The Dead Room (24 page)

Still, that dish on the roof changed everything for Eddie because the kitchen was upstairs, and so was his bedroom. For the past week he couldn’t just run up and grab something to eat. He had to prepare himself, write a scenario and play it in his head just in case the watchers were reading his mind on their computer screen. Sometimes he would make lunch thinking the thoughts he guessed a chef would ponder.
I slice onions like this. I grate cheese like that.
Other times he played the scenario of a mathematician or professional athlete whipping up dinner on the run.
Two plus two equals four. Jesus, man, God bless Jesus. I want more money. Look at my fucking box score!
When Eddie got tired, he turned on the TV letting his mind wash out in the rinse cycle and just go blank.

Eddie heard a noise and surfaced. She was moving around in the bathroom. Grabbing a stool, he sat down at the large worktable and waited. After a moment, she became quiet again. Not yet, he thought.

He looked at the newspapers spread out before him, the contents of her purse, and her driver’s license. Rosemary Gibb, twenty years old, five-feet-seven, from the art museum district. The picture didn’t do her justice. He’d spent enough time sipping caffe lattes and watching her work out from the window table at Benny’s Café Blue to know the snapshot wasn’t even close. He tossed the license aside and took another look at the newspapers he’d picked up last night on his way home from the suburbs and that errand. Her disappearance wasn’t even mentioned. Just the story about that mailman. He’d been a butcher, and now he was a serial killer. The world could be a dark place.

He heard the noise again. The bathroom door cracked open an inch or two, and he could see Rosemary staring at him from the darkness. She was squinting at the light, her body shaking from head to toe.

“I’m thirsty,” she said in a hoarse voice.

“I’ll get you something in a minute,” he said. “Close the door.”

“But my mouth’s dry.”

“Close the door,” he repeated.

She looked at him for a moment, then shut the door. She was in the dark again, and Eddie smiled. It was a good plan because it always worked. Be a hard ass, then come to her rescue by becoming nice. On TV they called it the good cop, bad cop scene. Eddie liked the idea, and realized he had the talent and gift to play both parts.

He walked out of the room, climbing the steps and pausing a moment before he entered the kitchen. He calculated it would take less than a minute to get everything he needed. The curtains were drawn, the view of the corner house concealed. The watchers would never even know he was there. He started counting. Rushing into the room, he grabbed two glasses, a container of orange juice, his mortar and pestle, and the stash of pills he kept hidden in the drawer behind his Sterling silver flatware. Before he even got to twenty-six-Mississippi in his head, he was safely in the basement again. Twenty-six seconds. No harm done at all.

Eddie set the glasses on the table, realizing he’d forgotten a spoon when he hit the drawer for his stash. The idea of going upstairs again didn’t appeal to him. He was tired of counting numbers and too exhausted to play the role of a chef. He’d have to make do, he decided, and use his finger to stir the brew. He twisted off the cap on the spice jar marked
Hot Chili Peppers
and dropped two pills into the mortar. MDMA. Ecstasy. The magic potion had more than one name, but Eddie liked
Love Drug
best. Treats for the trainee and her trainer, he thought. They had to
want
to come out of the bathroom. They had to
want
to be with him before they could see his genius and fall in love.

Crushing the pills with the pestle, he poured one hit into each glass careful not spill any of the powder. Then he added the orange juice and gave both glasses a good stir. He licked his finger, tapping on the bathroom door and hoping he wouldn’t startle Rosemary. After a moment, the door opened slightly. She still looked frightened, but that would go away soon.

“Something to drink,” he said.

Her eyes were on the glass. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s orange juice,” he said. “I thought you were thirsty.”

She took the glass and closed the door. Eddie returned to the table, picked up his own glass and gulped it down. It would take the better part of an hour before either one of them began to feel anything. After that, they’d be in love and could let go. Eddie believed in group therapy. He believed in the magic of the
Love Drug
.

He passed the time sitting in the greenhouse with a Tootsie Pop in his mouth. Although he couldn’t be bothered with keeping plants, he liked the humid air and bright light passing through the milky glass. It was almost like sitting in the backyard without having to take the risk of being seen. At the thirty-minute mark, he began to feel the rush. Glimpses of the first wave.

The doorbell rang.

Eddie wondered if it wasn’t his imagination. When the bell rang a second time, he checked the bathroom door and raced upstairs. He kept his back to the walls, sidestepping his way through the rooms quickly and avoiding the windows until he reached the den. Kneeling down, he scurried across the carpet and peeked through the curtain.

It was Mrs. Yap, his landlady, standing on the front porch wondering why he wasn’t answering the door. He looked at his car in the drive and saw her Mercedes. She rang the bell again, cupping her hands around her eyes and peering through the foyer window.

Eddie had grown tired of her frequent visits. If he answered the door, she’d undoubtedly want to come in. Mrs. Yap may have been older than him, but was within range, and he knew she liked him. She owned several rental properties, some of them large buildings. When she was in the neighborhood, she often stopped by for a cup of coffee. She talked about her business, but spent just as much time asking questions about his. Eddie endured the interrogations because he knew he had to. Still, he hated her curiosity. She always wanted to look at his things and often asked how much they cost. The price of his silver and where he picked up the oriental rugs or bought his antiques.

Mrs. Yap tapped on the foyer window again like a bird. She reminded him of a bird every time he saw her. She wore bright-colored clothing, had a beaklike nose, and seemed way too peppy to be human.

The room began to vibrate and he felt himself break into a sweat—the
Love Drug
rolling through him freely now. He bit through the Tootsie Pop, crushing the hard candy until he reached the soft, chocolaty center. He was in the flow. He was wading through it. And he hoped Mrs. Yap would get the message that he wasn’t home and just leave. He parted the curtain slightly and took another look outside. Then he did a double take and blinked.

