by Jo Macgregor
– 34 –
“Professor Deaver is … strange,” I told Ryan. “Creepy even,” I said, remembering the obsessive organization of his lunch box, how he’d enjoyed trapping the bee, and that sense I’d gotten about his need for control, not to mention his unexpected visit and the way he’d gotten my address from my mother. “And he’s dead set on being involved in an investigation like this.”
“An investigation like this, or this investigation?” Ryan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“It could be a red flag.” His hands shifted, tightening their grip on the steering wheel. “Many perpetrators are obsessed with how their own cases are investigated by law enforcement and covered by the media. They keep newspaper clippings and record the news coverage, and it’s not uncommon for them to try insert themselves into the investigation.”
“Singh once told me something similar,” I said.
“They volunteer for searches, call in helpful tips, even submit witness statements,” Ryan continued. “They want in on the action to establish how much the cops know or to find out what the cops think of them or just to have a laugh, knowing they’re right under our noses and we stupid flatfoots don’t even guess.”
“Yeah, I can see how that would feed their narcissism,” I said, rubbing a fingertip over the back of my hand and feeling the scabs there from where I’d picked at myself. “A funny thing, there was a moment, and I mean literally just a split-second, when I thought I saw Deaver in the crowd outside the Kehoe place.”
Ryan shot me a interested glance.
“But honestly, I think I must’ve been mistaken. He’s based in Boston. What would he be doing all the way up in Crowbury?”
“I don’t like it. At all,” Ryan said. “Call me if you see him again?”
“Sure.”
“Do you like him for this? You think there’s a chance he could be the killer?”
I considered for a minute, then said slowly, “No. No, I don’t think so. For one thing, he’s so fastidious, possibly even OCD. He wouldn’t want to risk getting blood on himself.”
“That’s what gloves and coveralls are for.”
“And he’s not very big. I can’t see him taking down a healthy young man.”
“Never underestimate the element of surprise,” Ryan said.
“I guess.” Anyone could’ve stunned the victims with a quick blow to the head or some kind of tranquilizer quickly injected. Was chloroform to the nose still a thing for kidnappers? Bottom line, I shouldn’t make assumptions based on size. “I just figured he was curious because he knows all the theory but isn’t able to apply it in real life. That must be frustrating. Like, he wants to be useful, and he probably also wants his work validated by real-world findings, but he’s outside the real world of the investigation.”
“Hmmm. What do you shrinks call it when you say something about another person but you’re actually talking about your own issues?”
Everyone was an armchair therapist.
“Projection,” I mumbled. “I guess he just … doesn’t seem like the type.”
Ryan tapped his fingers on the wheel. He had strong, square hands with nails cut short and wore a stainless-steel wristwatch, analog with no extra dials or buttons. I snuck a glance at his profile, the firm jaw, the deep line that became his sole dimple when he smiled, the nose with a little bump on the ridge. I liked that small flaw; perfectly straight noses were too much like beaks for my liking.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Back when I was new on the job, I spent a couple of weeks at the Middlebury PD, helping them out with a drug operation they had going. And while I was there, I caught a case.”
“Yeah?”
“There was this guy who was a popular high school gym teacher. Everyone thought he was great. Even the kids liked him.”
“Impressive.”
“They told me he was involved in the community too. Volunteered at the local food bank and collected chocolate eggs at Easter to send to a children’s home in Montpelier.”
“Did he wear a clown suit at charity parties to entertain the kids?” I asked, thinking of John Wayne Gacy, who’d raped and murdered at least thirty-three boys and young men and buried most of them in the crawlspace under his house.
“What?”
“Never mind. You were saying he was this all-around champ.”
“Right. So one night, a call comes in. A woman says there’s a huge ruckus going on at the house next door.”
Ryan glanced out his window, watching the woods flash by, but I could tell he was seeing something else. I wasn’t the only one plagued by bad memories. I reached across to squeeze his knee, and he placed his warm hand over mine.
