IN SPITE OF DAVE’S confident attitude about getting Fredericka to show up voluntarily, it was Tuesday afternoon before she finally arrived, leaving a trail of bug-eyed cops in her wake.
Dave was in the interrogation room with Fredericka. Schultz was content to watch from behind the one-way mirror. He missed PJ’s presence, since he wanted to get her input as a psychologist. She’d disappeared, though, off taking care of school problems.
Schultz studied Fredericka’s body language. She’d fallen immediately into the same behavior with Dave. She was wearing a short skirt that was a little scrap of leathery material, and a stretch top that ended in flirty lace north of her belly button. It was a wonder she didn’t freeze to death, dressed like that in the middle of winter. Schultz had to keep reminding himself that she was a successful real estate developer. He’d seen her closet, and he knew she had business suits. Whether she ever wore them was another story.
These clothes were selected with Dave in mind.
Sitting across the table from Dave, she’d crossed her legs at the ankle. Sometimes her knees strayed further apart than the approved good girl distance. Aside from the blatant sexuality, she seemed relaxed and confident. Not the demeanor of a guilty person, unless the person had no conscience. It was only an interview that she consented to, not a real interrogation, the kind that would take place after she’d been arrested and informed of her rights. It could be that the heat wasn’t high enough to melt her because of that. It looked like Dave was done with the preliminaries, so Schultz flipped on the speaker to listen in.
“We have reason to believe that you and Mr. Merrett were having an intimate relationship,” Dave said. “Would you confirm that?”
“Who told you that?”
“Photographs.”
“Oh, did June find those? I never knew where he kept them.”
“So that’s a yes to having a relationship.”
“Yes, it’s a yes,” she said. Her left hand strayed from her lap up to her bared abdomen. She drew her fingers slowly across the skin. “There wasn’t any relationship, though. We didn’t have all the trappings of an affair, like giving presents or sneaking away to bed and breakfasts. It was just, ‘Hey, the report’s done, wanna fuck?’ ”
“Who initiated this relationship?” Dave said.
“I think you could say we both did.”
“Did you make an effort to bring an album of photographs to the attention of the police?”
“The foreplay pics? Nope. I don’t even know where Arlan kept it. Kinky stuff, huh?” The hand had migrated to her neckline, where it was toying with the deep V-cut of her top. “So you’ve seen all those pictures of me?”
“Do you know of anyone who might want to take the album to the police?”
She shrugged, her breasts moving under the thin, stretchy material. “I said I don’t know where he kept it, so how could I know who got their hands on it?”
“When was the last time the album was put to use, and where?”
“At my loft, at least a couple of weeks ago. Arlan brought the chocolate. We didn’t bother with that very often.”
“Would that be before you thought your place might have been broken into, the time you came home and had a creepy feeling?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Since the album was last used at your loft, could Arlan have left it there?”
“I suppose. You think someone broke in to steal the album. It could have been among Arlan’s things in the closet. I wouldn’t have noticed anything missing. You’re so clever, Dave.” She reached across the table with the hand that wasn’t occupied with her cleavage, rested that hand on top of Dave’s, and let it linger there. Dave slid his hand out from under hers.
“Could we stay focused here?” Dave said.
“I am focused.”
Anita arrived, and silently stood next to Schultz.
“You’ve already indicated that you were working, alone, in your apartment at the time of Mr. Merrett’s death. Where were you on Sunday, from five until eight in the evening?”
“That’s an easy one. I was making a presentation at a seminar at The Westin St. Louis Hotel on Spruce, downtown. When the seminar was over, a group of us women went to the health club for awhile, then to the hotel’s restaurant and ate Asian food. We were there talking until the place was about ready to close. I got back to my loft, oh, I don’t know, maybe ten thirty. I was tired, and depressed about Arlan’s death, so I went straight to bed.”
“You were depressed but you went to a health club and a restaurant?”
“The seminar was scheduled months ago, and the women were all business associates. I can give you their names. What was I supposed to do, sit around all alone and cry? Going out took my mind off the sadness.”
