“Of course!” Tony said as everyone gathered around to have a look at the bills. “The twins would have had to go to different doctors and, especially, different dentists. Bruno Number Two couldn’t walk into a dentist’s office to have a tooth filled when that same dentist had filled the same tooth in Bruno Number One just the week before.”
“This helps,” Laurenski said. “Even identical twins don’t get the same cavities in the same places on the same teeth. Two sets of dental records will prove there were two Bruno Fryes.”
A while later, while searching a bedroom closet, Deputy Larsson made an unsettling discovery. One of the shoe boxes did not have shoes in it. Instead, the box contained a dozen wallet-size snapshots of a dozen young women, driver’s licenses for six of them, and another eleven licenses belonging to eleven other women. In each snapshot and in each license photo, the woman looking out at the camera had things in common with all the other women in the collection: a pretty face, dark eyes, dark hair, and an indefinable something in the lines and angles of the facial structure.
“Twenty-three women who vaguely resemble Katherine,” Joshua said. “My God. Twenty-three.”
“A gallery of death,” Hilary said, shivering.
“At least they’re not all unidentified snapshots,” Tony said. “With the licenses, we’ve got names and addresses.”
“We’ll get them out on the wire right away,” Laurenski said, sending Larsson out to the car to radio the information to HQ. “But I think we all know what we’ll find.”
“Twenty-three unsolved murders spread over the past five years,” Tony said.
“Or twenty-three disappearances,” the sheriff said.
They spent two more hours in the house, but they didn’t find anything else as important as the photographs and driver’s licenses. Hilary’s nerves were frayed, and her imagination was stimulated by the disturbing realization that her own driver’s license had nearly wound up in that shoe box. Each time she opened a drawer or a cupboard door, she expected to find a shriveled heart with a stake through it or a dead woman’s rotting head. She was relieved when the search was finally completed.
Outside, in the chilly night air, Laurenski said, “Will the three of you be coming to the coroner’s office in the morning?”
“Count me out,” Hilary said.
“No thanks,” Tony said.
Joshua said, “There’s really nothing we can do there.”
“What time should we meet at the cliff house?” Laurenski asked.
Joshua said, “Hilary and Tony and I will go up first thing in the morning and open all the shutters and windows. The place has been closed up for five years. It’ll need to be aired out before any of us will want to spend hours poking through it. Why don’t you just come on up and join us whenever you’re finished at the coroner’s?”
“All right,” Laurenski said. “See you tomorrow. Maybe the Los Angeles police will get the bastard during the night.”
“Maybe,” Hilary said hopefully.
Up in the Mayacamas Mountains, soft thunder roared.
***
Bruno Frye spent half the night talking to himself, carefully planning Hilary-Katherine’s death.
The other half, he slept while the candles flickered. Thin streams of smoke rose from the burning wicks. The dancing flames cast jiggling, macabre shadows on the walls, and they were reflected in the staring eyes of the corpse.
***
Joshua Rhinehart had trouble sleeping. He tossed and turned, getting increasingly tangled in the sheets. At three o’clock in the morning, he went out to the bar and poured himself a double shot of bourbon, drank it fast. Even that didn’t settle him down a whole lot.
He had never missed Cora so much as he did that night.
Hilary woke repeatedly from bad dreams, but the night did not go by slowly. It swept past at rocket speeds. She still had the feeling that she was hurtling toward a precipice, and she could do nothing to stop her forward rush.
***
Near dawn, as Tony lay awake, Hilary turned to him, came against him, and said, “Make love to me.”
For half an hour, they lost themselves in each other, and although it was not better than before, it was not one degree worse either. A sweet, silken, hushed togetherness.