Cam looked up to see a young officer standing in the doorway. “Agent, ma’am? The boyfriend, Mark Richards, he’s waiting in the kitchen. Detective Loomis told me to get you.” She wondered what else Loomis had suggested the officer tell her. Whatever it was, he’d been smart enough to keep it to himself.
Cam walked back down the skinny hallway with its pale blue–painted walls to the kitchen, past techs moving purposefully through the house, skirting boxes. The medical examiner walked past her, toward the bedroom, all brisk and impatient, not even giving her a nod. He would add no dignity to her death, her body now a job to him, a mystery to solve. She paused outside the kitchen door, closed her eyes a moment, and said a prayer for Deborah Connelly. Again, she smelled jasmine. It calmed her, helped her focus. Daniel was probably interviewing Pepita Gonzalez. She hadn’t known he spoke Spanish. She hoped he’d got something useful from her.
She walked into a small ancient kitchen to see a man sitting alone, still as a stone at a small table, his face in his hands. Loomis had said he was hysterical, but he was utterly silent. No, not quite. He was whispering something over and over, “I’m going to find you, you son of a bitch,” the same words, nothing else, sounding singsong. She knew it was his way of keeping hold of himself, of keeping him from flying to pieces.
She lightly laid her hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Richards.”
He slowly raised his face and Cam saw he was a tanned and buffed man in his early thirties with long dishwater-blond hair to his shoulders whipped back in a braid, lovely thick hair. He was wearing a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans, sandals on his big tanned feet. She saw a small diamond stud winking in his left earlobe. He looked up at her out of dazed eyes. She saw a pair of glasses on the table near his hand. “Who are you?” His voice was hoarse, blurred with tears.
“I’m Agent Wittier, FBI. You’re Mark Richards?”
“Yes. People call me Doc.” He sounded exhausted.
He looked like a surfer dude to her. “Doc?”
“Yes, I’m a neurosurgery fellow at Children’s Hospital in Santa Monica, only a half mile away, as if that matters. That’s why I wasn’t here. It’s all my fault, I as good as killed her.”
“Why do you say that, Doc?”
He looked up at her with blind eyes. “She shouldn’t even have been here. Deb and I were moving in together. You saw all the boxes and crap in the hallway and living room? It was all her stuff. We were all set to move her into our new place yesterday, but—” He swallowed. “I was treating a four-year-old with an ependymoma—a kind of brain tumor—and his parents were a mess and he wasn’t doing well, so we moved up the surgery to yesterday.
“I let Deb down, I wasn’t here. If I hadn’t put off moving her out of here, she’d still be alive. The house would have been empty, I’d have been sleeping next to her in our new apartment across the street from the hospital. That bastard wouldn’t have found her here, alone.
“I know I shouldn’t have touched her, but I couldn’t help it. I closed her eyes. She had the prettiest blue eyes. She was staring up at me, but she wasn’t seeing me any longer. I wondered if she was thinking about me when she died, how I should have been here with her.” He hunched his shoulders, put his face in his hands again, and sobbed.
Cam wondered if that guilt would gnaw at him for as long as he lived. She laid her hand on his shoulder, lightly shook him. “Listen to me. You know as a doctor you can only do the best you can. This was not in your control. You are not responsible.” She said nothing more, to give him a moment to process what she’d said, to get himself together. Slowly, he quieted. Cam said, “Doc, tell me about Deborah.”
His eyes glazed and his mouth worked, but nothing came out. He shuddered. Cam pulled him against her and held him. She said against soft hair that smelled like lemons the same thing she’d promised Deborah. “I swear to you we’ll catch this monster. Do you understand? And you can help us, all right?” She paused a moment, listening to his breath stutter and catch. “How did the child’s surgery go? On the brain tumor?”
That snapped him back. He raised his face. “His name is Phoenix Taylor and we clipped that sucker right out. I think we got it all. He’ll need some radiation treatment, but he has a chance at a life now. Deborah even came by after the surgery and took a photo of Phoenix and his parents—you can see the relief on their faces, big smiles. I guess it was still on her cell phone. One of the policemen told me it was stolen. Sorry, of course you know that.
“Phoenix had a bit of a setback with his intracranial pressure that I had to manage, and that’s why I wasn’t here last night. I couldn’t, I needed to be close, just in case.
“This morning, Phoenix was fine, even gave me a little smile through his missing front tooth. So I was able to leave the hospital early this morning—this would have been our moving day.” He lowered his head to his hands but didn’t make a sound.
Cam waited. He raised his head, looked at her blindly. “She was only twenty-six. Last Sunday was her birthday. We spent the day anchored off the coast, kicking back and drinking beer, eating chips and salsa, talking about how we were going to furnish our new place.” He ran out of words and sat there, motionless and silent. He reached for his glasses with small circular lenses and put them on. “Thank you, for caring about her. Of course I’ll help, any way I can.”
Twenty minutes later, Cam met Detective Loomis in the hallway. “The M.E. estimates the Serial killed her about midnight, but that’s not definite yet. He’ll let us know if anything we don’t expect turns up at autopsy. Did you learn anything from the boyfriend?”
Cam said, “Her boyfriend is a doctor, but he seems to know a lot about her career, maybe because she spent so much time recording it all. We may have caught a break with that, actually. Deborah was a record keeper. There are piles of documents in her office that she was going through before packing for the move. They’ve got to be filled with the names of people she worked with—actors, agents, producers—probably anyone with any clout at all that she’d met. He told me practically Deborah’s whole life is on her laptop that’s missing—it’s a Toshiba Satellite—every part and audition, every personality. Maybe with all those paper records and Dr. Richards’s help, we can reconstruct a lot of it. It’s more than we had in the other cases.
“I asked him to reconstruct as much of her activities this past week. I believe too this will help him, keep him focused on something other than his grief and guilt for not spending the night with her.”
Loomis sighed. “It’s something. The Serial’s killed twice now, in under a week. He’s escalating, and that scares me spitless.”
She nodded. “The profilers don’t like it, either. It’s something they didn’t expect.”
“So even Olympus isn’t always in control of the facts?”
“Alas, no. Where’d you get the name Arturo?”
Again, the look of surprise, then he eased. “Arturo’s my second name actually, after a big flamenco dancer in the thirties in Barcelona. My wife—a DEA Fed—didn’t like it, called me Lou. Lousy name.”
“I think Arturo is cool.” Cam gave him her card, explained the FBI website to him. “I’m going to visit the lady across the street Doc told me about, Mrs. Buffet. Doc said she knew everyone in the neighborhood, said it sometimes drove him crazy, since she always seemed to know what Deborah was doing before he did. He said Deborah treated her like her grandmother, was always over there, checking on her, drinking her lemonade, just hanging out whenever she had a chance.”
Loomis nodded. “The housekeeper and Daniel still have their heads together. I hope she has something helpful to tell him.”
“If she knows anything, I bet Daniel will get it out of her. Tell your people get all chatty with the neighbors, use their shock and surprise to their advantage—”
“Thanks for the hint, they were wondering what to do.”
“Yeah, that was heavy-handed, sorry.”
Loomis’s mouth fell open.
She smiled. “Please tell Daniel I’ll hook up with him when I’m through speaking to Mrs. Buffet.”