“Bob’s had Maine plates,” Darcy said. “As you very well know.”
“Acourse, acourse, but plates can be stolen, you know.”
“What about the Shaverstone murders, Holt? Was a blue and gray Suburban seen in Helen Shaverstone’s neighborhood?”
“I see you’ve been following the Beadie case a little more closely than most people. A little more closely than you first let on, too.”
“Was it?”
“No,” Ramsey said. “As a matter of fact, no. But a gray-over-blue Suburban was seen near the creek in Amesbury where the bodies were dumped.” He smiled again while his cold eyes studied her. “Dumped like garbage.”
She sighed. “I know.”
“No one could tell me about the license plate of the Suburban seen in Amesbury, but if they had, I imagine it would have been Massachusetts. Or Pennsylvania. Or anything but Maine.”
He leaned forward.
“This Beadie sent us notes with his victims’ identification. Taunting us, you know—daring us to catch him. P’raps part of him even wanted to be caught.”
“Perhaps so,” Darcy said, although she doubted it.
“The notes were printed in block letters. Now people who do that think such printing can’t be identified, but most times it can. The similarities show up. I don’t suppose you have any of your husband’s files, do you?”
“The ones that haven’t gone back to his firm have been destroyed. But I imagine they’d have plenty of samples. Accountants never throw out anything.”
He sighed. “Yuh, but a firm like that, it’d take a court order to get anything loose, and to get one I’d have to show probable cause. Which I just don’t have. I’ve got a number of coincidences—although they’re not coincidences in my mind. And I’ve got a number of… well… propinquities, I guess you might call them, but nowhere near enough of them to qualify as circumstantial evidence. So I came to you, Darcy. I thought I’d probably be out on my ear by now, but you’ve been very kind.”
She said nothing.
He leaned forward even further, almost hunching over the table now. Like a bird of prey. But hiding not quite out of sight behind the coldness in his eyes was something else. She thought it might be kindness. She prayed it was.
“Darcy, was your husband Beadie?”
She was aware that he might be recording this conversation; it was certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Instead of speaking, she raised one hand from the table, showing him her pink palm.
“For a long time you never knew, did you?”
She said nothing. Only looked at him. Looked into him, the way you looked into people you knew well. Only you had to be careful when you did that, because you weren’t always seeing what you thought you were seeing. She knew that now.
“And then you did? One day you did?”
“Would you like another cup of coffee, Holt?”
“Half a cup,” he said. He sat back up and folded his arms over his thin chest. “More’d give me acid indigestion, and I forgot to take my Zantac pill this morning.”
“I think there’s some Prilosec in the upstairs medicine cabinet,” she said. “It was Bob’s. Would you like me to get it?”
“I wouldn’t take anything of his even if I was burning up inside.”
“All right,” she said mildly, and poured him a little more coffee.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Those women… all those women… and the boy, with his whole life ahead of him. That’s worst of all.”
“Yes,” she said, passing him the cup. She noticed how his hand trembled, and thought this was probably his last rodeo, no matter how smart he was… and he was fearsomely smart.
“A woman who found out what her husband was very late in the game would be in a hard place,” Ramsey said.
“Yes, I imagine she would be,” Darcy said.
“Who’d believe she could live with a man all those years and never know what he was? Why, she’d be like a whatdoyoucallit, the bird that lives in a crocodile’s mouth.”
“According to the story,” Darcy said, “the crocodile lets that bird live there because it keeps the crocodile’s teeth clean. Eats the grain right out from between them.” She made pecking motions with the fingers of her right hand. “It’s probably not true… but it is true that I used to drive Bobby to the dentist. Left to himself, he’d accidentally-on-purpose forget his appointments. He was such a baby about pain.” Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. She wiped them away with the heels of her hands, cursing them. This man would not respect tears shed on Robert Anderson’s account.
Or maybe she was wrong about that. He was smiling and nodding his head. “And your kids. They’d be run over once when the world found out their father was a serial killer and torturer of women. Then run over again when the world decided their mother had been covering up for him. Maybe even helping him, like Myra Hindley helped Ian Brady. Do you know who they were?”
“No.”
“Never mind, then. But ask yourself this: what would a woman in a difficult position like that do?”
“What would you do, Holt?”
“I don’t know. My situation’s a little different. I may be just an old nag—the oldest horse in the firebarn—but I have a responsibility to the families of those murdered women. They deserve closure.”
“They deserve it, no question… but do they need it?”
“Robert Shaverstone’s penis was bitten off, did you know that?”
She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the warm tears trickling through the lashes. Did not “suffer” my ass, she thought, and if Bob had appeared before her, hands out and begging for mercy, she would have killed him again.
“His father knows,” Ramsey said. Speaking softly. “And he has to live with that knowledge about the child he loved every day.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”
She felt him take her hand across the table. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”
She flung it off. “Of course you did! But do you think I haven’t been? Do you think I haven’t been, you… you nosy old man?”
He chuckled, revealing those sparkling dentures. “No. I don’t think that at all. Saw it as soon as you opened the door.” He paused, then said deliberately: “I saw everything.”
“And what do you see now?”
He got up, staggered a little, then found his balance. “I see a courageous woman who should be left alone to get after her housework. Not to mention the rest of her life.”
She also got up. “And the families of the victims? The ones who deserve closure?” She paused, not wanting to say the rest. But she had to. This man had fought considerable pain—maybe even excruciating pain—to come here, and now he was giving her a pass. At least, she thought he was. “Robert Shaverstone’s father?”
“The Shaverstone boy is dead, and his father’s as good as.” Ramsey spoke in a calm, assessing tone Darcy recognized. It was a tone Bob used when he knew a client of the firm was about to be hauled before the IRS, and the meeting would go badly. “Never takes his mouth off the whiskey bottle from morning til night. Would knowing that his son’s killer—his son’s mutilator—was dead change that? I don’t think so. Would it bring any of the victims back? Nawp. Is the killer burning in the fires of hell for his crimes right now, suffering his own mutilations that will bleed for all of eternity? The Bible says he is. The Old Testament part of it, anyway, and since that’s where our laws come from, it’s good enough for me. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have to stop at every rest area between here and Augusta going back, but it was worth it. You make a good cup.”
Walking him to the door, Darcy realized she felt on the right side of the mirror for the first time since she had stumbled over that carton in the garage. It was good to know he had been close to being caught. That he hadn’t been as smart as he’d assumed he was.
“Thank you for coming to visit,” she said as he set his hat squarely on his head. She opened the door, letting in a breeze of cold air. She didn’t mind. It felt good on her skin. “Will I see you again?”
“Nawp. I’m done as of next week. Full retirement. Going to Florida. I won’t be there long, according to my doctor.”
“I’m sorry to hear th—”
He abruptly pulled her into his arms. They were thin, but sinewy and surprisingly strong. Darcy was startled but not frightened. The brim of his Homburg bumped her temple as he whispered in her ear. “You did the right thing.”
And kissed her cheek.
– 20 –