14

Jack Till spent his thirty-fifth morning in a row staring at escort ads on the screen of his laptop. He clicked on each ad that said “blond,” “red,” “ginger,” “redhead,” or “strawberry blond.” He would stop every fifteen or twenty minutes to rest his eyes. When he had gone all the way through the escort ads in one major city, he would put a check mark next to it on his list and move on to the next city. Over the past month he had been through the list of major cities several times. Each time he returned to a city, he would recognize a number of girls, but there would be as many new ones he had never seen before. He had admitted to himself that he wasn’t working just for Catherine Hamilton’s parents now. He was working for Kyra, the girl he had hired at the Biltmore in Phoenix and then followed home. He was also working for the next Kyra, the next girl who would come into the sphere of this killer. He wanted to find her before she died.

This morning he had moved his search to Boston. After so many days it was tempting to pass over groups of ads without looking at the photographs. Then, there she was. The girl looked very much the way they all had looked. She was tall and slender and very pale, with hair that couldn’t be called blond or red, but was something in between. She called herself Kelly. She presented herself in the usual poses, approximating the views a man would have of her in various sexual positions. Then he saw the glint of gold where the flash of the camera was reflected, and he held his breath for a moment. He put his fingers on the screen and enlarged the image.

Hanging from her neck was the gold oval with the diamond on it. There was the chain at the ankle. There was no question that this Kelly was wearing the custom-made necklace and anklet that Catherine Hamilton had worn in Los Angeles and Kyra had worn in Phoenix.

He closed his laptop and opened the two gun safes that were bolted against the wall in the office. He opened a couple of drawers at the bottom and found what he was looking for. He took out the two Ruger LC9 compact nine-millimeter pistols. They were only six inches long and nine-tenths of an inch thick, and each weighed seventeen ounces. He reached into the drawer again and brought out two spare magazines for each, then loaded the magazines.

Two compact pistols were the best choice for the kind of action he was expecting. Most people didn’t think clearly about concealed weapons because they didn’t know what worked and what didn’t. The human body didn’t conceal weapons well. A man walking around with a three-pound .45-caliber model 1911 under his coat wasn’t hard to spot. The man’s torso bent toward the weapon when he tried to hide it, and he bent away from it when he thought he might have to use it. A man carrying two small, thin polymer pistols was evenly balanced. He wasn’t leaning one way or the other. The eye didn’t pick up the width of the two LC9s on a man’s body.

At close range there was virtually no advantage to firing a nine-millimeter round from a bigger gun. At twenty-five feet he could place his rounds within a two-inch circle. The gun would do that at a hundred feet.

Till reserved a seat on a flight from LAX to Logan airport for that evening, and a room at the Intercontinental with an estimated arrival of eight the next morning. He prepared four packages for mailing. Each contained parts of two LC9 pistols. One had the slides, recoil springs, barrels, and one trigger and sear in a metal windup toy. He put the four loaded magazines between two external computer drives. He mailed the four packages to himself at his hotel.

He didn’t like doing things this way, because smuggling handguns around was risky. But he also didn’t like his odds of finding the weapons he might need in another state within an hour of landing.

He drove to the flower shop where Holly worked, parked on the street, and entered. As he did, he saw Holly emerge from the cutting room with a vase of flowers she had arranged. Mrs. Carmody, the owner, looked at the arrangement and said, “Beautiful, Holly. But think how much fuller it would seem if you added a little baby’s breath here and here.” He caught himself looking at Mrs. Carmody for longer than he should have.

Holly said, “Okay” and turned to go back into the cutting room, but then saw him. “Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, honey. I thought you might like to go to lunch. Do you have plans?”

“No,” she said. “Mrs. Camody, can I go early?”

“Hi, Jack,” said Mrs. Carmody. To Holly she said, “Finish that arrangement and you’re out of here.”

When Holly disappeared, he said, “Would you like to join us?”

“I’d love to, but I can’t. I have other plans today—a late lunch. Besides, Holly and I are the whole shop today until two.”

“We won’t be long,” he said. “By the way, is Holly still doing okay?”

“She’s doing great. A sense of color is like an ear for music. You have it or you don’t. She’s a worker, and it’s hard to be around her without being cheered up.”

Till tried to ignore the fact that she was so attractive, with her black hair, her blue eyes, and her graceful movements as she stepped around the small store getting things for the arrangement in the front window. He knew she was a widow, but that didn’t mean she would be interested in him.

Holly appeared with the vase; set it in the refrigerator case with a tag that said, “Sold”; and went to the door. “Let’s get this show on the road,” she said.

“See you later,” he said, and Mrs. Carmody gave a little wave as they left the shop.

They walked for a block before either of them spoke, because that was Holly’s rule. She didn’t want to be caught walking away from people and saying something about them. As soon as they had crossed the first street, she said, “You should take her out.”

“Mrs. Camody?”

“Jeanne. If you take her out you can call her Jeanne.”

“What makes you think she’d want to go out with me?”

“She asks about you sometimes, and she looks at you when you aren’t looking at her. At your butt, mostly. All the signs.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Till said. “If we didn’t get along it might make things awkward for you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Mrs. Carmody and I are adults. We’ll ignore anything like that.”

