by Sandra Brown
“The third guy? I think he was their boss.”
“Yes, he thinks so, too. They assured Mrs. Ford that her husband’s locker was empty, but she’s, uh, terribly distraught, as you can imagine. She insisted on checking it for herself. I volunteered to bring her.”
“You’re a detective, too?”
“Police chaplain.”
“Oh.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble…”
“Well, sure. Sure.” The young attendant gave Gif a reassuring wink. “Of course you can go in, Mrs. Ford,” he said, speaking to her as though she were deranged. “I don’t think anyone’s in there. Weather’s keeping the golfers in the card room. But let me double-check. I’ll be right back.”
Gif commended her performance. Talia commended his. But as they left the country club, dejection settled over all four of them. Feeling dispirited down to his bones, Drex gave the responsibility of driving back to Gif, leaving him free to concentrate.
The abbreviated search of the house hadn’t yielded anything. The trip to the country club had been a bust. He had nothing to work with. Nothing. As before. As always. Jasper had left nothing behind to come back for. Except Talia.
He’d taken only a wedding photo and…and what?
He stirred, stilled, stirred again. “Talia, you and Jasper took roll-aboard suitcases to the airport, correct?”
“Yes.”
“One each?”
“Yes. To carry on.”
“Did you pack for him, or see what he packed?”
“No. By the time he came home from the club, I’d finished packing. I left our room to him and went down to the study to catch up on emails and business-related calls. I worked right up until time to leave for the airport.”
“Mike, in that security video showing Jasper getting into the taxi?”
“Yeah?”
“He had his roll-aboard with him, right?” Drex thought he remembered correctly, but he wanted to check Mike’s computerized memory to be sure.
“He placed it in the back seat with him.”
Drex resettled, turned his head, and stared out the rain-streaked car window. Jasper had left behind a custom-tailored wardrobe and took with him only what he could pack into a roll-aboard. He fit his whole life into a piece of carry-on luggage. With the tip of his finger, Drex followed a rivulet of rainwater as it trickled down the outside of the glass.
What had he packed into that roll-aboard? Where was it now?
Gif drove them to the suite motel where he and Mike were already checked in. Gif pulled under the porte cochere. Mike said to Gif, “I’ve got this, Reverend Lewis.” He turned to Drex. “Every suite has two bedrooms.”
Drex didn’t rise to the bait. “Then it works out even.”
Mike shot a look at Talia, then squeezed himself out of the passenger door and lumbered into the lobby.
“Understating the obvious,” she said to Drex, “he doesn’t like me.”
“Don’t take it personally. He doesn’t like anybody.”
A few minutes later Mike returned and passed a card key to Drex. “Not that you asked, but we brought all your stuff from the garage apartment.”
“Thanks.”
“We didn’t figure you’d be returning for it,” Gif said.
In a lame attempt to lighten the mood, Drex said, “I miss the place already.” No one reacted.
Gif said, “What about your car?”
“Temporarily abandoned. They may impound it. I don’t know. Don’t care. I’ll worry about that after…After.”
Gif parked. They all got out. Mike said, “Here’s ours. Yours.” He pointed to another of the suites, facing his and Gif’s from across a gravel courtyard dotted with dwarf palmettos.
“I’ll see Talia in, then come and get my things,” Drex said.
Without further discussion, he walked Talia to their door, unlocked it, and told her he would be back within a few minutes. “Keep the chain on.” Looking as downcast as he felt, she nodded.
He waited until he heard her secure the lock then, heedless of the rain, strode across the courtyard and rapped on the door. Gif opened it. Drex went past him and made a beeline to Mike, who was sprawled in a chair in the living room looking not dissimilar to Jabba the Hut.
“Cut it out, Mike.”
“What?”
“Give me a fucking break. You know what.”
“All right.” Mike raised his hands as though in surrender.
“I mean it,” Drex said, stressing the words.
“Be nice or take my leave?”
“I couldn’t have phrased it any better. I need you. But I don’t need your shit. The situation is bad enough without it. Be nice. Or leave.”
Mike raised his hands higher. “I said, all right.”
Drex backed away. Now that the air had been cleared between them, he said, “Rudkowski has probably already blacklisted you. Do you think you can hack the autopsy report on Elaine?”
“Won’t have to.” Mike nodded toward Gif. “He bullshitted it out of somebody in the coroner’s office.”
“Email it to me, please, Gif.”
“Sure,” Gif said.
Drex spotted a stack of cookbooks on one of the living area end tables. “I see you got my message. Start digging into them.”
“They don’t look used enough to hold secrets,” Gif said.
“Maybe not, but check anyhow.”
“In the meantime, what are you going to do?”
They both looked toward Mike as though expecting an innuendo involving Talia. He raised both hands again. “What? This is me, being nice. Besides, that setup was so easy it was beneath me.”
Drex actually gave him a grudging smile as he lifted his duffel bag off the sofa. “I’m going to my room to think.”
“About what?”
“About what I would do now if I were Jasper.”
Chapter 29
Talia released the chain and opened the door. She looked so forlorn that Drex asked her what the matter was.
