“Look, Bryson-”
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Tell me if I fell in love with the wrong woman.”
“You didn’t fall in love with anyone, Bryson.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
He waited.
She studied his eyes.
Her face softened.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said.
“I already know that.”
“No, I’m not talking about my name, I’m talking about inside, in my heart.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t get it-”
“What I mean is that I did something,” she said. “Something that was wrong.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I do something wrong every day.”
“I don’t mean like that,” she said. “I mean something serious.”
He frowned.
“Tell me.”
She walked to the window and looked out, keeping her face away.
“It was in August of 1950, about two years ago,” she said. “It happened in Chicago. I was there on a photo shoot. My manager was with me. His name is Sam Lenay. He was in trouble. I did something to help him. At the time I did it, I didn’t realize exactly what I was doing.”
“Did what?”
“I played a role,” she said.
Wilde lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and blew smoke.
“You’re confusing the hell out of me,” he said. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I seduced someone,” she said. “I did it for Sam, to get him out of trouble.”
“I don’t care who you slept with.”
“It’s not about sleeping with someone, Wilde. It’s about doing something that makes them end up dead.”
Wilde stopped a puff halfway through.
He pulled the cigarette from his lips.
“What are you saying? Are you saying that you killed someone?”
She exhaled.
“Yes,” she said. “More than one.”
The pieces didn’t fit.
He didn’t care.
He wasn’t interested in the pieces any more.
He turned her around, took her in his arms and pulled her tight.
“I don’t know who you are and I don’t care what you did,” he said. “I do know one thing though. I know that I don’t want to lose you before I even really have you.”
122
Su-Moon stepped back, almost as if pushed in the chest by Waverly’s words, and said, “I can’t believe you’re even talking about killing someone. If that’s your goal, count me out. I’m all for doing whatever it takes to get this guy off the streets-I think I’ve already proved that-but I’m not going to turn myself into one of his kind to do it. You shouldn’t either. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
Waverly lowered her eyes to the ground.
Then she looked up.
“I had a sister,” she said. “Her name was Carmen Key. In August of 1950, she was murdered. Someone dressed her up in a red dress and dropped her off a roof. It happened in Chicago.”
“I had no idea.”
“No way you would,” Waverly said. “The police got nowhere. I hired a private investigator, a man named Drew Blackwater, who didn’t get much further than the police, but did get something. He found out that a woman named Emmanuelle LeFavre was in the vicinity at the time it happened. Emmanuelle in turn remembered seeing Carmen with a man that evening. They were entering the alley that ran alongside the building. She got a glimpse of the man. It wasn’t a good one but it was at least something.”
“Okay.”
“I flew to Chicago and met with her,” Waverly said. “She felt my pain. She agreed to help me in any way she could. The police didn’t know about her. She didn’t want to get involved with them. She thought they weren’t confidential enough. She thought that if the guy found out there was a witness, he’d be able to get that person’s name.”
“Through a bribe?”
Waverly nodded.
“A bribe, a leak, whatever,” she said. “I agreed to keep her identity secret and not tell the police about her. She spent two weeks combing the city on foot, hoping to run into the guy by blind luck. Their paths never crossed.”
“Too bad.”
“Right, too bad,” Waverly said. “She was a model from New York. She returned home. Meanwhile, my investigator, Drew Blackwater, kept pressing forward. He came up with a second piece of information. He found out that another woman-a lady by the name of Brittany Pratt-had been killed in an identical manner exactly one year before Carmen, meaning August 1949.”
“In Chicago?”
“No, in New York,” Waverly said.
“Where Emmanuelle lived.”
“Right,” she said. “I flew there, hired a local private investigator, and stayed with Emmanuelle for three weeks, trying to get a lead on that prior murder.”
“Because the same guy did both.”
“Exactly,” Waverly said. “That turned out to be a waste of time. In the end, we got nothing, no witnesses, no leads, no motives, no nothing.”
“Damn.”
“The hardest part about it was that I knew that there was something there somewhere to be found. We just never found it.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Well, I figured if there were two, maybe there were three,” she said. “My Chicago investigator-Blackwater- actually came up with another victim, a woman named Geneva Robertson who was murdered in Las Angeles in March of 1950. Again, the woman was dropped off a roof wearing a red dress.”
“So August wasn’t set in stone.”
“No, now we had two in August and one in March,” Waverly said. “I did the same as before, flew to Los Angeles, hired a local investigator, the whole bit. Emmanuelle met me there.”
“That’s quite a friend.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Waverly said. “She paid all the bills, too. She had the money, from her modeling. I
