Killing Streak

by Merit Clark

  He took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled. He watched his breath fog. There was nothing like the calm—the peace—he felt after finishing. If only the feeling lasted longer. The animal that lived inside of him was sated for the moment. He inhaled more draughts of the cold air. Evan felt intense relief. No shame; not anymore, not for a long time.

  He looked around. It was snowing heavily and more than an inch had already accumulated; the wind blew it in icy sheets across the still form on the stairs. Sulfur lights mounted on the exterior of the trailer gave everything a pinkish cast. He gazed for a moment into the trees at the edge of the clearing around the trailer, his breathing deep and even. It was a shame he had a long drive ahead of him because all he wanted to do was sleep; he always slept soundly after he played. Evan forced himself to move.

  He walked to a spigot with a hose connected, lifted the lever, and turned it on. He held the nozzle above his head, cleansing and refreshing himself with the icy water. It occurred to him that most people would find it unpleasant and he wondered, as he often did, why people were so weak. They were cold, they were hungry, they were tired. People always sought comfort.

  When he was finished washing he looked around, surveyed the scene, and put himself for a moment inside the mind of a criminal investigator. How would he sign this landscape? Each killing was a work of art and, like a painter, Evan signed each canvas. If only the police were smart enough to read it. So far they hadn’t been.

  Evan left the hose running and draped it over the railing at the top of the stairs so the frigid water ran down over the body. Lovely. He’d never used running water before. Why hadn’t he thought of it? The water would run without freezing obliterating footprints, tire marks, diluting blood, degrading DNA; it would wash her clean.

  He retrieved a large piece of cashmere from where it had snagged against the bottom step and held the soft remnant to his cheek. A souvenir. Perfect. He considered what to do with her cell phone and smiled when he had the answer. He propped the phone on one of her lifeless hands and used her finger to dial Jack one last time.

  Chapter 58

  Corie came back from Safeway and it didn’t look like Jack had moved, although there was now a beer bottle on the table next to the couch. Murphy had climbed up and was stretched out near Jack’s feet.

  “Aww,” Corie said.

  “I’m too sick to even care that I’m sharing the couch with a dog,” Jack said.

  “I’ll put your wallet back on your dresser.”

  “I know how much money was in there.”

  She picked up the beer bottle. “Are you sure you should be drinking?”

  “Beer settles my stomach.”

  “I bet that works real well. Here. Try and keep this down.” She handed him a pill and swapped the beer for a glass of water.

  “Didn’t you have trouble filling that?”

  “Nah. I said I was getting it for my husband.” He stared at her blankly. “Wow, you really are sick.”

  Jack sat up long enough to take the pill, then fell back over onto his side. “I don’t ever take these.”

  Apparently he hadn’t listened to his messages. Corie watched him and chewed the inside of her lip, debating. God, she wanted to tell him; she was desperate to tell him. But Jack was in no shape to do anything and he would want to. Corie swallowed hard. What difference would a few more hours make?

  Murphy, on the other end of the couch, shifted position and curled up into a ball. The sight made her impossibly sad. “That really is too cute.” Neither one answered her.

  Corie walked into the kitchen and stared out into the backyard. The snow fell and fell; the roads were slick and treacherous driving back from the store. Ordinarily she loved snow. But now it made her think of simpler times, innocent times, and the bright contrast of who she used to be with the darkness now was unbearable. Where was Evan? Corie exhaled, a deep shuddering breath. He wouldn’t dare look for her here.

  Tomorrow. Jack will fix it tomorrow.

  She checked on her patient and then, back in the kitchen, found his wine supply. Sometime into the second bottle, Chardonnay both lubricating her descent into despair and unleashing a thorough bout of self-pity, cutting her hair seemed like the thing to do. Penance. Who was it that cut his hair off and lost all of his strength? Hercules? No, that wasn’t right.

