“See the postmark?”
“May eighteenth.”
“Were you in Las Vegas on the eighteenth?”
Elder was palpably irritated by the question. “I have no idea, but I’d be happy to have my assistant check for you.”
“Great. How many times have you been to New York in the past six weeks?”
Elder frowned and replied testily, “Zero.”
“I see,” Will said. He pointed to the photocopy. “Could I get that back, please?”
Elder returned the sheet, and Will thought, Hey, buddy, for what it’s worth, I’ve got your fingerprints.
After Will departed, Bertram Myers wandered in and sat down in the still warm chair. “How’d it go?” he asked his boss.
“As advertised. He was focused on David Swisher’s murder. He wanted to know where I was the day his postcard was mailed from Las Vegas.”
“You’re joking!”
“No I am not.”
“I had no idea you were a serial killer, Nelson.”
Elder loosened his tightly knotted Hermes tie. He was starting to relax. “Watch out, Bert, you may be next.”
“So that was it? He didn’t ask a single troubling question?”
“Not one. I don’t know why I was worried.”
“You said you weren’t.”
“I lied.”
Will left Henderson to spend the rest of the day working out of the FBI field office in North Las Vegas before his scheduled return to New York on the red-eye. Local agents had been working up unidentified fingerprints on Doomsday postcards. By cross-tabbing with prints taken from postal workers at the Las Vegas Main Office they managed to ID a few latents. He had them throw Elder’s prints into the mix then settled into the conference room to read the newspaper and wait for the analysis. When his stomach started rumbling he took a walk down Lake Mead Boulevard to look for a sandwich shop.
The heat was blistering. Doffing his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves didn’t help much so he ducked into the first place he found, a quiet, pleasantly air-conditioned Quiznos manned by a crew of desultory workers. While he waited at a table for his sub to toast he called his voice mail and cycled through the messages.
The final one set him off. He cursed out loud, drawing a dirty look from the manager. A snot-nosed voice informed him his cable was about to be cut off. He was three months overdue and unless he paid today he’d be coming home to a test pattern.
He tried to remember the last time he’d paid any of his household bills and couldn’t. He visualized the large stack of unopened mail on his kitchenette counter-he needed this like head lice.
He’d have to call Nancy; he owed her one anyway.
“Greetings from Sin City,” he said.
She was cool.
“What’s going on with Camacho?” he asked.
“His diary checked out. He couldn’t have done the other murders.”
“No surprise, I guess.”
“Nope. How was your interview with Nelson Elder?”
“Is he our killer? I seriously doubt it. Is there something fishy about him? Yeah, definitely.”
“Fishy?”
“I got a sense he was hiding something.”
“Anything solid?”
“He had Pentel ultrafines on his desk.”
“Get a warrant,” she said, bone dry.
“Well, I’ll check him out.” Then, sheepishly, he asked her to help with his little cable problem. He had a spare key in his office. Could she stop by his apartment, pick up the overdue bill, and give him a call so he could take care of it with a credit card?
Not a problem, she told him.
“Thanks. And one more thing.” He felt he had to say it: “I want to apologize for the other night. I got pretty loaded.”
He heard her taking a breath. “It’s okay.”
He knew it wasn’t but what more could he say? When he hung up, he looked at his watch. He had hours to kill before his red-eye back to New York. He wasn’t a gambler so there was no tug toward the casinos. Darla was long gone by now. He could get loaded, but he could do that anywhere. Then something occurred to him that made him half smile. He opened his phone to make another call.
Nancy tensed up as soon as she opened the door to Will’s apartment.
There was music.
An open travel bag was in the living room.
She called out, “Hello?”
The shower was running.
Louder. “Hello?”
The water stopped and she heard a voice from the bathroom. “Hello?”
A wet young woman hesitantly emerged wrapped in a bath towel. She was in her early twenties, blond, lissome with a prepossessing naturalness. Puddles were forming around her perfect, small feet. Awfully young, Nancy bitterly thought, and she was blindsided by her initial reaction to the stranger-a tug of jealousy.
“Oh, hi,” the woman said. “I’m Laura.”
“I’m Nancy.”
There was an uncomfortably long pause until, “Will’s not here.”
“I know. He asked me to pick something up for him.”
“Go ahead, I’ll be right out,” Laura said, retreating into the bathroom.
Nancy tried to find the cable bill and get out before the woman reemerged but was too slow and Laura was too fast. She was barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair in a towel turban. The kitchenette was uncomfortably small for the two of them.
“Cable bill,” Nancy said weakly.
“He sucks at ADL,” Laura said, then at Nancy’s incomprehension, added, “Activities of daily living.”
“He’s been pretty busy,” Nancy said in his defense.
“And you know him-how?” Laura asked, fishing.
“We work together.” Nancy steeled herself for her next response-no, I’m not his secretary.
Instead, surprisingly, “You’re an agent?”
“Yeah.” She mimicked Laura. “And you know him-how?”
“He’s my dad.”
An hour later they were still talking. Laura was drinking wine, Nancy, iced tap water, two women with a maddening bond-Will Piper.
Once their roles were clarified they took to each other. Nancy seemed relieved the woman wasn’t Will’s girlfriend; Laura seemed relieved her father had an ostensibly normal female partner. Laura had taken the train up from Washington that morning for a hastily arranged meeting in Manhattan. When she couldn’t reach her father to ask if she could stay the night, she decided he was probably out of pocket and let herself in with her own key.
Laura was shy at first but the second glass of wine uncorked an agreeable volubility. Only six years separated them and they quickly found common ground beyond Will. Unlike her father, it seemed to Nancy that Laura was a culture hound who rivaled her own knowledge of art and music. They shared a favorite museum, the Met; a favorite opera, La Boheme; a favorite painter, Monet.
Spooky, they agreed, but fun.
Laura was two years out of college, doing part-time office work to support herself. She lived in Georgetown with her boyfriend, a grad student in journalism at American University. At a tender age, she was on the verge of
