by Ellie Marney
“Humor me. You’re a lot more interesting than anything in an FBI file.”
Emma doesn’t believe that. “If you want to play that game, it should be a fair exchange. How about I ask you questions about your own case, like how you got that scar on your neck?”
“My sister stabbed me.” He shrugs. “People fight. It happens.”
“Did she get angry at you?”
“She wanted me to stop doing what I do. Awkwardly enough, it’s not something I can simply switch off. I suppose she thought some time incarcerated would help me kick the habit—or maybe she felt I was too dangerous to leave walking around. She’s very community-minded, Kristin.”
“I met her.”
“Did you?” Simon straightens. A flicker of something across his face—a brightness, a yearning. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“She is.” The change in his expression prompts her to dig deeper. “It must be hard, not having contact with her.”
“Yes.”
His clipped answer is a traffic sign—NO ENTRY. Emma tries another tack. “The place she’s living in is very… refined.”
“Very expensive, is what you mean.”
“Why did you say I reminded you of your sister? We’re nothing alike.”
“You’re both survivors of trauma. You encountered Daniel Huxton and Kristin encountered me. The behaviors don’t present in the same way, but you have the same flavor. It’s hard to describe.” He gazes off into a high corner of the chapel, his voice singsong. “You are dark and she is fair, you no longer have your hair.…”
She needs to redirect. “It was your mention of hair in the questionnaire that annoyed me. But it was important, wasn’t it?”
Gutmunsson ignores that. “You and Kristin have both placed yourselves in positions where you can indulge your post-traumatic peccadilloes. She’s at Chesterfield, where she can relax into fantasy. You’re with the FBI, where you can channel your fury.”
She tries for a jaunty air. “Well, I don’t feel very furious at the moment.”
“And yet you smell of gunpowder.” He smiles directly at her. “You and Kristin each have a doorway in your mind that you keep firmly closed.”
Emma can’t help but feel she’s botching this conversation, struggling along two steps behind. “Kristin said you enjoy unraveling mysteries.”
“There are twenty-five feet of intestines in the human body—did you know that? I enjoy unraveling lots of things.”
She grimaces. “Now you’re just being disgusting to get a reaction. Are you trying to make me furious?”
“Maybe. Would you say you feel angry pretty much all the time?”
“Yes.” Her face feels tight. “In your questionnaire answers, you wrote—”
“And what do you feel when you don’t feel angry?”
“Tired. When you wrote, Let me know when he starts taking their hair, how did you predict that?”
“No.” Simon slashes with the blade of his hand. “I answered your questionnaire, Emma. Now I’d like you to tell me something.”
She tries to stay firm. “There’s nothing about me that could possibly be interesting to you.”
“Why don’t you let me decide?”
“Seriously, come on.” Her hold is slipping. “I’m just a… a regular, normal, boring girl—”
“Oh, Emma, you’re anything but boring.” He tilts his head. “And I have a certain professional curiosity. None of my models survived their transformations—I didn’t get to talk with them afterward. But here you are.…”
“Here I am,” Emma says. Suddenly and inexplicably, she feels like crying.
She works to control herself. Is this what it will take to get answers about the Pennsylvania case? What does it matter if she goes over with Simon Gutmunsson the things she’s gone over with the authorities a hundred times?
And the photos of the Pennsylvania killer’s victims keep coming to her, in her mind’s eye: not the grainy xerox horror copies but the identification photos, the smiling, youthful faces.…
She inhales, releases. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Huxton was deranged. There’s a proper medical term for it, but I don’t—”
“No, no, no.” Simon turns his head askance. “I don’t want the litany you’ve already recited to the police and the papers. Did you think I would pummel you with questions about Huxton? I’m not the FBI.” He turns back to screw his eyes into hers. “I don’t care about Huxton. Huxtons are a dime a dozen.”
“Then what?”
Emma can’t remember seeing him move, but Simon is now sitting on the floor near the front of his cell, long legs crossed. His arms are lifted, hands suspended from the horizontal crossbar, and his face is visible through the gap between the metal rods that keep him caged. Emma wants to look away from his gaze but finds she can’t. The dark motes in his eyes go back and back without end.
His voice is soft. “You’re so very prickly, Emma. However did he catch you?”
“I used to be a more trusting person.” A great lassitude is sweeping over her, like a narcosis. Fighting it is hard. Simon is sitting down. Maybe she could sit down, too.
“I’m sure you’ve been told that you’re special, that your courage is what set you apart. But it didn’t feel like courage at the time, did it?”
“No.” The truth of that lives deep in her bones. “It wasn’t courage. Just desperation.”
“But Huxton’s other brides must have been desperate, too. How did you move from desperation into action?”
“I don’t know.” His use of the word “brides”—the media term for Huxton’s victims—scrapes against her nerves. Her self-control feels slippery now, her hold tenuous. “Why do you care?”
“It’s interesting to me. There was a moment, wasn’t there? When you decided you’d rather die than be Huxton’s bride. And then you realized you’d rather fight than die.”
“Yes.” A gasp of a word. She claws desperately for better memories: petunias, soft loam, her sister’s hug.…
“What was the moment?”