Dave, taking notes, nodded. “How about this past Friday, between eight and midnight?”
Fredericka’s hand gently rubbed the neckline of her top, and then slipped inside it, continuing her self-caress. She sighed. “Can’t say much about that one. I was at home. And before you ask me, I didn’t phone anyone or order food delivered. It was just me, alone with my body.” She slouched a little lower, and her fingers were gently circling her nipple.
Dave shifted his chair and wiped his brow. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your hands in your lap,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” Anita said. “Doesn’t she know there’s somebody behind the mirror watching?”
“Yeah, and I think she likes it. Looks like our boy needs a bucket of cold water,” Schultz said to Anita. “Do you want to be the bucket or shall I?”
“I’d be happy to,” she said. She went to the door and opened it without knocking. “Detective Whitmore, you’ve got a phone call,” she said.
“Uh, thanks,” Dave said. He didn’t get up right away. Anita gave him a minute to compose himself.
“An urgent phone call, Detective,” she said. Soon after that, Dave got up and left the room. Anita took his place in the hotseat across from the nympho, who had a disappointed look on her face. “Now then, Ms. Chase, maybe you could be more explicit about your activities last Friday night?”
Schultz clapped Dave on the back. “Way to go, tough guy. Maybe they’ll study the tape of that one in the academy as a sample of how not to do an interview.”
“Fuck that,” Dave said.
PJ approached the two men just in time to hear what Dave said. In the mood she was in, she wondered if she should just turn around and go away. In her experience, if things were so bad that the Bear—the way she thought of tall, gently rounded, normally even-tempered Dave—was upset, that was not a good sign.
Turn around she did. She was behind in her simulation work and didn’t want to get involved in whatever Dave was so vehement about. Besides, there was someone she wanted to talk to even more than her two team members.
Settled in her office, she contacted Merlin.
“What’s the buzz, Keypunch?”
She filled him in on what had happened since the last time they spoke. Law enforcement had been unable to find the gamer so far and the dagger at the school indicated that this guy wasn’t going away.
“I thought it would be an isolated thing,” Merlin said. “Like a practical joke. But I see that’s not the case. If it’s okay with you, I’ll do some checking around.”
“Of course it’s okay with me. Why would you even ask?”
“Because I’m going to have to get very specific. At some point I’m going to have to reveal Thomas’s identity.”
She thought for a moment, not really sure of the consequences of what Merlin was asking. But she trusted him. “Do it.”
“Sure thing, Keypunch. What’s happening on the homicides?”
She gave him a concise summary, which helped to clarify her own thoughts. All the while, though, she was wondering what he meant by sure thing.
“So the maid didn’t pan out as a suspect,” Merlin said. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve always had a thing for design myself.”
“A thing? I can’t picture you flipping through wallpaper samples.”
“I didn’t say what type of design.”
“Oh,” she said. “What do you think about the Florissant murders?”
There was no answer for several minutes. PJ was used to the long silences in her conversation with Merlin. She doodled on some papers on her desk, and stopped when she noticed she was drawing daggers.
“I’m inclined to think they’re still connected with this case,” Merlin said. “The parolees are a strong argument, but you have to go with your gut.”
PJ nodded. “Heart and fingers. Or in this case, only one finger.”
“Yes, a solo finger. A ring finger.”
Why haven’t I thought of that before?
“June and her diamond engagement ring,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“June has no alibi for that time period. But she doesn’t have any connection to the teacher, either.”
“So the teacher could be a target of opportunity,” Merlin said. “An innocent victim whose purpose is to point the finger at June.”
PJ rolled her eyes at the comment. “To frame her. That could be May’s doing. May certainly knew the engagement ring story.”
“There could be plenty of others who knew. I can see May gloating about it.”
“So May is tormenting her sister and out to get her at any cost,” PJ said. “Probably continuing a long-standing pattern of behavior but taking it up a notch. I like it. May could have killed Shower Woman as a way of saying ‘this is what I could do to you, anytime I want’ to June.”
