Lacey stood up slowly. “It’s all right, gentlemen. Mr. Bullock just got a bit riled, didn’t you, sir?”
“You’ve got no right to ask him questions like that, Agent Sherlock. If you do it again, Marlin won’t say another word, the interview will be over, and there’ll never be another one. You got that?”
“I got it.” She saw Dillon standing in the doorway, his expression set, his eyes hard. They’d argued about this, but in the end, he’d given in, allowing her to see Marlin alone. She knew he’d seen her desperation. He said nothing now, merely looked at her. She smiled, gave him a slight nod, then sat down again. “I’ll be careful with my questions, Mr. Bullock,” she said. “Please sit down, sir. If you feel like bounding around like that again, please don’t. I’d just as soon not get shot by accident.”
“You just watch yourself, little lady.”
“I’m Special Agent Sherlock,” she said mildly, admiring his tactic.
He wasn’t stupid. He merely shrugged and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
She turned to Marlin, who hadn’t moved or spoken throughout the ruckus. “Did I entrap you, Marlin?”
“I don’t know what that means, Marty. I just knew I had to punish you. God sent me to punish his weak vessels, to purify them, to make them whole again.”
“As in to make them dead, Marlin?”
“Don’t answer that, Marlin. Watch yourself, Agent Sherlock.”
“Why did you leave out Belinda Madigan’s name?”
He gave her that superior smile again, disregarding her question. “Belinda who? I don’t know any Belinda. That’s a pretty name, old-fashioned. What’s she to you, Marty?”
“Do you think I look much like her, Marlin?”
“No, but I think you’re prettier, I always-”
Big John Bullock’s mouth was working. He didn’t know what was going on, but he soon would. He wasn’t stupid.
Lacey sat back in her chair and drew in a very deep breath.
Big John said finally, “Who’s Belinda?”
“She was one of the women in San Francisco that Marlin had to purify. It was seven years ago. He purified seven women in San Francisco. It was seven, wasn’t it, Marlin?”
He was shaking his head. “No, not seven. I don’t do seven. My pa always told me that seven was a bad number, that it was even worse than thirteen. He’d always laugh at the hotels who didn’t have a thirteenth floor, told me that the fools on the fourteenth floor were on the thirteenth really, but they were too stupid to realize it. No, I never did seven, did six, like my pa told me.”
“All right. The six women you purified in San Francisco, all of them cursed and bad-mouthed their husbands?”
He nodded. Big John didn’t say anything, which Lacey considered a gift.
“Did you date any of them, Marlin? You’re a good-looking guy, I bet it wouldn’t have been hard for you to get a date with almost any woman, right?”
He nodded again. “Ladies like me,” he said, and studied his thumbnail. “They tell me I’m a great lover.” She nearly gagged. “You date Belinda?”
“I told you, Marty, she wasn’t one of the women I had to purify. Why are you so interested in her anyway?”
“I like the name. It’s unusual.”
“I don’t like the name, but I like yours, Marty. It sounds kind of like a boy’s name. It was close, you know? Once I thought God wanted me to purify little boys, to correct them if they’d gotten a bad start, put them on the right path, but then I realized it wasn’t boys, it was girls. Women who’d had their chance to straighten out, but hadn’t. Women who’d married good men and turned on them. I slept with them, you know, just to make sure they were the ones to take out. All six of them cheated on their husbands, told me what jerks they were, so then I was sure they had to walk the walk through my maze.”
“Marlin,” Big John said very quietly, “shut up.”
“Yeah, well, purify, then. That’s it, purify. I wish I’d gone to college. I could have learned more pretty words like purify”