My mother was a beautiful and emotionally fragile woman twenty years of age when my father, eighteen years her senior, passed through her small country town on an engineering project. Married within two months, my mother expected a storybook life. Instead, she found herself embroiled in a hellish drama so far beyond comprehension her only recourse was retreating to her room to practice her sole skill: the sewing of wedding dresses, white and flowing waves of satin and tulle.
The mutant seed within my brother caused him to believe our mother could have intervened in the nights of terror at the hands of our father. She could have more easily stopped the tides with her fingertips.
“The Alabama State Police today announced a suspect in the bizarre and brutal killings of at least five women …”
So deep was my brother’s belief in our mother’s complicity in his suffering that a few years after killing our father, Jeremy began killing our mother. I speak metaphorically: To actually kill her would have consigned me to a foster home – and he would not have done that – so surrogates fed his unfathomable need. Shamed by my brother’s actions, I changed my name, hid my private history behind veils of obfuscation, and refused to visit him.
It was Vangie – with input from Jeremy – who tracked me down and convinced me to reestablish a relationship with my brother. Jeremy and I had even collaborated – if that’s the word – on several cases where his unique insights helped me understand the crimes. He was so finely calibrated for madness he once boasted he could walk through a mall and point out a half-dozen people “either convinced Martians are reading their minds, or thinking things so dark they’d make Torquemada retch”.
My brother was not only insane himself, he was a Geiger counter for insanity in others.
The desk staff at the mid-town hotel were expecting my arrival and treated me with deference though I was in sodden clothes and my shoes squeaked footprints across the marble floor. They directed me to a nearby shop where I secured denim jeans, three cotton dress shirts, a white linen sport coat, a pair of upscale walking shoes plus underwear and socks.
Finally in my hotel room, a third-floor double dressed in somber monochrome – black, gray, gray-white – I showered, then snapped on a muted CNN to add color and distraction to my world. I unwrapped my new dress shirts and rinsed them in the sink to remove the creases and factory starch, squeezing them as dry as possible. In the cool and arid air conditioning they’d be set to iron in the morning. I did the same to the tees.
The phone rang, the desk advising me a package had just been delivered. A small Hispanic gentleman brought an envelope to my room, NYPD stamped on top left corner, the information Waltz had promised. As he had noted, it was spare, the investigation barely off the launching pad.
The prelims from the forensic teams in Vangie’s room featured all the No’s: No signs of struggle, No blood or body fluids visible, No seeming thefts, No signs of a search. I noted the mention of a closet with casual-type wear that seemed good for a week’s stay. It appeared she had packed for a normal visit to NYC.
Yet before this particular visit, Vangie Prowse turned on a video camera, noted my experience with serial killers, then proclaimed she’d made a strange decision, and was “doing things that make little sense. But I needed a serious –”
She’d had to hang up before finishing the sentence. Needed a serious what? Doing what things that made little sense? As if that wasn’t cryptic enough, she’d looked into the camera and apologized.
“Carson, I’m so sorry.”
What the hell had Vangie done?
I lay on the bed and studied the ceiling and ran that question in front of my eyes a hundred times until I drifted into a sweaty, twitchy sleep.
A ringing phone at the bedside awakened me. I dropped it, picked it up by the cord and bobbled it to my ear.
“Hmmp?”
Waltz. “We’ve got a dead woman, Detective Ryder. It’s a bad one.”
“Do I know her?” I mumbled from between two worlds.
“Jesus, wake up, Detective. You don’t know her. God, I hope not. I’m on scene and sending you a car. Be out front.”
“Waltz, um, wait. Let me get myself toget—”
The phone clicked dead. The clock said it was 8.10 p.m. I’d slept for two hours. My washed shirts were soggy. All I had was the one I’d worn through the day, reeking of sweat and despair. Holding my breath, I pulled it on and headed outside.
Day was failing fast, oblique light soaking the sky with an amber hue. City noise echoed down the man-made canyons, giving the sounds a reverberant depth. A police cruiser waited on the sidewalk, almost to the hotel steps. I was barely inside before the cruiser roared into traffic. I looked at the driver: Koslowski. He wrinkled his nose at my used clothes, shot me a glance, and rolled his window down.
“Where’s the scene?” I yelled over the siren. The traffic was mainly taxis. Koslowski kept his foot deep in the pedal, expecting cabs to open a path by the time he got there, and somehow they did.
“SoHo. If I don’t get you there in five minutes, Waltz is going to chew my ass.”
“I can’t imagine Waltz chewing ass.”
“He does it without words. It’s worse that way.”
“He’s an interesting guy,” I said, fishing for more info about the sad-eyed detective. “What’s your take on him?”
Instead of answering, Koslowski pulled to a brick Italianate duplex, a FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard. I saw one cruiser by the curb, and a battered SUV with NYPD TECHNICAL DIVISION stenciled on the door. Beside it was a van from the Medical Examiner’s office. A blue-and-white was sideways across two lanes to keep gawkers distant, its light bar painting the street in shaking, multihued bursts. I jumped out and hustled toward the house.
“Hey, Dixie,” Koslowski called.
I spun. “What?”
“You asked me what I thought about Shelly Waltz.” He jammed the cruiser in gear. “When it’s nighttime for the whole world, and everyone is asleep, Shelly Waltz flies through the sky on a silver unicorn.”
“What?”
But Koslowski’s taillights were already flowing away. Shaking my head, I entered the house. A man and woman from the Medical Examiner’s office stood inside the door, opening a case of equipment. They looked shaken, ashen. They directed me down a hall to a bedroom. I smelled blood and my stomach shifted sideways.
I entered the room. Like the front rooms, it was devoid of furniture. Shelly was alone, standing above a draped figure in the center of the floor. The white cover was turning red as I watched. Waltz was rubbing his eyes with his palms.
“What is it, Shelly?”
He shook his head, lifted the cover. A woman’s nude body. Her eyes stared wide from the center of her own belly. Blood and fascia and yellow fatty tissue surrounded the head, having squirted out when the head was jammed into the wound. I let it all register for a five count, then closed my eyes.
“We’ve got a bad problem,” Waltz said.
“Bad as it gets,” I affirmed.
Waltz let the cover fall back over the corpse. When it fell it puffed out air, swirling hairs on the floor, the same