have in mind for her. She looked pale, maybe just tired.
“You sure you want to talk about this?” he asked.
“Of course. It’s a case. I offered to help. And it might help us find Joan.” She pointed to the wine rack at the end of the counter. “Would you mind opening a bottle?”
He checked for a red wine, pulled one out and showed her the label for approval, but she was handing him the corkscrew and reaching for wineglasses. What kind seemed of little consequence.
“Let’s go back a step. Maggie said he’s been taking parts from his victims,” she said, looking as if she was trying very hard to be her normal professional self, though the color hadn’t yet returned to her face. “But why? This doesn’t seem like the regular sort of trophies that serial killers take.”
“Yes,” he said, “this is different.”
“Is he on a mission to rid the world of those with deformities or imperfections?”
“I thought of that, but then why not show off his handiwork? Usually killers on a mission want to show off what they’ve done. This guy hides what he’s done. Not just hides the victims but goes through a lot of trouble to stuff them in barrels and then bury them under tons of rock never to be found.”
“Sort of overkill?” she said, then smiled. “Bad pun, sorry.”
Maybe the wine was working. The color was returning to her cheeks. He filled her glass again.
“But it’s exactly what I’m thinking. Why the overkill? I think he’s embarrassed of what he’s doing.” He waited for her reaction. He wanted to know what Gwen Patterson, the psychologist, thought.
“Hmm…interesting.”
“In fact, I don’t think he gets much enjoyment or gratification from the killings. Don’t get me wrong, I still think he gains something from killing besides just getting the pieces he wants. He might feel some sort of control, but again, I’m not sure it’s from the actual killing as much as it is from simply possessing those pieces. Does that make sense?”
“What does Maggie think?”
He picked up his own glass of wine for the first time and took a drink. “I haven’t talked to her about this yet.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I wanted to run it by you first.” He could tell from the look she gave him that she didn’t buy that. “Okay, I haven’t talked to her about it yet because I did something. And I’m not sure she’s going to be very happy with me.”
Now Dr. Patterson planted her elbows on the counter, leaning into him as if ready to share in his secret. “And just what did you do, Agent Tully?”
“I sort of pulled a Maggie O’Dell.”
She smiled. “Oh, heavens, she’s already a bad influence on you.” She sipped more wine. “What did you do?”
He pulled the laptop closer and clicked on the AOL icon. “I sent him an e-mail.”
“You sent Sonny an e-mail? That doesn’t sound so unforgivable. Actually it sounds very much like something Maggie would do.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Because I sent him an e-mail from Joan Begley.”
He waited for her reaction. She sipped her wine, watching him over the rim of the glass. Finally she said, “You think she’s dead, don’t you?”
He could almost feel the blood drain from his face, replaced by embarrassment, embarrassed that, yes, he had given up on Joan Begley. Especially if Sonny was the rock quarry killer. And the e-mails that Sonny and Joan exchanged in the days preceding her disappearance had convinced Tully that Sonny had taken her and most likely had killed her.
“Let me show you some of their e-mail correspondence,” he said in answer to her question. “And then you can tell me what you think.”
He brought up the file on the laptop’s screen and she came in behind him to look over his shoulder. Maybe it was the effect of the wine, because suddenly Tully found it difficult to concentrate on the computer screen. As Dr. Patterson read over his shoulder all he could think about was how good she smelled, a subtle soft scent like fresh flowers after a spring rain shower.
“It sounds almost like he’s jealous of Joan’s struggle with her weight,” he said.
“Jealous?”
“He sees it as a reason for her to get sympathy, to draw attention.”
“And you think that he’s jealous of his victims’ imperfections, their deformities?”
“Exactly. Here he tells her that he wishes he had a reason for people to feel sorry for him. In this one—” he scrolled down to find it “—he confides that as a child he had awful, terrible stomachaches and his mother never believed him. He says, ‘She gave me medicine but it only made me sicker.’ He tells her that’s when he gave up on telling people about his own aches and pains because nobody believed him. He reminds me of a hypochondriac.”
Tully felt her hair brush against his temple as she batted it out of her face in order to read the computer screen. He tried to focus. What was it he was saying? “So, anyway, I got to thinking, what if he had all these stomachaches, maybe he still gets them but the doctors have never found anything. Maybe the doctors even start telling him all his aches and pains are simply in his head, in his mind. But he sees people around him—a guy who has an inoperable brain tumor, a woman who’s survived breast cancer—and he sees them getting sympathy or at least having justification for their aches and pains. He wants justification for his ailments, too. Maybe he wants it so much he decides to take it from others, cuts it out of them. By keeping these things for himself, these deformed pieces that have drawn sympathy for others, by possessing them he gains strength, control.”
She came around to the other side of the table and sat down to look at him. He worried she was about to say he was way off base. But instead she said, “So he has no reason to keep Joan alive?”
She didn’t wait for his answer. She didn’t need it, having come to the same conclusion. She got up and went to the stove, busying herself with the sauce they had allowed to simmer for too long. “I can’t help but feel partly responsible,” she said, surprising him with what sounded like a confession.
“Responsible? Why in the world would you feel responsible?”
“Sounds silly, doesn’t it?” And she laughed, running a hand through her hair, a nervous trait he had noticed long ago. She seemed to do it whenever she was feeling a bit vulnerable, as if she had revealed too much and needed to remind herself to
“No, it doesn’t sound silly. I’m just not sure why you would feel responsible. You had no way of knowing Joan Begley would come across this killer when she went to Connecticut.”
“But I should have been available that night when she called. If only I had called her back…She needed me and I wasn’t available.”
“And if you had been available?” He came into the kitchen, leaning against the counter. “It may not have changed things. It was still her choice.”
She turned to meet his eyes, and he was surprised to find them moist with emotion. “She was asking for my help, asking me to talk her out of it.” She wiped at her eyes and looked away, now trying to hide a flush of embarrassment.
“You’re forgetting something, Doc.”
“What’s that?”
“It was still her choice to be there. A choice she was responsible for, not you. Didn’t they teach you that in counseling school?”
She met his eyes again and tried to smile, but it looked like an effort to do so.
“Sometimes,” he continued, putting aside every fiber in his brain that was yelling at him to stop while he was ahead, “it’s not such a bad thing to give yourself a break. You can’t be responsible for every patient.” And without listening to his head, he stepped closer until he was wrapping his arms around her and pulling her gently against his chest.
He leaned down and kissed her hair. When she seemed to respond, moving closer into him, he kissed her neck. She pulled away just enough to offer him her face, and he didn’t hesitate. He kissed her like he had been wanting to kiss her ever since Boston.
Again, she pulled away just enough to whisper in his ear, “Stay with me tonight, Tully.”
