My Boss is a Serial Killer (25 page)

“
No. Your calendar is clear today. Hand
me my purse.”

He picked it up from the floor and passed it
to me, and after I dug out my cell phone, I began searching through
my purse for Gus’s business card. I hadn’t known him long enough to
have phone numbers memorized, and besides, I’d never called him at
the police station before. I found Gus’s card and concentrated on
dialing, listening to the phone tree directing me on how to leave a
message for Detective Haglund or how to have him paged. I watched
out the window as Bill shuffled around the room behind me. He kept
his distance, doing nothing to alarm me. I pressed the numbers to
speak to a dispatcher or receptionist and waited while they paged
Gus. “Yes, it’s urgent,” I said. I gave my name. I was on hold
then, listening to a soft-rock station playing Simon &
Garfunkel.

I stared out the bare window into the
daylight. Bill didn’t have curtains on his windows, I supposed
because he couldn’t stand the chance that the material wouldn’t
fall evenly. Outside it was a clear and sunny day, and it was hard
to believe I was discussing with Bill how to best go the police and
admit our numerous connections to a possible serial murder case. I
heard a jingling behind me and turned to look at Bill.

He gestured to the door and a set of keys
gripped in his hand, and mouthed something about water.

Just then Gus’s voice was on the phone.
“Carol?” he asked.

Bill pantomimed some strange motions that I
believed were meant to show him tipping something onto something
else.

“
Hello, Carol?” Gus said
again.

“
Yeah, just a second,” I said to
Gus.

To Bill, I said, “What?” and he said,
“Watering the plants. Neighbor.” Then he turned and walked out his
front door, leaving it wide open. He moved away and a second later,
I heard him knock on the next door down the hall.

Gus asked, “Carol, is everything okay?”

“
Gus, I need to see you. Bill and I
both need to meet with you. It’s about Adrienne
Maxwell.”

“
Really? What’s happening?”

“
It’s about your list of suicide
widows.”

“
Suicide widows?”

I had forgotten, that this was a term I’d
only used between Bill and myself. “I have a list too,” I said.
“Alice Hooper, Bonita Voigt, Wanda Breakers, Rose Ann Trask, Bryony
Gilbert.”

On the other end Gus was silent for a few
seconds, then he asked, “How did you know all those names?”

“
They’re all Bill’s
clients.”

“
Bill? Your boss, Bill
Nestor?”

“
Yes, my boss Bill Nestor. I’m with him
right now. I know this is going to sound obnoxious, but can you
meet us? Can you come to Bill’s apartment? I’ll give you the
address.” Out in the hallway, I heard a vague chiming sound. What
was that, a doorbell? I had to concentrate to recall Bill’s street
address.

To his credit, Gus overcame his confusion
enough to sound businesslike with me. “Sure, sure.” He copied the
address down as I recited it.

“
Can you come soon? I’m not sure I can
keep him still for very long.”

“
Carol, you’re not there alone with
him, are you?”

I ran my eyes over the apartment behind me,
everything neat and sealed and clipped close. Moving to the open
doorway, I looked into Bill’s hall, which was utterly empty.

“
Carol?” Gus asked, his voice rising in
concern. “Are you there right now?”

I stepped into the hall, looking wildly
around. At the far end of the lifeless slate gray hallway, I heard
the elevator door lurch closed.

“
He’s leaving!” I shouted in disbelief,
no longer actually speaking to Gus. “He’s going!”

I started to race for the elevator and then
remembered my car keys—in case I had to do something like a TV
detective and “follow that car,” so I rushed back into Bill’s
apartment to get my purse and then I realized something. My keys
weren’t in my purse. They’d been dropped to the floor when Bill
couldn’t stand the sight of them on his table. And when Bill had
left the apartment, the set of keys he’d held up to show me had
been my own. He’d taken them.

Bill didn’t take my car. He only took my keys
so I couldn’t use my car. He left his apartment building in his own
BMW.

