counter by the window. “If nobody’s done it yet, I’d like somebody to take out the trap in the shower drain to check for her hairs. I’m almost certain the reason she touched a tile was that she took a shower after she killed him. Another good place to look is in his laundry basket. There should be a damp towel about halfway down.”
Catherine walked down the stairs, not touching the railings, and stepped outside the building to look up at the windows of Gregory McDonald’s loft. Nobody could have seen anything from down here, and the buildings across the street were lower. They seemed to still be used for some industrial purpose, not yet part of the gentrification that was gripping the neighborhood, but she would find out who occupied them and ask.
She hesitated for a moment, then took out her cell phone and dialed a Los Angeles number.
A woman who sounded younger than she was answered, “Pitt Investigations. May we help you?”
Catherine said, “This is Catherine Hobbes. Is Joe in?”
“No, I’m sorry. He’s out right now, but I’ll transfer your call to his cell phone.”
“You don’t have to do that,” said Catherine.
“Yes, I do,” said the young woman. Catherine thought she heard amusement in her voice. “He told us all that if he misses a call from you, then whoever dropped it is in trouble. Please hold for a moment.”
After a few seconds she heard Joe’s voice. “Catherine?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s only me. Do you really threaten your employees?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“I don’t have any. I just called to give you more bad news. Tanya has done it again. I don’t know why I’m bothering you with it, but I felt as though you had earned a right to a share of the misery.”
“Who was it?”
“A young guy named Gregory McDonald. He was some kind of software engineer. He was shot in the head while he was in bed with her in his loft.”
“So it’s like some of the others—Dennis Poole and the guy in the hotel down here.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure yet if it was a one-night thing or a bad end to a relationship. I just got word a few minutes ago that one of the prints in the loft belonged to Tanya, so I’m just getting started. Nobody has checked yet to find out whether they were seen together, and so on.”
“Would you mind if I flew up there tonight or tomorrow to take a look around?”
“Yes,” she said. “I definitely would mind. This is my case, and my job, and you’re the biggest distraction in the world. I’ve got to follow up the leads now, and then maybe later I’ll talk to you about what it all means.”
“It means she’s still there,” said Joe. “Be thorough, and be careful. I love you.”
She said, “Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Say ‘I love you’ when I’m just about to hang up. I could listen to you until my ears dropped off, but you never say it except at a crummy time like this.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Is it?”
“Yes, Joe. It’s true. The first time, I thought it was a bad cell phone connection. Now, is it just a figure of speech, like ‘Take care,’ or are you actually telling me that you love me?”
“I’m actually saying that I love you. I’ll say it again. I love you.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Because I love you too. Now I can hang up and have about a second of intense happiness before I go off to the coroner’s and look at the young guy with the bullet hole in his head. Bye.” She pressed the end button, put her cell phone in her purse, and got into her car, thinking about Joe Pitt.
As she drove toward the coroner’s office, she prepared herself for the sight that she knew awaited her. Head shots were horrible, but she had to look at everything that Tanya had done or touched or left. Maybe this time Tanya had acted carelessly. Maybe this time she had forgotten to eradicate some detail that would tell Catherine where to find her.
53
Judith had stayed in bed almost all day. She slept for nearly twelve hours during the first stretch, letting the exhaustion keep her unconscious and the time pass so the sights and sounds would not be so clear and sharp in her memory. When she awoke she lay in bed thinking and remembering, but what she thought about was not last night. Once an unpleasant decision had been made, there was no reason to go over and over it.
What she thought about was that nothing ever seemed to work out for her. It never had, and it was because there was always somebody who didn’t want her to be happy. The very odd thing was that the people who really wanted to hurt her were always other women.
Judith didn’t expect much of men. They were indifferent and thoughtless. They were insensitive and selfish. A few even had some sexual issue, some program running in their heads that made them behave a certain way, and want her to behave in a certain, exactly complementary way. In fact there was a little of that in all of them—they thought about sex all the time, and every dealing with them had that as a part of it. Even if it was wildly impractical or even impossible for them to have sex with a particular woman, they wondered about her. All of those things were part of the world that was known. Nobody was hiding any of it.
Women had a lot of reasons to be on the same side, but they never seemed to be. They always seemed to be competing. In her life, men had been difficult or disappointing, but the people who had been real tormentors had all been female. Her mother had been the first.
Sharon Buckner had never been able to pull herself together and move to Chicago or Milwaukee to get a serious job. Every night from the time when she was about sixteen, she had managed to get dressed up and transported to one of those same big cities to dance and drink and have fun, but the idea of going there to work was too far-fetched for her.
Charlene had been about ten before she had learned where the name Charlene had come from. By then Charles Kepler had married and left town—been shamed out of town, Sharon Buckner said—but the rest of the townspeople had not left. That day Charlene had realized that since her birth, all of the adults around her—the neighbors, her teachers—had been looking at her and knowing the most private aspects of her life.
When Charlene was little and first went on the pageant circuit, Charlene’s cuteness drew attention to Sharon. She got to be the pretty young mother of the pretty little girl. But when Charlene was in junior high school, the situation changed. Now the girls in the pageant were thirteen to seventeen. Charlene won Miss Junior Hogan County and Miss Junior Carroway County, both on false addresses, and finally Miss Junior Central Illinois. But her mother’s pleasure wore out.
They were both ten years older by then, and the years looked better on Charlene than on Sharon. She was the one who got the attention; she was Sharon’s competition, her enemy. Her mother began to make disparaging remarks about Charlene’s weight, her hair, her complexion, her performances. She began to mock the answers Charlene gave to the emcee’s questions. Charlene knew they were good, because there were only about twenty-five questions that all emcees always asked, and she had memorized the best answers of the winners over the years.
Charlene had to drop out of the pageants at the age of fifteen because her mother refused to enter her anymore. She was glad that she would no longer be forced into hours of close proximity to her mother, but it made her feel more vulnerable to the horrible girls at school. She no longer had the secret life where she got to wear fancy formal dresses—and, most of the time, a crown. When that world was gone, she had nothing.
The girls at school had always been cold and unfriendly, but beginning in junior high they were actively cruel. Anytime she talked to a girl she was told she was obnoxious and pushy. When she talked to a boy she was a whore. When she didn’t talk she was a stuck-up bitch. When she did well on a test she was showing off and sucking up to the teachers. She ate lunch alone, walked from class to class alone.
As she thought about it today, she decided that if she had the leisure sometime, she would take a drive up to Illinois and see if she could find a few of those girls. By now Gail Halpren would be married and have a couple of kids. Judith would walk up to the house and knock on the door. It would open. She would say, “Remember me? I used to be Charlene Buckner. I thought you deserved to be thanked for the way you treated me in high school.” Then she would pull out the gun. Or she would find Terry Nugent. Terry would probably be in Chicago, working as a lawyer or a stockbroker. She would wait for her in a parking garage. “Aren’t you Terry Nugent, from Wheatfield? Yes, it’s me. But let’s not talk about those days now. We can talk about them forever in hell.” Pow.
