Skin Deep

Going through the belongings of a victim always made him feel a little grubby because he was violating a domain intimate to the identity of a stranger. But clawing through the underwear of Terry Farina was worse because it created an uninvited titillation. It wasn’t so much the sexy underwear. It was her sexy underwear—and he could almost detect the warmth of her body, the scent of her flesh. And he could recall the intimate thoughts that had flickered across his mind while on coffee break.

He punched a second call on his PDA, this one to Nelson Wu, a friend in the crime lab. “Nelson, I need a reading on the Farina stockings.”

“Okay, but give me a minute.” And he put Steve on hold while he got the sheet of specs. A minute later he clicked back on. “What do you want to know?”

“If they’re new or used.”

“From the look under the scope they look brand-new. The fibers showed no microfraying from wear or washing. Also, the mate still has its packing fold visible, which means it was never worn.”

Steve’s eye slid to the nightstand and the framed photograph of Terry and her sister. In the photo a pair of sunglasses was perched on top of Terry’s head. “What’s the brand?”

“Wolford and the model is…and are you ready? Satin Touch Evening Thigh High. It’s the kind that stay up without a garter belt.”

“Elastic tops.”

“Yeah. And in case you’re interested, they’re top of the line—forty-eight bucks a pair.”

“So we’re not talking your basic L’eggs off the rack at CVS.”

“Nope. They’re a specialty item found in fancy lingerie shops or online. And in case you’re interested, they’re a patented chemical combination from DuPont Chemical, 87 percent nylon, 13 percent elastane.”

Steve went back through her dresser and the smaller chest of drawers in her closet. He found no other Wolfords. He pulled out his PDA again and called Nelson Wu back. “One more question. In her trash was there any packaging for the stockings?”

“I’ll have to call you back.”

While he waited, Steve checked the rest of the apartment, then went down to the garage and rechecked the trash barrels. The contents had been collected by C.S.S. He headed back up.

Just outside the kitchen door on the back landing sat a table stacked with newspapers and magazines that reminded him of something odd from yesterday. He went back into the kitchen and opened every drawer and cabinet. In a cabinet to the right of the sink, mail had been stacked up on dishes along with Saturday’s newspapers. The killer wouldn’t do that, which meant that that the victim was probably in a rush to straighten out the place for company—or for her last-minute guest.

The mail consisted of bills, a clothing catalogue, a copy of Entertainment Weekly, flyers, Psychology Today, Newsweek, and a UPS envelope with a return address on the label that said the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. The envelope was open, and inside was a letter congratulating Terry Farina for having received a five-thousand-dollar fellowship.

His phone rang. It was Wu. “Negative. No stocking packaging.”

Steve thanked him and clicked off. Maybe the killer had brought the stockings with him and left with the packaging. So, despite the explosive violence, he was cautious not to leave any trace of himself, then set up the autoerotica to look like an accident.

As Steve stood in the kitchen and processed that, he looked down at his PDA. As if on some weird autopilot, his finger pressed the button listing recent outgoing calls. Wu’s number was on top, then Dana’s. Then several others he had made over the last few days. He scrolled back to Sunday. Then Saturday the second.

For a moment he stared at a number that did not look familiar. A number he had called at 5:53 P.M. Without a thought, he pressed the recall button. Like a half-glimpsed premonition, from across the room Terry Farina’s telephone rang.

13

The phone was still ringing in his head as he drove to Carleton.

And slowly memory began to condense out of the fog. Terry Farina’s number was on his scroll of outgoing calls because he had telephoned about her sunglasses.

Yes. He had called to tell her that she had left them in the pub. Conor Larkins on Huntington Avenue Across from the NU quad. It’s where he had bumped into her.

That was it. And it came back to him with a shudder.

Last Saturday afternoon. He was off-duty and did his grades at home. Then he drove to campus to drop them off. Because it was the weekend, the night school office was closed, so he went to the grade sheet drop-box in the open lobby. It was late afternoon and he was hungry so he went to the pub for a sandwich. To his surprise, Terry was in a quiet booth in the corner doing a final on her laptop. She was just finishing but invited him to join her. She had already eaten and he didn’t want to eat alone, so he ordered a draft of Sam Adams and she had a glass of white wine. They chatted for a while until she had to leave to run off her exam in the library then slip it under her instructor’s door. Then she would head home because she was going out of town the next morning. They said goodbye, and he stayed behind and ordered a sandwich. Before he left, he noticed that she had forgotten her sunglasses. Because he didn’t have her home number, he called Information, then gave her a call to say he could drop them off.

As he turned off Route 2 into Carleton, all he could remember beyond that was parking across the street from Terry’s apartment building. Until Reardon’s call the next morning, everything else was a dead blank.

The good news was that there was no listing of his call in the subpoenaed records from her carrier. The only way the call was untraceable to his PDA phone was if he had first dialed *67 to block caller ID. The bad news was that he had.

And how do you explain that, pal?

The only thing that made sense was the old childhood guilt thing—the abnormal craving to eliminate any sign that he may have done something wrong even if he hadn’t. Out of an ancient impulse to eradicate possible bad-boy intentions, he had deleted the connection.

Okay, so what were your bad-boy intentions?

He pushed down the voice. He had also lost all recall.

But a fifteen-hour hole?

Maybe it was the beer. That and the medication the doctor had put him on. Sure! For a few years that had worked well, leveling off the symptoms to the point that he could take a milligram or two of Ativan as needed. But since his breakup with Dana, some of the anxieties and compulsive thoughts had returned. And with them, symptoms like the guilt clean-up rituals.

At least he was no longer a slave to the compulsive hand-washing and seven showers a day. Nor did he still go through his day plagued by the closed-looped tape playing in his head as when he was younger: “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

But he wasn’t completely cured.

There was *67.

By the time he arrived at the house he felt better, although he made a mental note to check the online pharmacy sites when he got home.

It was a little after eight when he pulled behind Dana’s car, which sat in the middle of the garage, overlapping both slots. They had lived separately for six months, but whenever he stopped by he felt like an intruder on his own turf, his marriage house—the neat, white, central entrance colonial with green shutters and a hostas- lined redbrick front walk and detached garage—the place on which he still made monthly payments.

He had come this time to pick up a container of his summer clothes from the cellar as well as a few items for his apartment.

Dana was grading student papers at the kitchen island when he arrived. She had expected him and said a cool hello then went back to her papers. As he rummaged through the stuff they had collected over the years, his