After an interrogation yesterday that had lasted more than five hours, Nancy had learned a great deal about John Everett Walker. She learned that he was a musician who hadn’t caught a break because it was all about who you know. That he was living with the Mood Disorders because Lucy Griggs had been a bitch and had thrown him out of their apartment (where he’d never paid rent). That he was a small-time drug dealer because his mother, Doris Nutz, owner of Shear Inspirations, was too cheap to give him more of her money. He was a victim not of an indifferent world, but a malign one, energetically focused on doing him harm.
In short, he was an addict and whatever brains he’d once possessed had been so jangled by drugs that listening to his ping-ponging thoughts was, Nancy told me, “like walking through a shag carpet full of fleas.” His anger at Lucy for leaving him had not been softened by the news of her savage death. In fact, he tearfully blamed Lucy’s death on their break-up (“I wouldn’t ever have let anybody hurt her like that!”) and blamed their break-up on his mother. (“She was always against anything I wanted.”) The other members of the Mood Disorders were also to blame: “They knew Lucy and me had something special and they couldn’t rest ’til they brought us down.” Everybody was to blame except John Everett Walker.
Eager for Nancy’s ostensible sympathy, he had finally admitted to stalking and harassing Lucy, although he preferred to think of his phoning her a dozen times a night, chasing her down the street to shake and slap her, and smashing into her car with his mother’s Thunderbird, as “just doing everything I could to get her to come back to me.” As for the mysterious lover for whom Lucy had apparently discarded him, John first denied that any such person existed, then admitted that he’d tried to track the man down by following his former girlfriend. But he’d never succeeded in catching Lucy with anyone, a failure he blamed on the police, his mother, and his friends: the police for revoking his driver’s license and his mother and friends for not letting him use their cars anymore.
“But get this,” mumbled Nancy, eating a Wendy’s burger in the squad room where we were talking. “I pull it out of him like hauling a key up from a sewer with an old wad of gum. Guess who John paid to tail Lucy?” Nancy pointed at the photo of Kristin Stiller on my desk. “G.I. Jane.”
“He knew her? He admits it?”
“Yep. He’s ‘cooperating.’ That’s why he agreed to give us blood and hair samples. ‘I got nothing to hide,’ he says and he tells me this whole story. Jane, I mean, Kristin, hitchhikes into town a couple of weeks before Christmas—headed to New York, she told him. She just stopped here because her ride did. John says he didn’t know much about her, not that she quit a cruise ship or nothing. She’s out of cash so she’s looking for work cutting hair like she did on her ship. John hooks up with her when she tries Shear Inspirations for a job. She gives them her photo but Doris blows her off.”
I said, “Which means Doris blew us off too when she said she never saw Kristin. I guess it’s mother lion protecting her cub. John’s starting to look good, Nancy. He’s got personal relations to two victims. He’s a cokehead. History of physical harassment. Catholic? Go to a Catholic school?”
Nancy studied a small frayed spiral notepad. “Nope. Hillston High, then Roper Community. Doris was a Baptist and he’s not anything.”
“You ask him about saints?”
“Yeah. The best he could do was the St. Louis Cardinals.”
“But John paid Kristin to tail Lucy and find out who Mr. X was, right?”
“Right.” Nancy had learned that when four Frances Bush seniors sharing a rental house on Tuscadora (a few blocks from mine) had all gone home for Christmas, John had given Kristin their place to crash in for a few weeks. He’d had a key to the house. “One of the Bushers gave it to him so he could water the plants while they were gone. I talked to this girl, she was so tense I bet he was dealing her pot or worse. She says they all freaked when they got back around January 10 and it’s like Goldilocks—who’s been sleeping in my bed and cleaning out my fridge? But they never said anything about it to HPD.” And while the coeds were gone, nobody on the block had noticed that Kristin was there. There were so many young women in and out of the place, neighbors had stopped paying attention.
Nor did Kristin ever discover on Walker’s behalf who the mysterious man in Lucy’s life was. Or at least she never told him if she did. What she did tell him was that she was going to spend the Christmas holidays with Bo Derek, the hairdresser she’d met at Shear Inspirations and with whom she’d struck up an apparently fast friendship. John said she told him her plans when he’d talked with her on Christmas Eve at his mother’s salon. He claimed he’d never seen her again after that.
