by P. J. Tracy
“Oh, really? You thought I’d get a kick out of being reminded of one of the most humiliating experiences of my life?”
Grace looked positively merry. “Hey, you were a babe. You still have the pictures?”
“No, I do not still have the pictures, and would you please keep your voice down? Do you have any idea of what kind of flak I’d get from those guys out there if they found out …”
“That you modeled Speedos?”
“It was a one-time thing. I needed the money. And they were not Speedos.”
“They were tiny. Really tiny.” She grinned, waiting for the blush to start creeping up his neck, for his eyes to start blinking rapidly the way they always did when she teased him about something, but he surprised her.
“You’re bringing it all up again, Grace,” he said, his expression deadly serious. “I never thought you’d want to do that.”
And then Grace was the one who blinked.
Chapter 7
That night Grace watched from the stove as Charlie climbed slowly up onto the kitchen chair, carefully placing his massive paws to avoid tipping it over. It had taken him a long time and many toenail-scrabbling falls to the linoleum to teach himself the trick, and Grace thought that in doggy terms, Charlie was probably a genius.
Once he had all four paws centered on the slippery wood seat, he turned by inches until his stub of a tail brushed the chair back, then sat down with an audible sigh.
“You are a brilliant animal.” Grace smiled at him. Charlie smiled back, letting his tongue fall out.
She had no idea why the dog insisted on sitting in chairs, but she understood panic when she saw it, and the first night she’d brought him home from the alley where she’d found him, Charlie had panicked when she’d tried to keep him off the furniture. He hadn’t lain on the floor with his head in his paws, whining pathetically; he’d danced on his hind feet, howling in terror, as if the floor were writhing with monsters, and height was his only salvation.
He was full-grown then, but obviously weak from near starvation, and she’d had to help him up into a chair, acting first and thinking only later that the strange dog could easily have turned on her with flashing teeth.
But Charlie hadn’t done that. Once she had him safely above whatever nightmares lived on her floor, he’d only whined softly and licked her face, over and over, making Grace laugh, and then strangely, making her cry.
“Which was more than all those silly psychiatrists were able to do,” she told Charlie, as if he’d been privy to her mental reminiscing. He cocked his head at her, then nudged the heavy ceramic bowl on the table in front of him, politely reminding her that supper was late.
It was lamb stew tonight. Grace took hers without kibble.
After supper Charlie headed for the couch and Grace headed for the long, narrow room sandwiched between the kitchen and dining room. A pantry, originally, the realtor had told her, back in the early part of the century when the house was young.
It was the first room Grace had remodeled, stripping the floors and refinishing the wood, replacing the one existing window with stained glass in deep, impenetrable colors. You couldn’t see the bars on the outside of the window anymore, and no one could see in, either.
There was a desk-high counter on one wall where computers hummed twenty-four hours a day, and barely enough floor space for a rolling chair that Grace rode up and down the length of the counter.
“You can’t possibly work in here.” Mitch had been horrified when he’d seen it. “This isn’t an office; it’s a coffin.” But it was the one place in the world where Grace felt almost safe.
She walked to the big IBM that was networked to all the office computers. “Come on, come on.” She spun the ball on the mouse to bring the computer out of suspend mode, and waited impatiently, fingers poised over the keyboard.
She’d been struggling with a stubborn command line for the last murder all day at the office and had finally visualized the solution during dinner. She could hardly wait to test it.
She heard the familiar muffled sounds of the hard drive examining itself, then finally, the soft crackle of the monitor coming to life. She’d imposed a digital photo of Charlie on her desktop, long tongue lolling, eyes half closed as if he were smiling around a secret. It always made her smile.
She reached for the function key that would call up the programming file for Serial Killer Detective, but never had a chance to push it. She frowned when the screen suddenly went black, then froze as the scrawled red message appeared on her screen.
WANT TO PLAY A GAME?
She straightened slowly, her eyes glued to the words on the monitor that simply shouldn’t be there; not unless she’d called up the game file, and even then, not until she’d moved to the second screen.
Glitch, she thought. It has to be a glitch. But even knowing that, for a moment she still felt that old fear tiptoeing up her spine, prickling at the back of her neck, paralyzing her.
The past ten years vanished in an instant, leaving the younger Grace that still lived in her mind huddled in a dark closet, trembling uncontrollably, being very, very quiet.
Chapter 8
Alena Vershovsky walked in mincing steps, teetering on the highest heels she’d ever worn, constricted by the tight dress. In this deathly quiet place she could actually hear the sequins rubbing against one another, snicking like the scales of a snake scraping across grains of desert sand.
“Sequins make noise,” she whispered, lips parted in delight.
“Yes they do. Aren’t they wonderful?”
Alena nodded happily, then held up her fingers to look at them again. As dark as it was, she could still see the red enamel gleam of the long press-on nails, making it look like someone else’s hands were dangling at the ends of her wrists.
Oh, how she loved this. Never had she dressed in such a way, and with good reason. Her parents would have killed her. But this was the first night of her life away from home—a night for breaking rules and taking chances with a stranger who was going to change her life.
