Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  As Windy watched, the picture of a girl’s face began to emerge, with the words MISSING above it, and beneath it

  Name: Marcie Blum—

  Last Sighting: 4/30/9—

  Last Location: Olymp—

  “I couldn’t get the other half of the information, but I ran a check on the name, and I think I found the missing girl. Marcie Blumfield. Kidnapped from her parents’ home in Olympia, Washington, in 1996. Body found in Seattle, Washington, in October 1999. They would have pulled her off the milk carton when her body was found, which means our photo was taken between 1996 and 1999.”

  “Are the missing person listings regional?”

  “Not always any more, but I looked it up on the web and in the 1990s the network was smaller. So the chances are, your photo was taken somewhere in Washington state.”

  “Amazing, Erica,” Windy said. “This is super.”

  “Can you use it? Will it help with the Home Wrecker case?”

  “I don’t think it is involved in that case.” Windy watched Erica’s face fall. “But then again, it might be,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.

  Windy went back to her office and arranged all the hair samples she had taken on her desk on one side, and the lab reports about the hair found on Kelly O’Connell’s neck and Nadene Brown’s fingers on the other, and stared at them, seeing what she had known she would, not liking it.

  Maybe everyone she worked with was just too well nourished, she told herself. Their hair was too healthy, held together better. Maybe Eve’s anorexia made her hair so brittle that it never seemed to have a bulb on it when it got pulled it out, but everyone else’s did. Maybe Eve just needed a better conditioner.

  Or maybe she was wrong about something.

  Her mind flipped back to the crime scene photo. Was there any chance that it did have something to do with the Home Wrecker case? Could Eve have sent it to her to taunt her? But that would mean that Eve had been in Washington state at some point in the 1990s and there was nothing in her biography about it.

  She looked up the number for the homicide divisions in Olympia, Washington, and Seattle, called them both to ask about any brutal murders of a woman in her kitchen in the mid- to late-1990s. The Olympia bureau was small enough that they were able to tell her right away that there were no matches. The duty sergeant in Seattle said, “Sure sure, I’ll ask around but we’re pretty swamped up here.”

  Windy could tell he was barely paying attention. She said, “Anything you can find out, I’d appreciate. And of course, if this is an old murder and it gets solved, that would close a cold case for you. Help your statistics. Without you having to do anything but look up some files.”

  The sergeant snorted good-naturedly. “You’re a woman who knows how to talk to a man, aren’t you? Give me that information again.” This time Windy heard the scrape of a pencil on a pad.

  When she was done with Seattle, since she already had the phone out of the cradle, she called home for the eighth time that afternoon. “Hi, it’s me. Is everything all right, Brandon?”

  “Hmm. Let’s see, honey. Not much has changed since ten minutes ago when you called.”

  “It was fifteen. What are you doing?”

  “We’re practicing sleeping in our sleeping bag for the class camping trip this weekend and trying to decide which outfits to take.”

  “I think she only needs two outfits. And I’m not sure I am going to let her go. It might not be safe.”

  “Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell her she can’t take her red glitter mary janes camping, or that she might not get to camp at all. You’re the mom.”

  “So everything is okay?”

  “Everything is fine. And we have such nice men outside guarding us. Oh, speaking of guarding, Bill called and asked you to call him. You didn’t tell him about yesterday, did you?”

  “Why?”

  “If you had, he would have been here packing boxes to move you back to Virginia.”

  Windy laughed. “Hey, will you do me a favor?”

  “Of course, honey.”

  “Pull out a piece of your hair.”

  “No way. I’m already concerned about premature hair loss.”

  “Brandon.”

  “Ow. Okay, I did it.”

  “Is there a bulb on the end? A round part?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Never mind. I’ll see you by six.”

  “I’ll sure be looking forward to it, but I have a feeling I’ll hear from you about a dozen times before then.”

  Erica poked her head around the corner of Windy’s office as she was hanging up.

  “I reduced the shadow in the corner of that photo,” she said, handing Windy a print-out.

  Windy glanced at it and looked away fast.

  “I’m not sure,” Erica said, “but I think it’s a baby.”

  “Yes,” Windy agreed. A baby in a pool of blood.

  CHAPTER 74

  The La Françoise School of Dance, Specializing in Ballet and Tap Instruction, was adding Tango-for-Tots! classes to its roster, Ash learned, reading the neon blue flyers tacked to the wall of the reception room while he waited for Miss Cordelia Kincade. She was the piano accompanist, presumably the one playing the snippets of music that could be heard over the hum of the air conditioner. The plastic chairs lining the walls were all filled with moms, Ash assumed, waiting for their children to come out of class. The woman closest to Ash had a baby in a car seat at her feet that she was rocking with one toe as she read Madame Bovary in French. Anyone who talked did it just loud enough to be heard over the piano coming from the other room.