“What did you find?” I asked softly.
“His wife. On the kitchen floor, surrounded by broken glass and plates. He’d broken her jaw and cheek. Her nose was bleeding, and she was bleeding between the legs too. She was pregnant, quite far along, and he’d kicked her in the stomach.” His thumb stroked the back of my hand, moving without pause over the scabs. “She lost the baby.”
I turned my hand over, threaded my fingers through his and held tightly for a moment. “I don’t know how you do the work you do.”
“We found the kids in the closet. She’d trained them to hide there when he went into a rage. It happened often, see? But the thing that really got to me is— Who am I kidding? The whole thing got to me. But my point is,” he said, glancing at me, “you can’t judge by appearances. This abusive son of a bitch in Middlebury, for instance. Outside the house, in public, he was this cool guy, friendly and helpful. Nothing was too much trouble. And when he was out and about with his family, he was apparently the sweetest, most loving husband and father you could imagine. But when he’d downed a few and the drapes were drawn, he was this completely different person. Vicious. Worse than an animal.”
“So I shouldn’t assume Deaver is as harmless as he seems?”
“Exactly,” Ryan said. He stared out at the road, which stretched ahead as straight as an arrow with nothing much to see except trees and an occasional pasture dotted with cows. “I’ve always wondered how they juggle those two selves. Most of the criminals I deal with, they’re assholes all the time, you know? Ask anyone who’s had dealings or a relationship with them, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, Tom’s a real dickhead.’ But these psychopaths are a whole other story. I just don’t get how the cold-blooded, violent part doesn’t slip out during the budget debate at work. Or how Mr. Nice Guy doesn’t appear when they’re torturing someone.”
“The thing is, there isn’t a Mr. Nice Guy, not with psychopaths, at least,” I said. “They aren’t capable of feeling real empathy or compassion, though they can often mimic it pretty well. They’re experts at reading people, so they figure out what others want or expect to hear and give it to them. It’s part of their manipulation skill set.”
For a mile or two of highway, we were stuck behind an SUV with three kids in the backseat, all of whom spun around to make hideous faces at us. I treated them to my own best effort: bottom eyelids tugged down, nose pushed up into a snout, and tongue wagging. Ryan and I chatted for a while about other things: family, travel, our opinion on the grave topic of whether pineapple belonged on pizza. Ryan, a purist, insisted that fruit had no place on top of cheese and tomato-basil sauce. I, on the other hand, had no such prejudices.
“I have never met a pizza I couldn’t eat,” I told him.
As we drew nearer to Woodbridge, we veered back to the topic of the Button Man. Ryan asked what my current working theory was, and I summarized what I knew or suspected about the perpetrator — that he was a lust, rage or thrill killer of the organized type who’d cruised the highways of New England in a Thunderbird, trawling for young men.
“Maybe he wanted to bump uglies with them, or—”
“I’m sorry. What?” Ryan said.
“Bump uglies. That’s what the old lady in the diner called it.”
He shook his head in amused disbelief. “You learn something new every day.”
“And then he kind of got carried away and killed them. The strangling could even have been erotic asphyxiation taken too far. Or maybe the hitchhikers demanded money for services or turned down his advances, and then he felt rejected and enraged, so he killed them.”
I closed my eyes and tried again to see past the moment when the Thunderbird had pulled up to the hitchhiker on the side of the highway, but I saw nothing more. It was so frustrating. What was the point of a talent that couldn’t be called into use on demand? We entered Woodbridge, and I consulted Google Maps to give Ryan directions to the first fabric store we’d be checking out.
“What do you reckon is the significance of the button with the victim’s bodies?” Ryan asked.