“And June retaliated for a lifetime of emotional abuse by killing May’s husband,” Merlin said. “Finally lashing out. A woman on the edge.”
“It sounds good,” PJ said. “Unfortunately, there’s the matter of proof.”
“Why spoil things when we’re on a roll?”
“Unfortunately my coworkers get sticky about things like proof.”
“Then get to work on it. What are you doing wasting your time talking to me? Don’t leave without your list, though. One: Marry Schultz. If you can’t do that, then at least live with the guy and get some regular smooching, albeit garlic scented.”
“Onion.”
“Can garlic be far behind? Two: Present behavior starts in the past. Set the Wayback Machine. Three: Chain Thomas to his bed at night, but not in a bondage sort of way. Fredericka is kinky enough for all of us. Four: Your hard drive will never be the same after the police give it back to you. It won’t trust you anymore, after what it’s been through. Five: The word for the day is still esoterica. Esoterica, noun: secrets known only to an initiated minority.”
“I know what it means, you annoying man,” PJ said testily, “but what does it mean when you say it?”
“Take care, Keypunch.”
PJ wasn’t leaving until she made some sense of her barn scenario. She had some ideas, and set to work with enthusiasm. Her conversation with Merlin had turned May into the top suspect. It required giving up PJ’s notion of a killing duo, but that had gotten her nowhere. Schultz had never bought into the duo idea, for what that was worth.
She didn’t have what she needed in her preprogrammed set of vehicles, so it took a while to add the item she’d glimpsed on the grounds of the May’s home. It was a motorized garden cart with large, smooth wheels that left no tracks on the landscaping.
The null world, then a night scene.
PJ, as a Genfem, pulled a full-sized pickup truck into Old Hank’s driveway. She followed the Eggs 4 Sale sign and came to a stop on the gravel turnaround some distance from the barn. There was a duffle bag full of supplies resting next to her on the seat, but she ignored it for now. Opening the truck’s tailgate, she slid out two substantial boards and positioned them as ramps. Getting up into the bed of the truck was a clumsy maneuver for her. It wasn’t the kind of motion she was familiar with in her scenarios.
In the truck bed was the utility vehicle she’d seen at May’s home, the garden cart, barely fitting between the rear wheel housings. Only now it held Arlan, naked and unconscious in the wood-slatted area where the gardener had been futilely tossing leaves. The cart’s engine was electric, so there was very little noise. She started backing the cart down the ramps. And promptly fell off. She had to restart the scenario a couple of times before she was able to get the cart down the ramps onto the gravel without overturning it.
Could May manage that? She could have practiced. Or she might just be more coordinated than me, which wouldn’t take much.
The utility cart had turf tires. It left no tracks and fit easily through the oversized barn door. She drove right up to the workbench with it, got out, and set up her portable light.
Now for the second part of her plan. How did the killer, unless he was a strong man or two people, get the two-hundred-pound weight out of the cart and up on a tall workbench?
PJ retrieved the duffle bag from the interior of the truck. Inside it were rope and a manual winch, no surprise to her because she’d set it up that way in the scenario. Looking up, she saw that one of the structural beams of the barn was above the workbench. She tossed the rope up and over, again having to try a few times before succeeding. Then she fastened the two ends of the rope to a winch, and stretching over the cart’s slats, worked the straps of the winch around Arlan’s body.
It was amazing how much trouble the killer had gone through to stage this murder so precisely, and in a place associated with both May and June. Powerful needs must go along with it.
Family traditions.
Working the manual winch, PJ easily raised Arlan from the cart and swung him out over the workbench. She had a little trouble positioning him just right and lowering him, and in the process scraped his back more than once across the workbench. Oak splinters had been found embedded in Arlan’s back, and it was easy to see how they’d gotten there.
