My Boss is a Serial Killer (15 page)

He did it to me again. Like boiling water.
You can pull it away from the heat for a moment and the boiling
will calm, but give it a moment on the fire and here come the
bubbles again. I didn’t know my body could do that, much less
whether it could take that sort of fabulous assault. I gasped a
name out—how embarrassing. I called him “Augustus” like a prim
little maiden, voice full of Victorian shock.

Amazing. That was the thing that sent him
over the edge. Augustus Haglund tensed, surged inside me and said
something unintelligible against my forehead. It sounded like
“detail-oriented.”

“
Grizzly bear,” I replied, without much
more sense.

He lay his head down on my shoulder, panting.
I’d never felt anything more big or warm.

“
Bedroom eyes,” he accused me. “Minute
I saw you,” he said, a further fragment of pleased
accusation.

“
Killer grin,” I replied, fully able to
fling back infatuated compliments. “Police badge.”

“
Copy machine.” Gus rose up a bit,
tugged a piece of my hair that had become stuck to his cheek, and
then peered under my bed. In his first complete sentence he asked,
“Is that popcorn?”

I offered, “Why don’t I make some fresh?”

“
I want to ask you something about
Adrienne Maxwell.”

I looked upside-down at Gus through the faint
golden light of my bedside lamp. Propped up on a stack of throw
pillows, he resembled a well-presented object d’art with a popcorn
bowl beside him. “Still Life with Snacks.” I’d microwaved kettle
popcorn in the nude—a first, for me—and also brought back two
beers. This was turning out to be one of my best nights ever. Now I
lay flat on my back, one knee crooked up insolently to swing back
and forth in time with my ceiling fan. I had the sheen of this man
all over me and intended to luxuriate in it for a while. My head
lay just close enough to him that my hair tickled his leg.

Gus said, “Well, okay.”

“
I know you can’t discuss the case. I’m
not grilling you. But I’ve only known a few people who actually
died. A few relatives, grandparents, a coworker who had a heart
attack, a friend who died of cancer. That was awful. But I’ve never
known anyone who killed herself. Not that I knew Adrienne really
well, but it’s still strange to think I sat in a room with a woman
who did that. Well, who
maybe
did that, I guess, since
otherwise there wouldn’t be a detective on it, would
there?”

Upside-down Gus was listening to me, but I’d
said a variety of things, none of which seemed to have a good
specific response. I asked, “Do you investigate a lot of
suicides?”

“
A few, over the years. There are more
homicides. I’ve investigated other things too, not just deaths.
Burglaries, assaults, missing persons.”

“
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever
seen stolen?”

“
A collection of casts from broken arms
and legs.”

“
Someone collects used
casts?”

“
They were autographed by celebrities.
You know, someone famous breaks an arm, and all his famous friends
sign the cast. The cast comes off, and someone else buys it. There
were almost thirty of them in the collection.”

“
Jeez, so you’ve seen the dark side of
mankind. Stealing autographed casts. Are you hardened and bitter
from looking every day at the underside of life?” I was only
half-teasing. I was curious to know if this object of my
infatuation was secretly harboring his own death wish.

“
Aw, that’s a stereotype. That’s
television’s fault.”

“
Stereotypes usually have a little
merit hiding in them somewhere. They’re useful psychological
tools.”

“
The only cops I know who are hardened
and bitter either started out that way, or they have gotten that
way because they don’t have anything else in their lives. I’m lucky
to have a good supervisor; she doesn’t let us get too overworked or
obsessed. She makes people go home at night.”

“
Having a good boss makes all the
difference.”

“
Damn straight. Also I have my son, who
is just the best thing that ever happened to me, and I have my
family and a couple hobbies that keep me out of trouble. Recently I
met a woman who’s been keeping my mind on happy
thoughts.”