“I’m still working on that,” I said. “Buttons were a big thing in the Kehoe family and business. The old man used them as a punishment, and the fabric store sold every variety of them. So I’m guessing that’s a factor. If our killer is Kehoe senior, then I guess it’s a part of his button fetish. He wants to button them up. But I don’t think it is Kehoe senior. It’s too much of a stretch for a man that old to still be killing. If it’s Kehoe junior, then the buttons have got to be connected to his trauma in some way. He suffered with buttons, so now they have to?”
“And if it’s Larry,” Ryan said, “maybe he acquired a taste for buttons when working at that store?”
“Association doesn’t imply causality,” I said like a well-trained scientist. “It could have been the other way around — Larry already had an obsession for buttons and that’s why he wanted a job in the trade. Then again, it could just be random. Like when he was killing his first victim, one of his own or the victim’s buttons got ripped off in the struggle, and he flung it at the body or shoved it in the mouth in irritation. And then afterward, he just left a button behind every time, like a calling card.”
Ryan pulled into a parking bay outside the fabric store and cut the engine. “So basically, it could mean anything.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “But I’m going to find out what it is if it’s the last thing I do.”
– 35 –
A Stitch in Time — established in 1990 by the Gifford family, according to the sign over the door — was a cutesy fabric store decorated in vintage style with glass-fronted display cabinets, ancient sewing machines, and an old-fashioned cash register complete with push buttons and a swivel-handle on the side. A wooden rocking horse stood guard beside the door, baring its teeth in an unsettling smile.
At the back of the store, bolts of cloth lay stacked on sloping shelves and on a vast oak table where a man was measuring out a length of fabric for a customer. One wall was a patchwork of shallow shelves stuffed with fat skeins of yarn in every hue, and a huge wooden cabinet housed dressmaking patterns, knitting needles, embroidery frames, pincushions, and haberdashery of every kind, each neatly displayed in its own cubbyhole. Deaver would’ve approved.
My gaze was drawn to the hodgepodge of odd buttons filling an antique cigar box on the front counter and then to the assistant standing behind it. She wore a denim apron with a black heart stitched on the front, and with her emerald hair, purple lipstick, nose and lip studs, and the leather collar around her throat, she stood out in the quaint store like a bruise on pale skin. When she turned to assist us, I half-expected her to snarl.
Instead, she gave us friendly smile. “What can I do for you today?”
“Um,” I said, uncertain where to start.
“We’re trying to track down a man who came to this town in the mid- to late-nineties.” Ryan said smoothly. “He was in the fabric trade and might have come here looking for a job.”
“I wasn’t even born then!” the girl said cheerfully, and suddenly, I felt old. “Let me ask my mother. Mom? Mom!”
A tall woman also wearing a denim apron, although hers had a pink heart on the front, emerged from a back office. Her ash-blond hair was immaculately styled, her lipstick was a soft pink, and around her neck, she wore pearls. She wasn’t nearly as interesting as her daughter or, we soon discovered, as friendly.
“These people want to ask about the last century,” her daughter said.
Ryan repeated his question, but the woman shook her head. “That’s ages ago, and assistants come and go all the time.”
“He would’ve been in his early to mid-twenties with dark hair,” I said.
“Call your uncle,” the woman told the goth girl. “Maybe he’ll remember.” To us, she explained, “He’s older than me.”
The man who’d been measuring cloth finished with the customer and came to join us. He had a pleasant, open face with brown eyes and hair, and I estimated him to be in his mid-fifties. He fiddled with the edges of the blue heart on his apron while he considered our question.
“That sounds like a guy who worked here for a short while,” he said eventually. “Name of Larry.”
A frisson of excitement shot through me. “That’s him! What was his surname?”
“I don’t remember. It must have been nearly twenty years ago.”
“Would you still have employee records?” Ryan asked.
“We’re only obliged to keep those records for seven years,” the woman said, as though we were IRS inspectors finding fault with her paperwork. “Then we shred them.”
I wanted to kick the rocking horse in frustration but settled for digging the nail of my index finger under the cuticle of one of the nails on my other hand, tugging back in satisfying pain.