Our question now was, when Miss Derek left town so suddenly on Christmas Eve after robbing her employer, Mrs. Nutz, and stealing her landlady’s car, did Kristin Stiller go with her? Had Kristin in fact been her partner in the robbery? Was it even possible that Bo Derek had killed Kristin? And if so, had she killed Cathy and Lucy as well?
It was a long shot. Serial killers are almost exclusively male, and the few female serial killers there are on record have tended to murder men. But, as Bunty admitted, there are exceptions to every rule, even at the FBI.
As for the FBI, it didn’t take them very long to trace the stolen Toyota and its thief Bo Derek, who proved to be a current inmate at the Virginia Correction Center for Women. Tracking her down (and Bo Derek actually was her legal name) proved to be a great deal easier than identifying G.I. Jane had been. Bo had been incarcerated at VCCW since January. And she’d been arrested on Christmas Day—which meant she hadn’t killed Lucy Griggs.
I walked over to the medical examiner’s office to check with Dick Cohen about another possibility. Was there any chance that Kristin Stiller (G.I. Jane) could have been killed as early as Christmas Eve?
Dick told me no. It would mean Jane’s body had been exposed to weather for three months rather than two. If it had been much colder last winter, that might have been possible, but the January weather had been unseasonably warm with only two days when the temperature dropped below freezing. Judging from the condition of Kristin’s body, Dick’s best bet was that she’d lain outdoors for no more than seven or eight weeks. He felt certain that she had been murdered between the end of January and the middle of February. If Dick was right, Bo Derek was not a homicide suspect on Kristin Stiller either. But she was definitely our best lead to Kristin’s last days. Nancy and I made an appointment to visit her in prison. She wasn’t at all eager to hear two police officers from Hillston, North Carolina, would be coming to visit her, but then she didn’t have much choice.
• • •
The task force worked until one in the morning, assembling all the information we’d gathered so far about the homicides. Cuddy had said nothing about the district attorney’s ordering him to turn the Guess Who case over to Sheriff Homer Louge’s department immediately. Obviously Mitch was acting on orders from A.G. Ward Trasker and Ward wanted someone running the investigation who wouldn’t investigate anything awkward. Obviously Cuddy was calling his bluff.
At two, I was home on the clawfoot couch, drinking my Calvados, listening to a CD I’d just bought of Mavis Mahar’s first recordings called Light at Midnight. No wonder it had made her a star; she offered the most intimate privacy while at the same time promising, through every gliding catch, every strange modulation of key, such large and intense feeling that the sound of her voice was like a great drum beating out not just her own heart’s pulse but everyone else’s too.
The doorbell suddenly rang. Because I’d been thinking about Mavis, I was not even startled that her dresser Dermott Quinn stood there, looking even paler and scrawnier in his jeans and black T-shirt. The shirt had a red drawing of the rock star’s face above the words, “Mavis. On the Devil’s Horn,” the name of her newest CD. In the dark beyond Dermott, I could see the shadowy black limousine waiting at the curb. In front of it was a BMW sedan. Both had their motors running.
He smiled when he heard the CD I was playing. “It’s me, Lieutenant, Dermott Quinn. Mavis is off to the airport but she’s hoping to talk to you.” The Irishman spoke almost nonchalantly, as if he had fully expected to find me awake and waiting for him at two in the morning. Then he started back down my front walk as if there was no question that I would follow.
And shirtless and barefoot I did.
Dermott opened the rear door of the limousine for me. I saw her smiling in the far corner of the lush leathery seat, a glass of whiskey held out to me. There was a smoked glass barrier between her and the front seat where presumably an invisible chauffeur sat at the wheel. Music came softly from everywhere, her music, “I Want You More.”
She was dressed only in a short soft linen shift the color of wheat. Slowly raising a bare leg, she wiggled her bare foot at me. Like her fingers, her toenails were painted hyacinth and on two of the toes there were silver bands with tiny bells on them. “Isn’t this what you were wanting to know? Rings on my fingers, bells on my toes?”
