Rhonda suddenly lunged around the table to grab a fax coming off the machine. As she did so, her elbow snagged the side of Bunty’s briefcase, spinning it off the table edge. We both knelt to pick up the spilt contents. Among all the loose papers and file folders, there were at least four different bottles of prescription drugs.
“I got it, I got it,” Rhonda backed me away and I moved over to the fax machine, pretending that I hadn’t seen the name “Barbara Crabtree,” and the label of the chemotherapy drug, “Cytoxan” on one of bottles of pills. Bunty’s weight loss, paleness, weakness, her thin hair and sudden sweats now made sense. I’d seen the worry in Rhonda’s eyes as she helped her friend to sit or stand, but I wasn’t sure she would want to talk about it, just as I had never wanted to talk about losing Copper, not even to Alice.
We talked about the fax instead. It was from the cruise ship’s purser’s office and informed us that Kristin Stiller had cashed paychecks amounting to $983 a day before leaving the ship. I said, “Think Kristin was running out of money by the time she got to Hillston? Maybe she took this photo to Shear Inspirations to apply for a job.”
While Rhonda and I were talking about John Walker, son of the evasive Mrs. Doris Nutz, the phone rang. It was Zeke at the desk, saying that Cuddy wanted me down the hall in the forensics lab. “I think maybe the chief just got another one of those sick presents from Guess Who.”
• • •
In the white organized clutter of Room 107, the forensics laboratory of the Cadmean Building, Etham Foster perched on a stool, his long legs folded under him like a crane, carefully dusting a baggie for prints. The delicate precision of his enormous hands was hypnotizing, and Cuddy, staring at his work, didn’t notice my entrance. “Nope, nothing,” Etham said.
Cuddy bent over to look at the bottom of a plastic container. “How ’bout a laser wand, Etham? Could we use a wand on them?”
Our head criminalist grumbled at him, “You’re driving me crazy.”
“You wanted to see me?” I called.
Cuddy made no reference to the outburst I’d witnessed yesterday between him and Mitch Bazemore in the hall. Instead, he held up a small box whose brown paper wrapping had been neatly opened. On the paper, red block letters now sickeningly familiar addressed the package to “Captain C.R. Mangum, HPD.” Although hand-delivered (there were no stamps or post office markings), it had somehow found its way into the morning pouch of HPD mail that was left as always on the station sergeant’s desk. When Cuddy arrived this morning, he’d checked through the mail Zeke had set aside for him. As soon as he saw the red magic marker on the box, he’d called in Bob Zolinsky, our explosives expert. But there was no bomb inside. So they’d brought the box down to Etham to dust it for prints. Inside they’d found two plastic zip-lock baggies. In the bag on the bottom was the discharged shell of a single brass-capped bullet, thirty-eight caliber. It proved to have blood of Lucy Griggs’s type on it. Inside the other bag, there were two viscous filmy globules of tissue and nerves that had once been human eyes.
I said, “Eyes on a shell.”
Cuddy said, “What?”
“It’s a pun. Remember Paul Madison told me about the pictures of St. Lucy where she’s carrying her eyes on a shell.” I pointed at the bullet shell in the second baggie. “Eyes on a shell. It’s another one of his puns, like headshot. Guess Who. It was in the police mail pouch? Jesus.”
Cuddy took a long breath and slowly let it out. “Goddamn bastard.”
There was a knock at the door, then Zeke Caleb stuck in his warrior’s head with its long black ponytail, and waved an envelope at Cuddy. “Chief, sorry to bug you, but the mayor needs you to look at this and get back to him.”
Cuddy took out a single sheet of paper, read it, balled it up in his fist and tossed it in the trashcan as he strode angrily out of the room. Etham swung silently back to the quiet safety of his microscope. I fished the letter out of the trash, straightened the page, and read it. It was a formal letter from the Hillston city council asking C.R. Mangum to submit his resignation as chief of police. I showed it to Etham. We both saw the important thing right away. The twelve signatures of the city council members were stacked neatly on top of one another. (Three of them were friends of Tyler Norris’s parents; two others had been trying to get rid of Cuddy since the day he arrived.) But to force the chief of police to resign, in other words to fire him, required a formal request from Hillston’s mayor as well as its city council. And Mayor Carl Yarborough had not signed the letter.
