“So you
are
somewhere on this,” I said slowly. “Caroline was from Kentucky.”
I was officially linked to Caroline’s psycho. Mike had it right all along.
“Here’s your lunch, honey.”
The
honey
was directed at Mike, although Wanda plopped a loaded plate in front of me, too. Crinkled French fries hung off three sides like suicide jumpers who’d changed their minds. The two onion rings perched on top were surprise bonus points. Eyeing the quarter-inch of breading, I was betting 600-calories-plus bonus points.
Wanda was pretty in a brittle kind of way, with a messy bleached-blond ponytail and a lot of Maybelline eyeliner. Tight Levi’s, and an even tighter red T-shirt with
BUBBA
’
S BARBE-Q
stitched in white over her right breast. I estimated her age somewhere between thirty and fifty. A great body and a lot of years in the sun confused things. In the dark, two-stepping across some scarred honky-tonk floor, she could pass for twenty-five.
She nervously rearranged the ketchup bottle and salt and pepper shakers to the middle of the table.
“Y’all need anything else? Extra Bubba’s sauce?”
“No, I think we’re good,” I said. “Thanks.”
But Wanda wasn’t so easily dismissed.
“You’re the new chief, right?” Before Mike could speak, she continued. “I heard that rich lady was raped and cut real bad. There hasn’t been something like this in Clairmont since that girl was found way back in pieces on the highway, her head stuffed into one of those jumbo Ziploc bags. My ten-year-old and her friends scare the bejesus out of each other telling that story in bed with the lights off. It’s like legend. Do you think it’s related? Do you think that a serial killer has been living in our mist all along, like the TV is saying? Should my boyfriend be spending the night?”
Wanda’s drawl, low at first, now stretched and curled to every corner of the room. The two farmers a couple of booths away were sitting perfectly still, their heads turned slightly, eyes on the floor, tea glasses drained. Waiting for Mike’s answer.
Mike pushed his plate forward a couple of inches. “There is absolutely nothing at this point that makes me think there is a serial killer … in our mist. The highway killer case you’re talking about, that was eleven years ago. The girl disappeared in Boston and was dumped here randomly. The FBI unofficially tied her to another serial killer. That man died two years ago on death row.”
I was surprised at the detail he provided. I loved him for not making fun of the word
mist
, repeating it with a perfectly straight face.
“You think it was someone in that club? Those women are scary as hell. One of them goes out in the middle of the night every spring and butchers her ex-husband’s Remember Me rosebushes. Like clockwork. It’s kind of clever, but still. Of course,
he’s dumb enough to keep planting them.” Wanda bit her lip, revealing a row of braces on her bottom teeth. Purple rubber bands. “Lots of us are glad there’s finally a real professional in town running things. Someone who maybe can’t be bought off and who isn’t a cop just so’s he can drive fast.”
Her face lit with a flirtatious grin. I callously reassessed her at a hard-lived thirty-two.
“You remind me of Bruce Willis before he started wearing glasses and doing those artsy-fartsy movies. Let me know if you need anything else, honey, and I’ll bring it right over.”
Was I not sitting right here?
“I don’t think you’re in danger,” Mike told her. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lock your doors. You should be doing that anyway. No matter how it feels, it’s not a small town anymore. And if your boyfriend doesn’t piss you off too much, I’d say it doesn’t hurt to keep him warm until this is cleared up.”
Wanda, mollified, sashayed off, and even I was slightly mesmerized. I recovered.
“
Keep him warm?
You’re even starting to talk like a Texan. And stop looking at her size four ass.” I shoved my plate over to the side. “I don’t think I can eat this. Visions of a head in a baggie.” I swigged some water. A slight bitter tang, like from a well. “Was Caroline raped? You didn’t answer that.”
“We don’t know yet if it was sexual. No semen, but that doesn’t always mean anything. The Ziploc on the other girl … not accurate. It was a cut-off dry-cleaning bag.”
“That makes me feel
much
better. I don’t want to hear any more. But it was nice that you didn’t correct her. A killer ‘in our mist.’ ” I nipped off a tiny bite of the onion ring breading and decided it was going down OK. I pulled my plate back over. “Actually, it’s pretty apt when you think about it.”