A mother and child entered the store, and the woman said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you further. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have customers to help.”
The man shifted his weight, drawing my gaze. He gave me a significant look and tilted his head a fraction in the direction of the door. I gave him a miniscule nod.
“Thanks, anyway,” I said. “Come on, Ryan. Let’s go.”
“You have a good day, now,” the girl said as we exited the store.
Less than a minute later, the man caught up with us outside and introduced himself as Chris. We walked a little way away from A Stitch in Time to where a railing separated the row of stores from a small public park. He leaned up against the bar and said, “My sister doesn’t like me discussing this side of my life in the store or in front of her daughter, as though she’d care.”
“What side of your life?” Ryan asked.
“First, can you tell me why you want to know?” Chris asked, taking a crushed packet of cigarettes and a lighter out of his apron pocket.
I glanced at Ryan, who gave me a small nod. “We’re investigating a series of murders and we think he, Larry, might have been involved.”
“Shit,” he said, pausing in the act of tapping out a cigarette.
“We need to find him for questioning. So we’d seriously appreciate any information you can give us,” I said.
“Murder, huh?” He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, then said, “Okay. I was only twenty-one when Larry arrived, and maybe I hadn’t experienced enough of the world, but I thought he was the same as me only he didn’t know it yet.”
“Know what?” Ryan asked, but I thought I understood.
“You had a relationship with him, with Larry?” I guessed. That would mean Liz at the diner had been right.
“A relationship? Hardly.” Chris tapped a cigarette out of the packet, lit it, and took a deep drag. “He rocked up here one day, looking for a job. He said he knew the business inside and out, so my mother hired him. Right from the get-go, we got along real well. Anyway, after a week or two of accidentally bumping into him and brushing against him as we squeezed between the shelves, I asked him if he wanted to go to the drive-in. There was one on the outside of town back then. It’s a factory now.” He puffed on his cigarette. “We packed a few beers and went in that great big car of his—”
“A Ford Thunderbird,” I said.
“If you say so. We went to see Meet
Joe Black. I mean, Brad Pitt, am I right?”
I nodded; he was right.
“And when the movie began, I slid over and started to, you know, make a move. I mean, I thought we were on the same page.”
“But you weren’t?” Ryan asked.
“Larry. Freaked. Out,” Chris said. “Totally lost his mind. He shoved me off him so hard I banged my head on the window. I asked him, ‘What’s your problem?’ He stares at me with this disgusted, angry expression and says, ‘I’m not a queer.’ So I said something like, ‘Hey, don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it,’ trying to make a joke to defuse the tension, you know? But then he hit me, punched me right in the face, giving me a hideous black eye, and pushed me out of his car before he took off. Just left me there to find my own way home, can you believe it?” He took another drag on his cigarette. “I got to the store early the next morning, so I was there when he arrived. I told him to fuck off and never come back.”
“And he did?” I asked.
“I never saw him again. Which was just fine by me, let me tell you. Guy was off his rocker.”
Chris didn’t know anything more about Larry or where he’d gone after he left, so we thanked him and went to a restaurant down the road for lunch. Over lobster rolls, Ryan and I discussed what we’d learned and what it might say about our suspect-in-chief. After the way that pendulum had swung, I’d hoped we’d discover some real information in Woodbridge, and I guess we had. But knowing that Larry had lived and worked there very briefly was not the sort of information that led anywhere fast.
After lunch, we set off for Halliwell, a bigger town about an hour east of Woodbridge, to check out the second fabric store on my list. Ryan snagged the last parking bay in front of Sew Pretty, squeezing in between a monster SUV parked over the line and a Heavenly Haberdashery delivery van decorated with cherubs trailing ribbons and lace. Ryan followed me up the stairs to the store, and turning to ask him a question about something, I caught him checking out my rear end and promptly forgot what I’d been meaning to ask.