PJ skimmed over the killing that came next, switching to an observer role and moving the simulation at ten times normal speed. In front of her eyes, a Genfem raced through the mutilations and dug into Arlan’s chest. She had no urge to linger on that again. When Arlan was dead and his severed parts nailed, PJ switched back into being the killer. She reversed her actions, using the winch to put Arlan back in the cart, pulling the rope down from the beam, and driving back out to the truck. This time, because she was pulling forward up the ramps, she had a lot easier time of it. In a few minutes, the truck pulled away from the barn.
“End,” she said. PJ felt exultant. It was something workable. She still needed a plausible connection between the kill site and the dump site, but the scenario had plenty of potential. PJ was surprised to find that it was eight o’clock at night. The time had sped by while she was working at the computer.
She called Thomas, who was watching a video at Mick’s house.
“Hey, you’re grounded. You’re not supposed to be watching TV.”
“It’s in the room I’m sharing with Mick. I’m supposed to make him turn off his own TV? Close my eyes?”
Grounding wasn’t as practical when Thomas was staying in another person’s house as it was when he was under her thumb at home.
“Okay, no using the computer, no phone calls to anyone except me or Schultz, and no going out, like to movies with your friends. When you get back home, it’ll be no TV, too. You can watch TV with Mick, as long as it isn’t anything R-rated.”
“Mick doesn’t get to see that stuff either, so that won’t be a problem,” he said.
She quizzed Thomas on what he thought about the dagger arriving at the academy. While PJ was still there, he’d been summoned to Mr. Archibald’s office and shown the dagger. He claimed no involvement with it, and she believed him. The principal did too, if she was correct in judging the man’s body language.
“I’m getting creeped out about it, Mom,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“What do we do if the police can’t find this jerk?”
“Let’s let the law do its thing,” she said. “And I’ve got something in reserve, too.”
“I’m really sorry about this.”
She was tempted to reassure him by saying everything was all right. But it wasn’t all right, so she clamped her lips together on that. She’d already lectured him enough about it.
“We’ll get through it, sweetie. We make a tough team, you know.”
“Yeah. You and me and Schultz.”
She hadn’t meant to include a third party, but hearing it from Thomas, it did sound reassuring.
“I still have work to do, so I’ll let you get back to your movie. Love you.”
“Love you, Mom.”
After hanging up, PJ used her computer to order flowers sent to Lilly Kane. Mick’s mother was being extraordinarily helpful, and PJ didn’t know how she was going to repay her.
She called Schultz, trying his desk first, and was surprised to actually reach him there. Explaining her insight about May being the killer, she left out Merlin’s role of talking it over with her. No one else knew about Merlin, and she preferred to keep it that way.
“So there are two things we need to do,” she said.
“You know, when you say that, you usually mean things I need to do.”
She flushed slightly, even though he couldn’t see her. “You are the official cop portion of this team, as you so often remind me.”
He sighed. “Let’s not get into that now. What is it we need to do?”
She talked him quickly through her simulation. “This scenario would have a lot of credibility if we could find two things.”
“One is the garden cart with Arlan’s blood in it,” he said. “The other?”
“Rope fibers on the beam above the workbench in Old Hank’s barn. There is one teensy problem.”
“Yeah?”
“I saw the garden cart in use at May’s home after the murder. The gardener was calmly loading leaves into it. You’d think he would have noticed if it had been heavily bloodstained.”
“It could have been scrubbed well enough that casual inspection wouldn’t reveal any blood,” Schultz said. “There could have been a tarp in it. Hey, maybe the cart was used to take the body to the dump site. You wouldn’t need one of those stretcher-body bags. Just drag the body out of the cart and roll it. The cart could have been pushed into the river afterward.”
“How about you go check out the cart, Dave goes to the barn, and Anita gets a search going in the river?”
“I can tell you right now that since this isn’t body retrieval, we’re not getting any divers until tomorrow, and that’s if we’re lucky.”
“Okay, then, Anita gets a night off,” PJ said.
Feeling that things were moving in the right direction, or at least a direction, PJ decided to follow through on the research she’d done about the parents of May and June and the mysterious third sister. It was time to put that theory aside or put some teeth into it. She got out her notes on the obituary with names of surviving relatives.