Chapter 21
Visitors Lounge
After an interrogation yesterday that had lasted more than five hours, Nancy had learned a great deal about John Everett Walker. She learned that he was a musician who hadn’t caught a break because it was all about who you know. That he was living with the Mood Disorders because Lucy Griggs had been a bitch and had thrown him out of their apartment (where he’d never paid rent). That he was a small-time drug dealer because his mother, Doris Nutz, owner of Shear Inspirations, was too cheap to give him more of her money. He was a victim not of an indifferent world, but a malign one, energetically focused on doing him harm.
In short, he was an addict and whatever brains he’d once possessed had been so jangled by drugs that listening to his ping-ponging thoughts was, Nancy told me, “like walking through a shag carpet full of fleas.” His anger at Lucy for leaving him had not been softened by the news of her savage death. In fact, he tearfully blamed Lucy’s death on their break-up (“I wouldn’t ever have let anybody hurt her like that!”) and blamed their break-up on his mother. (“She was always against anything I wanted.”) The other members of the Mood Disorders were also to blame: “They knew Lucy and me had something special and they couldn’t rest ’til they brought us down.” Everybody was to blame except John Everett Walker.
Eager for Nancy’s ostensible sympathy, he had finally admitted to stalking and harassing Lucy, although he preferred to think of his phoning her a dozen times a night, chasing her down the street to shake and slap her, and smashing into her car with his mother’s Thunderbird, as “just doing everything I could to get her to come back to me.” As for the mysterious lover for whom Lucy had apparently discarded him, John first denied that any such person existed, then admitted that he’d tried to track the man down by following his former girlfriend. But he’d never succeeded in catching Lucy with anyone, a failure he blamed on the police, his mother, and his friends: the police for revoking his driver’s license and his mother and friends for not letting him use their cars anymore.
“But get this,” mumbled Nancy, eating a Wendy’s burger in the squad room where we were talking. “I pull it out of him like hauling a key up from a sewer with an old wad of gum. Guess who John paid to tail Lucy?” Nancy pointed at the photo of Kristin Stiller on my desk. “G.I. Jane.”
“He knew her? He admits it?”
“Yep. He’s ‘cooperating.’ That’s why he agreed to give us blood and hair samples. ‘I got nothing to hide,’ he says and he tells me this whole story. Jane, I mean, Kristin, hitchhikes into town a couple of weeks before Christmas—headed to New York, she told him. She just stopped here because her ride did. John says he didn’t know much about her, not that she quit a cruise ship or nothing. She’s out of cash so she’s looking for work cutting hair like she did on her ship. John hooks up with her when she tries Shear Inspirations for a job. She gives them her photo but Doris blows her off.”
I said, “Which means Doris blew us off too when she said she never saw Kristin. I guess it’s mother lion protecting her cub. John’s starting to look good, Nancy. He’s got personal relations to two victims. He’s a cokehead. History of physical harassment. Catholic? Go to a Catholic school?”
Nancy studied a small frayed spiral notepad. “Nope. Hillston High, then Roper Community. Doris was a Baptist and he’s not anything.”
“You ask him about saints?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah. The best he could do was the St. Louis Cardinals.”
“But John paid Kristin to tail Lucy and find out who Mr. X was, right?”
“Right.” Nancy had learned that when four Frances Bush seniors sharing a rental house on Tuscadora (a few blocks from mine) had all gone home for Christmas, John had given Kristin their place to crash in for a few weeks. He’d had a key to the house. “One of the Bushers gave it to him so he could water the plants while they were gone. I talked to this girl, she was so tense I bet he was dealing her pot or worse. She says they all freaked when they got back around January 10 and it’s like Goldilocks—who’s been sleeping in my bed and cleaning out my fridge? But they never said anything about it to HPD.” And while the coeds were gone, nobody on the block had noticed that Kristin was there. There were so many young women in and out of the place, neighbors had stopped paying attention.
