only way you’ll get it is for you to tell me where Kirsten is hiding.”
Comafield’s dark eyes turned black, rage boiling up. He whispered, voice shaking, “You can’t do that. You think I’m stupid? You’re the law; you can’t torture me.”
“You let Kirsten torture all those women she butchered. Did you help her jerk a wire around their necks, pull it tight while your victims were helpless from the drug she’d fed them?”
“That’s different! How’d you even know about me?”
“A very sharp guy in New York described you very well. You know, the guy Kirsten set up to take the fall at Enrico’s Bar?”
Comafield knew; of course he knew.
Savich leaned close again. “I liked you better with hair. I’ve got to say, though, you fooled me. I never saw you go in the bar, and believe me, I was looking.”
“Yeah, I stuck myself right in the middle of a happy group, and hooked up with this little blonde. We waltzed right in. I’m always careful now—real careful after New York.”
He managed to preen through the pain. Savich leaned close. “Now that you had your little rush, I can see the pain’s really getting to you. Tell me where Kirsten is, and I’ll get you a ticket on the morphine express.”
At Comafield’s silence, Savich turned away from him. He walked over to the single window and looked down into the parking lot. It was nearly full at a little after nine o’clock in the morning. It was a gray day, clouds swirling low, the wind blowing fiercely. He was glad he’d put up the Porsche’s top. He began whistling.
He admitted to himself that he felt great relief when Comafield cursed him again, finally nodded, and whispered, “All right. Morphine, get me morphine.”
He gave Comafield a long look before he got Nurse Harmony, a lovely name for a nurse, Savich thought, and she nodded, said she’d just as soon leave the killer to rot. Comafield watched her hook up an infusion device to his IV. Every fifteen minutes he could press the button, she told him. When she left, he was frantically pushing the button, his eyes closed.
Savich walked back to the window, and waited.
It was Comafield who spoke first. “Like I said, you’ll never find her; she’ll be the one to find you. So, it doesn’t matter that you know where we were staying—at the Handler’s Inn on Chestnut. Hey, the room is one-fifty-one. Go search our room to the rafters, you won’t find anything, and believe me, Kirsten won’t care, she’ll be long gone.”
And he gave Savich a malicious smile, proof that the morphine was kicking in. “Why do you care, anyway? You’re going to be dead.”
“The two of you didn’t discuss where you were going after Baltimore?”
“Nope, she hadn’t decided.” Comafield actually gave Savich a small grin. “She told me her daddy was guiding her steps. Then she’d laugh and say, well, mainly it was her daddy.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know exactly, but sometimes she’d talk on her cell phone, never told me who she was talking to.”
“Did you hold down the women while she strangled them with the wire?”
“No, that was her deal. She said her daddy always worked alone, and so would she, at least at the denouement. That’s what she called it—
“When I was working for Lansford, she’d call my cell, tell me where to meet her.” He shrugged, but it hurt and he grew very still.
After several minutes, he spoke again. “I met her in New York on Sunday, checked out Enrico’s that night. We left Monday night, after Kirsten was done with Genny, to drive here. We only had two nights together, and now she’s gone from me.”
“I really tried to hate Lansford, because Kirsten did, but when he finally accepted his political future was wrecked, I kind of felt sorry for him. The old bastard. She told me how he was terrified of her, she could see it in his eyes, and she’d laugh.”
“Is that how you met Kirsten? Through her stepfather?”
“It was back three years ago.” He stilled a moment, then said, “I’d seen her before, at his office once or twice, but never met her. She didn’t live at home, but she crashed there occasionally, for the fun of it, she told me, to think about her mother going into her old room and wondering.
“But one time I couldn’t sleep even though it was really late. I looked out the window, saw Kirsten unlock the back door and slip inside. I snuck down to her, saw she was covered in blood and she was smiling so wide I could see her molars. And you want to know what? All she had to do was say my name and we ran back to my room. I tore those bloody clothes off her, and we had at it until I heard people moving around the next morning.”
“Do you know who she killed that night?”
“I know her first name was Arnette. Kirsten kept saying it over and over, said it sounded tasty on her tongue. I think her last name had something with a rug—Carpenter, that was it. She was a model, like Kirsten, and a pretend artist, Kirsten said. Kirsten despised her because she was a fake and a snob, said she had put her lights out right and proper, and she deserved it.
“We were together whenever possible from then on.”
“Did you know when she killed other women? Did she come to you afterward?”
“If she killed anybody else, she didn’t tell me. I never got to see her come in fresh from a kill again until— well, until she left San Francisco. I realized I missed it, missed the planning of it, watching her work the woman at the bar, watching her change her hair and her role whenever she stepped in to put her name on another lady’s dance card. I was her front man, always checked things out, kept an eye on what was going on while she was working. She never made a mistake until last night, with that redhead. I thought when she hooked up with that redheaded girl, she’d really hit the jackpot. I’ve never before seen her so involved; she was nearly thrumming with excitement—”
“With the thought of killing her?”
“Of course.”
Savich held himself still as a statue, couldn’t trust himself not to rip the IV lines from Comafield’s body. To listen to him talk so calmly about murdering Sherlock. He said very quietly, “The redhead is my wife. They had to pump her stomach.”
Comafield stared at him for a moment, then grinned. “Go figure that. That girl really is your wife? So she was in on the setup, too,” and he fell silent again.
Savich smoothed himself out. He didn’t know why he’d even told Comafield; it had just come out. He said, “Since you worked for Lansford, you couldn’t see her all that often when she left San Francisco.”
“Yeah, since I had to stick with him, it was difficult to get away to join her.” His voice trailed off, and Savich feared he’d fallen into a drugged stupor, but then he whispered, his eyes tightly closed, “I remember one night we were together in Cleveland. She told me she sometimes warmed her hands over the fires. ‘What fires?’ I asked. ‘In hell,’ she said, where she was sitting cross-legged next to her daddy while he told her what he did to have the most fun. And he’d ask her when she was going to get serious about her own work, when was she going to hit the road, like he did?
“Then she’d talk about how sexy her daddy said dead people were, but only when you were the one who put out their lights. Then that made them yours, and it was a fine thing to come back to visit your works of art and enjoy them, over and over, until they fell apart, and then they weren’t art anymore, they were trash. I didn’t want to know exactly what she meant, but deep down, I knew.”
Comafield’s words were slurring. Savich knew he didn’t have much more time before he was out of it. “Of course you knew, since I’m certain you’ve read everything written about Ted Bundy, including his taste for necrophilia.”
“Yeah, lots of it. Maybe it scared me a little, and then she’d shrug and look at me like she was—” He closed his eyes again—from the pain or the image?
“Like she was picturing you with catsup?”