“Better believe it. ’Cause here’s what else I see in there: while your lawyers are getting great press on Mrs. Friedman’s dime, your old school chums are going to testify for the prosecution.
“They’re going to trash you in court, Norma. And then they’re going to tell the press all about you, how sick you make them, how pathetic you are.
“And after you’ve been exposed as the godless, heartless psychopath you are, the jury is going to convict you five times over. You understand? You’re going to be disgraced – and then you’re going to die.”
I saw a flash of panic in the woman’s eyes. Had I gotten to her? Was Norma Johnson actually afraid?
“So if it’s such a dead cert, why are you even talking to me?”
“Because the DA is willing to make you a deal.”
“Oh, this should be good. Like I haven’t seen this ploy a hundred times on Law and Order.”
“There’s a wrinkle, Norma. A smidgen of wiggle room on that death penalty. So listen up. The chief medical examiner reviewed your old boyfriend’s autopsy report, and she says it doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
“McKenzie Oliver? He died of a drug overdose.”
“His blood test was borderline for an OD. But he was in his thirties, otherwise healthy. So the ME who did his autopsy didn’t look any further.
“But this is a new day, Norma. We think you killed him because he dumped you. His coffin is being hoisted out of the ground this minute. And this time, the ME is going to be searching for fang marks.”
Johnson looked down at the business card Ginny Friedman had given her, looked at my phone, looked up at me.
“What’s the deal?”
“Tell me about the murders, all of them, including what you did to McKenzie Oliver, and we’ll spare you the humiliation of a trial and take the death penalty off the table. This offer expires when I get out of this chair.”
There was a long pause, a full two minutes.
Then Norma Johnson said, “That’s not good enough.”
“That’s all we’re offering.”
I gathered my papers and buttoned my jacket, pushed away from the table.
Pet Girl piped up, “What will you take off my sentence if I give you the person who killed those richies in nineteen eighty-two?”
I choked down my surprise – and my excitement.
I turned to the one-way mirror, and a second later, Jacobi opened the door, poked his head into the interrogation room.
“Hang on,” he said to me. “I’m getting Parisi on the phone.”
Chapter 102
THE INTERROGATION ROOM got smaller as the combined four hundred fifty pounds of Red Dog and Jacobi came in.
Parisi is six two, has coarse red hair, pockmarked skin, a size-50 waist, and a smoker’s baritone. He could be funny, but if he wanted to, he could scare his own mother into a heart attack.
Jacobi is another unique terror if you don’t know and love him as I do. His unreadable gray eyes are like drill bits. And his large hands are restless. Like he’s looking for a reason to ball them up and strike.
The two hulking men dragged up chairs, and I saw Pet Girl’s snotty demeanor waver.
“Now I think I should have a lawyer,” she said.
“That’s your right,” Parisi grumbled. He said to me, “Boxer, take her back to her cell.”
As I got to my feet, Norma Johnson shouted, “Wait!”
“I’m not here to entertain myself,” Parisi warned her. “So don’t waste my time.” He flapped open a file, fanned the morgue shots out on the table, asked Pet Girl, “Did you kill these people?”
As Johnson’s eyes slowly panned the photos left to right and back again, I realized that she’d never seen her victims dead.
Was she repentant?
Or was she freaking impressed with herself?
Her eyes still on the photos, Johnson asked Parisi for his promise that she’d be exempt from the death penalty if she told him about her part in McKenzie Oliver’s death, and when he agreed, she let out a deep sigh.
“I killed them all,” she said, her voice breaking on her own self-pity, a couple of tears trickling down her cheeks. “But I caused them less pain in their deaths than they caused me in one day of my life.”
Didn’t Pet Girl know that tears were unnecessary? That all we cared about was her confession? That all we wanted were the words?
She wiped away her tears with the backs of her hands, and then she asked if the videotape was rolling. I told her it was, and she said she was glad.
“I want there to be a record of my statement,” she said. “I want people to understand my reasons.”
More than an hour passed as Norma Johnson fleshed out her motives, detailing the victims’ lives as only an obsessive voyeur could, describing their “unspeakably insulting behavior” toward her, none of which she deserved, and she told us how she’d painlessly put her victims down.
After she described stalking McKenzie Oliver, getting him into bed for a good-bye tryst, then stabbing him with the fangs of a krait, Parisi had what he wanted. No frills required.
He cut off her narcissistic rant midsentence, saying, “I have to be in court, Ms. Johnson. Tell me about the nineteen eighty-two murders if you want us to consider a reduction in your sentence.”
“What are you offering me?”
“Right now, you’re looking at six consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole,” he told her. “Give us the nineteen eighty-two society killer, and you’ll get to tell a parole board how sorry you are after you’ve served some time.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s hope. That’s a chance that maybe you’ll walk free before you die.”
Johnson covered her mouth. She was thinking long and hard, and as the silence did a few laps around the room, I couldn’t even guess what she would do.
Parisi looked at his watch and pushed back from the table, his chair legs screeching like the brakes of an 18- wheeler.
“I’ve had enough, Lieutenant,” Parisi said to Jacobi. “Wrap it up.”
“My father,” Norma said softly.
“Christopher Ross was one of the victims,” I said. “He knew the killer?”
“He was the killer,” said Pet Girl. “Daddy told me. He did them all.”
Chapter 103
PET GIRL HAD just ratted out her dead father as the 1982 high-society killer. If the story was true, then her father had been a serial killer.
She’d followed his example by becoming one, too.
Was that really the truth?
Or was it all a desperate fiction to help herself?
I wanted to hear her say it again – and then she did.
“He told me who he killed and why. Daddy hated those phonies who sucked up to him because he was rich. He loved my mother because she was real.”
Pet Girl reached into her blouse and pulled out a locket, opened it with shaking hands, and held it out to show Parisi the photo of Christopher Ross.
Parisi never shifted his eyes. He simply torched Johnson with his fearsome Red-Dog-will-rip-your-throat-out