There was giant canary on the porch pecking at the window, then marching over to the Mercedes on stick-thin legs. He blinked his eyes again, trying to see through the hallucination, but the canary got behind the wheel and drove away.

Was it the
Love Drug
or could it be his unique way of seeing the world? His vision. His genius. And what the fuck did it matter anyway?

Eddie Trisco laughed, rushing back downstairs and hoping Rosemary was finally ready to come out of the bathroom and join the party. They’d start with water and more Tootsie Pops. They’d listen to music and dance. Then maybe take a shower and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed getting to know each other while they sucked on teething rings and sniffed Vicks VapoRub. The people in the corner house could watch and listen all they wanted now. Eddie didn’t even care it they were reading his mind. He could feel his wings again. He could feel the joy. He was stronger than all the watchers in all the world put together. He was invincible. Soon to be famous and thinking in another language. Maybe it was the language of dolphins.

He entered the basement filled with anticipation, his arms and legs feeling finlike. The bathroom door was open, the light on. He found Rosemary sitting at the worktable staring at the picture on her license and giggling. When he approached her, she looked up at him and smiled. He pulled the pop stick out of his mouth and smiled back. Ready, Eddie....

THIRTY-THREE

He legged it out of the Central Detective Division offices located in the art museum district, hustled to his car, and punched Carolyn Powell’s number into his cell phone. When her assistant refused to put him through, Teddy realized Powell was still angry with him. He told her assistant that he wanted another look at the Lewis house in Chestnut Hill, expecting Powell would make things difficult for him. But when her assistant came back on, she said an escort would be waiting for him at the house in an hour with the keys.

His trusted escort. Michael Jackson. Perhaps the man who’d beaten him over the head until he was unconscious.

Teddy slipped the phone into his pocket, mildly surprised and wondering why it had been so easy. Shrugging it off, he pulled down to the corner, hit the parkway, and set out for another look at the death house in Chestnut Hill.

He’d gotten nowhere with the detective assigned to Rosemary Gibb’s disappearance. Maybe nowhere. Although Detective Ferarro wouldn’t show him a copy of the missing persons report, claiming it was confidential, he seemed happy to answer any questions Teddy might have.

Originally from Baltimore, Rosemary Gibb had moved to the city only one year ago and was a student at Drexel University. She didn’t have many friends, and called home to check-in on a regular basis. Her mother had been reading the papers and was aware of the Darlene Lewis murder. When she couldn’t reach her daughter, she panicked and called the police. Detective Ferarro seemed to have taken a special interest in finding Rosemary, perhaps because Valerie Kram’s body had just been found. Rosemary lived within a mile of Boathouse Row and only four blocks from the Central Detective Division. An examination of her apartment revealed nothing out of the ordinary.

Everything except for her picture. Her likeness.

Ferarro admitted to Teddy that he spotted the similarity between Rosemary, Valerie Kram and ten other young women he’d been trying to locate over the past year. He stepped up his investigation, and with the help of a partner and ten cops in uniform, scoured the neighborhood. Because Drexel and Penn were set side by side, they worked both campuses with the help of volunteers from the police academy. By day’s end, they’d narrowed their search to a health club just off Walnut Street downtown. A classmate, another young woman who worked out at the gym, remembered seeing Rosemary on the Stair Master that night. They checked every business around the club, including a café located directly across the street, but turned up nothing. Rosemary’s classmate had been the last person who remembered seeing her before she vanished.

The following day, Detective Ferarro was given an early heads-up on the DNA results linking Holmes to the murders of Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram. Detectives Vega and Ellwood were asking him for his files on any related cases dated prior to Holmes’s arrest. That left Rosemary out, as Nash said it would. Ferarro was looking for her just the same as he was looking for thirty other people from all walks of life. But he was out of leads, and Teddy knew that Rosemary was in the wind.

Teddy made a right onto Scottsboro Road, didn’t see any cars or news vans outside the Lewis house, and pulled over to the curb. Breaking open the flap on a cup of take-out coffee, he took a sip and lit his second cigarette of the day while he waited for his escort. When a neighbor drove by in a Lincoln Navigator, a woman with two young children in the backseat, he caught the look in her eyes, the fear and suspicion. Darlene Lewis’s murder—that ominous feeling of death—pervaded more than just the Lewis house. It was part of the neighborhood now.

Teddy turned back to the house. He wasn’t interested in the dining room or even the plumbing. Three days ago he’d walked through the place thinking Holmes had been caught in the act. He wanted to get a feel for the house without all that baggage. He wanted a clean view.

A car hit its horn. Teddy watched the DeVille sweep by and pull to a fast stop before him. Michael Jackson got out, not the dancer but the detective with tired legs and an old gun who’d worked with the DA since Andrews got rolling. He had a manila envelope in his hand. As he approached, Teddy tried to remember the shape of the figure standing in the darkness who clubbed him over the head. His memory wasn’t clear enough to make a match, but Jackson had a big smile going, and Teddy wondered if the detective wasn’t overcompensating for what he’d done.

“I come bearing gifts,” Jackson said with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Just like Santy Klaus.”

Teddy took the envelope, pried it open and peered inside. Photographs from the crimes scenes and autopsy.

“You’re keeping an album, right?” Jackson said. “A murder book? Powell asked me to give them to you. She said she wants to keep you up to date.”

“She say anything else?”

“Yeah, kid. You can’t be trusted. We’ll have to stay close.”

Teddy tossed the envelope on the front seat and they walked to the house. As Jackson pulled out the keys, Teddy glanced at the letter box on the wall, then turned to the door. The curtain on the other side of the glass was opaque. He heard the lock click and watched Jackson swing open the door.