Insidious (18 page)

The window was open, broken glass on the floor. She looked for
footprints outside the window, but the Serial had been careful to walk on grass. He hadn’t used the back door. Had he changed the pattern, or as with Molly Harbinger, had there been someone too close, possibly watching, and so he’d chosen the window?

She traced his path to Deborah’s bedroom. Down the narrow hall, and into a lovely light-filled room. Two uniformed policemen were standing over a double bed, looking down at Deborah Connelly’s body, their faces set. It felt to Cam like the air itself was thick with anger. When they saw her, they looked at each other and stepped aside. Cam nodded to each of them and looked down at a young woman who’d been beautiful in life. But not now. Her face was gray and slack, her eyes closed. She was wearing a lime-green nightgown, a sheet pulled to her waist, both soaked with blood. There was blood spray on the wall beside the bed, on the ceiling. Her neck was cut so deeply her head hung to the side, her long black hair stiff with blood. So much blood. Her mouth was open, not in terror, but in surprise. She hadn’t had time to register what he was going to do before he’d slit her throat. That at least was a blessing.

Cam felt a noxious mix of anger, sadness, and regret, saw her hands were trembling. She forced herself to focus on what was in front of her. She said quietly, “He broke the window in the other room, her office, and climbed in. He was wearing soft-soled sneakers that made no noise, probably the same ones he’s worn five times before. He came into this bedroom, stood over the bed, looked down at her. What was the monster thinking? What was he feeling? Anticipation, elation? Did he know her?”

She felt the cops staring at her, but she kept her focus on Deborah Connelly’s face. She moved a few inches to her right, closer, and leaned down. “This was exactly where he stood.” She felt a punch of cold, then a light scent of jasmine.
We would have liked each other, Deborah. Or were you Deb? I’m so sorry. I promise you, we’ll catch the monster who did this to you
.

31

Cam looked up to see a young officer standing in the doorway. “Agent, ma’am? The boyfriend, Mark Richards, he’s waiting in the kitchen. Detective Loomis told me to get you.” She wondered what else Loomis had suggested the officer tell her. Whatever it was, he’d been smart enough to keep it to himself.

Cam walked back down the skinny hallway with its pale blue–painted walls to the kitchen, past techs moving purposefully through the house, skirting boxes. The medical examiner walked past her, toward the bedroom, all brisk and impatient, not even giving her a nod. He would add no dignity to her death, her body now a job to him, a mystery to solve. She paused outside the kitchen door, closed her eyes a moment, and said a prayer for Deborah Connelly. Again, she smelled jasmine. It calmed her, helped her focus. Daniel was probably interviewing Pepita Gonzalez. She hadn’t known he spoke Spanish. She hoped he’d got something useful from her.

She walked into a small ancient kitchen to see a man sitting alone, still as a stone at a small table, his face in his hands. Loomis had said he was hysterical, but he was utterly silent. No, not quite. He was whispering something over and over, “
I’m going to find you, you son of a bitch
,”
the same words, nothing else, sounding singsong. She knew it was his way of keeping hold of himself, of keeping him from flying to pieces.

She lightly laid her hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Richards.”

He slowly raised his face and Cam saw he was a tanned and buffed man in his early thirties with long dishwater-blond hair to his shoulders whipped back in a braid, lovely thick hair. He was wearing a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans, sandals on his big tanned feet. She saw a small diamond stud winking in his left earlobe. He looked up at her out of dazed eyes. She saw a pair of glasses on the table near his hand. “Who are you?” His voice was hoarse, blurred with tears.

“I’m Agent Wittier, FBI. You’re Mark Richards?”

“Yes. People call me Doc.” He sounded exhausted.

He looked like a surfer dude to her. “Doc?”

“Yes, I’m a neurosurgery fellow at Children’s Hospital in Santa Monica, only a half mile away, as if that matters. That’s why I wasn’t here. It’s all my fault, I as good as killed her.”

“Why do you say that, Doc?”

He looked up at her with blind eyes. “She shouldn’t even have been here. Deb and I were moving in together. You saw all the boxes and crap in the hallway and living room? It was all her stuff. We were all set to move her into our new place yesterday, but—” He swallowed. “I was treating a four-year-old with an ependymoma—a kind of brain tumor—and his parents were a mess and he wasn’t doing well, so we moved up the surgery to yesterday.