  In the bathroom Corie looked at herself in the mirror, picked up thick section of hair, and ran her fingers through it. She thought of all the biblical, symbolic uses for hair: washing Jesus’s feet, escape from the tower, drying tears. She pulled a long piece across her own cheek, touching her own tears. Yes.

  She rummaged through Jack’s kitchen looking for scissors. Should she be going through his things? Fuck it. Evan’s voice from the night she asked for the divorce, the night Brice died, floated back to her: ‘Things could have been so good.’ Yeah. Right. Whatever. Was that just a few days ago? Corie topped off her glass, sloshing some wine on the counter. Whoopsie.

  At some point she noticed Jack was no longer on the couch. She checked on him and found him sound asleep in bed, Murphy stretched out next to him. The dog looked up at her standing in the bedroom doorway. “Traitor,” she whispered. Jack didn’t stir.

  Cutting her hair wasn’t easy. Not that she cared what it was going to look like. The point—the whole point—was to do penance. But she had a lot of hair. And she was drunk. Her friend Anne told her once that you could gather your hair up as if to put it in a ponytail, cut straight across, and it would come out layered. Corie tried that, sawing with Jack’s scissors, which were bad. “This is going to take forever,” she told her reflection and then peeked into the bedroom again. “Great. Jack’ll find me talking to myself and be convinced I’m a lunatic.” But both he and the dog were sound asleep. The very pictures of contentment. Which made Corie cry harder.

  Soon there was hair everywhere—in the sink, on the counter, on the floor. The scissors made a kind of grinding sound as she cut. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Was she making too much noise? Would he hear? But every time she checked he was in the same spot under the covers. He even started to snore.

  Corie drank more wine and considered. Christ, I’ve got a lot of hair.

  Her glory, her mother used to tell her: ‘Other girls wish for hair like this.’ Vi believed in that old hundred strokes thing. When she was young Corie used to dread their bedtime hair brushing ritual.

  And then there was Evan. Corie felt a chill remembering his hands in her hair, the way he would lift it off of her neck, wrap it around his hand, or pull out a few strands and tug. And not a chill in a good way but one like you’d stepped onto an elevator only to find it wasn’t really there and you were in free fall.

  Her fucking hair hadn’t done her any good. Stupid hair. Annoying hair. Troublesome hair.

  “Goodbye, Vi,” she said, as another big hank fell to the floor.

  “Goodbye, Evan, you prick.” Squeak went the scissors.

  “Goodbye, Jack.” Where did that come from?

  She started weeping in earnest. Her life was never going to be any fucking good and no amount of Chardonnay was going to help. She picked up the glass anyway, drank, and set it back down precariously on the top of the toilet tank. Okay, maybe the wine helped a little. She scrubbed at her face with her hands and then stood in front of the sink and finished, cutting by feel until there was nothing left that was long enough to grab onto.

  “Take that, Evan. See if you still like me now. See if I’m still your beautiful Corie.” Being beautiful had done her no fucking good either. It had only hurt.

  She sat on the toilet and drained her glass. Then she rummaged through Jack’s kitchen again for a sponge and a trash bag, and forced herself to clean it all up. For some reason, when she was done cleaning the bathroom, the crying stopped on its own.

  Feeling strangely calm, she let herself out through the security door, into the alley. Lifting a lid on a Dumpster, she tossed in the bag filled with her glory. The thought made her
laugh. It was dark and quiet, not many people out and about because of the snow, lights off in the surrounding houses, sounds muted. A streetlight made a fizzy sound and flickered. She ran her fingers through what was left of her hair and savored the strangeness of it. She felt better. She had no idea why, but she did. Corie looked up at the stars and snow landed on her face; the cold felt good.

  Back inside the house, she walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. A stranger’s face stared back at her. It was Samson.

  Chapter 59

  Panting woke him, warm breath on his face. Jack opened his eyes, blinked, closed them, and then blinked again. There was a Border Collie on the bed staring at him. It was morning. Jack turned his head and looked at the slim form hidden under the covers.

