Benedict Welch’s apartment was situated in a premier Fifth Avenue building and boasted treetop views of Central Park from every window. The living room was brimming with sofas and wing chairs and ottomans and benches, all pricey-looking, all done in shades of white that contrasted dramatically with the enormous black grand piano. The overall effect was beautiful and luxurious, if cold. It certainly didn’t look like the lair of a psychotic killer, but Melanie told herself not to be taken in by appearances. People were so twisted these days. Once the rich and the powerful were done amassing their material wealth, they sometimes found themselves bored, with time on their hands, looking for the next thrill. If Welch had turned to darker pastimes to keep himself amused, would that really be so shocking? She’d seen it before.
By the time Melanie reached the apartment, the agents were nearly done searching, and Welch’s wife, Gloria, was splayed out on a Biedermeier settee staring into the far distance with the eyes of a woman on heavy meds. She didn’t fit the stereotype of a killer’s wife, if there was such a thing, and yet she wasn’t wrong for the part, either. She wore a bloodred dinner suit that made a gash against the white upholstery and petted a tiny Chihuahua as serenely as if she’d be heading out any minute to her regular table at Le Bernardin. Melanie envied Mrs. Welch her pharmaceutical calm. She could’ve used a sedative herself right then, but unfortunately she needed full command of her faculties to make sense of what Agents Waterman and Mills had discovered in the apartment. They’d struck pay dirt in the form of Suzanne Shepard’s investigative file—the one Miles Ortiz had lifted from Suzanne’s apartment at Welch’s behest. Welch had kept it. Melanie was so anxious to get her hands on the contents that she couldn’t wait for the agents to make copies. She snapped on rubber gloves, sat down at a lacquered table beneath a curving Art Nouveau chandelier, and dug in, determined to find some connection to the man of the house, whom she had locked up in the MCC.
The manila folder was marked with Benedict Welch’s name in Suzanne Shepard’s handwriting. Melanie opened it with a racing heart. Inside, she found copies of the newspaper articles Miles had described in his proffer session.
Thirteen years earlier, in Los Angeles, a man named Edward Allen Harvey had been convicted of the murder of a woman named Cheryl Driscoll and sentenced to fifteen to life. Cheryl had been twenty-four when she died, a wannabe actress earning her living on the seedy fringes of the sex industry, dancing at a strip club called Playground and landing the occasional part in a porno film. The microfilmed copy of the black-and-white newspaper reprint of Cheryl’s high-school-yearbook photo from South Bend, Indiana, was grainy and blurred but still conveyed her megawatt smile and beautiful wide-set eyes.
Cheryl had been missing for three days, Melanie read, when her body was discovered rolled up in a blanket in a remote state park north of Los Angeles. She’d been raped and slashed to death. The L.A. Times said that the autopsy confirmed seventeen separate stab wounds on her face, chest, neck, and arms. But her stomach was oddly untouched, except for the word SLUT cut into her flesh with a carving knife.
Melanie read that, and the bright white room faded momentarily to black. This old murder had to have been committed by the Butcher himself.
When her vision cleared, Melanie pulled herself together and continued reading. Scandalmonger or no, Suzanne Shepard had been one kick-ass investigative reporter, and she’d assembled a thick file on the Driscoll homicide. Melanie pored over articles on the pretrial hearings that spelled out the course of the investigation in detail. The homicide detectives’ path to the convicted man, Edward Allen Harvey, had been a straight shot. The murder weapon was a ten-inch-long butcher knife with an acrylic handle found lying in a gully twenty feet from the victim’s corpse, and it had fingerprints on it. The fingerprints matched ones already on file for Harvey, who had a rap sheet for other sex crimes. Homicide detectives showed Harvey’s mug shot around at Playground and established that he was a regular customer, one who’d had a few run-ins with the bouncers for getting rough with the girls. Melanie paged through the file in vain looking for a picture of Harvey. Every paper that had run a photograph had gone with the gorgeous young victim instead, who naturally would have sold more copies at the newsstand.
