Individually, simultaneously, the investigators watching the video tensed their muscles in anticipation of what they might see next.
The video jerked and rolled. The new image was a different bathroom, much dimmer, the light source coming from the left side of the frame. Ahead was a beige wall, a white slatted window treatment. There was no sound.
Suddenly a young woman rises to midframe. She is wearing a white, scoop-neck T-shirt dress, long-sleeved. It is not an exact duplicate of that worn by Glenn Close’s character— Alex Forrest— in the film, but it is similar.
As the tape rolls, the woman steadies herself, centered in the frame. She is soaking wet. She is furious. She appears outraged, ready to pounce.
She stops.
Her expression suddenly turns from rage to fear, her eyes widening in horror. Someone, probably whoever was holding the camera, raises a small-caliber gun into the right side of the frame and pulls the trigger. The bullet slams into the woman’s chest. The woman reels but doesn’t instantly fall. She looks down at the widening intaglio of red.
She then slides down the wall, her blood painting the tile in bright crimson swaths. She slips slowly into the tub. The camera moves toward the young woman’s face beneath the reddening bathwater.
The video shudders, rolls, then returns to the original film, to the scene where Michael Douglas shakes hands with a detective in front of his formerly idyllic home. In the movie, the nightmare is over.
Buchanan shut off the tape. As with the showing of the first tape, the occupants of the small room were stunned into silence. Every high they had felt in the past twenty-four hours or so— catching the break on the
Psycho
tape, finding the plumbing supply house, finding the motel room where Stephanie Chandler had been killed, finding the Saturn submerged along the banks of the Delaware— went out the window.
“This is one very bad actor,” Cahill finally said.
The word floated for a moment before settling into the image bank.
The Actor.
There was never any sort of official ritual when criminals got a nickname. It just happened. Whenever a person committed a series of crimes, instead of calling him the doer, or their unsub— short for
unknown subject
— it was sometimes easier to give him a nickname. This time it stuck.
They were looking for the Actor.
And it looked like he was far from taking his final bow.
* * *
WHENEVER THERE WERE two homicide victims, apparently killed by the same person— and there was no doubt that what they had witnessed on the
Fatal Attraction
tape was indeed a homicide, and little doubt it was the same killer as the
Psycho
tape— the first thing detectives look for is a connection between the victims. As obvious as it sounds, it was still true, yet not necessarily an easy link to establish.
Were they acquaintances, relatives, co-workers, lovers, former lovers? Did they attend the same church, health club, encounter group? Did they shop at the same stores, bank at the same bank? Did they share a dentist, doctor, lawyer?
Until they could identify the second victim, finding the connection would be unlikely. The first thing they would do is print an image of the second victim from the tape and recanvass everywhere they’d been for Stephanie Chandler. If they could establish that Stephanie Chandler knew the second victim, it might be a short leap to identifying the second woman, and finding the link. The prevailing theory was that there was a ferocious level of passion to these two homicides, which indicated some sort of intimacy between victims and killer, a level of familiarity that could not be achieved through casual acquaintance, or fuel such viciousness.
Someone had killed two young women and saw fit— through the prism of whatever dementia colored his daily life— to record the murders on tape. Not to taunt the police, necessarily. But rather to first horrify an unsuspecting public. It was certainly an MO that no one in the Homicide Unit could ever recall encountering before.
Something connected these people. Find the connection, find the common ground, find the parallels between these two lives, and they would find their killer.
Mateo Fuentes provided them with a fairly clear photographic image of the young woman on the
Fatal Attraction
tape. Eric Chavez was off to check on missing persons. If this victim was killed more than seventy-two hours earlier, there was a chance her disappearance had been called in. The other investigators assembled in Ike Buchanan’s office.
“How did we get this?” Jessica asked.
“Courier,” Buchanan said.
“Courier?” Jessica asked. “Is our doer changing his MO on us?”
“Not sure. But there was a partial rental sticker on it.”
“Do we know where it was from?”
“Not yet,” Buchanan said. “Most of the label was scraped off. But some of the bar code remained intact. The digital imaging lab is looking at it.”
“Which courier service brought it?”
“Small company on Market called Blazing Wheels. Bike messengers.”
“Do we know who sent it?”
Buchanan shook his head. “According to the kid who delivered it, he met with a guy at the Starbucks on Fourth and South. The guy paid cash.”
“Don’t you have to fill out a form?”
“All false. Name, address, phone. Dead ends.”
“Can the messenger describe the guy?”
“He’s with a sketch artist now.”
Buchanan held up the tape.
