mean these victims still aren’t forgotten. He’ll work on them after he’s finished with the Darlene Lewis case. Until then, he’ll do enough to get by. He probably asked the families for DNA samples in order to match the six samples on the knife. But spreading out his resources by wasting staff time to look for them could jeopardize the Lewis case as well.”
“You’re doing great, Teddy. Now tell me why Rosemary Gibb will never even come up.”
“Because everything we’ve talked about depends on Holmes’s guilt. Like you said, Holmes has been locked up for four days. Rosemary Gibb has been missing for two.”
Nash had known it all along, guiding Teddy through the maze until he saw it as well. Rosemary Gibb would slip through the cracks. The DA’s office would have no interest in locating her because they had the killer and there was no reason for them to think otherwise. Andrews had followed the evidence to Holmes and was certain that he had his man. Now the murders were connected by DNA, the scientific results indisputable. The likelihood that Andrews would look beyond the evidence and admit that he’d made another mistake was nil. Even more troubling, the FBI wouldn’t be called in to assist because everyone involved thought the case was over. Why spend time and money on an investigation when the serial killer was already awaiting trial behind bars?
“Andrews is running out line,” Nash said. “He hasn’t caught his mistake, and he’s in too deep to make a change now. The man’s got blinders on. He always has.”
Teddy wasn’t thinking about Andrews anymore, or even ADA Powell for that matter. His mind was riveted on Rosemary Gibb. Without Nash and himself, she was in the weeds.
“The killer’s doing something to the bodies for a reason,” Teddy said. “Valerie Kram was taken away and worn down, then hidden in the water when he was through with her. Darlene Lewis was murdered on the spot. Maybe it was because Holmes interrupted him, but maybe it’s more than that. It’s almost as if he got to Darlene Lewis and rejected her for some reason.”
Nash turned to him and smiled like he hadn’t thought of it before. It was a look of genuine surprise. Another step down the road.
“That’s a good point,” Nash said, lighting his cigar. “And with a decent profile of the man and a little luck, that’s just how we’ll find him.”
THIRTY-TWO
She was in the bathroom. It had been two days and she was still in there. But Eddie Trisco was patient. Tired of waiting maybe, but patient.
At least the screaming had stopped. All the crying. She’d quieted down at some point last night after he ran an important errand and ditched her car in the long-term parking lot at the airport. When he returned and checked the lock, he knew she was still alive because she kicked the door and moaned.
He could drag her out, of course. He could do it any time he wanted. But she had to be willing. That was the key to the whole thing. They had to
The truth was that he’d let her run into the bathroom the same way he’d done it with the others. It was part of the plan. Once he’d helped her down to the basement, he gave her the tour. And like the rest, she’d fled into the bathroom and slammed the door. There were no windows and the light switch was outside the door. Two or three days in solitary without light usually brought them around.
Eddie checked the water pipes, making certain the valve to the bathroom was shut off. He’d examined the valve five or six times in the last hour. A creature of habit, he told himself. When the toilet bowl was empty, they got thirsty and opened the fucking door.
The basement was as large as a two-bedroom apartment and offered just as many rooms, including a greenhouse off the main workroom just through the door. Eddie used the basement for his experiments, his work. Even though the house was large and there were plenty of rooms upstairs, he spent most of his time down here. It was safer in the basement. More comfortable. There were too many windows upstairs, and every time he looked outside he could feel his neighbors watching him.
Particularly that house on the corner. When the new people moved in six months ago, they looked like a regular family. But Eddie knew they weren’t regular at all. They were only playing a family. They’d found him and staked out his house, and Eddie had been careful not to go outside during the day ever since. Once their fake kids went to school, the
When a satellite dish went up on their roof last week, Eddie began to really worry. The device was pointed just over his house. He’d read a magazine article a few months back about mind reading and the government’s secret experiments with dolphins. The article indicated that there had been some sort of technological breakthrough, and IBM was involved. According to the writer, you could point the device at someone’s head and what they were thinking would appear as text on the FBI’s computer screen. If the subject they were following was Chinese, you could click a button and the words would be translated into English in an instant. If they were dolphins, you were still out of luck because no one could speak dolphin yet. The article said the government was hopeful that someday they’d have a button you could click for dolphin, too. It read like a joke, but Eddie wasn’t sure. He didn’t like jokes. He didn’t like the sound of people laughing.
Still, that dish on the roof changed everything for Eddie because the kitchen was upstairs, and so was his bedroom. For the past week he couldn’t just run up and grab something to eat. He had to prepare himself, write a scenario and play it in his head just in case the watchers were reading his mind on their computer screen. Sometimes he would make lunch thinking the thoughts he guessed a chef would ponder.
Eddie heard a noise and surfaced. She was moving around in the bathroom. Grabbing a stool, he sat down at the large worktable and waited. After a moment, she became quiet again. Not yet, he thought.
He looked at the newspapers spread out before him, the contents of her purse, and her driver’s license. Rosemary Gibb, twenty years old, five-feet-seven, from the art museum district. The picture didn’t do her justice. He’d spent enough time sipping caffe lattes and watching her work out from the window table at Benny’s Cafe Blue to know the snapshot wasn’t even close. He tossed the license aside and took another look at the newspapers he’d picked up last night on his way home from the suburbs and that errand. Her disappearance wasn’t even mentioned. Just the story about that mailman. He’d been a butcher, and now he was a serial killer. The world could be a dark place.
He heard the noise again. The bathroom door cracked open an inch or two, and he could see Rosemary staring at him from the darkness. She was squinting at the light, her body shaking from head to toe.
“I’m thirsty,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“I’ll get you something in a minute,” he said. “Close the door.”
“But my mouth’s dry.”
“Close the door,” he repeated.
She looked at him for a moment, then shut the door. She was in the dark again, and Eddie smiled. It was a good plan because it always worked. Be a hard ass, then come to her rescue by becoming nice. On TV they called it the good cop, bad cop scene. Eddie liked the idea, and realized he had the talent and gift to play both parts.
He walked out of the room, climbing the steps and pausing a moment before he entered the kitchen. He calculated it would take less than a minute to get everything he needed. The curtains were drawn, the view of the