She’d always known that fate would find her, that she wouldn’t have to go looking for it like ordinary people. Let the plain girls settle for the trinity of boredom—education, marriage, children—Alena was better than that, more beautiful than that, and soon everyone would know it.
Alena shivered as a gust of wind hit her. She hoped she wouldn’t have to take off the dress—it wasn’t much protection from the cold, but at least it was something. She also hoped there wouldn’t be any sex involved. She’d heard that photographers sometimes tried to have sex with their models before they were stars. But it didn’t really matter, she supposed. She’d had sex for worse reasons before.
“Here we are.”
Alena stopped and looked up at the huge sculpture and immediately understood the heavy, garish makeup, the fishnet hose and the revealing dress. She could see now what the photographer envisioned for the first photograph in her portfolio: a whore transported on the wings of an angel. A striking image—a mesmerizing photograph—and not so very far from the truth after all.
The climb was difficult, especially when she had to worry about the stone snagging the stockings or scraping her brand-new nails, but eventually she managed to position herself across one of the cold, massive wings. “Is this all right?”
“Almost perfect. I’m just going to climb up and clip your hair back. It’s beautiful—did you know that?”
Alena smiled. Of course she knew that.
“But it’s blocking part of that million-dollar face. We certainly can’t have that.”
The fingers were soft on her cheek as they tucked her hair behind her ear, and they lingered there a moment. “You’re going to be very famous, Alena.”
And even though that had been the whole point, when Alena felt the cold circle of metal that didn’t feel like a hair clip at all, thoughts of fame disintegrated in an instant. She thought of her mother, saw her warm, gentle face, and then she felt th
e wing of the angel shift powerfully beneath her, and start to lift her up.
Chapter 9
Sheriff Michael Halloran pushed his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he opened them again, he saw Sharon Mueller standing in his office doorway.
“Those things’ll kill your eyes.” She nodded toward the green-shaded lamp on his desk.
“It’s a reading lamp. I’ve been reading.”
“It’s too dark in here for reading.” She reached for the wall switch, dropped her hand when he shook his head. She was wearing her heavy jacket, collar pulled up around her ears because her hair was too short to do the job.
“You coming or going?” Halloran asked. “And if you’re going, what’re you still doing here? It’s almost midnight.”
“Stuff on the Kleinfeldts. Don’t worry. I’m off the clock.”
“I’m not worried, and you’re not off the clock.”
She wandered into the office and started touching things—furniture, books, the cord for the blinds Halloran never pulled over the big window. He’d known a lot of women who did that whenever they entered someone else’s environment, as if they could gather information through their fingertips. She stopped directly in front of his desk. “How’s your hand?”
“What do you mean?”
“Bonar said you put it through a wall at the Kleinfeldts’ this afternoon.”
“I was annoyed.” And he was annoyed now, too. “I asked you what you were doing here so late.”
She looked at him for a minute, then sat down in a chair facing his desk. “I’ve been looking at all the interviews from today. Mine and everybody else’s.”
“Did Simons tell you to do that?”
“No, but it needed doing.” She tossed a thick file folder onto his desk. Several sheets of paper were stapled to the front cover. “Individual reports are inside. That’s a list of all the parishioners, all checked off except a couple—one guy was in the hospital, another couple was visiting their daughter in Nebraska, like that. No red flags anywhere.”
“You talked to everybody they tried getting banned from the church?”
“Oh yeah. Twenty-three of them, can you believe that? Four are actually gay, in case you’re interested.”
“They told you that?”
“Hell, no. But they are.”
Halloran glanced down at the list and saw names he’d known his whole life. Sharon had marked the ones the Kleinfeldts had accused of homosexuality with a yellow highlighter. When he caught himself wondering which ones were actually gay, he set the list aside. “But no red flags.”
Sharon shrugged. “Not really. Oh, a lot of them were pissed; a few of them even tried beating the Kleinfeldts at their own game—getting them kicked out of the church for bearing false witness or something like that. But it turns out the Catholics will forgive you for breaking one of the Ten Commandments. You can still be a card-carrying Pope dope. On the other hand, practice a sexual preference in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult and you’re out of there. Jerks.” She blew out a long, exasperated sigh. “Anyway, after the first few accusations, nobody paid much attention anymore. I mean, the Kleinfeldts thought Mrs. Wickers was gay. The woman is eighty-three years old and totally around the bend, doesn’t have a clue what a homosexual is, let alone if she might be one. Her kids are bitter about it—hell, a lot of the twenty-three are—but none of them are homicidal. Trust me.”
“I do.”
“Okay. I also checked in with VICAP and NCIC. We’ve got the only creative thoracic carver in the country at the moment. At least with a religious theme. There’s a guy in Omaha doing breasts, but he’s just chopping them off, and if you were talking genitalia, even faces, they’ve got a wide assortment …” Suddenly she pressed her lips together and stared hard at a point on the wall behind his head. “There’s stuff going on out there you wouldn’t believe, Halloran, you know?”
She looked at him, stood up, then sat down again. “You look bad. You need to go home.”
