14 BOOK 2 (8 page)

“To start with, the wound tracks are inconsistent. Snow White was left-handed, you confirmed that with all the original autopsy findings. This guy looks like a righty trying to make himself look like a southpaw. He’s cutting them from the front instead of from behind. There are two other major discrepancies—the news articles placed in the vaginas, and there’s a cream on each girl’s temples. It looks like it’s arnica cream, and we’ve found the composition includes frankincense and myrrh. We can’t be sure that the substances are combined or separate just yet, but regardless, it’s a big deviation from the original murders. We’re tossing around the idea that this might be some sort of religious ritual.”

“So there’s no hair evidence?”

“You mean at the scenes? Not that we’ve found.”

“No, I mean the new victims’ hair wasn’t pulled out at the roots like the first girls’?”

Taylor and Fitz exchanged a glance, and Fitz answered,

“Not that we’ve come across, no.”

Kimball went to the boxes on his desk, flipped the lid off the center box, slipped on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses. He thumbed through the center of the files and pulled out a manila folder marked Photos. He paged through until he reached one he liked. He held it out for Taylor to look at.

“That picture is of the back of Vivienne White’s head. See that little bald patch? We always figured he was yanking their heads back so hard that he pulled the hair out at the roots. It was the same for all ten girls. A bald patch, right at the nape of their necks. I don’t know about any cream being found on the bodies, but the missing hair was a big deal for us.”

Taylor’s lips were pursed. “That wasn’t in the files.”

She looked at Kimball then, a mean thought niggling her mind. She hated to think the worst, but it had happened before.

“Kimball, is there something we’re missing? Are our files incomplete?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t answer that for you. That’s why I pulled these from the garage, just in case. You know how it is. Files get lost over time. The case is twenty years old. You’re welcome to these, if you want. Compare and contrast.”

“I appreciate that.”

Kimball circled the desk, sat in his leather chair. He pulled out a pipe and loaded it up. The scent reminded Taylor of her grandfather, a man she hadn’t known very well. When she looked in a mirror there was a likeness, and when she felt her temper rise, she knew it was his anger.

“Anything else top your list?”

Taylor smiled. The man was still as sharp as ever.

“Tell me. Why did they name him Snow White?”

Kimball smiled, then turned and went to the bookcase. He ran his fingers along the spines on the third shelf from the bottom, the wood just high enough that he didn’t need to bend over to read the titles. He made his selection, a tattered, beaten book that looked quite old. He turned back to them. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. My daughter, Stacy, Sabrina’s mother, was a little girl when the first murder happened. I was reading to her before I tucked her in, a ritual I tried to maintain even when I was working the B-shift on Homicide. I’d read, get her to sleep, then go to work.”

He fingered the cover of the book. Taylor could see that the edges of the pages were gold.

“Well, this was the story I’d read to her that night. It was snowing hard, and I got to work thinking we’d have a slow night. Instead, we got called to the lot behind the old Chute Complex, those gay bars out in Melrose. You know where I’m talking about, off Franklin Road? It’s all built up now.”

Taylor nodded.

“That was Tiffani Crowden’s final resting place. I got on the scene and saw her, lying there in the snow. The story popped right into my head.”

He cracked open the book. No bookmark was necessary; it opened to the page he wanted. The words he read made a chill spread through Taylor’s body.

“‘Once upon a time, when the flakes of snow were
falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window
sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black
ebony. And whilst she was sewing and looking out of the
window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle,
and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red
looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to
herself, would that I had a child as white as snow, as red
as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.
Soon after that she had a little daughter, who was as white
as snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black
as ebony, and she was therefore called little Snow White.
And when the child was born, the queen died.’”

Kimball closed the book, cleared his throat. “Fitting, really.”

They were silent for a few beats. Taylor was the first to venture in. “Wow. I had no idea.”

Kimball offered her the book. She took it and glanced at the cover.
Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

“That was my copy from when I was a boy.”

Taylor met Kimball’s eye, gave the book back. “Thank you. This helps. Did you ever think that he’d read the story and was trying to re-create the scenes?”

