Pearl peeled his fingers from her coat and threw his hand away. Without another word, she tossed the loose ends of her scarf around her neck and strolled from the Saint Angel. As she passed me, I couldn’t help but notice the small smirk that lifted the corners of her mouth.
“Who was that?” Luis asked once Pearl was gone.
“No one good.”
Later that night, I lay in bed and examined the layered ring I’d found in Wolf’s penthouse. Whirling the rings back and forth, I studied the letters along the side. Someone with bad eyesight might need a magnifying glass to make out the engravings.
I flipped open the coded journal and started at the beginning. Using the ring, I began to make sense of the garbled random letters on the pages in front of me. Within the hour, the entire journal lay in wait for me to read.
14
“But what does it mean?”
An exhausted Evelyn draped herself across the sofa and let her legs dangle over the armchair. She had been out all night, doing who knew what, and returned smelling of cigar smoke and sweat. Her usually luscious hair hung limply as she swept it away from her neck.
I’d deciphered the entire journal by hand. Fifty loose leaf pages of handwritten notes lay strewn across the coffee table. I massaged my sore wrist and rubbed my tired eyes. I wished I had never read the contents of the warped diary, but I also couldn’t look away from the terrible words. I drew a page toward me and read aloud:
“‘The pleasure of hating runs deep and swift,’” I said. “‘It is a violent yet invigorating adrenaline rush. I cannot stem this flow of satisfaction, not when the climax is so desperately rewarding.’”
I flipped the page over and continued on to the next paragraph as Evelyn’s contempt grew visible in the lines around her mouth and eyes.
“‘She screamed and begged for mercy,’” I read on in a monotone. “‘Like the others, she slammed her fists against the walls and pleaded for her life. God, they’re so fragile, aren’t they? Each one always puts on a tough front—all these feminists off to fight the patriarchy—but when faced with certain death, they are reduced to the truth of their existence. She was inferior. A cat in a cage, only cunning when the situation allowed it.’”
Evelyn covered her eyes, though it looked like what she really wanted to do was plug her ears. “I didn’t ask for the read-through.”
My fist shook, and I relinquished the page before the urge to destroy it consumed me. I wanted to throw the journal off the balcony and fire a shotgun after it. I wanted to stuff it into a box with a live grenade and watch it explode. I wanted to bury it in the earth and suffocate the horrible ideas the writer had enclosed in the pages. And I wanted the writer to feel every prick of pain, every note of panic, and every last breath that the women in these pages had felt before he killed them.
“There are no names,” I said bitterly, using my foot to cast the journal to the floor so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. “He must have known someone else might decode it. He doesn’t mention any of the women by name or describe their looks in any detail.”
“You found the decoder ring in Wolf’s penthouse, right?” Evelyn asked. “Does that mean he did these things?”
I framed my face with my palms and squeezed, using the pressure to calm the roar of rage that surfaced every time I read a passage from the journal. “The evidence points that way, but it doesn’t make sense. Wolf’s disease makes it nearly impossible for him to drag unconscious women around. He doesn’t have the strength or the stamina.”
“He could be faking it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He has trouble standing and walking, and his skin is strangely elastic.”
“Maybe he has an accomplice,” Evelyn suggested next. “Someone to do the grunt work for him so he can enjoy the effects of his labor unencumbered. Nothing in that journal says he’s the one who kidnapped and carried the girls to a secluded location. He could have hired someone else to do it.”
“Megan Hollows had been tortured,” I reminded her. “She had a variety of wounds.”
“Could have been defensive.”
“She had been defending herself for days then.” I stood up, walked to the kitchen, and filled the kettle. When such chilling details came to light, it was helpful to have something warm on hand to soothe the soul. “By the time she fell, she was bruised and beaten from head to toe.”
“That’s another thing that nails Wolf,” Evelyn said. “Megan fell from a great height. The penthouse is over thirty stories up.”
“The glass walls around the balcony are too high for someone to jump from or be pushed off,” I said. “She would have needed a stool to get over the edge.”
“I don’t suppose you saw anything that could have been used as a stool in the penthouse.”
I dug through my mental images of Wolf’s suite, but nothing came to mind. Everything he owned served a purpose, and the minimalist style of his living quarters didn’t support a murderer’s hobbies.
Evelyn took a whiff of her own armpit. “Bloody hell, is that me? I desperately need a shower.”
Feigning disinterest, I pulled the whistling kettle off the small stove. “Where were you last night anyway? Hooking up with some hot city slicker?”
Grinning, Evelyn gathered her oily hair and secured it in a messy knot at the top of her head. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I would,” I agreed. “That’s why I asked. I can’t imagine Marie has you running wedding errands all night long.”
“The wedding preparations are pretty much finished,” Evelyn admitted. In a sour tone, she added, “It’s almost as if we didn’t have to be here three weeks before the actual wedding date. What a waste of everyone’s time.”
Acutely