Nor did Kristin ever discover on Walker’s behalf who the mysterious man in Lucy’s life was. Or at least she never told him if she did. What she did tell him was that she was going to spend the Christmas holidays with Bo Derek, the hairdresser she’d met at Shear Inspirations and with whom she’d struck up an apparently fast friendship. John said she told him her plans when he’d talked with her on Christmas Eve at his mother’s salon. He claimed he’d never seen her again after that.
Our question now was, when Miss Derek left town so suddenly on Christmas Eve after robbing her employer, Mrs. Nutz, and stealing her landlady’s car, did Kristin Stiller go with her? Had Kristin in fact been her partner in the robbery? Was it even possible that Bo Derek had killed Kristin? And if so, had she killed Cathy and Lucy as well?
It was a long shot. Serial killers are almost exclusively male, and the few female serial killers there are on record have tended to murder men. But, as Bunty admitted, there are exceptions to every rule, even at the FBI.
As for the FBI, it didn’t take them very long to trace the stolen Toyota and its thief Bo Derek, who proved to be a current inmate at the Virginia Correction Center for Women. Tracking her down (and Bo Derek actually was her legal name) proved to be a great deal easier than identifying G.I. Jane had been. Bo had been incarcerated at VCCW since January. And she’d been arrested on Christmas Day—which meant she hadn’t killed Lucy Griggs.
I walked over to the medical examiner’s office to check with Dick Cohen about another possibility. Was there any chance that Kristin Stiller (G.I. Jane) could have been killed as early as Christmas Eve?
Dick told me no. It would mean Jane’s body had been exposed to weather for three months rather than two. If it had been much colder last winter, that might have been possible, but the January weather had been unseasonably warm with only two days when the temperature dropped below freezing. Judging from the condition of Kristin’s body, Dick’s best bet was that she’d lain outdoors for no more than seven or eight weeks. He felt certain that she had been murdered between the end of January and the middle of February. If Dick was right, Bo Derek was not a homicide suspect on Kristin Stiller either. But she was definitely our best lead to Kristin’s last days. Nancy and I made an appointment to visit her in prison. She wasn’t at all eager to hear two police officers from Hillston, North Carolina, would be coming to visit her, but then she didn’t have much choice.
• • •
The task force worked until one in the morning, assembling all the information we’d gathered so far about the homicides. Cuddy had said nothing about the district attorney’s ordering him to turn the Guess Who case over to Sheriff Homer Louge’s department immediately. Obviously Mitch was acting on orders from A.G. Ward Trasker and Ward wanted someone running the investigation who wouldn’t investigate anything awkward. Obviously Cuddy was calling his bluff.
At two, I was home on the clawfoot couch, drinking my Calvados, listening to a CD I’d just bought of Mavis Mahar’s first recordings called Light at Midnight. No wonder it had made her a star; she offered the most intimate privacy while at the same time promising, through every gliding catch, every strange modulation of key, such large and intense feeling that the sound of her voice was like a great drum beating out not just her own heart’s pulse but everyone else’s too.
The doorbell suddenly rang. Because I’d been thinking about Mavis, I was not even startled that her dresser Dermott Quinn stood there, looking even paler and scrawnier in his jeans and black T-shirt. The shirt had a red drawing of the rock star’s face above the words, “Mavis. On the Devil’s Horn,” the name of her newest CD. In the dark beyond Dermott, I could see the shadowy black limousine waiting at the curb. In front of it was a BMW sedan. Both had their motors running.
He smiled when he heard the CD I was playing. “It’s me, Lieutenant, Dermott Quinn. Mavis is off to the airport but she’s hoping to talk to you.” The Irishman spoke almost nonchalantly, as if he had fully expected to find me awake and waiting for him at two in the morning. Then he started back down my front walk as if there was no question that I would follow.
And shirtless and barefoot I did.