“Sure. Made perfect sense. Too perfect. I always thought there was more. Hate. Lust. Power. All excellent motives. But why does any killer develop his MO? Maybe Snow White’s mother read to him before she went to work. Maybe he had someone who he read to, and lost her? Attaining the unattainable, always a rich source for motivation. We won’t know unless we catch him, ask him.”

“Can I ask you about the note he sent you? I’m curious about that.”

“Smart girl. I bet you are.” Taylor took the praise and realized she would have enjoyed working with this man, had she ever gotten the chance.

He puffed, sucking the fire into the tobacco, ruminating. “That damn note. I swear, we went over it and over it. Didn’t have all the fancy tests y’all have nowadays, but we could do a fair amount of work back then. The computers were young, and the printers weren’t as plentiful. Just the fact that it came off a computer told us something. He was well-off. It came from an IBM 8580, PS/2 Model 80 386, one of those early desktops, and the printer was a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet Inkjet.”

Fitz shook his head. “You remember that offhand?”

“Yeah.”

Taylor was beginning to understand the reputation Kimball had acquired as the detail man. He continued his recitation.

“Top-of-the-line printer, too. Those things were a thousand bucks a pop when they first came out. At the time, not too many people here in town had one. We traced the ownership, came back to a fellow in Green Hills, man by the name of Mars. Wasn’t him doing the killing, but it was his computer that the note got written on, his printer that spit it out.”

Burt Mars. Taylor knew that name. He was a friend of her parents. An accountant, if she remembered correctly.

“But it wasn’t Mars who wrote the note, right?”

“We never could prove it was him. Never thought so, either. He just didn’t seem capable of pulling off something so elaborate as ten murders. Now, he could bilk Uncle Sam out of a pretty penny, I’ll give him that. No, we always thought it was one of his clients. Someone who had access to his office.”

“Why a client? Why not an employee?”

Kimball gave her a look, then smiled at Fitz, who had rejoined Taylor on the couch. “Because whoever this guy was, he had money. Now, Mars was a generous guy, but not that generous. His employees didn’t have the cash flow that Snow White did. No, it was one of Mars’s clients, all right. Someone who paid other people to do his work for him. I’ve always been confident about that.”

“Why? What was so special about him that you think he came from money?”

“The signet.”

Taylor shook her head. “What?”

“The signet ring. Jesus, that wasn’t in the files, either?”

“I know nothing about it. Fitz, what about you?”

“Don’t remember anything in there about a ring.”

“Found it at one of the last scenes, let’s see, I believe it was Ellie Walpole. When they rolled the body, the ring was caught in her hair. It was a gold ring, scroll work on the sides, big sucker, with a monogrammed
F
in the crest. That’s all. Just an
F.
We went through Mars’s files with a fine-toothed comb, interviewed every single person whose name started or ended with an
F.
Didn’t get anywhere, but that didn’t mean too much. It could have belonged to the killer’s parent, grandparent—hell, cousin or friend, for all I know. It looked old, like it might have been passed down, you know what I mean?”

“Now, that isn’t in the files, I know that for sure. I went through all of the evidence by hand three weeks ago when we pulled some of the boxes for our investigation. There’s nothing about a signet ring. And nothing in the interviews about a ring, either.”

“Don’t know what to tell you, LT. It was there. Saw it with my own eyes. I wrote a lot of those reports myself—that’s why I know they were there. I’m getting the feeling you aren’t working with a full deck on this one.”

Taylor looked at Fitz. This was a problem. Kimball took a last puff on his pipe, emptied it out in a clay ashtray that looked homemade, and stood.

“You can take these files, just be sure you get them back to me in one piece, okay? I want to go be with Sabrina now. We don’t get to see her as much as I’d like, and she’s growing up too fast. Pretty soon she won’t have any desire to make gingerbread houses with Gramps, you know?”