“Well, I’m going out of town tonight, so I can’t ask her out right now anyway.”

“Where are you going?”

“Boston. I’d like to be home in a few days, but it could take longer.”

“When you come home, then. That gives me more time to get her thinking about you, so she feels butterflies when she hears your voice. You need a girlfriend.”

They went to lunch at a restaurant that was too far to walk to from the shop, so it wouldn’t be a place she got to go to often, and he watched her eat a hamburger and a piece of pie, then drove her back to the store. On the way, he said, “Will you have enough money if I’m gone for a while?”

“Dad,” she said. “I’m not a child.”

A few hours later he got to the right gate at the airport just before boarding began, settled himself in his seat on the plane, watched the flight attendants’ safety pantomime, and waited for the plane to taxi out to the runway. The plane was aloft in a few minutes, and the lights went black. He closed his eyes and slept. There were so many people on the ground who wanted an old homicide cop like Till dead that sleeping had sometimes been a risky activity for him, but in an airplane he was anonymous to the people around him, and all of them had been screened to be sure they were unarmed. He always slept peacefully on airplanes.

Daylight streaming in through the scratched plastic windows woke him. He stretched his muscles and looked at the GPS map on the screen in front of him. Many of the passengers around him were waking up too. The others looked worn and dazed as though they had worked twenty-four hours, but he felt rested. Till reached under his seat, took his sport coat out of the plastic bag where he’d kept it, put the plastic bag in the pocket, and waited serenely for the plane to land.

When it had bounced once and rattled to a stop, the plane made its way to the gate. When the lights all came on again and there was a ping sound, the passengers all stood, rifled the overhead compartments, and slowly lockstepped down the aisle and out. Till rode the shuttle bus to the car rental lot, then drove to his hotel. He checked in, put his bag in the room, and went into the restaurant for breakfast.

As he ate, he tried to figure out everything he would need to know about this killer. It was obvious that as soon as he murdered and robbed his current prostitute in a month or so, he would be off again. He would travel a significant distance to another city and find another girl who looked like the one before. He would shortly be so tight with her that he was—practically or actually—living with her. But what made him decide when to kill her? What made him choose the next city? Why were these girls all so willing to have him around?

After breakfast Till went to his room, took out his laptop, and signed onto the hotel’s wi-fi network. He went to a couple of sites to see the escort ads posted for today. For this day, at least, Kelly was still alive, feeling well enough to advertise for work. He hadn’t killed her yet. Till wrote down the phone number she had posted.

He decided it was late enough to call Ted McCann in Los Angeles. He dialed his cell with his thumb and waited.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Ted. It’s Jack Till.”

“What can I do for you today?”

“I’m making some headway on the Boyfriend.”

“That’s what you call him—the Boyfriend?”

“It’s what he is. Or one of the things he is. He forms relationships with these girls. Each one seems to last a month or two. Then he kills her, takes whatever she’s got that’s valuable—cash and jewelry, mostly—and he leaves. He’s been in Boston recently, and I’m guessing he’s still here because the girl here is still alive.”

“How did you trace him?”

“Catherine Hamilton had some distinctive pieces of jewelry on in some of her pictures. Jewelers have all told me it was custom-made. It wasn’t listed among her belongings by the crime scene people, so I figured he took it with him when he left Los Angeles. Next time I saw it was in the photo of a girl named Kyra in Phoenix. He killed her too.”

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Me too. I think what bothers me most about this guy is that he’s happy to end somebody else’s life for no discernible reason. I know he’s nuts, picking out girls that look the same. But I’m not detecting rage or a thrill or even regular greed. And it can’t be a challenge. When he leaves he kills the girl and turns out the lights.”

“What makes you think he’s in Boston now?”

“There’s an ad for an escort named Kelly. She’s the same type as the other girls, and she’s wearing the same two pieces of jewelry. It’s definitely the same—a gold oval with a big diamond in a kind of off-balanced spot, and a lot of little ones around the edge.”

“I’m sensing there’s a problem. What is it?”

“He’s here in Boston, but I don’t know why he’s here. I can’t figure out why he chooses one place over another. I want to know if there’s something going on in these cities that makes him come or makes him leave.”

“Too bad you can’t ask him.”

“That’s what I’m here to do.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I’ve got a feeling about this guy. He’s got the skills, and he’s cold. If he gets me, I want you to know what I know about him. Anthony and her partner are worse than useless. All they do is think up reasons why no lead is good enough. I know you can’t go after him. But I’d hate to die and leave nobody alive who knows what I’ve found out.” He paused. “I also wondered if you know anybody with the Boston police.”

“I know a guy,” said McCann. “Met him at a vice cop convention in Las Vegas a few years ago. We talk now and then. His name is Alan Rafferty. Let me get you his number.” He read the number aloud twice.

“Thanks, Ted,” said Till. “I won’t presume on him too much.”

“Presume away. This is what the bastard’s there for. He’s a cop. Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Till disconnected. He sat for a moment, then got up to leave. He had to find out more about Kelly as quickly as possible. Every minute was moving her closer to the moment when the Boyfriend would put his gun to the back of her head.