Loves Music, Loves to Dance

  Then one day, two years ago, it was over. In the middle of the dance, Ginger drifted away and Nan was in Charley’s arms again. Just like the moments after he killed her, waltzing on the jogging path, her light, svelte body so easy to hold, her head lolling on his shoulder.

  When that memory came back, he’d run to the basement and taken the mates of the sequined dancing slipper and the Nike that he’d left on her feet from the shoe box and cradled them in his arms while he swayed to the music on the stereo. It was like being with Nan again, and he’d known what he had to do.

  First he’d set up a hidden video camera so he could relive every single moment of what was to happen. Then he’d begun to bring the girls here one by one. Erin was the eighth to die here. But Erin would not join the others in the wooded fields that surrounded the house. Tonight he would move Erin’s body. He had decided exactly where he would leave her.

  The station wagon moved silently down the driveway, around to the back of the house. He stopped at the metal doors that led to the basement.

  Charley’s breath began to come in short, excited gasps. He reached for the handle to open the back door of the wagon, then stood irresolutely. Every instinct warned him not to delay. He must lift Erin’s body from the freezer, carry it to the car, drive back to the city, leave it on the abandoned Fifty-sixth Street dock bordering the West Side Highway. But the thought of watching the video of Erin, of dancing with her just one more time, was irresistible.

  Charley hurried around the house to the front door, let himself in, snapped on the light, and without bothering to remove his overcoat ran across the room to the VCR. Erin’s tape was on top of the others on the cabinet. He popped it in and sat back on the couch, smiling in anticipation.

  The tape began to play.

  Erin, so pretty, smiling, coming in the door, exclaiming with delight over the house. “I envy you this haven.” He fixing a drink for them. She sitting curled on the couch. He sitting across from her in the easy chair, getting up and setting a match to the kindling in the fireplace.

  “Don’t bother to light a fire,” she’d told him. “I really must get back.”

  “Even for half an hour it’s worth it,” he’d assured her. Then he’d turned on the stereo, muted, soft, and pleasant, the songs of the forties. “Our next date is going to be at the Rainbow Room,” he said. “You enjoy dancing as much as I do.”

  Erin had laughed. The lamp beside her accentuated the glints of red in her auburn hair. “As I wrote when I answered your ad, I love to dance.”

  He’d stood up, held out his arms. “How about now?” Then, as though struck by a thought, said, “Wait a minute. Let’s do this right. What shoe size are you? Seven? Seven and a half? Eight?”

  “Seven and a half narrow.”

  “Perfect. Believe it or not, I have a pair of evening slippers that should fit you. My sister asked me to pick up a pair she had ordered in that size. Like the good big brother I did as I was told. Then she phoned and told me to take them back. She’d found a pair she liked better.”

  Erin had laughed with him. “Just like a kid sister.”

  “I’m not going to be bothered running around returning them.” The camera stayed on her, catching her smiling, content expression as she looked around the room.

  He’d gone up to the bedroom, opened the closet where boxes of new evening shoes were lined up on the shelf. He’d bought the ones he’d chosen for her in a variety of sizes. Pink and silver. Open toes and backs. Heels as narrow as stilettos. A gossamer ankle strap. He reached for the pair that were seven and a half narrow and carried them down, still wrapped in tissue.

  “Try these on, Erin.”

  Even then, she wasn’t suspicious. “They’re lovely.”

  He’d knelt and slipped off her ankle-top leather boots, his hands impersonal. She’d said, “Oh, really, I don’t think . . . ” Ignoring her protest, he’d fastened the slippers on her feet.

  “Will you promise to wear these next Saturday when we go to the Rainbow Room?”

  She had lifted her right foot a few inches off the carpet and smiled at the sheer beauty of the shoes. “I can’t accept these as a gift . . . ”

  “Please.” He had smiled up at her.

  “Well, let me buy them from you. The funny thing is, they’d go perfectly with a new dress I’ve only worn once.”