Much later, I learned that Gus ran Bill’s
plates and put out an APB for the car, which was spotted (with Bill
at the wheel) by three different intersections’ videocameras and
found forty-five minutes later in the parking lot of a small local
business that was unfortunately not under any sort of video
surveillance. Bill was not with the car, obviously. Nearby where
he’d abandoned it, there was a metro bus stop, but it was a busily
bustling little area of Kansas City, Kansas and the bus was not the
only direction he could have taken. Whatever direction that was,
he’d managed to disappear for the time being.

I didn’t know about that at the time. All I
knew was that I was stuck at Bill’s apartment building, numb with
disbelief, waiting for police to show up. I didn’t even go back
upstairs to Bill’s rooms, just sat in the lobby staring at my
shoes. Outside I could see where I’d stood with Bill, trying to
convince him that he did not need to scrape up the leaves that
clogged the gutter.

Footsteps sounded on the tile floor of the
lobby, and I looked up to see Gus and a uniformed officer. She was
a young woman who observed me as one might observe a friend’s
unattractive pet. You know, you have to be nice to it, but you
don’t really want to touch it.

“
Hi, Carol,” Gus said, stopping before
me. His tone was gentle, his eyes kind and full of concern. But
there was something else in his face as well, hectic and wild. “Are
you okay?”

“
I’m okay.”

“
Good. You should come with
us.”

I was going to say that I wouldn’t bore you
with the details about the day that followed, to make myself sound
magnanimous. But to be honest, I don’t remember clearly enough to
describe it all in any coherent detail. All I can say with any
certainty is that I told Gus and then about two hundred other
people how I came up with a list of suicide victims from Bill’s
records, how I got from having a list to asking Bill to come
forward so he’d look less suspicious, and how I’d managed to do
this so badly that I’d scared him into running away. The
authorities were alternately angry with me for different reasons.
How could you have been so careless as to go to his apartment? And
then, the very next question, How could you have just let him walk
out the door?

I told the story to Gus in the middle of Bill
Nestor’s apartment. Then I told it to his supervisor, the
gargantuan Sergeant Paige, who didn’t look like any real human
woman had ever looked. She was like a middle-aged Barbie doll
incarnate—boobs, hair and all—and was probably 6 feet, 3 inches
tall. I spoke with Sergeant Paige in an interview room at the
Kansas City Police Department. Gus stood nearby, in what I hope was
a protective manner.

“
Do you know where he is?” the
statuesque Sergeant Paige asked. “Where he may have gone? We have
units outside both his apartment and your law firm. Where else
should we look? I understand from your supervisors and Detective
Haglund that William Nestor is a fairly private man and that you
are the only one who has a clear idea of his patterns.”

“
His patterns?” Yes, this was feeling
more and more like a bad dream. I think it was when she called him
“William Nestor” that my feelings of guilt and horror began to
overwhelm me. I said, “I need coffee.”

“
I’ll get it,” said Gus, my hunky
knight in shining armor. “Take a deep breath, Carol, and go over
what’s happened recently. We need to know where he is. We think
you’ll probably be able to help us with that. Now, you think it
over, and I’ll be right back with an espresso.”

You see, that’s why he was not hard-boiled:
because they served espresso at the police station. MBS&K
didn’t even have an espresso machine, but the cops had one? Gus
left me with Sergeant Paige. I watched him go, and then I looked to
his boss. “This is the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me.
I’m sorry if I act like a flake.”

She didn’t look any less threatening, but she
said, “If it makes you feel any better, I think we can take him
without any violence. If you can just let us know where to find
him.”

“
Give me a minute. Let me think.” But I
couldn’t think. I was worried. I said, “Bill Nestor is not a bad
man. You don’t have to ‘take him’ at all. He just acted as the
attorney for those women. It doesn’t have to mean anything. There
are sixty people working at that law firm.”

Sergeant Paige’s expression did not change.
How many of those sixty people, she was thinking, had ever met
these clients? How many of the sixty had been at the firm for
fifteen years? How many of these sixty people had turned to run as
soon as the police were called into the matter? Or maybe she wasn’t
thinking those things. Maybe I was the one who couldn’t stop
thinking them.