“I let Deb down, I wasn’t here. If I hadn’t put off moving her out of here, she’d still be alive. The house would have been empty, I’d have been sleeping next to her in our new apartment across the street from the hospital. That bastard wouldn’t have found her here, alone.

“I know I shouldn’t have touched her, but I couldn’t help it. I closed her eyes. She had the prettiest blue eyes. She was staring up at
me, but she wasn’t seeing me any longer. I wondered if she was thinking about me when she died, how I should have been here with her.” He hunched his shoulders, put his face in his hands again, and sobbed.

Cam wondered if that guilt would gnaw at him for as long as he lived. She laid her hand on his shoulder, lightly shook him. “Listen to me. You know as a doctor you can only do the best you can. This was not in your control. You are not responsible.” She said nothing more, to give him a moment to process what she’d said, to get himself together. Slowly, he quieted. Cam said, “Doc, tell me about Deborah.”

His eyes glazed and his mouth worked, but nothing came out. He shuddered. Cam pulled him against her and held him. She said against soft hair that smelled like lemons the same thing she’d promised Deborah. “I swear to you we’ll catch this monster. Do you understand? And you can help us, all right?” She paused a moment, listening to his breath stutter and catch. “How did the child’s surgery go? On the brain tumor?”

That snapped him back. He raised his face. “His name is Phoenix Taylor and we clipped that sucker right out. I think we got it all. He’ll need some radiation treatment, but he has a chance at a life now. Deborah even came by after the surgery and took a photo of Phoenix and his parents—you can see the relief on their faces, big smiles. I guess it was still on her cell phone. One of the policemen told me it was stolen. Sorry, of course you know that.

“Phoenix had a bit of a setback with his intracranial pressure that I had to manage, and that’s why I wasn’t here last night. I couldn’t, I needed to be close, just in case.

“This morning, Phoenix was fine, even gave me a little smile through his missing front tooth. So I was able to leave the hospital early this morning—this would have been our moving day.” He lowered his head to his hands but didn’t make a sound.

Cam waited. He raised his head, looked at her blindly. “She was only twenty-six. Last Sunday was her birthday. We spent the day anchored off the coast, kicking back and drinking beer, eating chips and salsa, talking about how we were going to furnish our new place.” He ran out of words and sat there, motionless and silent. He reached for his glasses with small circular lenses and put them on. “Thank you, for caring about her. Of course I’ll help, any way I can.”

Twenty minutes later, Cam met Detective Loomis in the hallway. “The M.E. estimates the Serial killed her about midnight, but that’s not definite yet. He’ll let us know if anything we don’t expect turns up at autopsy. Did you learn anything from the boyfriend?”

Cam said, “Her boyfriend is a doctor, but he seems to know a lot about her career, maybe because she spent so much time recording it all. We may have caught a break with that, actually. Deborah was a record keeper. There are piles of documents in her office that she was going through before packing for the move. They’ve got to be filled with the names of people she worked with—actors, agents, producers—probably anyone with any clout at all that she’d met. He told me practically Deborah’s whole life is on her laptop that’s missing—it’s a Toshiba Satellite—every part and audition, every personality. Maybe with all those paper records and Dr. Richards’s help, we can reconstruct a lot of it. It’s more than we had in the other cases.

“I asked him to reconstruct as much of her activities this past week. I believe too this will help him, keep him focused on something other than his grief and guilt for not spending the night with her.”

Loomis sighed. “It’s something. The Serial’s killed twice now, in under a week. He’s escalating, and that scares me spitless.”

She nodded. “The profilers don’t like it, either. It’s something they didn’t expect.”

“So even Olympus isn’t always in control of the facts?”

“Alas, no. Where’d you get the name Arturo?”

Again, the look of surprise, then he eased. “Arturo’s my second name actually, after a big flamenco dancer in the thirties in Barcelona. My wife—a DEA Fed—didn’t like it, called me Lou. Lousy name.”

“I think Arturo is cool.” Cam gave him her card, explained the FBI website to him. “I’m going to visit the lady across the street Doc told me about, Mrs. Buffet. Doc said she knew everyone in the neighborhood, said it sometimes drove him crazy, since she always seemed to know what Deborah was doing before he did. He said Deborah treated her like her grandmother, was always over there, checking on her, drinking her lemonade, just hanging out whenever she had a chance.”