John T. Winter, the sisters’ paternal uncle, lived in Denver. It was only a little after seven o’clock there, not too late to give the man a call. She looked up his phone number on the Internet, pleased to find it with minimal effort. She identified herself when he picked up, and asked if he was the brother of Henry Winter, the husband of Virginia Crane.
“Yes, I am. Henry died in 1997, though, if you were looking to get in touch with him.”
“No, I’m calling to talk to you. Were you aware that both of Henry’s son-in-laws have died within the past ten days?”
“Oh, god, no. Nobody calls me anymore. After Henry died, I lost touch. Was it another accident? My brother died in a plane crash.”
“I’m sorry to say it was homicide, in both cases.”
PJ gave the man all the time he needed to absorb the information. She didn’t like being the one to bring him the news. “Mr. Winter, I’m sorry for your losses. This must be especially hard, hearing about both of these men at one time, and from someone who is not a member of your family.”
“I’m all right, just stunned, I guess. Is there anything you can tell me about their deaths?”
“Very little, I’m afraid. I can say that Frank Simmons was shot and Arlan Merrett was stabbed.”
“Jesus. No one called me.” His voice trailed off. “Thank you for letting me know. I guess I’ll get in touch with my nieces, see if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“May I ask you some questions, Mr. Winter? It could be of help in the investigations.”
“Sure, anything. I just need to sit down first,” he said.
PJ heard some shuffling that sounded like a chair being dragged across the floor. “You said that you lost touch with the St. Louis families after your brother died. Were you in close contact before that?”
“It depends on what you call close,” he said. “Henry came out to visit me two or three times a year, and at Christmas, I usually went to St. Louis for a week.”
“Was that from the time he first got married to Virginia Crane?”
“Yes, but Virginia and I didn’t get along too well. I think I was a little too much of a reminder of our family’s middle-class roots for her. I was a traveling salesman. Cash registers.”
“Did Virginia ever talk about her little brother, the one who died when he was less than a year old?” PJ asked.
“Strange you should ask about that. She never did mention that to me, but my brother did. The boy’s name was Ellis, I think. Died of the flu.”
“There weren’t any rumors about Ellis being murdered?”
“What? No, nothing I knew about. He got sick and died, that’s what I heard.”
“Only one more subject, Mr. Winter. How many children did your brother and his wife have?”
“Three.”
PJ’s heart nearly stopped. The rumor was true, then. “So there’s May, June, and?”
“And April. I didn’t know her very well. I was traveling a lot at the time. April was born only six months after my brother married Virginia. You know, like a shotgun wedding, only into a high-class family. Years later, when she was a teenager, Henry told me there were some problems with her, some behavioral problems, or problems at school. I don’t really remember, and he didn’t make a big deal of it. Doesn’t matter, though. She died when she was twenty. A horse riding accident. I went to her funeral. May was a young girl at that time, second or third grade, I think. Little June was a baby then.”
Not an imaginary friend. A real sister. Why would May lie and say June was delusional? To make June look crazy, apparently.
“Do you happen to have any pictures of April or of the entire family at that time?”
“I’m not sure. I can look through the old photos. If you’re interested, Jasmine, that’s Virginia’s sister, would probably know a lot more about it. She and Virginia kept in very close touch. Listen, I’d really like to call my nieces now.”
PJ checked her notes. “That would be Jasmine Singer, of Hannibal, Missouri?”
“Yes. Talk with her. She knew April well, I think.”
“Thank you. I’ll certainly do that. You’ve been very generous with your time, Mr. Winter. Again, I’m sorry for your losses.”
Tempering PJ’s excitement about confirming the existence of the third sister was the fact of that sister’s death. Why would May lie when she said she didn’t know of another child in the family? There could have been something traumatic about April’s death that caused May to block out the experience of even having a sister.
Far-fetched. That would take some horrendous trauma.
Too bad April was a dead end.