“
Easy there,” said Sergeant Paige.
Perhaps she saw I was on the verge of hyperventilating.

“
I can’t come up with anything.” I was
referring to places Bill might be.

“
Detective Haglund,” Paige said, seeing
Gus return with my espresso. “Stay with her. See if you can’t calm
her down and get some place names from her.”

The door to the interview room closed, and I
was able to gulp half the espresso and resisted the temptation to
begin sobbing. Crying wasn’t going to solve any problems, and it
would just make Gus uncomfortable. Gus knelt in front of me, but he
didn’t try any charm. Probably a good thing; I couldn’t stand charm
just then. I felt like an evil traitor to Bill, and I also felt
like an evil conspirator in front of these nice detectives. Maybe I
shouldn’t have espresso. My nerves were wound tightly enough. At
least without Commander Barbie in there, I could gather my
thoughts.

“
There are a few places he could be, if
he’s just running errands,” I said. I reached for the pad of paper
and pen that had been left for me, and wrote down the name of his
grocery store, his dry cleaner’s, the place where he rented videos,
the offices of his doctor and dentist, the place where he had his
haircuts. Staring at this, I thought: running errands? What on
earth would make me think he’d be running errands? Does a man grab
a quick haircut before turning himself in? Or perhaps it is
terribly rude to go into hiding when one’s video rentals are
overdue. I gave the tablet to Gus and then I admitted sheepishly,
“I doubt he’s at any of them. But it’s hard for me to think of him
in any other way.”

Apparently my emotional instability was
forgiven. “Can you help us with next of kin, family or friends,
places he might go if he wanted to hide?”

“
He doesn’t have any family that I know
of. And lawyers all seem to know each other. He could be parked in
someone’s garage. But as for friends?”

I didn’t even say it out loud to Gus. He
could probably read my mind though. I was Bill Nestor’s only
friend.

So for the rest of the day I talked into
microphones; I signed things; I talked again to a panel of gruff
looking men; I talked to alternate interviewers of indiscernible
purpose; and then, just when I supposed that they were as tired of
hearing me talk as I was of talking, we started over again and
Sergeant Paige came at me with the same questions asked a new way.
Were they trying to trip me up? Did they suspect I was covering for
Bill? I would not have been surprised to end up in a cell, after a
point.

While I was undergoing interrogation that
would have made Junior Gestapo Brent go into climactic ecstasy,
MBS&K was in its own upheaval. I learned this much later, and
never in great detail, but my grapevine network at the office
eventually told me all they could.

By one that afternoon, the KCPD was at the
firm with a truckload of warrants and Sergeant Paige and Detective
Haglund at the head of the brigade with two prosecuting attorneys
and, if rumor proves true, the President of the United States and
the reanimated corpse of John Wayne. They tore Bill’s office apart.
Then they hit the storage room. Boxes were removed. People were
interviewed. Emergency meetings were held. Riots broke out. Senior
attorneys had heart attacks. Somebody’s lunch was stolen. Judges
were called, and orders were issued. I do not know how most of the
KCPD managed to invade Markitt, Bronk, Simms and Kowalsky while at
the same time they were horsewhipping me with questions. Maybe they
called in reinforcements.

But at the end of the day, Bill Nestor was
still missing.

And at the end of the day, I had to admit
that, though this was certainly the worst day I’d endured in years,
it was still better than working for the psychotic sadist. I could
comfort myself with that. I was surprised, when taken out of the
police station by Gus in his department-issued car, that it was
growing dark. It was after eight that night. Sometime during the
afternoon, a nice young officer, the one who’d been with Gus when
he’d first arrived at Bill’s apartment, delivered a sack lunch to
me—ham and Swiss on white bread, an apple, a soda and a cupcake.
But I was starving now. Gus took me through a Taco Bell drive-thru
lane and bought a jumbo bag of tacos, and then he drove me
home.

Outside my poor little house, a police car
waited with two very large men inside.