I slipped into the seat beside her. Dermott Quinn closed the door and stepped away from the huge car as it moved smoothly mysteriously forward, taking me from the house where I knew I belonged and should stay.
“That’s a fine strong chest you have,” Mavis said and moved her fingers down my breastbone. “Dermott wants me to marry you. Did you know that then? So you can take care of me. It’s his grand scheme. He thinks a police officer could keep me safe.”
“No one can keep anyone safe,” I said. I took the crystal glass from her. The amber gold of the whiskey was the color of her hair. I toasted her and drank. “So, Mavis, what have you been up to?”
“I’ve been up to good.” She smiled. “Good Mavis mending fences, workin’ hard. The likes of the little Irish scullery maid your fancy family kept in their attic.”
I said, “Not many Irish maids in the South. We had other, older oppressions to call on. Are you flying off from us?”
“Aye, New York. I’m singing in the park there.”
“Central Park?”
She nodded. “But then I’ll be coming back in a few days. I’m giving that concert I missed at Haver Field.” Her bare foot rubbed against mine and the bells on her toes chinkled. “And I’m hoping you’ll cook me another fine meal at your house on the lake. Would you do that for me, Lieutenant?” Her hand moved down my chest to the belt of my pants. “I’ll sing for my supper. I’ll sing you all the music inside me.” Her hand was warm on me.
She raised her leg so I could kiss the hyacinth toes. I moved my lips along her foot to her ankle and to the luminous flesh at the back of her knee. She took the drink from me and slipped the shift above her waist.
The deep powered engine drove us into the night.
• • •
At the airport, eerily quiet in the neon light, Dermott Quinn opened the rear door just as if he hadn’t closed it on us thirty minutes earlier. He told Mavis that her plane was leaving in ten minutes and he told me that the driver would take me home and that he wished me all the best in finding my killer. On the gleaming tarmac, I could see thin young men in black quickly unloading musical instruments from a van parked in front of us onto a trolley under the direction of a tall young woman. She was also in black, with bright frizzy red hair, and I took her to be the manager Bernadette Davey. The young men I recognized from the covers of CDs as members of her band The Easter Uprising. Porters raced the luggage trolley toward a Cessna jet waiting on a runway. Very modish blue and black letters spelled the name of her recording company “MEGA” across the side of the plane.
Mavis brushed her hair with quick sure strokes. I asked her to tell me before she left if her driver had ever come across Lucy Griggs’s mesh purse with the photos in it. She said no. And she’d never gone back to The Fifth Season either. All her belongings had been brought to her suite at the Sheraton. “Do you still think it was me the man wanted to murder? Because it’s for certain he’s not very good at killing if so. Here I am.”
“There’s a possibility he knew his victim was Lucy. But you should still take care.”
She laughed. “I’ll take care, Lieutenant. Taking care of business in a flash, that was Elvis’s slogan, did you know?”
“You should meet our police chief, Cuddy Mangum, he’s a big Elvis fan. And he likes your music too. Which is amazing because I thought he only liked Patsy Cline. But he wouldn’t like my seeing you like this. He’s a very moral man.”
“Ah is he? And yourself, you’re a lovely sad man.”
I smiled at her. “You think so?”
“I know so. I’ve sold fifty million records from knowing how a heart hurts. You should listen to yours, me boyo.” She put on lipstick without looking. “Oh, about that girl Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“You were asking what she was saying about loving this married man and all that?” I nodded. “It came back to me one thing she said, very dramatic like, ‘His whole life’s in the palm of my hand. And he knows it too.’”
The mysterious man in Lucy’s life was growing more interesting. “Did you think Lucy meant something like, ‘I’ll tell his wife about us?’”
Mavis shrugged. “It was more like she was showing off how she had the power to destroy this man entirely.”
The red-haired woman leaned into the door. “Lieutenant Savile, I’m Bernadette Davey. Nice to meet you. Mavis. Sorry. We’re late.” She stepped away from the car.
“I’m going.” Mavis kissed me. “Oíche mhaith,” she whispered. “That means good night.”
“Slán leat,” I answered her. “Someone told me that’s how you say good-bye to the one who’s leaving.”
“Ah.” She touched my face. “Tisn’t much that goes by you, Detective.”
