“No, but that wouldn’t be in the clips. The cops never…”
“But you did say the house in New Orleans was torched and burned.”
“Yeah, the cops there thought it was done to cover up the murder.”
“They may’ve told the press that, but I’ll bet there were some cops down there who didn’t believe it.”
“What’re you thinking?” she asked again.
“Might’ve been somebody burning a book. He left it burning and the fire spread and burned the house.”
Bowman had come out of the restaurant, standing off to one side to grab a smoke. I looked at Trish and the question that had nagged at me all morning bubbled up and out.
“Why would he leave the blind woman alive?”
“You tell me.”
“Because of her blindness. That’s the one thing all the others had in common that made her different. They could see.”
“He knew she couldn’t see him. Couldn’t identify him.”
“That’s the logical answer. But this bird wasn’t thinking logically. And I can think of another possibility.”
She shook her head. “I must be dense.”
“There was something in the book. Something they could see and she couldn’t. Something that had been put in or bound in by mistake. Something so awful in the killer’s mind that it had to be retrieved, and anybody who had seen it killed.”
“I don’t know, Janeway.”
“I don’t know either. I’m just doing what cops always do in murder cases, I’m playing it through in my head. Maybe he never intended to kill anybody. But he went to St. Louis to get his book back, and Hockman wouldn’t play. Now we get into the collector’s mentality. Hockman suddenly knew he had something unique. He wasn’t about to give it up, not for Jesus Christ, not for Daryl Grayson himself. The only way to get it from him was to kill him.”
“Keep going,” she said, but her voice was still laced with doubt.
“The killer was single-minded, you figured that out yourself. He flew from
I let that thought settle on her for a few seconds.
“Let me tell you something about killers, Trish…something you might know but never thought about. There are people who never kill till they’re forty, fifty, then they kill a dozen times. That first one pushes them over the edge, sets them on a dark path they never intended to travel. The first one’s the catalyst: there’s no question after that. He goes to Phoenix and this time he doesn’t even ask. He wades in, kills the people, takes the book. And so it goes.”
“Until he gets to Baltimore…”
“And he walks into the room and there’s this woman, obviously blind, with a dog and all, maybe a cane leaning against a table. She’s blind, she didn’t see anything, she’s not part of this. He leaves her alive.”
“But who’d go to such a length? Who’d do something like that?”
“Only one guy I can think of. The guy who made it.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Jesus, Janeway, what’re you thinking?” she asked for the third time, her voice now an urgent whisper.
“Did you ever talk to the coroner who did the Graysons?”
“No,” she said in a tiny voice. “There was never a reason.”
“There was never any doubt that it was really Darryl and Richard Grayson who died in that fire?”
She never got to answer because Bowman came back and got in beside us. We sat in the car, still as death, thinking about it.
All this time we’ve had the wrong motive, I was thinking. We’ve been thinking money, but that was never it. All the specter of money had done was cloud it. Only after Scofield had begun to collect Grayson and the books had become so avidly sought and eagerly paid for did money become a credible possibility. But this case had begun long before that.
The clock pushed ten: the breakfast rush was over. Scofield and Kenney had been inside more than two hours.
“They must be getting discouraged by now,” I said.
It was on that weary note that Pruitt arrived.
45
He was the invisible man, leaving footprints in the snow.
