I had the chance. But maybe it wasn’t too late. I dialed the number of the Rutland agency office and asked to speak to Special Agent Tyler Washington.
“Speaking.” He sounded wary; perhaps he recognized my voice.
“Oh, hi, Tyler. It’s Garnet McGee.”
After a pause, he said, “Why are you
calling me?” He didn’t sound nearly as friendly as he had the last time we’d spoken.
“I sent you a text about the other visions I saw. Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“Was any of it helpful?” I asked hopefully.
“Not yet.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s hard-core vague. But I’m working on it, Tyler, and if I get anything more specific, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
“Uh-huh.”
He didn’t sound overly enthusiastic about the prospect of continued communication between us, but I pressed on regardless. “I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions? I promise I’ll only take a few minutes of your time.”
“No, I’m afraid not … Shirley. We’re not in the market for a new property.”
“Huh?” I said, puzzled for a second. “Ohhh, Singh’s in the room with you, and you can’t talk freely?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And he tore you a new one for helping me before?”
“Oh yeah. You bet,” he said fervently.
“Look, I’m really sorry about that. I was honestly just trying to help. And I can help you if you could just tell me—”
“No, I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”
“I admire your integrity, Tyler, I do. But we both want to nail this killer, right? Tell you what, I’ll narrow it down to just two questions, and we’ll make it a quick multiple choice. I’ll just say the possible answers, and you tell me yes or no, okay? That surely won’t break your code of ethics.”
“Okay, but just the two … bathrooms.”
“Have you identified any more of the victims found at the Nash Stream Forest burial site?”
“Yes, one.”
“Did he go missing in New Hampshire, too?”
“No. We’re very happy in our current home.”
“Oh, that’s a clue, right? Okay then, did he get taken from Vermont?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me where exactly?”
“No. I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back to my work now, so—”
“Wait!” I’d just remembered something. “In the original FBI profile, the geographic experts said they thought the killer was from Vermont, too, right?”
There was a second of silence, then Washington said, “You certainly sound like you know what you’re doing, Shirley. I’ll call you if we decide to sell.”
“One more quick question. Is there any evidence the killer had sex with or raped any of his victims?”
“None, yet.”
“And — last one, I promise! — this victim you’ve just identified, did he also go missing on or around May sixth?”
“Yes. Goodbye, then.”
“Thank you, Tyler Washington! You’re a good man, and I owe you a steak dinner,” I said, and ended the call.
So the Button Man had snatched another victim in Vermont and left his body over the state border in New Hampshire. Somewhere in or between those two places, he’d committed the murder. But even if I limited myself to Vermont, or Vermont and New Hampshire, that still left me with a lot of territory to cover. This was hopeless. I needed more data points to narrow down my search, especially since the Stakeout list of earlier murders was incomplete and quite possibly inaccurate. Their information had, after all, merely been based on a tipoff.
I called Ryan. “I want to ask you a favor, but you can say no if you think it’s going to be an issue because of our relationship. I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m using you or taking advantage of you.”
“Garnet?”
“Yes?”
“If you want to use me or take advantage of me, I’d be happy to submit anytime,” he said, his voice deep and playful.
I was glad he couldn’t see my blush over the phone. But he could surely hear my giggle. It sounded strange to my own ears — lighthearted and almost girlish. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d giggled. It felt … good.
“So what’s the favor?” Ryan asked.
“Remember how you told me that when the Pitchford police department was investigating Colby’s murder ten years ago, you briefly wondered whether Colby was a victim of the serial killer operating in New England at that time?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell me the victim names and places of abduction and body disposal that you knew of back then?” He’d told me them once before, but I couldn’t recall them.
“I guess, sure. Hang on while I look up my old case notes.”
By “old case notes,” Ryan must mean Colby’s case file. Old memories floated to the surface — the last time I saw Colby alive, the days of waiting and searching, his pale, battered body lying beside Plover Pond — but the images seemed more distant now, more faded. It was easier to recall the times when he was alive, the days when we’d laughed and swum at the quarry and kissed in the rain, the nights when we’d made love. And even those memories were infused with a golden haze that blurred the details. Remembering Colby now felt bittersweet instead of like poking an open wound of raw pain.