I rolled over so he could see my face, all
the better to beam at him. Now I was mostly lying on his thigh, not
at all a bad place to be. But I said, “You’re disappointing me, Gus
Haglund. I’ve been watching detective shows for years, and I expect
to see whiskey and dark depression and Russian roulette.”

“
I ride a motorcycle. My mother thinks
that’s the same as Russian roulette.”

“
Oh my God, he talks to his mother,
too.”

“
I wouldn’t dare not to.”

“
Is it me?” I asked. “The woman who’s
keeping your mind on happy thoughts?”

He looked at me as if he thought I was crazy.
“Sometimes I’m not sure when you’re being funny or serious. Yes,
it’s you, in case you were being serious.”

This lovely patch of pillow talk was
distracting me from my other concerns. Before it managed to
distract me further, I said, “Anyway about Adrienne Maxwell. I was
wondering, do a lot of older widows kill themselves?”

“
I’ve never seen one do it before,
myself. I have heard of it, but the suicides I’ve actually seen
have all been men, and a lot of them pretty young or really old.
Statistically, I don’t know.”

“
Have you been in Kansas City for a
long time?”

“
I moved here after my divorce, in
2003.”

“
So if this were a kind of ordinary
thing, around here, would you have heard about it?”

Gus gave me a puzzled look, one of his big,
hard hands coming to rest on the side of my face. “I’m not sure I
would have heard much. Ordinary suicides, ones that aren’t
considered suspect, I’m not involved with those. They’re
investigated just because it’s routine, but if the coroner and the
assigned officers don’t find anything out of the ordinary, the case
wouldn’t get to my level. Adrienne Maxwell’s death was suspicious,
so it was kicked up to me and Sergeant Paige.”

“
So, if for whatever reason, a lot of
women in Kansas City liked to off themselves, you might not have
heard about it?”

“
That would depend on…Are you worried
about something?”

“
I’m only curious.”

“
You look worried.”

“
I have a weird face,” I said. “It
looks worried when it’s curious, and it looks confused when it’s
thinking.”

“
How does it look when you’re really
worried?”

“
I don’t know; I don’t worry about
much.”

“
You’re not worried about your mom or
something? She would be around that age, wouldn’t she?”

Aw, that was sweet. And rather an intuitive
leap, particularly for a guy. In my experience, men don’t tend to
make those sorts of transitions. But I had to remember that this
was a detective, and perhaps he was more likely to listen to what
was said and infer something from it. At last I succumbed to
temptation and crawled up the bed to straddle his lap. Gus was not
displeased by this change of position. There was a long patch of
skin from his earlobe to his chest that I hadn’t nibbled yet, so I
got right on that project with enthusiasm. It was a great way to
make us both forget any troubling thoughts in the backs of our
minds.

I wouldn’t have called legal secretarydom a
paradise. The job tended to be dull, not wildly rewarding. Working
for Bill certainly made it easier. But honestly, would I rather
have been touring Europe? Probably. Would I rather have spent my
days cocooned in my home watching TV on DVD? Definitely. But it’s
okay. I wasn’t an heiress or a mistress, and I had to work. Not
being terribly ambitious, I didn’t want to work very hard or be
largely responsible for things. I was a lazy Generation X
layabout.

At MBS&K, the only real problem I had to
conquer was keeping myself entertained. Boredom was the enemy.
Crossword puzzles could help with this, or craftily hidden
magazines, or surfin’ the net. The second week after Adrienne
Maxwell died, the first week after I’d fallen head over heels in
lust with Gus Haglund, I had found a hobby that was more
preoccupying than I’d first imagined.