Emma shudders. Petunias, petunias—“ I don’t remember.”
“I’m sure you do. Let’s go back to it. You were held in a basement, weren’t you? Was it dark?”
“Yes. It was.…” Her breath fractures, and all remembrance of sweetness falls away. “There was a sliver of light that came through a gap in the boards of the door.”
“I can see you’ve just remembered that. And the light was important?”
“It meant there was an outside.”
“Yes, an outside. An escape route.” Simon’s voice has a cool cunning. “That must have been tantalizing.”
Emma is not looking at Simon anymore. She is staring back into memory. “Vicki and Tammy were afraid of the light.”
“They were afraid of the door opening.”
“A lot of light meant he was on his way down.” The terror in her words is barely contained.
“And that would be very bad.”
“Yes.” She’s hoarse now.
“Were the other girls catatonic by that stage? Had they lost their capacity to reason?”
“Tammy was… She couldn’t walk.” Emma closes her eyes.
Simon prods further. “She tried to rebel, didn’t she?”
“Yes. And he… he…”
“He cut off her foot.”
“Yes.” She has to float through the nausea. “And Vicki… Vicki couldn’t function so good. He’d already had her two weeks.”
“Yes, she would’ve been completely tattered by then.” He smiles softly. “But you were still functioning well.”
“I was the last girl he caught. He only had me for three days.”
“So it was fortuitous circumstances. You were still fresh. He didn’t have a chance to starve you for very long, and you still remembered what it felt like to be free.” Simon waves his hand toward her. “Plus you had some skills that the other brides didn’t have.”
Emma watches
his eyes move. “The other girls were all from the city. I grew up in the country.”
“You had a certain mental toughness.”
“I guess.”
“There’s no guessing—here you are. You didn’t go into shock and shut down.” He seems almost proud of her. “And you had something else, too. Do you know what it was?”
“Not really.”
His eyes hold her entire as his fine, graceful fingers grip the bars. “It’s the same quality that keeps you running, Emma. That keeps you pounding the track every day. It’s what will save you, in the end. But go back for me. How did you and Vicki and Tammy learn each other’s names?”
“Our cages were…” She swallows. Such bitterness in her throat! “Our cages were pushed together. We could whisper. We could reach out and touch each other’s hands.”
“I could reach out from my cage and touch your hand right now.”
Her eyes flash and her voice firms. “Don’t.”
“Our friend in Pennsylvania doesn’t keep his donors in cages. How does he control them?”
That flash of fire has cleared some of the clouds in her head. “Ether. He knocks them out with ether.”
“Hmm. But I don’t think he would want them etherized at the end. He would want the drug out of their blood, because the blood is too important.”
“How do you know?”
He smiles. “Let’s just say I have a fellow feeling with our new friend. I don’t think he would want any impurities in the blood. I’m sure he wants his donors clean and sober for the grand finale. Have you checked the histamine levels?”
“Yes. We couldn’t make sense of the numbers.”
“We?”
She corrects herself without stumbling. “Me. Agent Cooper just gave me the file—he didn’t offer to translate it. I have numbers but I don’t know what they mean.”
“Then allow me to explain. In postmortem biochemistry, if the free histamine reference range is over thirty-five but not less than twenty-two nanograms per milliliter, the subject was in distress.”
Sweat on her brow, her own distress. “Why doesn’t the killer want impurities like ether in the victims’ blood?”
“He’s been particular up until now, hasn’t he. He’s cleaned off prints, removed clothes to avoid fiber contamination, disposed of ropes. He’s a very tidy fellow.”
“And the blood is too important.”
“Oh, Emma—the blood is everything.” Simon’s shoulders straighten as he elaborates. “It’s his purpose, his essence, his reason for all this. I imagine he loses himself a little when the red is all around him. It’s so easy to get carried away in the moment.”
“Does he need a special sort of blood? How does he know he’s got the right donor?”
“That’s an interesting question. Have you ever selected fruit at the greengrocer? You squeeze a little to see if it’s ripe, ask for a slice so you can nibble—taste is very individual.”
“Is he taste-testing them?” Urgency in her voice now. “Simon, how is he choosing his victims?”
He grins. “Another good question. Pick at it a little, I’m sure it will come to you.”
It does come, like the pulsing scarlet blaze of a ship’s flare. “He knows their blood type.”
“It’s more than just blood type, though. He sees something glowing in them, something he wants to kindle inside himself.” Simon’s own eyes are glowing. “It’s like the gleam of a firefly.”
“What is it?”
“Listen. No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks—Mary Shelley, of course. Our Pennsylvania friend seeks his happiness. Every creature on earth has wants and desires, has things they turn toward—flower to sun, snake to warmth, moth to flame. Daniel Huxton saw something in you, Emma. He could not resist your shine.”
She feels a cool streak of wet on her cheek. “There’s nothing shiny about me.”
Simon looks at her kindly. “You think your glow is gone. You think that by saving these new lost ones, it will come back, but that’s not true. It never left. You’re only a little tarnished. Rub off the rust and your beacon is revealed, like a sliver of light in the dark.” He sighs and stands, moves to his desk. “Now all these compliments have exhausted me, and I have a paper to write. Goodbye, dear Emma. It’s been lovely to see you. I’ll look forward to our next conversation.”
