Through The Grinder

Quinn.

On a little prayer, I smacked the laptop’s spacebar. The screen jumped to life. Bingo. It had been in sleep mode. I searched the computer’s desktop for anything that might look like a lead.

It appeared he was hooked into a DSL line for the Internet, and he’d set his password to automatic. I quickly logged on and checked the “New Mail” box. It was empty. He must have been answering e-mails just before I arrived. The box was completely cleaned out.

I flipped over to the “Old Mail” box, looking for correspondence from any of the victims. I was fishing blindly, not sure what, if anything, I’d find, but praying I’d know it when I saw it.

The “Old Mail” box screen was set up to scroll mail from oldest to newest. The first date was thirty days ago, and I assumed this box, like my own, expired mail at that time, dumping it into a back-up folder. I didn’t have time to search for that folder, so I just began to scroll down.

There were a number of e-mails from people in his company — the URL address was tagged with “@Bowman-Restoration.com.” I ignored those. There were also dozens of e-mails from someone named “Vintage86.”

Bruce had grown up in California wine country, so it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to have a correspondence with a person who also liked wine.

At random, I opened one, my eyes scanning the long, rambling text.

“Nobody thought you were very smart. They used to say I was slumming. I was. You were just a sex toy. Nothing of any consequence….”

The words were ugly. Harsh. And they went on and on.

I shuddered. If this were his ex-wife, Maxine, then I could see why Bruce considered this new life, this new house, an escape.

I hated myself for doing this, but I clicked on the “Sent” box to see how he was answering. This was a terrible invasion of privacy. I knew that. But I had to know. Was he just as cruel? Was this a sick back-and-forth, a pattern he was maintaining? Was he really the man Quinn painted him to be — someone who could snap, give into rage and hate, someone who had the ability to kill, maybe at the moment one of these women started belittling him like his ex-wife?

The “Sent” box was set up like the “Old Mail” box. There were thirty days worth of correspondence here. Not one was addressed to “Vintage86.”

The realization stunned me. Not even I could have read those attacks and not fired off a few choice words. But Bruce hadn’t written one e-mail to Vintage86, at least not in the last thirty days. It appeared he was reading her e-mails, reading all that ugliness, all that terrible stuff, but giving none of it back.

Maybe he’d written some in the past and had simply gotten to the point where he chose to ignore her — just let her blow off steam. Either way, though, it was clear he was a man who could in fact hold his temper, even in the face of verbal abuse, not to mention in the face of my interrogation of him tonight. He’d been annoyed with me at times, even a little angry with my prying questions, but he’d always been reasonable, never lashed out, never lost his temper or turned on me, and he certainly never raised a hand.

I exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

He’s innocent. I knew it then for sure, knew it with every fiber of my being.

Quickly, I went back to the “Old Mail” and continued scrolling. In the days just prior to her death, I saw a few from “IngaBabe34_24_32,” the numbers sounding like her measurements, which was in character for Inga.

The last one read, “Where’ve you been? Are you traveling? I’ve been calling. Let’s get together and…”

The e-mail degenerated into a profane description of sex acts.

I flipped over to the “Sent Mail” and found Bruce’s answer.

“…and I’m sorry. You’re a beautiful woman, but I’m not the man for you. And you’re definitely not the woman for me. Good-bye and good luck. B.”

I shuddered, seeing that B, remembering that’s how Quinn said the note to Inga was signed. But Bruce wouldn’t have kissed her off like this in the e-mails if he’d intended to meet her again. It had to have been some other man she’d been involved with.

I flipped, one more time, back to the “Old Mail,” scrolling all the way to the end of the long stack of e-mails. My eyes caught on one labeled [email protected]. The date and time indicated it had come in the evening before.

“Okay…last one…”

I opened the mail, my eyes scanning. Sally “Sahara” McNeil had provided the names addresses and phone numbers of two men she called “my old flames and your old buds…”

These had to be the old friends from college that Bruce had wanted to get back in touch with. Sally came through for him. More text below these addresses talked about how she had enjoyed seeing him again and how she’d love him to come to a gallery show the following week. She also provided a hyperlink at the bottom of the e- mail, which she said would give him more info on Death Row.

“Death Row?” I whispered, shuddering. “What the heck is Death Row?”

“Clare?”

I heard the voice. Faint and distant. Damn. Bruce had woken up.

It would take him at least sixty seconds to get up here. I held my breath and clicked on the hyperlink. The DSL was fast and quickly connected me to a web site for an art gallery.

In the blink of an eye, I skimmed the home page. There were a number of links listed. They looked to be artist’s names, and the tagline on the site read, “Journey into Violent Art and the Art of Violence.”

It seemed Sally McNeil’s gallery was dedicated to “art inspired by lust, morbidity, and obsession.”

When I heard the creak of the sixth step, I began quickly closing all the active windows on the laptop.

“Clare?”

The voice was louder now, slightly tense.

“Bruce?” I called as innocently as I could manage. “I’m up here. In your bedroom.”

I took hold of the open roll-top’s cover. Please god don’t stick.

It didn’t. The cover smoothly and silently rolled down, giving me about five seconds to get to Bruce’s bureau before he appeared in the bedroom’s doorway.

When I looked up from an open drawer, he was standing there barefoot. He’d pulled his jeans back on, zipped them, but hadn’t bothered buttoning them. In the soft bedroom light, the brown mat of hair on his naked chest appeared a shade darker than the coarse stubble now shadowing his jawline.

“I was cold…so I came up here…thought I could find some extra blankets or something to sleep in…”

Bruce smiled. “I like you in that.”

I pinched a bit of the black cableknit. “This old thing? Oh, I just picked it up somewhere.”

He yawned. “It’s way too early in the morning for bad jokes.”

“Agreed.” I headed toward the doorway, still nervous. Still certain he’d heard the roll-top going down, would suspect what I’d been up to and hate me for it.

“Wait right there,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. “I was kidding. I have something for you to wear.”

He moved to the bureau, opened a drawer, and pulled out a pair of flannel pajamas. “You take the top, I’ll take the bottom.”

“Thanks.”

“And I have something else to keep you warm…”

I thought for sure he was setting me up for another seduction, but instead, he reached for one of two Saks shopping bags leaning beside the bureau.

He reached in and pulled out a classic, floor-length shearling with exposed seams, turn-back cuffs, and a hood. “It’s for you, Clare. Try it on.”

“Bruce? What did you do?” The coat was easily over a thousand dollars.

He shrugged. “You and Joy were going at each other just because of a stupid-looking parka. I thought it was silly. So I bought you both early Christmas gifts. You can give Joy’s to her next time you see her.”

“Bruce, it’s too much — ”

“No, it isn’t.” He cut me off. “It’s a gift, Clare. Don’t turn it down. I didn’t turn down the dinner you made for