“Holy shit,” Marino muttered every other minute.
In more than a dozen of them, Hilton Sullivan was nude and in poses of bondage, and Helen Grimes was his sadistic guard. One favorite scenario seemed to be Sullivan sitting in a chair while she played the role of interrogator, yoking him from behind or inflicting other punishments. He was an exquisitely pretty blond young maid, with a lean body that I suspected was surprisingly strong. Certainly, he was agile. We found a photograph of Robyn Naismith’s bloody body propped against the television in her living nom, and another one of her on a steel table in the morgue. But what unnerved me more than any of this was Sullivan’s face. It was absolutely devoid of expression, his eyes cold the way I imagined they would be when he killed.
“Maybe we know why Donahue liked him so much„” Marino said, sliding the photographs back inside their envelope. “Someone was taking these pictures. Donahue’s wife told me the warden’s hobby was photography.”
“Helen Grimes must know who Hilton Sullivan really is,” I said as sirens wailed.
Marino peered out the window. “Good. Lucero’s here.”
I examined the down vest on the bed and discovered a downy white feather protruding from a minute tear in a seam.
More engines sounded. Car doors slammed shut.
“We’re out of here,” Marino said when Lucero arrived. “Make sure you impound his blue van.”
He turned to me. “Doc? You remember how to get to Helen Grimes’s crib?”
“Yes.”
“Lets go talk at her.”
Helen Grimes did not have much to say.
When we got to her house some forty-five minutes later, we found the front door unlocked and went inside. The heat was turned up as high as it would go, and I could have been anywhere in the world and recognized the smell.
“Holy God,” Marino said when he walked into the bedroom.
Her headless body was in uniform and sitting in a chair against the wall. It wasn’t until three days later that the farmer across the road found the rest of her. He didn’t know why anyone would have left a bowling bag in one of his fields. But he wished he had never opened it.
EPILOGUE
The yard behind my mother’s Miami house was half in the shade and half in the gentle sun, and hibiscus grew in a riot of red on either side of the back screen door. Her Key Lime tree by the fence was heavy with fruit when virtually all others in the neighborhood were barren or dead. It was a fact I failed to understand, for I had not known it was possible to criticize plants into good health. I thought you had to talk nicely to them.
“Katie” my mother called from the kitchen window. I heard water drumming into the sink. There was no point in answering.
Lucy knocked out my queen with a castle. “You know,” I said, “I really hate playing chess with you.”
“Then why do you keep asking me?”
“Me asking you? You force me, and one game is never enough.”
“That’s because I keep giving you another chance. But you blow it every time.”
We were sitting across from each other at the patio table. The ice in our lemonades had melted and I felt a little sunburned.
“Katie? Will you and Lucy go out after a while and get the wine?” my mother said from the window.
I could see the shape of her head and the round outline of her face. Cupboard doors opened and shut; then the telephone sounded its high-pitched ring. It was for me, and my mother simply handed the cordless phone out the door.
“It’s Benton,” the familiar voice said. “I see from the papers that the weather’s great down there. It’s raining here and a lovely forty-five degrees.”
“Don’t make me homesick.”
“Kay, we think we’ve got an ID. And by the way, someone went to a lot of trouble. Fake identifications – good ones. He was able to walk into a gun store, and rent a condo, with no questions asked.”
“Where’d he get his money?”
“Family. He’s probably had some stashed. Anyway, after going through prison records and talking to a lot of people, it seems that Hilton Sullivan is an alias for a thirty-one-year-old male named Temple Brooks Gault from Albany, Georgia. His father owns a pecan plantation and there’s a lot of money. Gault’s typical in some ways – preoccupied with guns, knives, martial arts, violent pornography. He’s antisocial, et cetera.”