Jessica didn’t take backup to the neat little house on Hill Street in Walnut Park. She parked under a street sign that read, ominously, Bumps ahead and watched the house, waiting for the object of Mariana’s warning to reveal itself, but it did not. The business address of Scream Inc. was a pretty stucco place with arched windows and low palm trees in the front yard, a red hummingbird feeder hanging from a rail near a door inlaid with stained glass. She went and knocked, waited, listening to the sound of footsteps on stairs. The woman who opened the door was younger than Jessica expected, squat and round, her hair dyed a blue-black that was stark against her pale and ginger-speckled skin.
‘Jessica Sanchez?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I’m Tania Austen,’ the woman said, and smiled. A strong southern accent. ‘Come on in.’
The house was as classically tidy and ordinary inside as it was on the outside. Persian rugs on hardwood floors, a rack on the wall for coats or bags that was emblazoned with the word Family. Jessica guessed the young woman lived with her parents. A stirring feeling had begun in her stomach as soon as she passed the threshold, a feeling at odds with her pretty surrounds. She followed Tania to a door off the kitchen and watched the woman fish for the right key from a bundle she extracted from her hoodie pocket.
‘So you didn’t say on the phone which item you were interested in,’ Tania said, slipping the key into a heavy padlock on the door. Jessica hadn’t said much on the phone at all, only that she wanted to speak to Tania about a purchase she had made the previous month. Sometimes Jessica found cases unravelled themselves much more easily when she just showed up, not announcing her presence as a cop, not trying to dig too deeply into the situation in which she was about to find herself. Too many questions would make doors start blowing shut. As she followed Tania down a set of narrow basement stairs, the woman ahead of her didn’t know Jessica was armed, that she technically required a warrant to enter the premises.
‘I’m here to talk to you about Dayly Lawlor,’ Jessica said vaguely.
‘Ah, right,’ Tania said with a smirk. ‘I’m not surprised. I haven’t even put those letters up on the site yet. But word gets around, doesn’t it?’
A rigidly organised basement. Jessica stood before a wide rosewood desk and looked at the shelves around her, custom-built display cabinets that were packed with labelled items. There were shelves of unframed sketches and bright acrylic paintings of ghosts and beautiful women next to items that seemed to have no category: a handbag with a torn zipper, and a pink teddy bear that appeared burned on one side, the cotton-candy-like fur curled and blackened. Jessica turned and looked at a rack full of hundreds of tiny jars, each labelled with a name: Schaefer, G. J. – Jones, J. – Gacy, J.W. – Norris, R. – Pike, C. She stepped closer and saw that some of the tiny jars were filled with what looked like hair. Grey, black, brown bundles. Others contained sharp, yellowish fibres in the shape of crescent-moons. Tania was searching in a huge filing cabinet. Jessica spied files labelled with the words Transcripts, Psych reports, Auth certs, Scene/autopsy pics. The feeling in her stomach was deepening, a sick tightening just above her pelvis.
‘It’s in here somewhere, don’t worry,’ Tania said, thumbing through the files. ‘Go ahead and admire the shop while you’re waiting, but I’ve got to let you know, you’re on three different cameras right now. Last year I had a guy come down here and try to steal a jar of Berkowitz’s fingernails. I got the only jar in the country that’s for sale and has an attached certificate of authenticity. That’s one of the premium jars, top shelf. If you buy Dayly’s letters, I can give you a good deal on a couple of non-premium jars.’
‘Are you talking about . . . David Berkowitz?’ Jessica asked. ‘The serial killer?’
‘Son of Sam,’ Tania said. ‘I’ve also got a pair of his prison shoes, too, if you’re into that guy.’
Jessica looked back at the shelves. At the little jars of hair and fingernails labelled with the names of famous killers. In the corner of the room was an old fridge, humming, bolted and padlocked at the door. Jessica went to the opposite wall and examined a frame hanging high on the wall. In the frame was a slice of cream carpet partly soaked in a reddish-brown substance. She noticed the back of the frame was screwed to the wall.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, that’s not for sale.’ Tania came to Jessica’s side. ‘That one’s mine. That right there, missy, is a square of carpet one of the forensic investigators cut from the floor of the Columbine High School library two days after the shooting. I’ve got a certificate of authenticity for that one, too. It’s worth more than everything else in here.’ She put her hands on her hips proudly. ‘Someone wanted to trade me a pair of Jeffrey Dahmer’s glasses for it a couple of weeks ago. I thought about it, I tell ya. I really thought about it.’
‘So this is all . . .’ Jessica wheezed.
‘Murderabilia,’ Tania said, nodding. ‘You must have thought this was prison letters only?’
‘I didn’t . . .’ Jessica lost her words.