Fitz carried two boxes, Taylor one. Kimball escorted them out through the kitchen, where Mrs. Kimball and Sabrina stopped them and put cookies wrapped in foil on the tops of the boxes, a treat for later. Kimball saw them to the door, a sad smile on his face as they drove away. Taylor was three feet tall and fit perfectly into the space between the banister and top step, slightly shrouded by a Doric column that abutted the crown stair. She could see the ball going on below her. There seemed to be hundreds of people, all dressed in the most elaborate of costumes. It was New Year’s Eve, her parents’ traditional masquerade ball, though the house and environs were new. This was Taylor’s second home, but the only one she ever remembered.

The music was loud, and the people twirled around like marionettes, flutes of champagne disappearing at an alarming rate—tuxedo-clad waiters circling the foyer and ballroom, keeping the guests well supplied. A woman in a large Marie Antoinette wig, powdered face, a black triangle patch meant to be stuck to the corner of her mouth askew and half-unglued, sat down hard on the bottom step—a full forty-seven steps away from Taylor in her little hiding place. Her mother was dressed as Marie Antoinette, but this wasn’t her mother. Taylor felt the concussion of the woman’s sudden not-quite fall, smelled the alcohol waft up the stairs mixed with another scent, a powdery musky smell.

Three people rushed over to make sure she was okay, but she giggled and shooed them, assuring them she’d purposely taken a seat to rest her weary feet. After three waiters had helped her up, she waddled away, dress swinging precariously.

Then there was quiet for a few moments before her father and mother came into view, several people at their heels.

The women were simpering back and forth to one another, but the men talked loudly, expansive with drink.

“Win Jackson, you’ve obviously made a deal with the devil,” a dark-haired man brayed.

“Yeah, Win, your own little Manderley, is it? What did you do in a past life to get so goddamned lucky in this one?

The judge should have thrown you in jail, not dismissed the charges.” A sandy-haired man with thick black glasses smacked her father on the shoulder. Win laughed.

“Manderley? Shit, let’s just hope the place doesn’t burn to the ground. Kitty would have my head.”

And so they went, on and on, poking and gibing at one another, until Taylor’s governess found her and snatched her from under the curved balustrade, shuttled her back to the nursery.

Taylor squeezed her eyes shut, trying hard to place the moment, the spot where one of the men turned….

“Jesus, Taylor watch out!” Fitz shouted.

She opened her eyes, disoriented to see the road in front of her, her hands on the steering wheel of the truck, and a small car swerving through a slide on the ice right into her path. The ballroom was gone. She swung the wheel lightly to the right, steered into the slide and scooted around the Camry, which righted itself and slowed, creeping away in her rearview mirror.

Something there, she thought to herself. Something there. But the memory was lost in the glare of the snow. 

Quantico, Virginia

Tuesday, December 16

10:00 a.m.

Charlotte Douglas knew how to enter a room. She preferred to do it late in the evening, wearing Valentino or Cavalli, delicate feet strapped in some fanciful creation by Louboutin or Blahnik, on the arm of whatever delicious flavor of eye candy she’d chosen for the evening. To stop just inside the doorway for a priceless moment, giving every head the chance to turn and take in her glory. Once all eyes were upon her, she’d glide in, smiling, touching an arm here or a buttock there, depending on the level of intimacy she had with the player involved. The sea of men would proverbially part to allow her access, champagne would magically appear and the evening was instantly considered a success.

She generally reserved those shenanigans for the high rollers: senators, congressmen, people who had funding levels under their watchful command. She had an image to project—glamour, posh and publicly unattainable. It drove the power-hungry men in Washington wild, assured her of a place at most every event of significance. But she couldn’t be on the A-plus list all of the time; she needed to finesse the peons, as well. She’d never waste her couture on them, designer fare from Nordstrom was entirely appropriate. So for the dates with the underlings, the chiefs of staff and deputy secretaries, she made sure she was dressed as elegantly as possible, was perfectly coiffed and made up, and reached or exceeded their height. Charlotte had been handmade for stilettos. The previous evening, she’d spent half the time talking to a minor Saudi prince, a full half hour with the head of the Ways and Means Committee, and shared a snippet of conversation with an NBC affiliate reporter being groomed for the network before calling it a night. Working D.C. could be awfully tiresome.