  It had been on the tip of his tongue to say, “I saw you in that dress.” Instead, he’d murmured, “We’ll talk about payment later.” Then he’d put his hand on her ankle, letting it linger just enough to begin to alert her. He’d stood up, gone over to the stereo. The cassette he had specially prepared was already in place. “Till There Was You” was the first song. The Tommy Dorsey orchestra began to play and the unforgettable voice of the young Frank Sinatra filled the room.

  He walked back to the couch and reached for Erin’s hands. “Let’s practice.”

  The look he’d been waiting for came into Erin’s eyes. That tiny first flicker of awareness that something wasn’t quite right. She recognized the subtle change in his tone and manner.

  Erin was like the others. They all reacted the same way. Speaking too quickly, nervously. “I think I really had better start back. I have an early appointment tomorrow morning.”

  “Just one dance.”

  “All right.” Her tone had been reluctant.

  When they began to dance, she seemed to relax. All the girls had been good dancers, but Erin was perfection. He’d felt disloyal thinking she might even be better than Nan. She was weightless in his arms. She was grace. But when the last notes of “Till There Was You” faded away, she stepped back. “Time to go.”

  Then when he said, “You’re not going anywhere,” Erin began to run. Like the others, she slipped and slid on the floor he had polished so lovingly. The dancing slippers became her enemy as she scurried to escape him, raced toward the door to find it bolted, pushed the panic button on the alarm system to learn it was a farce. It emitted a hollow maniacal laugh when touched, a little extra bit of irony that set most of them sobbing as he reached for their throats.

  Erin had been particularly satisfying. At the end she seemed to know it was useless to plead and in an animal burst of strength she fought him, clawing at the hands that gripped her slender neck. It was only when he twisted that heavy gold necklace around her throat and she began to lose consciousness that she had whispered, “Oh God, please help me, oh Daddy. . . . ”

  When she was dead, he danced with her again. No resistance now in that lovely body. She was his Ginger, his Rita, his Leslie, his Nan, and all the others. When the music stopped, he took off her left slipper and replaced it with her boot.

  * * *

  The video ended as he carried her body down to the basement, where he laid her in the freezer and placed the other slipper and boot in the waiting shoe box.

  Charley got up from the sofa and sighed. He rewound the videotape, removed it, and turned off the VCR. The cassette tape he had prepared for Erin was still in the stereo. He pressed “Play.”

  As the music filled the room, Charley hurried downstairs and opened the freezer. Lovely, lovely, he sighed as he saw the still face, the bluish veins that showed in the ice-blue skin. Tenderly, he reached for her.

  It was the first time he’d danced with one of the girls whose body he had frozen. It was a different but thrilling experience. Erin’s limbs weren’t pliant now. Her back would not bend in a dip. Her cheek pressed against his neck, his chin rested on the auburn hair. That hair once so soft, now beaded with frost. Minutes passed. Finally, as the third song was ending, he twirled her around one last time, then, satisfied, glided to a halt and bowed.

  It had all begun with Nan fifteen years ago on March thirteenth, he thought. He kissed Erin’s lips just the way he had kissed Nan’s. March thirteenth was three weeks away. By then he would have brought Darcy here and it would be over.

  He realized that Erin’s blouse was beginning to feel damp. He must get her to the city. Hol
ding her in one arm, he half-dragged her to the stereo.

  As he turned off the dials, Charley did not notice that an onyx ring with a gold E slipped from Erin’s frozen finger. Neither did he hear the faint ping as it landed on the floor and lay almost hidden in the fringe on the rug.

  V

  FRIDAY

  February 22

  Darcy stared unseeingly at the blueprint of the apartment she was decorating. The owner was spending a year in Europe and was specific about her needs. “I want to rent the place furnished, but I’m putting my own things in storage. I don’t want some klutz burning a hole in my carpets or upholstery. Fix the place up tastefully but cheaply. I hear you’re a genius at that.”