‘Here at Scream Inc. we deal in all aspects of murder. We’ve got confession tapes, psych reports, cranial scans and medical waste. This here is one of Casey Anthony’s handbags.’ Tania tapped the glass of the cabinet at Jessica’s side. ‘Nabbed it from a yard sale the parents held a couple of years after the kid’s death. You wouldn’t believe what it would go for now. Are you an O.J. fan? I’ve got stones from the garden where Brown and Goldman were stabbed to death, but no certificates, unfortunately. I’ve got a line on one of the outdoor lamps from that scene. Guy says it has blood spatter on it, but they always say that. Should close that deal in the next few days. I can put you on the mailing list if you want to get an alert when the item goes up for sale. Unless you’d like to make an offer now?’
‘I’m . . .’ Jessica took a deep breath. ‘I’m just here for the Dayly Lawlor letters.’
Tania went back to the filing cabinet. Jessica stared fixedly at a pair of scuffed high heels on a low shelf, tried not to think about what might be in the refrigerator by the door. In time, she heard the flutter of papers and went to the desk, where Tania stood carefully spreading out three pieces of paper on the desktop.
‘Please don’t touch,’ Tania said. ‘And no photos. That’s all I ask.’
Jessica looked at the papers. They were letters, typed on an electric typewriter.
Dear Dayly,
In your last letter, you were talking about my reasons for killing all those people . . .
A chill splintered her chest.
‘So what am I looking at here?’ she asked.
‘What? You don’t know?’
‘I’ve come on behalf of a friend.’ Jessica smiled weakly.
‘These are letters to a woman named Dayly Lawlor from John Fishwick, the Inglewood Bank killer. Fishwick was a famous bank robber. He’s in San Quentin now, death row. The guy was really prolific, but he went nuts and blasted a bunch of people away in his last bank heist. Six adults and a kid.’ Tania moved behind the desk. ‘Some people, yours truly included, believe that one of these days Fishwick is going to reveal the location of some of his hidden caches of stolen money in one of these letters.’
Jessica stared at the letters, reading snippets, her heart hammering in her chest.
‘Now,’ Tania said, ‘Fishwick letters usually go for about five hundred a pop but in these ones, Dayly appears to be asking the man if he’s her father. That’s different. Special. There are new personal details about Fishwick that haven’t been released to the public, including a murder confession from his childhood. And with the news story last week on the decision made about money of Fishwick’s that has already been found, there’ll be renewed interest in these letters. I’ll be fighting off buyers with a bat. So my earlybird price is fifteen hundred a piece. I take Amex. I assume you’ve got authority from your friend to negotiate on their behalf?’
Jessica stepped back from the desk. The room felt very small and hot.
‘How old are you?’ Jessica asked.
‘Excuse me?’ Tania frowned.
‘You heard me, Tania.’
‘I’m twenty-five.’
‘And this is what you do for a living? You gather up the remnants of people’s pain and suffering and you sell it to creeps online?’
Tania baulked, stunned. She looked up at the square of carpet from the Columbine massacre.
‘Listen, lady,’ Tania said carefully. ‘What I do is no different to the work of any person who trades in historical artefacts. People buy and sell war memorabilia on the internet all day long. You go into the game room of any rich guy in the state and you’ll find a gun that was used in the Civil War or stack of letters from someone in the trenches or a . . . a Roman spear. A flag torn down in some foreign battle. This is history.’ She gestured to the walls. ‘You can tour whole museums full of this shit. Only difference is that those pieces are from government-endorsed murders. These are the history of individual murders.’
‘This teddy bear.’ Jessica pointed to the burned pink bear in the cabinet beside her. ‘Whose bear was this? What happened to that kid?’
‘Look, are you going to buy the letters or not?’ Tania snapped. Her eyes were wide. ‘I didn’t let you down here so you could judge me.’
‘I’m not buying the letters,’ Jessica said. She drew her gun out of the back of her jeans, her badge from her front pocket. ‘I’m confiscating them. I’m a cop. These letters are pertinent in an ongoing missing person investigation.’
‘You got a warrant?’ Tania asked.
‘No, but—’
Tania brought her hands up from where they had hung by her sides, out of sight below the desk. In them was an enormous 12-gauge shotgun. Jessica looked down the barrel of the gun as the aim swung around at her, her own pistol useless, pointed at the floor by her side. She let her gun slip onto the carpet at her feet with a gentle thud.
‘No warrant, no letters,’ Tania said.
Jessica jolted as Tania pumped the action of the shotgun. The sound was loud in the small space, like the crunch of truck gears. She felt the roof of her mouth turn dry with terror. When she spoke, her voice was gravel.
‘How much did you say they were?’ Jessica asked.
‘Four and a half grand for the lot,’ Tania said, the aim of the gun lingering on Jessica’s stomach. ‘But for five I’ll throw in two jars of toenails. Non-premium killers of your choosing.’
‘Just the letters,’ Jessica said. She carefully extracted her wallet from her back pocket.