By the end of Wednesday, I had a list that
looked like this:

Client Name / Date of Estate Work / Date of
Death

Adrienne Maxwell / 2004 / March 11, 2006

Wanda Breakers / 2000 / January 18, 2003

Bryony Gilbert / 1999 / August 4, 2001

Rose Ann Trask / 1998 / December 11, 1999

Bonita Voigt / 1996 / August 29, 1998

Alice Hooper / 1995 / February 3, 1996

Coming up with this list had not been
particularly difficult; I had done most of the work the first time
I looked up Bill Nestor’s condolence correspondence. The reason I
had turned up only Bonita Voigt’s name that first time was that,
once I’d discovered a suicide, I stopped looking. I didn’t think it
could be so common an occurrence to warrant a further search. Bill
sent condolence letters to a lot of people, and a lot of them were
natural or accidental deaths, but there were also these suicides. I
took the list to the scary storage room and spent an hour down
there with a cart. Every time I found a file with a particular kind
of Bill Nestor summary memo, I put in on my cart, and then I
brought them all upstairs and hid them in the bottom drawer of my
file cabinet.

The only one that I had known personally was
Adrienne Maxwell; the one just before her, Wanda Breakers, had died
a few months before I came to work for Bill. But all of these women
were widows who had come to Bill Nestor to have their estate work
done after their husbands died. All of them were financially secure
but not shockingly wealthy. They all lived locally; they all lived
alone; and approximately two years after completing their estate
documents, each one of them committed suicide. Despite being
written by Bill-the-Notetaking-King, the file notes were fairly
vague on just how they’d done themselves in.

I didn’t know what I was looking at. I knew
it was strange. I knew that it pushed the envelope of believable
coincidence. But what did it mean?

Back in my college days, I minored in
philosophy, one of the many reasons why I’m not suited for much
other than secretarial work. Though philosophy may wear a cloak of
whimsical uselessness, it does help you learn to think in new ways.
And it hammers home the process of logic. I could not start
proposing wild theories based on the information I had gathered.
The facts as I saw them could mean all sorts of things, starting
with the possibility that widowed women kill themselves a lot more
often that I’d thought.

If some kind of conspiracy was going on,
though—and conspiracies aren’t wild theories, are they?—some plot
that compelled women to commit suicide within three years following
their husband’s death, wouldn’t the police have noticed it? Surely
they would have noticed it. I didn’t want to act like I’d found
something fascinating when everyone on Earth already knew about it.
If I went to Gus and told him what I’d found, he might think I was
trying to impress him, the boring little secretary who likes
imagining that she’s part of a
Mystery
mini-series. I
thought I’d ask Bill first. Maybe he knew something that I
didn’t.

On Thursday morning, after our regular
powwow, I asked Bill, “Do you have a few minutes you can spare for
something not completely work-related?”

Not a common request, coming from good old
ask-no-questions Carol. Bill looked surprised, but almost happily
he said, “Of course, of course. I hope there’s not a problem.”

“
Not a problem, a puzzle.” I tried to
think how to begin. “This business with Adrienne Maxwell got me
thinking, and then someone mentioned another suicide here a few
years ago, and I was looking through some older files. I mean, of
course, I made sure all the current work was done
first.”

“
Of course you did. I know
that.”

That’s right, I was dealing with Bill Nestor,
best boss ever. I granted him a smile of gratitude.

“
Who said that someone else had
committed suicide?”

It’s not the number one rule for secretaries,
but it’s in the top ten: unless you’re about to pay a big
compliment, don’t mention names. It’s not even a good idea when
your boss is as nice as Bill. I said, “One of the girls, I can’t
even remember which one. But I ran across some really strange
information.”

“
What information?”

“
Does it seem weird to you that so many
widows kill themselves?”

Bill was straightening his shirt cuffs when I
looked back at him. “So many?”

“
Well, I’ve counted six in the last ten
years. Of course that includes Adrienne Maxwell, and according to
Detective Haglund, they’re still considering that a suspicious
death.”

“
Because of the witness.”

“
And the drugs.”

“
Six, huh?”

“
Do you want to see my list? I made a
little list of their names and dates of death.”

“
Yes, show me.”

I’d brought the list with me, of course, and
handed it to him. Bill looked at it for a long time, longer than it
takes to simply read it, and I was glad that he wasn’t dismissing
me out of hand. He must be thinking it over.