“This is a wanted man, people,” he said. Everyone knew what he meant. Until this psychopath was shut down, you ate standing up, and you didn’t even think about sleeping. “Find this son of a bitch.”
39
THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE LIVING ROOM WAS BARELY TALL ENOUGH to see over the coffee table. On television, the cartoon figures bounced and gamboled and zoomed, their manic movement a loud and colorful display. The little girl giggled.
Faith Chandler tried to focus. She was so tired.
In that space between memories, the bullet train of years, the little girl became twelve, about to enter junior high school. She stood tall and straight, the last moment before the boredom and utter misery of adolescence took over her mind; the furious hormones, her body. Still her little girl. Ribbons and smiles.
Faith knew she had to do something, but she could not think. She had made a phone call before she left for Center City. Now she was back. She was supposed to call again. But who? What had she meant to say?
There were three full bottles on the table, a full tumbler in front of her. Too much. Not enough. Never enough.
God, grant me the serenity . . .
There is no serenity.
She looked to her left once more, into the living room. The little girl was gone. The little girl was a dead woman now, cold in some gray marble room downtown.
Faith lifted the glass to her lips. She spilled some whiskey on her lap. She tried again. She swallowed. The fires of sorrow and guilt and regret flared within her.
“Stephie,” she said.
She lifted the glass again. This time he helped her bring it to her lips. In a little while he would help her drink straight from the bottle.
40
AS JESSICA WALKED UP BROAD STREET, SHE CONSIDERED THE nature of these crimes. She knew that, generally speaking, serial killers go to great lengths— or at least
some
lengths— to conceal their deeds. They find out-of-the-way dump sites, remote burial grounds. But the Actor was putting his victims on display in the most public and private of arenas: people’s living rooms.
They all knew that the case had just become much bigger. The grip of passion needed to do what was done on the
Psycho
tape had become something else. Something cold. Something infinitely more calculating.
As much as Jessica wanted to call Kevin, to update him and get his take, she was ordered— ordered in no uncertain terms— to keep him out of the loop for the time being. He was on limited duty and the city was currently fighting two multimillion-dollar civil suits regarding officers who, even though cleared by doctors to return to work, had come back too soon. One had swallowed his barrel. The other had been gunned down in a drug raid when he could not run. There were enough detectives available, and Jessica was told to work with the team on duty.
She thought about the look on the young woman’s face in the
Fatal Attraction
video, the change from anger to fear to paralyzing horror. She thought about the gun rising into the frame.
For some reason, she thought mostly about the T-shirt dress. She hadn’t seen one of them in years. She’d had a few when she was a teenager, of course, as did all of her friends. They were all the rage when she was starting junior high. She thought about the way it made her look shapely in those gangly scarecrow years, the way it gave her hips, something she was willing to give back now.
But mostly she thought about the blood blossoming on the front of the woman’s dress. There was something unholy about that stigmata of bright red, the way it spread on the wet white fabric.
As Jessica neared city hall she noticed something that unnerved her even further, something that cloistered her hopes for any sort of rapid solution to this horror.
It was a hot summer day in Philly.
Almost all the women wore white.
* * *
JESSICA BROWSED THE racks of mystery fiction, thumbing through some of the new releases. She hadn’t read a good crime novel in a while although, ever since she joined the Homicide Unit, she hadn’t had much tolerance for crime as entertainment.
She was in the huge, multilevel Borders on South Broad Street, right near city hall. She had decided to walk instead of eating lunch today. Any day now, Uncle Vittorio would close a deal for her to be on ESPN2, which would mean she would have a bout set up, which would mean she’d have to go into training— no more cheesesteaks, no more scones, no more tiramisu. She hadn’t run in nearly five days, and she was pretty pissed at herself about that. If for no other reason, running was a great way to relieve the stress of the job.
For all cops, the specter of weight gain loomed large, due to the hours, the pressure, the ease of living a fast-food life. Not to mention the booze. For women cops, it was worse. She had known many fellow female officers who had entered the force a size four and left a twelve or fourteen. It was one of the reasons she had gotten into boxing in the first place. The steel mesh of discipline.
Of course, as soon as these thoughts crossed her mind, she caught the aroma of warm pastries wafting down the escalator from the café on the second floor. Time to go.
She had to meet up with Terry Cahill in a few minutes. They were going to canvass the coffee shops and lunch counters near Stephanie Chandler’s office building. Pending identification of the Actor’s second victim, it was all they had going.
Near the checkout counters on the main floor of the bookstore she saw a tall, freestanding rack of books labeled LOCAL INTEREST. Displayed were a number of volumes about Philadelphia, mostly small-press editions covering the city’s history, attractions, colorful citizens. There was one title that jumped out at her:
