The Darker Side

  “Agent Barrett, Agent Washington.”

  “Hello, Father,” I say. “It’s pretty empty in here. Slow day?”

  I wince inside. I seem helpless to censor my own bitterness in this place. Alan looks at me strangely. Father Yates takes it in stride.

  “Every day is a slow day at the Reedeemer, Agent Barrett. We’re not saving souls by the bucketful here. One at a time.”

  “Sorry, Father. That was uncalled for.”

  He waves a hand. “You’re mad at God, I understand. If He can take it—and I think He can—then so can I. Now, I have someone I’d like you to meet. Agent Washington told me why you’ve come, and the woman I’m about to introduce you to is the only person I could think of. So far as I know, she was Rosemary’s only friend. Rosemary had no living family. But perhaps this person will be helpful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she used to be a police officer. A detective, in fact. In Ohio.”

  “Really?”

  “Cross my heart.” He smiles. Priest humor. “She’s waiting for you in the sacristy.”

  LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT THIS church, the sacristy is small but clean. Simple shelving provides a place for the chalice to rest when not in use. I can see the wine and the bag containing the host wafers.

  “They’re made by nuns,” my mother had told me when I asked.

  I was not a fan of nuns at the time, but I had to admit that I liked the wafers even less. They should have been a reward for surviving the endurance test of Mass, but they tasted like Styrofoam.

  I see a closet with no doors, wood painted white. Father Yates’s vestments hang inside.

  There is no desk in this small room, just a window and three battered wooden chairs. A woman sits in one of the chairs, waiting.

  “This is Andrea,” Father Yates tells us. “Andrea, this is Agent Smoky Barrett and Agent Alan Washington.”

  She nods but does not speak.

  “I’ll leave you alone for now,” the priest says, and takes his exit.

  I examine Andrea. She’s not a small woman but not big either, about five-four and maybe a hundred thirty pounds. Her face would be average if not for her eyes and her hair. The hair is long and shiny and so black that it’s almost blue. Her eyes are large and limpid and darker than the hair.

  They are intelligent eyes. I can see the hint of cop in them. Her gaze is frank, direct, guarded, that mix of contradictions only found in law-enforcement professionals and hardened criminals. She takes in my scars without a perceptible reaction.

  She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt that’s maybe a half size too big for her and a pair of faded blue jeans and tennis shoes.

  I hold out a hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Andrea,” I say.

  Her grip is firm and stronger than I expected. Her palms are dry. I manage to cover my own surprise at the scars I see on her wrist and arm. Two cuts, one horizontal, one vertical. The mark of the truly dedicated suicide.

  “Likewise.” Her voice is low and throaty, the voice of a phone-sex operator. “And yeah, I tried to kill myself once.” She turns up her other wrist, and I see more scars. “They’re a matching set.”

  “Been close myself,” I say, though I’m not sure why.

  She gives me a mild look, and nods for us to take a seat.

  “Why does Rosemary’s murder rate the attention of the Feds?” she asks.

  Right to the point. I try out the standard answer.

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  She gives me the most mirthless smile I’ve ever seen, followed by a chuckle that says we’re funny if we think she’s going to be that easy. “Then I’m not at liberty to help you. Put up or shut up.”

  I glance at Alan. He shrugs.

  “Fine,” I say. “Rosemary is not this killer’s only victim. If you need to know more, then we’re done.”

  “Nope, that makes sense. And I’m glad to hear it.”

  “That he’s killed others?”

  “Of course. Multiple murders are easier to solve than single instance homicides.”

  She has no concern for the bigger picture. If the death of others will help solve the murder of her friend, so be it.

  “You want to tell us about it?” Alan asks.

  I glance at him. He’s entirely focused on Andrea. Alan is possibly the most gifted interrogator I know, so I keep my mouth shut and take a moment to study her.

  It takes me longer to see it than he had, but I catch on. It’s in her eyes, in her face, in everything about her. She’s sad. It’s not the short-term sadness of someone having a bad day. It’s not despair. This is something in between, a weariness that carries weight. Andrea is someone with a story to tell, a bad one, and you have to let her tell it before you can ask her what you really want to know.

  Andrea doesn’t respond right away. She continues to assess me with those big, dark eyes for a few moments before turning them onto Alan.

  “I used to be a cop,” she begins. “Back in Ohio.”

  Alan nods. “Father Yates told us.”

  “I was a good cop. I had the gift. I could smell the lies a mile away, and I could make connections where others couldn’t. I ended up in homicide five years in.”

  “Fast track,” Alan notes. “All ability, or did you have a rabbi?”

  Someone higher up who shepherded her career, he is asking.

  “Both. I was good, real good. But my dad had been a cop too, so I had people looking out for me. It’s the way of things there.”

  “Here too,” he says. “I was in LAPD homicide for ten years. Ability wasn’t always enough.”

  “Yeah. Well, I managed to juggle it all pretty good. I got promoted fast, married a great guy—not a cop—and had a baby. A beautiful boy named Jared. Life was good. Then things changed.”

  She stops talking. Stares off into the distance.

  “What things?” Alan prods her.

  “There was this guy. He killed families. Wholesale. He’d come into a suburban neighborhood and recon until he found the right family. His requisites were: multiple children aged ten or above, preferably with some boys and girls in their teens, and at least one parent. Single moms were the best, but he always wanted a boy as a part of the equation, whether it was the dad or a son, brother, whatever.

  “He’d come at them when it got dark. He’d make them all strip and then he’d spend the night doing his thing. He’d force them to have sex with each other. Sisters to sisters, Mom to son, dads to daughters. You get the picture. Then he’d fuck his favorite or a few of his favorites. When he was done, he’d leave all of them alive except for one that he would strangle while the others watched.”

  She swallows, remembering all of this.

  “A task force was put together. I was on it as second in command. I was hot for it too. Something about this one got to me. Still don’t know why. It was bad, sure, but I’d already seen gruesome.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to deal with dead victims than living ones,” I offer.

  She looks at me with renewed interest. “Funny you should mention that. These families were permanently fucked up. Most ended in divorce. Some of the fathers and kids killed themselves. None of the mothers, though. Still not sure why.”

  “For the kids,” Alan murmurs.

  “What?” she asks.

  “The mothers didn’t kill themselves because they needed to be there for the kids.”

  She stares at Alan for a moment, then continues.

  “The ruin of those poor people is what he got off on. That was his real fix. Once I understood that, I knew that’s why he kept them alive. He wanted to go back and watch them be miserable. We posted surveillance around his victims’ homes and, sure enough, the fucker showed up. Ohio has the death penalty so he sucked down cyanide gas a few years ago.”

  “That’s good work,” I say.

  “We caught him,” she agrees, “but it didn’t help me. I couldn’t get the victims’ stories out of my head. The things
he made them do. How it affected them. I started to have trouble sleeping and in true cop fashion, I kept it all to myself and turned to the same therapist my dad had always used in rough times. Dr. Johnnie Walker.” Another one of those mirthless smiles. “Dr. Walker was cheap, he could keep a secret, and he always went down clean.”

  “Seen him myself,” Alan says.

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Sure. Lots of cops have.”

  Bitterness spasms across her face. “The thing is, he’s not really cheap. He starts out low, but that back end is a bitch.”

  “Almost cost me my marriage,” Alan replies. “What did it cost you?”

  Those eyes close once and open again and turn to me and then Alan and then the ceiling. I see a storm in them, wind and rain and thunder, pain and rage and something more terrible but undefined.

  “Everything,” she says. “It cost me everything.” Her voice is a monotone. “Maybe if I’d reached out, asked for help, I could’ve changed things. But cops aren’t too big on that anyway, and I had the added pressure of being a woman. Someone was always waiting for me to show weakness. I kept it to myself, and I hid it good. One thing a cop can do, man, is lie.” She looks at Alan. “I drove drunk with Jared in the car. We crashed, he died.”

  Silence. She’s not looking at us now.

  I have a bitter taste in my mouth, like blood. This is just one more terrible story to add to my catalogue of useless and terrible stories. What happened to her did not happen because she was a bad person or a bad cop or a bad mother. Something about that case got to her where others hadn’t and drove her to the bottle. One day she was in the car with her son and the bottle made her zig instead of zag. That was the end of her, at least for a little while. The fact that she’d caught the monster didn’t matter. She was his last victim.

  “I tried to kill myself twice. Once with pills, the other time with a razor. I got put on disability from the force. My husband left me. I was about to give suicide a third whirl when I realized the truth: death was too good for me. What I needed to do was suffer.” She’s still talking in that laconic monotone. “So I moved to LA and I became a whore.”

  I flinch at this revelation.

  “Why?” I ask.

  The large eyes find me, pin me. “Penance. I killed my son. I deserved to suffer. I figured letting myself get fucked by strangers for four or five years for money would be a good start.” She barks a laugh. “The capper? A guy I had arrested in Ohio had gotten out and moved to LA. Fate sent him my way. He really got off on having the female cop who busted him down on her knees sucking his cock.”

  I am aghast. I can’t find the words.

  “You’re not doing that now,” Alan says. “How’d you come to be here?”

  “Time does one thing, Agent Washington. It keeps on going. The world moves on. You get changed by that, whether you want to or not. Doesn’t matter how much pain, doesn’t matter how much you hate yourself. Sooner or later, even if just in little ways, your soul moves on. I was happy to suffer for what I did to Jared. It was right. But one day I woke up and had the idea that maybe it was enough.” She shrugs. “I needed a place to turn. I was raised Catholic, so I found my way here. Father Yates did what he does, and I quit being a whore.”

  I realize this is about as abridged as it gets. The gap between whoring herself as penance for her dead son and who she is now is a big one, but this woman is only going to share what she wants to. She’s not going to cry, or get touchy-feely, or look toward heaven with a beatific light in her eyes. She might have been a soft flower once—who knows? That rose had long since turned to stone.

  “How well did you know Rosemary?” Alan asks.

  The smallest quiver in the cool facade.

  “Well. Real well. We’d become best friends.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Life’s a bummer sometimes.”

  “You met here?”

  “Yeah. We both did volunteer work on Saturdays. Helping other down-and-outers, whatever. I wasn’t very talkative. Rosemary drew me out. She had a way about her, a kind of helpless happiness that was hard to resist. Like, she knew everything was fucked up, but she couldn’t help laughing anyway. That’s what attracted me to her; she never stopped hoping for a reason to be happy.”

  Something about the way she’s talking makes me ask the question.

  “Were you lovers?”

  Her eyes narrow, then she sighs.

  “Briefly. It wasn’t about sex for me, really. I just wanted to be with someone. And I liked Rosemary. We ended it in a good way. I’m not that into women, and neither was Rosemary. We dropped the sex and kept the love. It worked for us.”

  “I understand,” Alan says. He moves in gently now, with the question we really want answered. “Andrea, is there anything you can tell us that you think might help us? Anyone you noticed taking an undue interest in Rosemary? Anyone new working around the church? Anything at all.”

  She shakes her head in frustration.

  “I’ve been racking my brains, believe me. When I heard Rosemary had been killed, I went a little crazy. I never cry anymore, but I destroyed some furniture. I haven’t thought about too much else since then. The thing is, Rosemary kept herself on a tight, tight leash. She was addicted to fucking. I’m not saying she was addicted to sex, that’s the wrong phraseology. She liked fucking. The more degrading the better. The way she kept things under control was to have a routine and to not change that routine. She’d get up, exercise, work, then come here. Other than spending time with me, that was it.”

  “And no breaks or changes in that routine prior to her death?” Alan asks.

  She spreads her hands, helpless. “No. Nothing.”