“Not much at all,” I agreed. “So long, Queen of the Night.”
She turned in the door, leaned down, and sang to me softly, “Ah, but I’m coming home to you,” the first line of the No. 1 song she’d sung to millions.
Dermott Quinn had a cigarette lighted and waiting for her. She ruffled his hair as she took it from him and then they ran together like children toward the waiting jet.
• • •
At dawn on Wednesday, Nancy Caleb-White and I sped up I-85, headed north through the last miles of undisturbed pine forests toward the interminable congested construction that stretches from the Petersburg-Richmond corridor all the way to Boston. Our destination was the Virginia Correction Center for Women. As I drove, Nancy munched on a Danish and talked about Guess Who. Finally I interrupted her. “Zeke said Dermott Quinn was trying to get in touch with you. What did he want?”
She licked sugar from her fingers. “It was so nice of him. It was about, you know, Danielle being all freaked about Mavis’s concert getting cancelled. Cause I’d told Dermott about it when I was interviewing him. So he gave me these two tickets for the new concert. He said they’re personally from Mavis. Can you believe it? I take back anything I ever said against her. Right on the front row too. I mean, like, two hundred dollar tickets! And Dermott gave me this card so I could bring Danielle backstage afterwards and she can get Mavis’s autograph. Isn’t that nice?”
I said it was very nice. “Did Dermott ask you anything about me when you were talking? I mean about me personally?”
She stared at me, stricken, with beautiful green eyes that distracted you from the old acne scars on skin that she could never get to tan. (Zeke called her “Paleface” for a joke.) “Did Dermott…tell you I did? I guess I maybe…I’m sorry, Justin. I shouldn’t have said anything?”
“No, it’s not a problem. I just wondered because he came by my house last night and I’m not in the phone book.”
“Oh shit, you mean like he’s harassing you?” She squeezed my arm. “You think he’s got a thing about you?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Yeah, I mentioned where you and Alice lived.” Her face crumpled with regret. “Maybe he asked some personal stuff, I guess, how long you’d been married and all. He acted like he liked you so much. Zeke always says why can’t I keep my mouth shut. I don’t mind what people know about me, but that doesn’t mean I should…I’m real sorry.”
“Nancy, don’t worry about it.” As Interstate 85 joined 95, I moved in among the discontented morning commuters to Richmond. “But Zeke’s right.”
“I know he’s right.”
“Anybody connected to a homicide? Let them talk. You just listen.”
Nancy nodded seriously. She wanted very much to do the right thing. “Well, Dermott talked my ear off. I’ll tell you this. Mavis has a problem with drinking that’s really scaring him. You know Windrush, about thirty miles south of Hillston?”
I knew it. There’d been nothing like the luxurious Windrush Clinic back when my family took me to “the mountains” and left me there locked in a room where the windows didn’t open because I’d had “a problem” too.
Nancy felt down in the foot well for the tie she’d thrown there. “Well, Mavis has put herself in Windrush a couple of times. Or somebody else put her there. She was back in there just this past January but only for a week or so and nobody knew about it but Dermott. He stayed with her. I guess he’s really kind of like her best friend or something.”
I glanced at her. “Mavis and Dermott were in Windrush in January?”
“Yeah?” She paused, her tie half over her head.
“So they could have been in Hillston when Kristin Stiller was killed.”
• • •
Bo, formerly Belle, Derek wasn’t much interested in talking with Nancy and me, even though we’d driven all the way to Goochland, Virginia, to visit her. With a year to go on her sentence, Bo kept a busy schedule, what with two jobs—one in the copy center, one in the hair salon—plus her abuse-survivors group therapy, her AA meetings, her work-out sessions, and her auto mechanics class. She liked the classes. If she’d known more about auto mechanics back at Christmas, she might have solved the ignition troubles on that stalled Toyota before the highway patrol discovered that she’d not only stolen the car (and several other things) in Hillston, North Carolina, but that her U-Haul contained two motorcycles she’d stolen in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
To my taste, Bo was overdoing the workouts. She was big to begin with, and free weights had given her the look of an East German Olympic swimmer just when word leaked out about the steroids and everybody was in a terrible mood. Drawing comparisons between herself and Bo Derek seemed to me ill-advised, but “Belle” didn’t fit her either.