Mike raised his eyebrows.
“Not Misty the person. I mean that we can’t see our way through yet. The mist. Never mind. What else?”
“We’re still wading into Caroline’s files. There are only two people besides Billie that I completely trust at this point with sensitive information. So it’s very slow going. And then there’s the maid. She took off, but not before running Caroline’s mansion like a crematorium. A pile of ashes in every one of the fireplaces. Ten in all. Three downstairs, and one in each of the seven bedrooms. She was burning books.”
“Not books,” I said softly. “Caroline’s old diaries. The ones I told you about. In that weird pink room.”
“It doesn’t really matter because there’s not a piece of useful evidence in the ashes. We did reach Caroline’s ex. He lives alone on the estate up in Appalachia. Caroline deeded him the house. It’s been in his name for years. He claims he got a phone call out of the blue from Caroline several months ago. He hadn’t heard from her in years. She wanted to know the location of their son. He said she seemed a little … off.”
“By the way,
where the hell is the son
?” The farmers fell silent again, listening. Mike picked up on it and lowered his voice.
“Nobody knows, according to Richard Deacon. Their son never married. He calls up Dad when he needs some cash. Deacon says that in the last fifteen or so years, he’s wired money to his son all over the country. New Mexico, California, and Nevada.”
OK, not hungry again. Done, kaput, no more grease going down this hatch. I covered my plate with a napkin for the official burial.
Mike traced a finger over my knuckle, an unusual public display of affection. “I need to go up there. To Kentucky. I want to watch Deacon’s face while we talk about the murder of his wife. He knows more than he’s saying about his son. There’s Caroline’s sister, too. About sixty miles apart.”
I felt my skin go hot. “You’re going to leave me
here
?”
Wanda was venturing our way with the tea pitcher, and Mike waved her off.
“The opposite. I want you to come along. I think you’re safer with me than without me in this circumstance. But I don’t want you anywhere near Deacon. I’ll figure something out.” He drained the last of his tea, and banged the cup on the table. “So tell me about Bradley Hellenberger.”
A long, dangerous silence.
Mike held up a hand before I started in with the excuses. “Save it. I’m not angry. Right now, a reporter is the least of my worries. My guy says he checks out. He’s an asshole after a story. You’re a victim after resolution. I get it.”
Mike had a guy. He didn’t really trust me all that much, after all. Good for him.
He slid a ten under the corner of his plate. “Did you ever hear of the Chessboard Killer?”
I shook my head, trying to figure out why Mike was giving me a free pass on Bradley Hellenberger.
“The Chessboard Killer was convicted in Russia of killing forty-eight people. Do you know why?”
I shook my head, still wondering where this was going.
“He wanted to mark off sixty-four squares on a chessboard. Each person he murdered was a square. He claimed he got to sixty. Only four more squares to go when he got caught. He was mad that the cops only gave him credit for forty-eight. When the judge asked him if he understood his life sentence, his response was: ‘I’m not deaf.’ ”
“And you’re bringing this up because …?”
“I use him as a barometer. That’s the kind of evil that gets under my skin. When there’s no logic. No remorse. No emotional connection to human life.”
He nodded his head toward Wanda, earning her tips, leaning her tight breasts a little closer than necessary to the head of Farmer One while she refilled his tea glass. Orthodontics was damned expensive.
“No matter what I told
her
,” Mike said, eyes on Wanda, “my skin is crawling.”
I hesitated. “How long did he keep Caroline alive?”
Mike pretended interest in a fly buzzing in the window.
“Mike?”
“At least four days.”
In my head, fragments. Caroline’s bright red lipstick. A glistening knife. A chessboard and a row of pawns.
Mike’s message, loud and clear.
Yes, the Queen is dead
.
But the game is on
.
I
swung the Volvo into the driveway, apprehensive in a way I hadn’t been before. The cigar connected me to Caroline. To a vicious murder. My stalker had spoken, a first. An escalation, I was sure. His malevolent spirit was now comfortably nesting in Mrs. Drury’s little frame house, and I was about to walk right in and say,
Hi, honey, I’m home
.