Loomis nodded. “The housekeeper and Daniel still have their heads together. I hope she has something helpful to tell him.”

“If she knows anything, I bet Daniel will get it out of her. Tell your people get all chatty with the neighbors, use their shock and surprise to their advantage—”

“Thanks for the hint, they were wondering what to do.”

“Yeah, that was heavy-handed, sorry.”

Loomis’s mouth fell open.

She smiled. “Please tell Daniel I’ll hook up with him when I’m through speaking to Mrs. Buffet.”

32

MRS. BUFFET’S HOUSE

SANTA MONICA

Mrs. Buffet’s 1940s stucco bungalow was directly across the street from Deborah Connelly’s house. It was painted a blinding bright pink that fit right in with the other rainbow colors of the neighborhood. The window frames were painted white, with built-in window boxes filled with impatiens and marigolds, adding color to a yard covered with gravel and cacti. An ancient pale blue Chevy Impala sat in the driveway.

Cam breathed in the soft morning air, still too early to be hot, and knocked on the door. Oddly, there was no doorbell.

A good two minutes later, she heard shuffling, like slippers sliding over a wood floor. The door opened and she looked down at a very slight lady, at least ninety, maybe older, wearing a pink jogging suit, pink UGG slippers on her tiny feet. Her hair was all over her head, tossed around like she’d been in a stiff wind, and sprayed to within an inch of its life. Her faded blue eyes were red with crying.

Cam introduced herself, presented her creds. Mrs. Buffet waved them away. “I don’t have my glasses, but even in a blur, they look official and so do you. Come in, young lady, I know why you’re here. I’m
surprised it took you so long. Come with me in here, it’s more comfortable.” She led Cam into a living room that looked as ancient as she did, the pale green sofa from the forties, at least, with springs that dug into Cam’s bottom. Yellowed doilies covered the backs of every chair, knickknacks and old hardcovers filled the shelves of a weathered bookshelf. The rugs were old and faded, but still, it was a very cozy and comfortable room. The first thing out of Mrs. Buffet’s mouth was “I hope you don’t want tea, because it would take me a long time to make it, and my feet hurt.”

“My feet hurt, too, Mrs. Buffet. And I’m fine, thank you. I’m here about Deborah.”

Mrs. Buffet’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe she’s gone. Just yesterday, my Deborah was telling me how it didn’t matter she was moving, she’d come back to visit me at least three times a week and tell me everything she was doing. But now I’ll never see her again.” Mrs. Buffet picked at an old blue afghan and began smoothing her hands over the soft material, silent now, without words, her grief palpable, just like Doc’s.

Cam leaned forward, relieving the pressure of the springs. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Buffet. Please, tell me about Deborah.”

She gave Cam a small smile. “My sweet Deborah, she was always happy, always up, that girl, always singing. She had a great voice, a big voice, like Judy Garland, and she loved to sing. She’d come over and I’d give her lemonade and my famous sugar cookies and she’d sing me all my favorites. What’s the world coming to when someone would kill a girl like that?”

“It was a terrible thing, Mrs. Buffet, for all of us.”

“Not just terrible, no, it’s an evil thing. In all my years I’ve never found an answer to evil.” Mrs. Buffet turned her head away to blot her eyes, then looked back at Cam. “Maybe you can do something, who knows? I’ll
tell you what I saw last night. It might help you catch that monster.”

Cam felt her heart kick up a beat.

“Unlike you, young lady, I’m old, so I don’t need much sleep, a good thing, since it gives me more time awake to appreciate that I’m still alive and kicking.” She nodded toward the lacy white curtains hanging still, since there was no breeze coming in through the open window. “Last night I was standing just there, looking out at the stars, once everyone’s lights were turned off for the night.

“It was around midnight, calm and quiet, and so I heard what sounded like glass breaking, but really muffled so I couldn’t be sure. I thought some of those wild teenagers from one block over had busted a car window again, but to be honest, I didn’t think much more about it.” She huffed. “Where are their parents? I’d like to know.”

Cam smoothly steered her back. “You didn’t call 911 to check it out?”