Dermott opened the rear door of the limousine for me. I saw her smiling in the far corner of the lush leathery seat, a glass of whiskey held out to me. There was a smoked glass barrier between her and the front seat where presumably an invisible chauffeur sat at the wheel. Music came softly from everywhere, her music, “I Want You More.”
She was dressed only in a short soft linen shift the color of wheat. Slowly raising a bare leg, she wiggled her bare foot at me. Like her fingers, her toenails were painted hyacinth and on two of the toes there were silver bands with tiny bells on them. “Isn’t this what you were wanting to know? Rings on my fingers, bells on my toes?”
I slipped into the seat beside her. Dermott Quinn closed the door and stepped away from the huge car as it moved smoothly mysteriously forward, taking me from the house where I knew I belonged and should stay.
“That’s a fine strong chest you have,” Mavis said and moved her fingers down my breastbone. “Dermott wants me to marry you. Did you know that then? So you can take care of me. It’s his grand scheme. He thinks a police officer could keep me safe.”
“No one can keep anyone safe,” I said. I took the crystal glass from her. The amber gold of the whiskey was the color of her hair. I toasted her and drank. “So, Mavis, what have you been up to?”
“I’ve been up to good.” She smiled. “Good Mavis mending fences, workin’ hard. The likes of the little Irish scullery maid your fancy family kept in their attic.”
I said, “Not many Irish maids in the South. We had other, older oppressions to call on. Are you flying off from us?”
“Aye, New York. I’m singing in the park there.”
“Central Park?”
She nodded. “But then I’ll be coming back in a few days. I’m giving that concert I missed at Haver Field.” Her bare foot rubbed against mine and the bells on her toes chinkled. “And I’m hoping you’ll cook me another fine meal at your house on the lake. Would you do that for me, Lieutenant?” Her hand moved down my chest to the belt of my pants. “I’ll sing for my supper. I’ll sing you all the music inside me.” Her hand was warm on me.
She raised her leg so I could kiss the hyacinth toes. I moved my lips along her foot to her ankle and to the luminous flesh at the back of her knee. She took the drink from me and slipped the shift above her waist.
The deep powered engine drove us into the night.
• • •
At the airport, eerily quiet in the neon light, Dermott Quinn opened the rear door just as if he hadn’t closed it on us thirty minutes earlier. He told Mavis that her plane was leaving in ten minutes and he told me that the driver would take me home and that he wished me all the best in finding my killer. On the gleaming tarmac, I could see thin young men in black quickly unloading musical instruments from a van parked in front of us onto a trolley under the direction of a tall young woman. She was also in bl
ack, with bright frizzy red hair, and I took her to be the manager Bernadette Davey. The young men I recognized from the covers of CDs as members of her band The Easter Uprising. Porters raced the luggage trolley toward a Cessna jet waiting on a runway. Very modish blue and black letters spelled the name of her recording company “MEGA” across the side of the plane.
Mavis brushed her hair with quick sure strokes. I asked her to tell me before she left if her driver had ever come across Lucy Griggs’s mesh purse with the photos in it. She said no. And she’d never gone back to The Fifth Season either. All her belongings had been brought to her suite at the Sheraton. “Do you still think it was me the man wanted to murder? Because it’s for certain he’s not very good at killing if so. Here I am.”
“There’s a possibility he knew his victim was Lucy. But you should still take care.”
She laughed. “I’ll take care, Lieutenant. Taking care of business in a flash, that was Elvis’s slogan, did you know?”
“You should meet our police chief, Cuddy Mangum, he’s a big Elvis fan. And he likes your music too. Which is amazing because I thought he only liked Patsy Cline. But he wouldn’t like my seeing you like this. He’s a very moral man.”
“Ah is he? And yourself, you’re a lovely sad man.”
I smiled at her. “You think so?”
“I know so. I’ve sold fifty million records from knowing how a heart hurts. You should listen to yours, me boyo.” She put on lipstick without looking. “Oh, about that girl Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“You were asking what she was saying about loving this married man and all that?” I nodded. “It came back to me one thing she said, very dramatic like, ‘His whole life’s in the palm of my hand. And he knows it too.’”
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