“I’m sorry my brainstorm didn’t pay off.”
“Most brainstorms don’t. We celebrate the odd occasions when they do.”
“Those odd occasions are what keep you going?”
“What keeps me going is that I haven’t caught him yet.”
“It’s going to be more difficult now that you’ve resigned. Maybe if you appealed to Rudkowski, he would disregard what you did this morning.”
“You heard him. Does he sound like a man to whom a mea culpa would make a dent?”
“No.”
“However, I might attempt it except for the time it would cost.”
“And you think time is of the essence, don’t you?”
Not wanting to alarm her—yet—he hedged. “I need to shut myself off and think. Are you going to be all right for a while?”
“After the night and morning I’ve had? I need some downtime, too.”
He gave a strand of her hair a tug then kept hold of it. “I wish I’d seen you in action in the locker room. Gif said you struck just the right note. Somewhere between a pit bull and pitiful.”
“I’m out of my league.”
He tucked the strand of hair behind her ear and rubbed the lobe he’d taken a bite of earlier. “I’m afraid I am, too.”
“Why do you say that?”
He lowered his hand. “Jasper’s been at this for three times longer than I’ve been chasing him. He’s had more practice.” He gave her a grim smile as he checked his watch. “We’re regrouping at six o’clock. Gif’s going to bring in dinner.”
They climbed the stairs. The two bedrooms were separated by a short hallway, the shared bathroom between them. “I put my things in here.” She pointed to the bedroom on the right. “I’ll see you a little before six.”
She turned away, but before she’d taken a single step, he reached for her and brought her around. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her.
“I want to lie down with you so bad.” He
kissed the side of her neck. “But you wouldn’t want to go where I’ve got to go now.”
He hugged her tighter, then his arms relaxed and finally dropped to his sides. He left her, entered the darkened room, and closed the door behind him.
Gif had brought in Chinese. They divided the cartons and sat around the dining table to eat.
The cookbooks, Drex noted, had been ripped apart. Pages from them formed a snowbank in a corner of the room. Nodding toward it, Drex said, “Nothing?”
“Not a single notation,” Gif replied. “And we went through each book page by page. Nothing glued into the backings. We turned up nada.”
“Some of the recipes look good, though,” Mike said. “I saved those.”
“You can add that to the paper pile.” Drex pointed his fork at the phony manuscript he’d set on the bar when he’d come in. It had been included in his belongings that Mike and Gif had brought from the garage apartment. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”
“Did you actually write all that?” Talia asked.
“I had it copied from a paperback book.”
“Elaine told Jasper it wasn’t very good.”
“Pam will be crushed,” Mike said as he polished off an egg roll.
Talia looked at Drex. “Pam?”
Drex shot Mike a warning look. “A woman at the office typed it for me. I never even read it, only messed up the pages to make them look authentic.”
“You had me fooled,” Talia said. “That day I came over to the apartment and asked…”
Becoming aware that Mike and Gif were listening with rabid interest, Drex said, “That was the point. To fool you.”
After that, conversation lagged, and they focused on eating. When they were finished, they made quick work of cleaning up then chose their seats in the living area. Mike claimed the largest chair, Gif straddled one of the dining chairs, Talia curled up into a corner of the sofa. Drex perched on the opposite arm of it.
He had decided how he was going to call the meeting to order, despite how tough it would be on Talia. He had to be straightforward, perhaps even harsh, because it was essential to erase any lingering doubts in his partners’ minds about her culpability.
“Talia?”
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “This is the ‘I want to hear it all later,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes. Speaking for all three of us, we need it explained how you couldn’t have known that you were married to a psychopath.”
It was the opening Mike had been waiting for. “When I saw you in that picture taken at Marian Harris’s party, that did it for me.”
“And you haven’t changed your mind,” she said.
“Say you didn’t meet your husband that night—”
“I didn’t.”
“—and that everything else you’ve told us is true, didn’t he ever strike you as not quite right in the head?”
“I’d like to hear that myself,” Gif said, quieter and less judgmental than Mike.
“Yes, I sensed something wasn’t quite right,” she said. “But I couldn’t isolate what it was. You three think in terms of criminology and psychopaths every day. That’s outside my realm. So, no,” she said, addressing Mike, “it didn’t pop into my mind one day that my husband was a serial killer.”
“Okay,” Drex said. “Take a breath. This isn’t an inquisition. We’re trying to analyze and understand him more than we are you. What first sparked your feeling that something was off?”
“It didn’t spark. It came on gradually. Initially, I talked myself into believing that it was the difference in our ages. Three decades’ difference.”
“But you married him anyway,” Drex said.
“The strangeness didn’t start until after we married. Soon after, though, I began to notice oddities. For instance the way he phrased things. Words and expressions seemed to have a double meaning that escaped me. I felt particularly uneasy when we were alone, but I couldn’t account for it. I thought it might have been hormonal. I was going through some procedures.” She glanced at Drex. “But my uneasiness persisted. Over the past few months things he said and did became even stranger.”
“Did this strangeness intensify around the time Marian’s remains were discovered?” Drex asked.