“That’s all?” Emma stands also. “Simon, I need more. How do we find out who he’s choosing next? Simon.”
When she steps forward involuntarily, too close to the barricade, Pradeep takes her gently by the arm.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bell thinks he can endure just about anything so long as it’s not a woman suffering.
He remembers his uncle Luther—who wasn’t really his uncle but had been his father’s partner since basic training—coming to the house to tell Rosa Bell that her husband was dead. She made a long, low, ululating moan as she collapsed in the doorway. Travis could hardly comprehend his own pain, and here was his mother’s: no high, dramatic screams, just bone-deep groans, pain felt in the dark, hollow well of the body. It chilled and wrenched him by turns.
His sisters shambled around for weeks, blank-eyed and dry-lipped. He was supposed to be there for them, but their suffering made him feel picked clean. It made him want to punch a wall.
He has a similar feeling of helplessness now as he stands outside the door of the women’s bathroom in the foyer of St. Elizabeths, listening to Lewis dry-retch following her interview with Gutmunsson.
“Fuck this,” he mutters. He turns and knocks twice on the wood in warning. “Lewis, I’m coming in.”
Her voice is threadbare. “All right.”
The bathroom is full of old-fashioned tile and fixtures, spacious and echoey. They’re the only people in there. Emma flushes the toilet she’s been leaning over and leaves the stall. She washes her mouth at the handbasin, swilling and spitting out water.
“I’m okay.” She looks more wan than he’s ever seen her. He reminds himself he’s only known her a week. It’s battlefield camaraderie, this feeling like they’ve been friends for years.
“You keep saying you’re okay, but every time you say it I believe it less and less.”
“No, really.” She dries her face with paper towels. “He just… He hit me with some questions about Huxton. It caught me by surprise, is all.”
“Lewis, you know trading in personal information with Gutmunsson is bad strategy. I said that at the beginning.”
“Then why did you suggest to Cooper that I go in without a wire?”
There’s a beat of acknowledgment. He tongues his back teeth. “I did that to protect your privacy. Cooper wants the information, regardless of the cost. He wants you in there with a goal in mind. But Cooper isn’t the one dealing with this guy. You are. Don’t commit more than you’re willing to.”
Emma doesn’t seem to hear him. It’s like she’s listening to some internal music, her gaze abstracted as she stares at herself in the mirror.
“I need to write it down. Some of the things he said… the phrasing wasn’t an accident. Nothing he ever says is by accident. And I think he does have insight into Pennsylvania.” Light bounces off her face and eyes, the skin over her cheekbones stretched and translucent. The fine hair on her head seems darker by contrast. “He said something about blood type—could the victims be blood donors? Is there a registry of some kind? Is that how they’re targeted? I think we’ve been going about this ass-backward. We’ve been looking for the killer. Maybe we should be looking more closely at the victims themselves, so we can see how he’s choosing them.”
Bell wants to tell her to ease down, but it would come out wrong. “If you need to write it all down, I’ll get a notepad and pencil from the lady at the front desk.”
“That would be good. Yeah, I need to write it.”
“Okay, do you wanna come out to the foyer? Cooper’s due to arrive in fifteen.”
&
nbsp; The lady at the reception desk wears a beige skirt suit and frosted eye shadow, and she is very accommodating with writing materials. Bell gives Emma a pen, paper, a cup of water, and a place to sit, then leaves her alone to write.
The gray Diplomat isn’t in the parking lot. It finally shows up at about quarter past four.
“Don’t drive west,” Emma says when she slides into the back seat. “We need to see the bodies.”
“What?” Cooper looks at her in the rearview, but Emma is already head-down again, scribbling furiously. He glares at Bell instead. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.” Bell buckles up in the back, reminds Lewis with short gestures to do the same. “I mean, Gutmunsson happened. And Lewis thinks we might have something—”
“The blood.” Emma glances at Cooper as she writes. “He kept going on about the blood. We need to check if the victims were blood donors, if there’s a registry—”
“No registry I’m aware of.” Cooper squints. “We can check it back at Quantico—”
“No. We need to examine the bodies for needle marks.” Emma finishes a line, looks up to make her point. “The killer is using the blood, okay? He’s using it as part of his ritual, for whatever reason—but he needs to know he’s got the right type of donor. He’s drawing blood before he kills them and using it for something. Taking a sample, like he’s taste-testing somehow. The medical examiner who did the original autopsies… What’s his name?”
“It’s complicated.” Cooper’s turned back over the seat now, watching her as the car idles. “We’ve got four bodies from three counties.”
“Ah, crap.” Bell realizes what this means. “They all went to their county medical examiner.”
“Correct.”
Emma looks mystified. “I don’t get it.”
“The bodies went to different district health departments,” Bell explains.
“They went to different coroners?”
“Three coroners,” Cooper says. “The Lambton girl and the Davis boy both went to Central District in Richmond, but they were examined by different staff pathologists. The Pennsylvania victims went to Dauphin County.”