Now she had Faye’s attention. “They what?”
“The killer had buried the poor woman with a bouquet of flowers. If you remember, they found her within a few weeks from the time she went missing. This means that the flowers weren’t completely rotted and there was still some integrity to the body. They found the stems in what was left of her hands, fanned out across her chest. Carnations, roses, ferns, all of it. And there were hundreds of little white flowers—”
“Baby’s breath?”
“Yeah, probably. He’d picked each little flower off its stem and scattered them all over her body. It doesn’t make sense that he did all that while he was standing over the body. It would take too long. He must have bought the flowers, then made a bag of the little white ones to bring with him while he was looking for someone to kill. And then he used them to decorate her corpse. Creepy, right?”
“No joke,” Faye said. “Or maybe he didn’t have to look for someone to kill. Maybe he carried the flowers around while he stalked the woman he’d already chosen as his next victim.”
“Exactly right. Some serial killers choose their victims at random. Some prefer to stalk.”
Faye pictured an automobile trunk holding a large shovel and a slowly wilting bouquet. What else would he pack? A change of clothes? Soap? Bleach? A small ebony box to hold the soul he had relinquished?
“What about the dead woman in Arkansas?”
“The case file didn’t mention finding any flowers, but they were pretty sure she’d been dead for years. The flowers would have rotted with the body. Bits of stem and flower could even have sifted through the rib cage over time and ended up underneath the body. Weird things happen to organic materials left underground.”
“Did the note say whether they sifted the soil?”
“No, and who’s to say how well they did it, if they did? These are the people who didn’t bother filing a report with the FBI. The notes do, however, mention that they found a small plastic ampoule like the ones florists use. You know, the little vial they fill with water, so that they can stick a flower stem in it and keep it fresh?”
She sounded satisfied as she delivered this exciting news, and that made her voice sound younger, healthier.
“I know the vials you’re talking about.” Faye said. She was thinking that if they’d missed a whole bouquet of flowers, rotten or not, it was a good thing they’d been paying enough attention to find the ampoule. The ones Faye had seen were half the size of her index finger or more. Anybody who missed a piece of plastic that size should probably hang up their trowel.
“So do you think that the bouquet of flowers and the florist’s ampoule is enough to say that the same person killed those two women?” she asked Windom.
“Of course not. Any murderer can stroll to the grocery store and buy some flowers, but it seems like a mighty big coincidence. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I say about it. I’m just a civilian with a database. What do you think your investigator is going to say?”
“Considering that his forensic archaeologist just dug up a chrysanthemum and some baby’s breath, and considering that I just found three more burials that involved flowers listed in your database, he’s going to have a hard time arguing with our hypothesis.”
“I love it when that happens.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Flowers. There were flowers everywhere.
And in the middle of them, he saw Frida.
She was wearing yellow. Of course, she was wearing yellow. Seeing her there, lying in a satin-lined casket with pink carnations garlanded around her pretty face, she looked the way he had wanted her to look when he put her in the ground.
He was nervous. He had attended many funerals in his day, but none that he had personally caused. That was because none of his other women had been Frida.
The others had been women of convenience. A woman might be chosen because of the appealing angle of her head as it met her neck. Another might be chosen because of the titillating flutter of her eyelashes when he walked too close to her and she pulled away in fear. They had been random women who had done nothing to merit their deaths beyond standing in the wrong place on a day when he’d pointed his car down a highway and gone hunting.
Frida had possessed all his triggers, from the top of her shapely head to the soles of her tiny feet. She had been frail, nervous, pretty, giggly, vulnerable. She’d had the power to trigger a protective pity that was new for him. How Frida had birthed that stony-faced child was anybody’s guess.
It was dangerous for him to be here, but he was standing his ground. If anyone suspected him, he would see it on their faces, and he would know that he needed to move on. He was proud of how long he’d been able to stay in one spot without being caught, but he’d always had a backup plan. St. Louis seemed like a place where a man like him could get lost.
In the meantime, he would enjoy the cognitive clash of being in a room full of people who usually couldn’t be bothered to be nice to each other. But just let somebody die and watch the tears start to fall. These people knew the things they’d said to each other about Frida, and they knew how they had treated her, but they were pretending for one short hour that all of that judgment had never happened. None of them had loved her like he did.
Frida in her casket presided over them all, like a princess in a fairy tale, sentenced to sleep for a century, or for a lifetime, or for the space of time
