The sun was at a sharp angle and still very hot, but clouds were streaming across the face of it, throwing us into intervals of shade and white light. The wind had whipped up and the air was pregnant with change.
He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve and squinted at me. A gust of wind bent the trees and sent a paper towel fluttering across the patio. “Bad, Kay, because his getting quiet may mean he’s left the area.”
We backed away from the smoldering coals and sipped from bottles of beer. I couldn’t endure the thought that the killer might have moved on. I wanted him here. At least we were familiar with what he was doing. My nagging fear was he might begin striking in other cities where the cases would be worked by detectives and medical examiners who did not know what we knew. Nothing could foul up an investigation like a multijurisdictional effort. Cops were jealous of their turf. Each investigator wanted to make the arrest, and he thought he could work the case better than anyone else. It got to the point one thought a case belonged to him.
I supposed I was not above feeling possessive either. The victims had become my wards, and their only hope for justice was for their killer to be caught and prosecuted here. A person can be charged with only so many capital murders, and a conviction somewhere else might preclude a trial here. It was an outrageous thought. It would be as if the deaths of the women in Richmond were practice, a warm-up, and utterly in vain. Maybe it would turn out that everything happening to me was in vain, too.
Bill was squirting more lighter fluid on the charcoal. He backed away from the grill and looked at me, his face flushed from the heat. “How about your computer?” he asked. “Anything new?”
I hesitated. There was no point in my being evasive. Bill knew very well that I’d ignored Amburgey’s orders and hadn’t changed the password or done anything else to, quote, “secure” my data. Bill was standing right over me last Monday night when I activated answer mode and set the echo on again as if I were inviting the perpetrator to try again. Which was exactly what I was doing.
“It doesn’t appear anyone else has gotten in, if that’s what you mean.”
“Interesting,” he mused, taking another swallow of beer. “It doesn’t make much sense. You’d think the person would try to get into Lori Petersen’s case.”
“She isn’t in the computer,” I reminded him. “Nothing new is going into the computer until these cases are no longer under active investigation.”
“So the case isn’t in the computer. But how’s the person getting in going to know that unless she looks?”
“She?”
“She, he—whoever.”
“Well, she—he—whoever looked the first time and couldn’t pull up Lori’s case.”
“Still doesn’t make a lot of sense, Kay,” he insisted. “Come to think of it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense someone would have tried in the first place. Anybody who knows much about computer entry would have realized a case autopsied on Saturday isn’t likely to be in the office data base by Monday.”
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I muttered.
I was edgy around Bill. I couldn’t seem to relax or give myself up to what should have been a lovely evening.
Inch-thick ribeyes were marinating in the kitchen. A bottle of red wine was breathing on the counter. Lucy was making the salad, and she was in fine spirits considering we hadn’t heard a word from her mother, who was off somewhere with her illustrator. Lucy seemed perfectly content. In her fantasies she was beginning to believe she would never leave, and it troubled me that she’d begun hinting at how nice it would be “when Mr. Boltz” and I “got married.”
Sooner or later I would have to dash her dreams against the hard rock of reality. She would be going home just as soon as her mother returned to Miami, and Bill and I were not going to get married.
I’d begun scrutinizing him as though for the first time. He was staring pensively at the flaming charcoal, his beer absently cradled in both hands, the hair on his arms and legs gold like pollen in the sun. I saw him through a veil of rising heat and smoke, and it seemed a symbol of the distance growing between us.
Why did his wife kill herself with his gun? Was it simply utilitarian, that his gun was the most convenient means of instantly snuffing herself out? Or was it her way of punishing him for sins I knew nothing of?
His wife shot herself in the chest while she was sitting up in bed—in their bed. She pulled the trigger that Monday morning just hours, maybe even minutes, after they made love. Her PERK was positive for sperm. The faint scent of perfume still lingered on her body when I examined her at the scene. What was the last thing Bill said to her before he left for work?