She took a philosophical approach to life, perhaps under the influence of all the self-help groups she attended in prison. The photograph of Kristin Stiller produced a contemplative silence, followed by the inquiry, “What’s it matter in the long run if I knew her or not?”
I suggested a shorter-term approach to life, pointing out the pleasures of spending time in this pleasant lounge, of breaking the day’s routine by talking with strangers, of feeling like a helpful citizen—all these might be made to matter. Bo didn’t think so. On the other hand, the prospect of my putting in a word with the parole board had enough appeal to persuade her to accept a carton of Virginia Slims from me. Smoking, she relented enough to admit that the transitory world did still call to her. “I know it’s dumb, but I wish I had a frozen dac. A frozen strawberry daiquiri. God, don’t I!”
I said, “Can’t help you there.”
“And a long hot soak in a whirlpool. Day I get out of here, I’m headed for the Hyatt and a room with a whirlpool.” Bo walked to the window, leaned out as if right through the pines she could see the beautiful hotel room from where she stood.
I brought her a cup of coffee. “If I talk to your parole board about how you’ve been helping the police and the FBI solve a double homicide, maybe we can get you into that hot tub a little sooner.”
“Double homicide, what are you talking about?” Puzzlement spread slowly over her doughy big-featured face. But then she put it together. “Kristin’s dead? That’s why you’re here?” She stood up. “Hey, wait a minute. You’re not tying me to a murder.”
“Two murders. Possibly three”
She looked from me to Nancy. “No way. Somebody killed Kristin?”
Nancy asked Bo if she’d heard of the Guess Who Killer. Yes, she had. Had she heard of his victim G.I. Jane, whose throat he’d slit and whose tongue he’d cut out? G.I. Jane was her friend Kristin.
The mystery of life and the wanton randomness of fate dropped the large woman into a seat beside us. “Whoa, you just never know. That’s bad, bad luck. Wrong time, wrong place and it could have been me or you. Yeah, Guess Who was on TV all the time, like about G.I. Jane and that hooker they found back in the fall. What do you mean three?”
Nancy said, “We think Guess Who also killed someone named Lucy Griggs at The Fifth Season Resort.”
“You mean the Mavis Mahar thing? How it wasn’t Mavis, it was a waitress? Yeah, I saw that on the news.”
“Well, that was Lucy Griggs. You probably met her. She dated John Walker and sang in his rock band called the Mood Disorders. You know John Walker, right? You worked for his mom, Doris Nutz.”
Bo admitted that she knew John Walker through Shear Inspirations. And it was possible that she had seen Lucy in the salon before the two young people broke up. But she didn’t know anything about his band. She didn’t listen to rock’n’roll. She needed music that kept her serotonin flowing—new age and Mozart was all she could load on her system these days.
The news that she had personally met two of the victims of the Guess Who killer seemed to terrify Bo, as if Death was drawing too close for comfort. That she had been the last person to see Kristin Stiller alive shocked her into a willingness to cooperate; it spilled out like sticky syrup as she moved from “What’s it matter anyhow?” to “Ask me anything.”
Yes, she had befriended the young Swedish woman. She’d bought Kristin a few meals (but never at the Tucson Lounge) and a few thrift store outfits (but never a Guess T-shirt, and she didn’t recall ever seeing Kristin wear one). On Christmas Eve she had given her a free buzz cut at Shear Inspirations. Yes, she’d offered her a ride to Maryland for Christmas. Kristin was trying to make her migratory way north to fulfill a childhood fantasy of visiting New York City. Bo made the Swedish girl’s determination to get to New York sound as valiant as the legless Porgy taking off in his goat cart.
Their plan had been to drive together on Christmas Eve to Havre de Grace, Maryland, where Bo could spend the holiday with her ex-husband, with whom she maintained a “good relationship,” and who (we subsequently learned) ran an auto paint shop where stolen cars and motorcycles were quickly given a whole new look. Riding with Bo would bring Kristin closer to her dream of seeing Manhattan. But the travel plan went awry. That same afternoon Doris Nutz, owner of Shear Inspirations, accused Bo of robbing her and fired “the best stylist who ever worked in that dump.”