Her brow furrowed. “Now that you mention it, yes. About that time.”
“That fits,” he said, getting nods of agreement from Mike and Gif. “That would have agitated him. Made him second-guess burying her alive.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his intention to,” Gif said. “When he nailed shut that box, he mistakenly thought she was dead.”
Mike jumped on that. “‘Mistakenly’ is the key word. A blunder like that is anathema to him. It would have set him off.”
Drex had followed their exchange with interest, but he didn’t want to address the particulars of it yet. “It would have set him off in either case. The discovery of that grave spoiled his perfect record.”
Back to Talia, he said, “You went out to dinner together one night this week. I waved at you as you were leaving.”
“Yes.”
“You two seemed simpatico. All dressed up. Hubby taking his best girl to dinner.”
“So you heard that conversation?”
He nodded.
She looked embarrassed. “The invitation surprised me. That was the first date night we’d had in weeks.”
“He was playing to me?”
“He must have been. But what I thought was that he was trying to cover an affair.”
Drex looked at his cohorts to gauge their opinions. Gif looked interested but as yet undecided. You could have cut Mike’s skepticism with a knife.
Drex turned back to Talia. “What shape did his strange behavior take? What did he do to make you think something was really out of joint?”
“Nothing threatening or overtly weird. He never mistreated me. On the contrary, he was solicitous, often to an annoying degree. But sometimes, when he looked at me in a certain way, it would cause a chill to creep over me. I began making up excuses to avoid intimacy.”
“How did he react?”
“Casually.”
“Not violently?”
“Not at all. Just the opposite. He was indifferent.”
She pulled one of the sofa’s throw pillows into her lap and hugged it against her chest. A shield, Drex thought, against what she was still reluctant to admit.
“His indifference seemed abnormal,” she said.
“It’s all kinds of abnormal,” Drex said, “because he is. Some of these guys can’t function sexually unless it is violent. But Jasper isn’t about sex. It’s the mind fuck he gets off on. Except for my mother, his relationships with the women have been platonic.” Mike and Gif looked like they’d been goosed. “Yes, I told Talia this morning, and I trust her not to reveal it to anyone else. But back to the point I was making. None of his other relationships have been characterized as love affairs.”
Mike said, “Even the solicitations he put on the match-up websites didn’t reference sex or romance. Only companionship.”
Looking at Talia, Drex said, “For whatever it’s worth, I doubt he was romantically involved with Elaine. I don’t believe she would have betrayed you. However, to you, an affair was a logical explanation for his quirky behavior.”
“Why was I the exception to his platonic relationships?” Talia asked.
“We’ll come back to that,” Drex said. “Go on with what you were telling us earlier. How did his strangeness manifest itself?”
“Small things, any one of which could have been overlooked, but collectively they bothered me. Like his obsession with his clothes, his closet.”
For the benefit of the other two, Drex described it.
“He was fanatical about the fit of every garment,” Talia continued. “He fussed over sleeve length, buttons, everything. I was never allowed to fold his laundry and store it. He had a ‘system,’ he said. I teased him about the way he lined up utensils in the kitchen
drawer.”
“He didn’t laugh it off,” Drex said.
“No, he took umbrage. His obsessions like that began to wear on me. Walking a fine line twenty-four/seven is exhausting. I started inventing reasons to go out of town. My business trips came to feel like escapes. I could only relax when I was away from him. Which should have told me something, shouldn’t it?”
She asked it of all three men, letting her gaze light briefly on one before moving to the next, until she came back around to Drex. He said nothing, wanting to hear how she answered her own question.
“We’re supposed to trust our fear. That’s what we’re told. I didn’t. I rationalized it away or denied it altogether.” She waited a beat, then added, “Until you moved in next door. Then everything changed.”
Mike shifted in his seat. Gif cleared his throat. Drex didn’t move, just continued to look into Talia’s troubled eyes.
“Jasper was mistrustful of you right from the start, although you’d given him no reason to be. You’d even returned the fan he loaned you. I couldn’t understand his aversion.”
“He saw Drex as competition.”
She nodded at Gif. “Male assertion, protecting his territory, that would have been understandable over time, and if Drex and I had given him reason to be jealous. But Drex has been here all of a week, and Jasper turned paranoid almost from the day he moved in.”
“‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind,’” Drex quoted.
“What?”
“Shakespeare,” Mike said.
“But don’t be too impressed,” Drex said. “I only know that line because it applies to a mind like Jasper’s.” He held up his index finger. “Except that he feels only the suspicion, not the guilt. In his mind, whatever he does is sanctioned.
“Oh, he’s subtle,” he went on. “He doesn’t pull the wings off houseflies or eviscerate kittens. Although he may have in his youth, or in secret now. But when he’s ‘working,’ he assumes all the trappings of normalcy.
“He expresses remorse when it’s called for. ‘Shame about your dog getting hit by a car.’ He apologizes for minor offenses like being late for an engagement or forgetting a birthday. He takes a small gift to a hostess. He invites a new neighbor over for dinner. Because that’s what civilized people do.