  Yesterday after she’d left the police station, Darcy had forced herself to follow up a “Moving/Everything Must Go” sale in Old Tappan, New Jersey. She’d hit a bonanza of good furniture that was practically a giveaway. Some of it would exactly suit this apartment; the rest she’d store for future jobs.

  She picked up her pen and sketching pad. The sectional should be on the long wall, arcing to face the windows. The . . . She laid down the pen and put her face in her hands. I have got to get this job finished. I’ve got to concentrate, she thought desperately.

  A memory came unbidden. The week of finals of their sophomore year. She and Erin holing up in their room, cracking the books. The music of Bruce Springsteen coming from the stereo in the next room, echoing through the walls, tempting them to join the celebrants whose exams were over. Erin lamenting, “Darce, when Bruce is playing, I can’t concentrate.”

  “You’ve got to. Maybe I can buy us earplugs.”

  Erin, a mischievous look on her face: “I’ve got a better idea.” After dinner they’d gone to the library. When it was closing, they hid in stalls in the bathroom until the security guards left. They’d settled themselves on the seventh floor at the desks by the elevator, where fluorescent lights burned all night, and studied in perfect peace, letting themselves out through a window at dawn.

  Darcy bit her lip, realizing she was on the verge of tears again. Impatiently, she dabbed at her eyes, reached for the phone, and called Nona. “I tried you last night, but you were out.” She told her about going to Erin’s apartment, about Jay Stratton, about finding the Bertolini necklace, about the missing diamonds.

  “Stratton’s going to wait a few days to see if Erin shows up before he makes a report to the insurance company. The police can’t accept a missing-person report because it interferes with Erin’s right to freedom of movement.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Nona said flatly.

  “Of course it’s nonsense. Nona, Erin was meeting someone Tuesday night. She’d answered his ad. That’s what worries me. Do you think you should call that FBI agent who wrote to you and talk to him?”

  A few minutes later, Bev poked her head in Darcy’s office. “I wouldn’t bother you, but it’s Nona.” There was sympathetic understanding in her face. Darcy had told her about Erin’s disappearance.

  Nona was brief. “I left a message for the FBI guy to call. I’ll get back to you when he does.”

  “If he wants to meet you, I’d like to be there.” When Darcy hung up, she looked across the room at the coffee brewer on a side table near the window. She made a new pot, deliberately heaping a generous amount of ground coffee into the filter.

  Erin had brought along a thermos of strong, black coffee that night they had hidden in the library. “This makes the gray cells stand at attention,” she had announced after the second cup.

  Now, after the second cup, Darcy was finally able to fully concentrate on the apartment plan. You’re always right, Erin-go-bragh, she thought as she reached for her sketchpad.

  Vince D’Ambrosio returned to his twenty-eighth-floor office from the conference room in the FBI headquarters on Federal Plaza. He was tall and trim, and no one observing him would doubt that after twenty-five years he still held the record for the mile run at his high school alma mater, St. Joe’s, in Montvale, New Jersey.

  His reddish-brown hair was cut short. His warm brown eyes were wide-set. His thin face broke easily into a smile. People instinctively liked and trusted Vince D’Ambrosio.

  Vince had served as a criminal investigative officer in Vietnam, completed his master’s degree in psychology on his return, then entered the Bureau. Ten years ago, at the FBI training academy on the Quantico Marine Base near Washington, D.C., he’d helped set up the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP, as it was called, was a computerized national master file with a particular emphasis on serial killers.

  Vince had just conducted an update session on VICAP for detectives from the New York area who had taken the VICAP course at Quantico. The purpose of today’s meeting had been to alert them that the computer which tracked seemingly unrelated crimes had sent out a warning signal. There was a possible serial killer loose in Manhattan.

  It was the third time in as many weeks Vince had delivered the same sobering news: “As you all are aware, VICAP is able to establish patterns in what heretofore have been considered isolated cases. The VICAP analysts and investigators have recently alerted us to a possible connection between six young women who have vanished in the past two years.