  “Corie?” He put out a hand and touched her back. She moaned and pulled a pillow over her head.

  In the kitchen he saw the two empty wine bottles and understood the moaning. Jack put on coffee and was surprised to find food when he looked in the refrigerator. The pill bottle sat on the counter. He picked it up and stared at it. Murphy’s toenails clicked on the floor and Jack looked at him. “See? This is why I don’t take pills.” By way of answer, Murphy walked to a plastic bowl of water on the floor and drank.

  In the bathroom Jack noticed bits of blond hair stuck to the grout between the tiles. He frowned at them but figured he’d find out soon enough. In the meantime, he had about a thousand phone calls to return, including two from Aranda and one from Frank Yannelli.

  Jack called Frank first.

  “There you are,” Frank said. “Enjoying the snow? I have good news.”

  “I could certainly use some.”

  “The tox screen showed traces of ecstasy in Vangie Perez’s blood.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you get it? She was overheated. A very particular designer strain, too, called PCA. Not very common. It causes whoever takes it to overheat dramatically without any compensating increase in pleasure, or so they say. I wouldn’t know. There are documented cases of body temp still being elevated by as much as seven degrees hours after death.”

  Jack found it hard to breathe. “That changes the time of death?”

  “Moves it up. By as much as five or six hours.”

  “That’s fucking great.”

  He called Dani, Mike, and Serena in turn, and in between kept trying Aranda. Her last message had been weird. Aranda didn’t speak and it sounded like there was running water in the background. It filled the two minutes allowed on his voice mail, as if she’d accidentally hit redial without realizing. It wasn’t like Aranda not to call him back. He thought about calling Roger but decided there was no good reason to alarm the man yet. Almost two feet of snow had fallen; she was probably taking a snow day.

  He also talked to Jessie who still sounded friendly and accommodating. She said she assumed his plans had changed because of the snow. Jack tried to swallow his frustration at not talking to her last night. Jessie told him she would be available later that afternoon, and they signed off with him agreeing to call her when he had a definite time. That is, if Jessie didn’t lawyer up by then.

  Couldn’t be helped. The new information about Vangie changed everything.

  He tried to burn off nervous energy by shoveling snow. When he came back inside he heard the shower running. Finally, Corie was up. When she came out of the bathroom, Jack was glad he had years of practice keeping his face neutral in extreme situations because she looked like she’d used a lawn mower on her hair. She didn’t say anything, just slumped into a chair at the kitchen counter and put her head down on her arms so that he couldn’t see her face. She was wearing his robe. He put on a fresh pot of coffee. When it was ready he put a mug on the counter in front of her. She didn’t raise her head.

  “Hungry?” Jack asked.

  It looked like her head moved from side to side.

  “When you’re ready to talk about your messages, let me know.”

  Something was really wrong. In her voice mails she’d sounded frantic to see him. What else had he missed yesterday? Goddamn it. Goddamned cancer, goddamned radiation.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered how much warning he had, because nothing could have prepared Jack for what Corie was about to show him.

  When she came into the living room she had a pile of what looked like loose-leaf pages in her arms. She sat on the opposite end of the couch and dumped the papers between them. Jack looked at the pages and realized they were old calendars. He gave her a puzzled look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Evan’s tax records.” She explained which two years they were for and her rationale for taking them. “I’ll give you the complete address of the office so you can write a warrant. Hopefully everything will still be there.” Her eyes held on his for a short second and then skittered away before continuing.

  “This is what I wanted to tell you yesterday,” Corie said. “Evan was in Charlotte when Monique was killed.”

  Jack frowned, mentally reviewing Len’s statement. “Corie, we have a suspect in custody.”

  “Wait, please. Let me tell you.” Her voice faltered and she looked down for a few moments, her hands nervously rearranging the pages.

  Jack badly wanted to reach across the papers and touch her, but he didn’t.