  “What about here?” he prods. “New male arrivals?”

  “I considered that, believe me. But no, nothing. Sorry, I wish I could be more help, but the only thing I can say for sure is that it wasn’t someone from her past.”

  “Why do you say that?” I ask.

  “Rosemary told me everyone she ever knew was long dead and gone. Killed off by age, illness, or drugs.”

  ALAN AND I ARE DRIVING back to the Bureau. I’m feeling restless and discombobulated.

  “This is fucked up, Alan,” I say.

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re nowhere. Nowhere. We have three victims—and we only have those because he gave them to us—no reliable description, no fingerprints, no nada. I have an idea of what’s driving him, but it’s too incomplete. Nothing’s vivid, nothing’s standing out.”

  He gives me a look.

  “What?” I ask.

  “This is how it goes sometimes. We work the case until we find something that breaks it. You know that. Why are you getting so worked up about it just two days in?”

  “Because it’s personal.”

  “How?”

  “We think this guy has been creeping around for years killing people, right? We think that the numbers on those crosses designate the number of victims. If that’s true, he’s going to turn out to be one of the most prolific killers ever. And he’s been doing it right under our noses. The Lisas and Rosemarys of the world have been dropping like flies and he’s been laughing about it the whole time.”

  He nods. “The victims got to you.”

  It’s an incisive observation, a word-knife.

  “I always care about the victims.”

  “Sure, of course. But sometimes you care more than others. This is one of those times, isn’t it?”

  I stop resisting.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason that Atkins was upset about Rosemary. Most people let life carry them along. They accept what they get. Lisa Reid and Rosemary Sonnenfeld swam against the current. Even though they knew it might be hard, might even be futile, they swam anyway. Then, after they’d made it to shore, this guy came up behind them, slit their throats, and dumped their bodies back in the river.”

  He’s silent for a l
ittle while, just driving. He clears his throat.

  “Yeah. They got to me too. Made me think of you.”

  I look at him in surprise.

  “Really?”

  He smiles, gives me a sideways glance.

  “When it comes to swimming against the current, Smoky, you’re the hands-down gold medal winner.”

  19

  “NO USABLE PRINTS,” CALLIE BEGINS. “ALL THE BLOOD ON the cushions belonged to Lisa Reid. We found a black hair on trace that did not belong to Lisa, but there was no root. We’re not going to be able to get DNA from it.”

  “Great,” I say. “What about the cross?”

  “It’s not pure silver,” James says. “That is, it’s sterling silver. About ninety-three percent silver mixed with copper. Very common. He picked a good metal to work with if he wanted to make the crosses himself. Sterling silver melts at approximately sixteen hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit, it’s harder than gold, and very malleable.”

  “What you’re saying is that he could have grabbed up a bunch of spoons and melted them down to make his crosses?” Alan asks.

  “Easily.”

  “What about the tools needed to do that? Anything unusual that we could track?”

  “’Fraid not,” Callie says. “If you’re not melting large amounts, the right kind of gas torch will do the trick.”

  “Lisa’s apartment? We know he touched her diary, and I bet he spent a while roaming through the rooms.”

  Callie shakes her head. “Again, no prints. I even brushed the keys on her keyboard. He’s a careful boy.”

  “As expected,” I admit.

  “Got a call from the local detective,” Alan says. “Passengers on the plane describe our perp as a talkative white guy with a beard. He had roughly the same appearance as Ambrose. Unhelpful.”

  I walk to the dry-erase board in frustration. I begin to rattle off what we know, little as it is, searching for something cohesive or helpful.

  “It’s not about sex, it’s about him seeing them as sinners—repentant or not.”

  “Repentant,” James says.

  I turn to look at him. “Explain.”

  “The story the cop told you about herself tells us something about Rosemary. They were friends because these were people who had devoted themselves to walking the straight and narrow. They kept themselves under tight control. They took care to reduce any catalysts in their environments that might drive them back into addiction-seeking behavior. The point being, everything about these people says repentance.”