  The music stopped and the room got quiet, like the calm before the storm, and all the moms began to shift, gathering up purses and backpacks. Then the door to the back of the dance academy opened and tranquillity erupted into babble as a dozen pink-tutued little girls with their hair in buns spilled out, being bundled into jean jackets and sandals and sneakers and sweatshirts, some of them laughing, one getting carried out while complaining to her mother that her toes hurt. Ash stood to one side against the wall, fascinated and more ill at ease than at a shoot-out, watching the controlled chaos, until the last mother-daughter-stroller combination had gone out the door and he was alone again.

  “You’re not a parent, are you?” a woman said from near his elbow, and he looked down to see a tiny lady who appeared to be in her sixties.

  “No,” Ash said to the woman. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Just the look of sheer terror on your face is all, dear.” Giving him a smile and a once-over at the same time. “I’m Cordelia Kincade. I believe you are waiting for me.”

  The small woman had an air of authority that made Ash feel like he should pat down his hair, straighten his shirt collar. As he followed her into the academy, past a large room with a wood floor, a wall of mirrors, ballet bars at two heights, and a piano, he took the toothpick out of his mouth and put it in his pocket.

  She turned in at a room marked LOUNGE. There were two women in their late thirties, both wearing black leotards, tight buns, and red lipstick, sitting on a gray-brown sofa smoking and speaking in what sounded to Ash like Russian. They paused to nod as he and Miss Kincade came in, then went back to their conversation. Miss Kincade sat down in an easy chair and pointed him into a straight-backed wooden chair next to a potted plant.

  Feeling like he’d been caught cutting school, Ash sat down, knees together, hands in his lap.

  “Now, what can I do for you, Detective Laughton?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me a little about one of your former students. Harold Williams? You taught him at Las Vegas Artistic Academy. If you remember him.”

  “I’m not that old, Detective Laughton, and I’m certainly not senile. Of course I remember Harry. He was a doll and very charming when he wanted to be.”

  “The guidance counselor at the school said you and he had a particularly close relationship.”

  “Harry was a very driven s
tudent. A perfectionist. He would stay very late to practice. I think music was a release for him. Since I was there when he was playing, I got to know him.”

  “Was he talented?”

  “He was diligent. Technically accomplished. And dedicated. But his playing was always slightly unsatisfying. It sounds like a cliché, but to be a truly great musician, you put emotion into it. Harry was not very emotional.”

  “What can you tell me about his home life?”

  “Very little. Once he had, well, a small problem at school. He started to steal things here and there, other student’s lunches. I had his mother and his stepfather in for a conference, told them I was concerned. After that there were no more problems, so I assume everything worked out.” A crease appeared on her forehead. “There was one strange thing. His mother and stepfather never came to any of his performances. I know he had a little sister, so perhaps they were at home with her.”

  “Harry had a sister? Do you know how much younger she was?”

  “Perhaps ten years? I remember him telling me how when she was a baby, they got along so well, but as she got older it was harder to be with her. He loved babies. In fact, when he was talking about his sister, his playing was the best. The most emotional. Except—now I remember. Except for the last half of his senior year.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He started dating that wonderful girl. What was her name? Something biblical. Judith, maybe, or Delilah.”

  “Eve?” Ash suggested.

  “Yes, Eve. That was it.”

  “Did you meet her? See them together?”

  “No, she didn’t go to our school. But he talked about her often. About the things they did together, taking long walks, picnics. She must have been a very special girl to appreciate him. Their romance sounded like something from a storybook. And there was a decided change in his playing.”

  Ash was trying to picture Harry and Eve—the Harry and Eve he knew about—taking walks and having picnics, when Miss Kincade said, “I was sorry to learn it did not work out for them. He seemed very much in love with her. Of course, he was only eighteen. People change.”

  “Did he tell you they broke up?”

  “No. But I got a wedding invitation from him, must have been six or seven years ago. The name of the woman he was marrying wasn’t Eve. It was Amanda. I remember because that is my niece’s name.”

  “Did you attend the wedding?”

  “No, I couldn’t. I don’t really believe in airplanes.”

  “Where was it?”

  “All the way in Seattle. But it was charming of Harry to remember me. If you see him, tell him I hope he is still playing.”

  Ash was on the phone to the Seattle police department before he reached his car. “Anything you have on Harold or Amanda Williams,” he told the detective on the desk. “Going back maybe seven years.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll add it to the other information.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re from Vegas, right? One of your people already called asking about this. Crime scene photo from the mid- to late-nineties? Woman with her throat cut?”

  Ash stared at his phone. “Do you remember the name of the person who called?”

  “It was a woman. Chicago something. I told her we’re busy but I’d look into it.”

  “Please do. It’s urgent.”

  “Always is,” the man assured him.

  CHAPTER 75

  Windy sat up expectantly as Jonah came into her office, but got dejected when she saw he was only carrying a folder.

  “You don’t happen to have one of Ash’s Twinkies on you, do you? Or know where he keeps the key to his supply?”

  “No way. One of the conditions of my employment is I don’t have to touch those things. But I’ve brought nourishment for your mind.” He held the folder out to her. “File on your Jane Doe from the desert the other day. The one who ate dirt? Just came in. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  “Daisy Graber AKA Daisy Deluxe. Deejay KRST,” Windy read, then her eyes popped. “No. Oh no. The night before she died she did a monologue about the Home Wrecker?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is there a transcript?”