“But you did rob her,” I pointed out.
“Just afterwards,” she explained indignantly.
“And the Toyota?” Nancy asked. “What’d your landlady do, evict you, so you stole her car?”
Apparently, the Toyota was a last-minute replacement for Bo’s own vehicle, whose transmission had suddenly failed, forcing her into grand theft auto. “Sometimes Life shoves you into a bad corner and you can’t get out unless you do things you never dreamed you’d do.”
“Tell me about it,” said Nancy. “I worked three jobs in high school, starting at five A.M. cleaning office toilets and finishing up scooping the guts out of chickens ’til eleven every night. I had three little brothers and a mama in bed with pancreatic cancer and the last thing I wanted was my stepfather getting out of the hospital where I’d put him.” Nancy had zero tolerance for criminal hard luck. “So you bailed on your friend?”
For Bo, there had clearly been some urgency to leave Hillston as soon as possible, not only because of the holiday traffic, but because she was sitting in a stolen Toyota full of stolen property. And so when Kristin, due at four, hadn’t appeared by five (and with Bo’s landlady, the car’s owner, likely to return from the mall by six), Bo felt compelled to “cut a chogie” without her holiday guest. As to why Kristin hadn’t shown up—well, would we like to hear Bo’s theory? I held out my hand to stop Nancy from interrupting and said yes, we’d very much like to hear her theory.
Bo took a while calculating whether she was giving away something she ought to be charging us for. We waited. “Okay,” she finally said, “I’m not the sort to talk ill of the dead, but with Kristin there was a definite greed thing going. She’d been bragging about how she’d found out something juicy about some guy, some big shot guy with money. And what I think is, this guy was paying her to keep quiet. Because a couple of days earlier, she had this nice new leather coat on, full length, and where’s she going to get the money for something like that?”
“So you think Kristin was blackmailing this man?” I asked.
Bo nodded. “While I was buzzing her hair Christmas Eve she was telling me how she was going to go see this guy later that afternoon and I said it was Christmas Eve and probably he’d be with his family. She said ha, he’d see her okay. I remember ’cause Kristin spoke pretty good English, but sometimes she got little things mixed up and what she said was she was going to ‘turn the nails on him.’ Not the screws but the nails. Get it?”
I got it. But another hour of questioning Miss Derek produced no more information than that. Not even the image of frozen daiquiris in a Hyatt hot tub could stimulate her. She didn’t know who the man was, or what Kristin had found out about him that was so valuable, or where he lived, or what he did for his money, or what he looked like, or where this last meeting with him was supposed to take place.
Nor did she know—or said she didn’t—that John Walker had been paying Kristin (possibly in drugs) to spy on Lucy Griggs in order to find out who her lover was. Nor that Lucy’s lover was almost certainly the man that Kristin was apparently blackmailing. All Bo knew was that Kristin had gone off to meet with someone on the afternoon of December 24 and had then failed to show up for a free ride half way to New York, city of her dreams.
“You never know,” she mused in her philosophic way. “Every fork in the road, you make your choice and whatever’s behind the curtain, that’s your deal with Fate. Maybe they flew off to New York together or maybe he cut her throat and dumped her in a ditch.”
“You never know,” I agreed.
Driving back down I-85 in the June heat, I told Nancy that the wealthy man Bo thought Kristin was blackmailing and the man whose “whole life” Lucy had told Mavis she held “in the palm of her hand” were likely to be the same man. We needed to find out who he was as fast as we could.
Nancy didn’t see how such a man could fit the profile that Bunty and Rhonda were putting together of a serial killer. They were moving the investigation toward a psychopath, not a man trying to escape from blackmail. Given the sick things he’d done to victims, the FBI approach made more sense to her. “You know, Justin, how they say, with serial killers it’s compulsions and patterns like the shaved heads and Guess shirts. And with regular killers it’s like money or jealousy. I mean, if this is a guy involved with Lucy, why’s he chopping everybody to pieces? It’s, what’s that word, redundant?”
Slowly I nodded at her. “Nancy, that’s exactly right. It’s redundant.”
“It’s confusing.”
“Maybe that’s why he does it.”