CHAPTER 9
Brandon was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the coffee table, focused on his latest video game, an Xbox thing that had something to do with motorsports. Jen’s father had bought it for Brandon a couple of weeks before. He had assured her that it was age appropriate, and that was good enough for her. She had no desire to immerse herself in video games, but fortunately for her, her dad had the time and the interest. He also had the money and desire to spoil her son.
“Hi, Mom,” Brandon said, without looking away from the screen, his thumbs moving rapidly as he negotiated the game’s challenges.
“Hi, hon. How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Fine” seemed to be Brandon’s standard answer any time she asked him about something he didn’t think she’d understand. She had no doubt that if his grandfather had asked him the same question, he would have received a detailed answer about whatever Brandon had accomplished to that point.
“That’s good,” she said. “How’s pizza for dinner?”
“Pizza sounds great!”
“Now how come I knew you were going to say that? I’m going to shower and change and go back down to the building for a while. I’ll ask Ada to look in on you.”
Ada Levinson lived across the hall. She was sixty-two and widowed. With no children of her own, she had more or less adopted Jen and Brandon. Jen knew her parents were willing to watch Brandon any time, but Brandon was old enough to stay home by himself most of the time. Rather than drag him out or ask her parents to drive across town, it was much more convenient to ask Ada to check on him from time to time.
Brandon paused the game and turned to her.
“Why do you have to go back to work?”
“Another lady was murdered. Like the one two weeks ago.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Was she a school teacher, too?”
“No, this woman was a beautician.”
“Did the same guy do it?”
“We think so.”
Brandon looked troubled. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, hurried to Jen, and threw his arms around her.
“Be careful, Mom,” he mumbled into her shoulder. “Be real careful.”
Jen hugged him tightly, surprised at his “mushiness,” as he would have called it. He seldom expressed any concern about the danger inherent in her job. In fact, she knew he was proud of what she did, often bragging to his friends when he didn’t know she could hear. Now, for the first time, she suspected that underneath all that pride ran fear.
She kissed the top of his curly blond head, put her finger under his chin and tilted his face up to look into his concerned blue eyes.
“Sweetheart, I’ve got the best reason in the world to be careful, and it’s looking me right in the face.” She kissed him again. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
“Now, what’ll it be? Sausage or pepperoni?”
“How about both?”
“You got it.”
The shower felt good. Jen shampooed her thick shoulder-length hair and soaped her body, then just stood under the water, enjoying the feel of the hot spray on her skin.
Brandon’s reaction disturbed her. She tried to keep the local news off when he was around. Considering the depravity and violence in the world today, she thought the news should carry ratings like the movies. Still, he could have seen something while at Ada’s or his grandparents. They all knew she didn’t want him watching TV shows or movies that were too violent or sexual, but she had stopped at asking them to forego the nightly news. Maybe she should have once these murders started.
It wasn’t like she had tried to keep him completely in the dark. She’d told him about the earlier murders, but only that two women had been killed and that she was tasked with finding the killer of one. The trouble was, the TV stations vied to see which one could out-gross the other. They seemed to think prefacing explicit scenes or descriptions with “Caution: Some viewers might find the following scenes or descriptions disturbing” absolved them of any responsibility for the reactions the scenes or descriptions might elicit. In her more cynical moments, she thought the warning was simply their way of ramping up the anticipation, since the lag time between the warning and the scene or description was never more than a few seconds. Unless the remote was in the parent’s hand, there wasn’t time to turn the TV off, much less get a child out of the room.
Well, it was too late now. Brandon seemed to know more about the first two murders than she wanted him to, but she made a mental note to herself to ask Ada and her parents to not watch the news when he was around. He didn’t need to hear any more about the third one than what she told him. He was growing up, and she knew it might only be another year—maybe even a month—before she could no longer shelter him from the ugliness of the world, but for now, that’s exactly what she was going to do. Try to do, she amended. Thanks to the Internet, she wasn’t sure she would succeed.
The murders. The computer checks on the people they knew who were connected to Victoria Kaufmann hadn’t turned up anything of value. The mailman, a fellow by the name of Carter Holiday, had been in and given his statement, and the hospital had verified that Sandy Norton was under sedation and couldn’t be questioned till morning.
Don and Al had witnessed the autopsy. As the coroner had suspected, there had been no sexual assault. He had found several brown hairs on