“Here we go,” Ryan said, interrupting my musings. “I don’t know much, I’m afraid. I wasn’t directly involved in any of the serial killer investigations, and the FBI had jurisdiction even then, so this list is far from complete.” He rattled off the names of a number of towns and rural locations. “Any reason in particular you want this information?”
“I want to see if there’s a correlation between those sites and the location of the New England round barns I told you about, so I can narrow down my search. Else I’ll be spending the rest of my natural life visiting barns.”
“I could help you,” he offered.
“Much as I’d love your company, I couldn’t do that to you. Honestly, it’s crazy boring and likely a total waste of time. Plus,” I added, “it would ruin any faith you have in my abilities if you saw first-hand how often I strike out.”
He paused for a moment and then said almost sternly, “Garnet, promise me you won’t go marching headlong into any danger, that you’ll call me if you need help.”
“Aye, aye, chief.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Are your fingers crossed?”
I uncrossed them and declared, “No! Sheesh, don’t you trust me at all?”
“I know you too well,” he said.
That was probably true, and it alarmed me a little. The closer he and I grew, and the more of ourselves we invested in each other, the more devastating it would be if our relationship didn’t work out. Knowing I couldn’t handle another catastrophic heartbreak, I’d vowed never to risk it. But I was beginning to see that my self-protective strategy kept me in a place of not living fully either. To be alive was to risk pain, and I didn’t like it.
“Do you by any chance know the name of that latest Nash Stream Forest victim who’s been identified?” I asked in a more businesslike tone.
“I didn’t even know they’d made another identification.”
“Can you find out? Would it help if I told you that the victim disappeared in Vermont?”
“Singh told you that?” Ryan said, sounding amazed.
“Him? Not likely!”
“Then how did you find out?”
“Do you really want me to tell you, or would you prefer to maintain plausible deniability?”
Ryan sighed. “I’ll nose around and see if I can find out anything. I don’t think there’s any point in me contacting Singh directly. He’s leery of letting me know anything because he suspects I’d tell you.”
“Would you?” I asked.
“Only if you promised to take serious advantage of me,” he said, and that warm note was back in his voice.
I was still smiling when I ended the call a minute later.
Some of the information Ryan gave me hadn’t been mentioned in the TV special, and from the increasing number of murders in the years leading up to Jacob Wertheimer’s death, it seemed like the serial killer
had been escalating. I added the new names to my list of victims and marked the places on my maps, then I pored over the information again, looking for a pattern. If I searched within a thirty-mile radius of the victim disappearance and disposal sites I now knew, there were five round barn sites — one in Maine and two each in New Hampshire and Vermont. Were any one of them the place I’d glimpsed in my mind’s eye? Another Vermont disposal site was about forty-two miles from the barn in Hucknall, making me wonder if I’d already found the right place — the farmhouse with Grumpy, Lumpy, Floppy, and Gunner the psycho dog.
If she were here, my mother would’ve advised me to use my “third eye” to identify the most likely site. What the heck? It couldn’t hurt, and no one was present to witness my lunacy. I rolled my shoulders then shook out my hands and stretched them over the maps. I tuned in to my gut, but whatever I was waiting for didn’t happen. My mother would probably also have advised me to use crystals to “boost my inner vision” or something of the sort. So, feeling like a first-class fool, I fetched the crystals from my handbag — the amethyst quartz that I’d found at Plover Pond and that was supposed to amplify my intuitive abilities: the lepidolite my mother had given me to assist in decision-making, the “seer kit” she’d foisted on me during my last investigation, and the bag of stones from our jaunt around southern Vermont. Deciding I may as well go the whole hog, I arranged the crystals in a circle around the maps, closed my eyes, and stretched out my hands again.
My scientist brain intervened just then, informing me that this was a wildly compromised experiment. My knowledge of how the maps beneath my hands were arranged could easily influence my findings. My subconscious mind might steer me to the places I knew victims had disappeared or been found. Keeping my eyes closed, I scrambled the maps around on the desk and stuck out my hands for the third time. At first, I felt nothing. But after a few minutes, I got two very clear sensations: growing tiredness in my arms and an increasing conviction that I’d lost my marbles. What the hell was I even doing?