Melanie found an article describing Harvey’s arrest. He’d been working as a handyman for a company that managed a bunch of motel-like apartment buildings in the San Fernando Valley. Homicide detectives had located him at work with no difficulty, which gave Melanie pause. Three days after a murder, and Harvey was going about his business? In Melanie’s experience of killers, that wasn’t normal behavior. Men who committed heinous crimes had the sense to run, or at least to hide. They made more of an effort to cover their tracks than Harvey had, anyway. Either Harvey was a complete psychopath, accustomed to killing and getting away with it, skilled at hiding in plain sight like BTK and others of that ilk. Or else he was innocent—which of course was what he’d claimed. Melanie skimmed through a number of articles in which Harvey’s lawyer loudly trumpeted his innocence, promising an acquittal at trial. Buried at the bottom of one of them, she finally found the connection to Benedict Welch that she’d been looking for all along.
In her rush, she’d almost skipped right over it. The page trembling in her eager fingers, Melanie read about the alternative suspect whom Harvey’s lawyer had offered up to the media. The lawyer claimed that the real killer was a second-rate plastic surgeon named Howard Vine. Harvey had met Vine at Playground, where they both hung out and ogled the girls. According to Harvey, Vine had bragged to him repeatedly about having sex with patients while they were under, and had let it slip that Cheryl Driscoll was a patient of his, one for whom he had sinister plans.
The investigative reporter covering the Driscoll case had followed up on the lawyer’s claims and actually found evidence to back them up. There had indeed been a plastic surgeon named Howard Vine who had been practicing out of an office in a small strip mall, performing cosmetic procedures on young actresses and models who couldn’t afford anyone better. At the time of the Driscoll murder, Vine’s medical license was in the process of being revoked because of patient complaints combined with certain irregularities in his licensing application. Even more critical, it turned out that Cheryl Driscoll had indeed been a patient of Vine’s, that she’d been reported missing the day after she was scheduled for a mole removal in Vine’s office, and that Vine himself had skipped town shortly after her body was found.
Melanie had years’ worth of practice listening to bogus claims of innocence. A large percentage of the guys she’d put away—even those who’d pleaded guilty—filed appeals and habeas corpus petitions trying to divert suspicion onto somebody other than themselves. And they were usually careful to pick straw men who were dead or beyond the reach of due process, since things got complicated if your “true killer” showed up in court to defend himself. The fact that the mysterious Howard Vine was in the wind gave him every appearance of being a figment of Edward Allen Harvey’s imagination. Yet, despite her ingrained skepticism, Melanie thought the whole scenario had the ring of truth—or at least plausibility—about it.
But the jury hadn’t agreed. They’d had trouble with the fact that Edward Allen Harvey’s fingerprints were on the bloody knife. Okay, Melanie had to admit she had a little trouble with that herself. They deliberated for twenty-six minutes before returning a guilty verdict.
“Ma’am?”
Agent Ryan Waterman was standing over her with furrowed eyebrows.
“What is it?”
“It’s pretty late. We’ve been done with the search for a while now. I was hoping to place that file into an evidence bag and get going.”
She didn’t want to give it to him. But he was only doing his job, ensuring a proper chain of custody.
“If you want it back, I need copies,” she said.
“I can do that for you once we get back to headquarters. I have no way to make copies here.”
“All right. Give me a minute to make some notes.”
Melanie drew her notebook from her bag and reflected on what she’d just learned. Benedict Welch had ordered Miles Ortiz to steal a file from Suzanne Shepard’s apartment. Shortly thereafter, Suzanne Shepard had been brutally murdered. The file turned out to contain articles about a murder with an MO virtually identical to the Shepard murder committed over a decade earlier. In the earlier murder, a phony plastic surgeon had been implicated and had escaped justice. What did it all mean?
As if she didn’t have enough on her plate. There was really only one way to get to the bottom of this mess, and that was to haul her butt out to California, track down Edward Allen Harvey in prison, and hear what he had to say.