Across the street, a man in a camouflage hunting cap hunkered down in the front of a blue, beat-up Hyundai. A beautiful black German shepherd hung his head out of the backseat window, eyes alertly following me, and the squirrel on the sidewalk, with divided interest.
My new bodyguards. According to a text sent to Mike, they’d searched the house thoroughly ten minutes before I arrived.
Jesse Milligan was a Clairmont boy back from war, a twenty-one-year-old sniper who lost half his left leg in Iraq and wore a prosthetic from his knee down. He’d spent eight months recuperating in Brooke Army Medical Center before applying to the Clairmont police force. Mike said he picked Jesse to watch over me because he was, in random order of importance: a crack shot, the best at taking a direct order, and a trained soldier who would
die to save me. Apparently, this Jesse plan was hatched well before our lunch today at Bubba’s. The only thing Mike told me about the dog was that Jesse refused to go anywhere without him.
As I stepped out of the car, my body felt like I was carrying fifteen babies instead of one. All I wanted to do was sink into my bed and pull the lucky quilt up to my chin. I definitely wasn’t ready for an official meet and greet with my new bodyguards. I tossed Jesse an offhand wave and stepped quickly toward the back door, glancing around for anything out of the ordinary. The garden hose was still curled up like a snake. No new footprints in the mud. A hedge trimmer droned on the next street over.
The back door was locked, exactly as I had left it, the new alarm system blinking as cheerfully as Christmas. I punched in my mother’s birthday, thinking it was really not a good idea that I now missed my mother every time I entered the house. I set my purse on the kitchen table, opened the cabinet under the sink, and reached behind a box of Cascade for the case that held my gun. The .22 was a present from Mike for my twenty-ninth birthday, along with ten lessons at a Westchester shooting range, the only place I’d ever fired it. As far as Mike knew, this gun was still packed in a moving box.
It felt cold, and smooth. I placed my finger on the trigger, and carried the gun to the front door. Locked. I inched down the hall to the bedroom, throwing open the closets, checking under the beds twice, wondering if obsessive compulsive disorder was taking root in the wild garden with all my other disorders.
“I have a gun!” I yelled stupidly into the air. I felt mad and not mad, like Hamlet. After all, my husband, a seasoned veteran of horror, had informed me over a barbecue sandwich that his skin was crawling. A soldier, trained in stealth, was sitting right outside.
I flipped on the light in the dark bathroom. My damp towel was still crumpled on the floor, my makeup scattered across the shelf over the sink. I ripped down the straggly piece of wallpaper that I’d picked at, leaving a jagged scar on the wall, revealing more sweet little girls in bonnets.
There wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to venture farther down the hall to survey the sunroom. But I wanted complete assurance more. What if Jesse hadn’t checked, just like the police the other day? I didn’t have good feelings about that room. A few days ago, I had asked Mike to rig a chain lock on this side of the sunroom door, the side that faced into the hall. Mrs. Drury had the right idea. We just feared different things from behind the door. She believed in ghosts. I believed in windows that gave up a perfect view of me, in evil flesh and blood fingers that could lift up those old, rusty latches.
It was a silly request with everything on Mike’s mind and the thousands of dollars he’d just spent on home security. I turned the corner cautiously. Surprise. I was staring at a gleaming, industrial-looking brass door bolt that belonged on the back of a motel room door in case an angry pimp came to call. Latched tight. Not overkill as far as I was concerned.
When did Mike do this?
My breathing eased. Red eyes blinked at me from the ceiling, from the doors, from the windowsills. I headed to my bed, carefully rested the .22 on the bedside table, pointed away, plopped down, kicked off my shoes. The baby rolled over inside his cocoon, which was sweet, sweet relief, because he hadn’t budged for the last five hours. The books say these patches of stillness are nothing to worry about, but tell that to any warhorse of miscarriages.
I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket to silence it during my nap.
As if protesting, it buzzed, tickling my palm.
It buzzed again, setting off a chain reaction shiver.
RESTRICTED
.
He’d never called on my cell phone.
My hands started to shake. It took three tries to slide the bar over to answer.
“Hello.” I kept my voice as even as possible, and my eyes on the gun. I imagined that dog outside digging his teeth into my stalker’s face, disfiguring him, so everyone would always know on sight that
this
was a monster.