  “All of them had apartments in New York. No one is sure whether they were actually in New York when they disappeared. They’re all still officially listed as missing persons. We now believe that is a mistake. Foul play is a probability.

  “The similarities between these women are striking. They are all slender and very attractive. They range in age from twenty-two to thirty-four. All are upscale in background and education. Outgoing. Extroverted. Finally, every one of them had begun to regularly answer personal ads. I am convinced we have another personal-ad serial killer out there, and a damn clever one.

  “If we are right, the profile of the subject is the following: well-educated; sophisticated; late twenties to early forties; physically attractive. These women wouldn’t have been interested in a diamond-in-the-rough. He may never have been arrested for a violent crime but could have a juvenile history of being a Peeping Tom, maybe stealing women’s personal items at school. His hobby could be photography.”

  The detectives had left, all promising to be on the lookout for any reports of missing young women who fit that category. Dean Thompson, the detective from the Sixth Precinct, lingered behind the others. Vince and he had met in Vietnam and had remained friends over the years.

  “Vince, a young woman came in yesterday, wanting to file a missing-person report on a friend of hers, Erin Kelley, who hasn’t been seen since Tuesday night. She’s a young woman who fits the profile you’ve described. And she was answering a personal ad. I’ll stay on top of it.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  Now, as Vince flipped through the messages on his desk, he nodded with satisfaction when he saw that Nona Roberts had called him. He dialed her, gave his name to her secretary, and was immediately put through.

  He frowned as Nona Roberts’s troubled voice explained, “Erin Kelley, a young woman I talked into answering personal ads for my documentary, has been missing since Tuesday night. There is no way Erin would have dropped out of sight unless she’d been in an accident, or worse. I’d stake my life on that.”

  Vince looked at his list of appointments. He had meetings in the building the rest of the morning. He was due at the Mayor’s office at one-thirty. Nothing he could skip. “Would three o’clock work out for you?” he asked Roberts. After he replaced the receiver, he said aloud, “Another one.”

  A moment after she telephoned Darcy about the three o’clock appointment with Vincent D’Ambrosio, Nona received an unexpected visit from Austin Hamilton, CEO and sole owner of Hudson Cable Network.

  Hamilton had an icy, sarcastic manner which his staff regarded with intense apprehension. Nona had managed to talk Hamilton into the personal-ads documentary despite the fact that his initial reaction had been: “Who cares about a bunch of losers meeting other l
osers?”

  She had secured his reluctant go-ahead by showing him the pages upon pages of personal ads in magazines and newspapers. “It’s the social phenomenon of our society,” she’d argued. “These ads aren’t cheap to place. It’s the old story. Boy wants to meet girl. Aging executive wants to meet wealthy divorcée. The point is, does Prince Charming find Sleeping Beauty? Or are these ads a colossal and even humiliating waste of time?”

  Hamilton had grudgingly agreed that there might be a story there. “In my day,” he’d pointed out, “you met people socially at prep school and college and at coming-out parties. You acquired a select group of friends and through them met other social equals.”

  Hamilton was a sixty-year-old professional preppie, and the consummate snob. He had, however, singlehandedly built Hudson Cable and his innovative programming was a serious challenge to the three big networks.

  When he stopped in Nona’s office his mood was frosty. Even though he was as always impeccably dressed, Nona decided that he still managed to remain remarkably unattractive. His Savile Row suit did not quite conceal his narrow shoulders and thickening waist. His sparse hair was tinted a silvery blond shade that did not succeed in looking natural. His narrow lips, which were capable of selectively breaking into a warm smile, were set in an almost invisible line. His pale blue eyes were chilly.

  He got right to the point. “Nona, I’m damn sick of this project of yours. I don’t think there’s an unattached person in this building who isn’t placing or answering personal ads and wasting time comparing results ad nauseam. Either wrap this project up fast or forget it.”