  “Two pages back. And a report by the officers who took the missing persons call. I’ll leave you to your reading, I just wanted to be here for the good part.”

  Windy read the transcript, then flipped to the report by the officers who were assigned to check Daisy’s house when she didn’t show up for work.

  “Front door ajar, but no sign of forced entry. Large quantity of dirt on back stairs, and leading inside house. Neighbors report that subject’s dog, a large Great Dane, is also missing. Subject described as medium height, five-foot-five to five-foot-seven with short brown hair, almost always concealed with a wig.”

  Windy reached for her file on the evidence from the Dumpster.

  Item 10: Yellow T-shirt, large quantity of blood; blood identified as canine.

  Item 16: Blond wig, traces of type O blood inside consistent with a head wound.

  Those listings convinced Windy that Daisy had been killed for her derision of the Home Wrecker. Which meant that in addition to the green Saab, Eve had a mid- to late-eighties Camaro IROC-Z, perhaps the most muscled-out muscle car of them all. She thought of the tire impressions, perfectly preserved gatorbacks, the kind of tires only a serious car buff would buy. And then she tried to place Eve behind the wheel.

  She couldn’t do it. Maybe Eve borrowed the car, she told herself. Maybe. But all the doubts she had been having came nagging back. Her eyes roamed over the notes all over her desk and kept coming back, over and over again, to Crest White Strips.

  She sprinted from her office to Ash’s flapping the file in front of her.

  “If you’re planning an armed assault on my Twinkies—” he started to say, but stopped.

  She leaned over his desk, cheeks red, out of breath and said, “We’ve got it backwards. Eve Sebastian isn’t the killer at all.”

  CHAPTER 76

  Windy took three deep breaths and went on. “All the evidence is just window dressing, to make us notice the wrong things.”

  Ash eyed her skeptically. “You’re saying we need to ignore the evidence? That’s a new approach. Gerald will like it.”

  “Stop being snide. Not ignore it, but reinterpret it.”

  “How can you reinterpret away the fact that she was at all the murder scenes?”

  “That’s not a fact.”

  “We’ve got her hair, her cigarette butts, Diet Coke cans—why are you shaking your head?”

  “The hair is phony. It’s her hair, certainly, but none of the pieces, not one, has a bulb on it. That means it is all broken, the way hair is when it comes from a brush or comb, rather than pulled out, the way it is in a struggle.”

  “You think the killer collected and then dispersed Eve’s hair.”

  “Yes. And I think he did the same thing with her cigarette butts. There were butts at Nadene’s house, but no ashes. And there was no ashtray at Eve’s.”

  “So your killer took the ashtray and is using the cigarette butts as plants. To make it seem like Eve was present.”

  “Exactly. The Diet Coke cans at Nadene’s too. Those would be easy to take from Eve’s house and easy to store for later use. But leaving them at Nadene’s was actually a miscalculation on the part of the killer, because it’s too obvious. While someone might bring Diet Coke with them when they go to murder, two cans is, well, overkill, and the chances of them chucking the cans and forgetting about possible prints on them when they haven’t left prints anywhere else, is laughable. All of that is evidence that is a cinch to plant.”

  “What about the shopping list you found? Eve’s prints were on that.”

  “Print, yes. Because she turned the page. She wrote Nadene’s flight number on the next page. There is not enough writing for a really good comparison, but it’s different than the writing on
the shopping list. Which is different from the writing on the back of a photo Eve gave Trish.”

  “Eve wrote on that photo seventeen years ago.”

  “Sure. But the writing on the shopping list looks a lot like the writing on the walls in The Pit.”

  Ash nodded. “What else?”

  “Eating toast with the victims doesn’t make sense for Eve.”

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t eat carbohydrates.”

  “ ‘Defense by Atkins Diet.’ But we know irrefutably that she and her car were outside the houses. We know she lived in all of them. We know she had the tape used at the Waterses’ murder. Motive, means, opportunity. Reinterpretation?”

  “Yes she lived in the houses, and yes she sat outside them, for reasons we can only guess. But the tape was planted in her townhouse.”

  “How? By whom?”

  “By the ex-boyfriend she ran to when she heard that the police were looking for green cars, I am guessing. The one who used to follow her from house to house when she was younger, and is now getting his revenge on her for some real or perceived slight, by framing her for murders he is committing.”

  “Harold Williams. You think Harry is the killer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where is Eve?”

  “I thought that was obvious. Eve is dead.”

  “What?”

  “You found the evidence. The fingerprints from the doorjamb at the O’Connells’. We know those are Eve’s. Based on the placement and the intensity—someone was holding on very tight—I think she left them when she was fighting Harry off. I may be wrong, she may be alive, but that would put Harry in a difficult position.”

  “Why?”

  “His whole plan depends on framing her. Shifting the blame for the crimes from him to her.”

  “So Harry lived in the O’Connell house, not Eve. Harry was the one who spent time in The Pit. And Harry hates Eve. Can you deduce any more about him from the evidence?”