“So do you. Good night, Sharon.” He pulled a stack of papers into the pool of light and started reading again.
“You want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Danny.”
“Christ, no.” He kept reading.
“Well, I do.”
“Then go do it somewhere else.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mike.”
“I am not one of your abuse cases, Sharon, and I don’t need analysis from a kid with a penny-ante U of W psych degree, so give it a rest.”
“You’re doing the mea culpa Catholic thing. It’s stupid.”
“Fuck you, Sharon, goddamn it.”
“Well, that might help, but I don’t think you’re ready for it yet. Never heard you say the F-word before.”
Halloran looked at this nice young Wisconsin woman who dealt with sexual abuse of children almost every day of her life, and yet couldn’t bring herself to say the F-word. “Get out of here,” he said wearily. “Go home. Leave me alone.”
She sat there quietly for a moment, staring at the stacks of papers on his desk. “What are you looking for?”
“Go.”
“Can’t do it. I love this place. The buzzing fluorescent lights, the lingering smell of sweat, the sexual harassment—I can’t get enough.”
Halloran pushed his chair a few inches back from his desk and looked at her. “Tell me what I’ve got to do to get rid of you.”
“What are all those?” She nodded at the stacks of papers.
Halloran sighed. “Stuff we pulled out of a home office at the Kleinfeldts’. Paid bills, some receipts, tax returns, mostly.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Bank statements, correspondence …?”
Halloran shook his head. “Nothing. They paid cash for everything. I ran a credit check this afternoon when we came up empty at the house, and these people simply did not exist in any databank in the country.”
“That’s impossible.”
“That’s what I would have said before today, but I’m running out of rocks to turn over. DMV didn’t even have anything, and that really frosts me. As far as I can tell, the Kleinfeldts have been driving in my county for the past ten years without a driver’s license.”
Sharon was really interested now. She was leaning forward, eyeing the papers on his desk, trying to read upside down. “They were really hiding.”
“They really were.”
“And whoever they were hiding from obviously found them.”
“Unless you ascribe to Commissioner Heimke’s theory that it was either a gangland slaying or a nomadic psycho.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I kid you not.” He thumbed through a packet of papers on top of one of the stacks: a five-year-old tax return. “Anyway, if you’re nixing disgruntled parishioners, I’ve got to find somebody else who at least knew these people enough to want them dead, and there certainly isn’t anyone in this county that qualifies. They might as well have been hermits.”
“So you’re getting their old addresses from tax returns.”
“That’s what I thought I was doing, but the copies only go back ten years, just as long as they’ve lived here. So I called the IRS to request previous addresses and got some song and dance about privileged information and special dispensation, and when I threatened warrant the little snip on the other end said good luck on the journey through Federal court, he’d talk to me in about fifty years.”
“Jerks,” Sharon muttered, getting up and heading for the door.
“I thought the Catholics were the jerks.”
“It’s a big category. There’s room for everybody. Give me a minute.”
“To what?” He followed her out into the main office, squinting in the sudden brightness, noticing for the first time the persistent buzz of the overhead fluorescents. He looked around at all the empty desks. “Where are Cleaton a
nd Billings?”
“Downstairs.” Sharon settled into her chair, grabbed the phone, and punched in a number from memory. “Melissa’s on dispatch tonight. Nobody works up here when Melissa’s on dispatch. Haven’t you ever been here for the third?”
“Not that I can remember.” Halloran dropped into Cleaton’s chair at the desk next to Sharon’s and called up a mental image of Melissa Kemke, the Marilyn Monroe look-alike who was the deputy manning dispatch tonight. “They don’t harass her, do they?”
Sharon snorted. “Not unless they have a death wish. They just like to look at her. She thinks it’s funny.”
“She does?”
“Of course.”
Of course? He was missing something about women. Again. “Who are you calling at this hour anyway?”
“A guy who never sleeps … Jimmy? Sharon. Listen, we’re looking for previous addresses on the Kleinfeldts. You heard about them? Yeah, well, we’re getting stonewalled by your people. Some sort of special dispensation shit …” She listened silently for a moment, then said, “You can do that? Banzai.”
She hung up and spun her chair to face Halloran.
“You got a mole in the IRS?” he asked.
She ignored the question. “Apparently it’s possible to keep your addresses off the form under special circumstances. Witness protection, stalkers, stuff like that. That’s probably what the Kleinfeldts did, and addresses like that aren’t accessible, even by subpoena. IRS keeps them locked down. Now under the circumstances, since they’re dead and all, we might be able to get them after we jump through about a thousand hoops at the Federal level, like your guy said, but that could take months.”
“Damn it.”
“Anyway, he’s gonna call back. Shouldn’t take long.”
Halloran blinked at her. “He’s going to get the addresses? Now?”
“Sure.”
“Isn’t that against the law?”
“Oh yeah, but Jimmy’s a pretty decent hacker. He can hook up to the database from his home computer and make it look like the contact came from Timbuktu. They’ll never figure it out. He’s the guy they call when someone else tries to do it.”