  Corie looked up again and took a deep breath. “Evan had a receipt from an Italian restaurant for the night she was killed—the night Brice found her. That’s meaningful, I think, because Brice told me Monique had a date that night. She didn’t tell anyone who her date was, but she did say he was taking her to this new Italian restaurant. That’s why it stuck out in Brice’s memory. The restaurant was the hot new place in town.”

  Corie cleared her throat and reached into an envelope pocket with the old calendars. She came out with a receipt and showed it to Jack. “Marchianos. They opened a couple of weeks before Monique was killed. I found an old restaurant review online. The critic raved about the place. And I know this is, like, not something you’d use in court, but the reviewer specifically commented on the restaurant’s macaroons.”

  “Macaroons?”

  “Evan isn’t big on desserts, but one of the few things he likes is a good macaroon. He loves almonds, marzipan, anything with that kind of flavor. I know that sounds silly.”

  She looked impossibly fragile. Without the hair her head looked tiny, her features delicate, giving her the appearance of a child. It struck Jack how much of a prop the hair had been.

  “A few months after Monique was killed,” Corie squeezed her eyes shut and seemed to will herself to continue, “a young woman in Philadelphia named Yvonne Harris was murdered. Evan was there at the time. I have all the receipts.”

  Corie handed Jack an article about the murder she’d printed from the internet, which included a photo of the victim. It was a studio shot for a high school or college graduation, a hopeful young face. Yvonne’s smile was wide. Her dark hair was pulled back and Jack could tell from the ample curve of her breasts and her upper arms that she was slightly plump.

  “Look.” Corie pointed at the photo. “Twenty-five. Long, dark hair. Slightly overweight. The killer cut her up pretty bad and had sex with her. The case was never solved.”

  Corie showed him a receipt from the Philadelphia International Airport dated February 12th, probably for a bottle of water or a magazine from a newsstand. “Thank you, come again” on the check from the Madison Restaurant in downtown Philadelphia where Evan had lunch on February 13th. And the night of Yvonne Harris’s murder, Evan parked in a garage on Latimer Street.

  “Evan was there when she was killed. The bastard was there.”

  “You know how many people were in Philadelphia on that date?” Jack hoped to protect Corie for a little while longer. Until he was sure.

  Corie ignored his protest. Her gaze and her voice were steady. “After Philadelphia Evan had a trip to New York. On March 15th he drove into Manhattan. There’s a receipt from the Triboro Bridge. I wonde
r if any dark-haired young women were killed in New York that March? I know you can find out. And this is only two years.”

  Jack looked down at Yvonne Harris’s picture again. She was wearing a heart-shaped locket. YH. The monogram on the necklace Jack had recently checked into evidence, that Corie had found in the cabin. He answered carefully. “Corie, you realize what you’re implying?”

  “Implying? Hell. I’ve been sleeping with a sociopath, at the very least. And this isn’t even the worst part.”

  The hairs stood up on Jack’s arms. What could be worse than realizing your husband was a murderer?

  “Once when we were in Atlanta we stayed at a Motel 6. Horrible place. Completely out of character for Evan. I had my period too, and that usually repulses guys, but Evan seemed to like it. We had sex and Evan got crazy.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “No knives, but we trashed that hotel room. I know, it’s disgusting. But the worst part? A woman named Alicia Stavros had been murdered there. Unsolved like the rest.”

  She handed him another printout and, with tremendous reluctance, Jack dragged his eyes away from Corie and looked at it. The grainy photo showed a young woman, Caucasian, with long, dark hair. From what he could see in the photo she was a little overweight with full breasts. Shit.

  Corie’s eyes filled. “I think Evan had sex with me at the very same place where he killed someone. I’ve read about serial killers. Some of them do that, it turns them on. You know the weirdest thing? After a while, Evan didn’t want me to go on trips with him anymore.”

  A rock landed in Jack’s stomach.

  “I asked him why,” Corie continued, “and he said it was important to keep business and pleasure separate. I thought that was strange because I was part of the business, too. And then it hit me yesterday when I was looking all this up: I was only the business part.”