The Girls Are Missing (14 page)

“Good heavens, I hope those people back there at the meeting appreciate what you’re doing for them. But doesn’t your wife mind you inviting strange women for dinner, instead of going home?”

“She might if I had a wife,” he answered without looking at her. “I’d level with her. But I haven’t had a wife in fifteen years.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why it’s good to have company sometimes. What about your husband? I guess he wouldn’t make a big deal over this, would he? Or you wouldn’t have come.”

“He isn’t going to know,” she said. “I really don’t know whether he’d make a big deal. He’s—kind of odd sometimes.”

“Odd? In what way?”

She could hardly tell him about her sex life. “Oh, I don’t

know. He just—Well, he’s moody. Sometimes he seems very distant.”

“Yeah?”

She really had no right to be discussing Carl with this man. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me, talking like that.”

He was silent, absently spinning the pepper shaker with his fingers.

“Your husband’s staying with the kids tonight?” he finally asked. “How many kids do you have?”

“Three at the moment.” She explained about Adam and Gail, and Mary Ellen visiting. “So we have his, hers, and ours. We were both married before. He was divorced and I was widowed.”

“You, too?”

“My husband was killed by a mugger two years ago.”

“Rough.” He twirled the pepper shaker again. “You’re probably up to here with murder. So am I. That must be hard on your kid, too. She’d be old enough to remember. Does she know what happened?”

“Yes, but not all the details. Of course she asked what happened to him, and I had to tell her.”

“How old was she then? About seven, right?” His computerlike mind amazed her. How could he remember Gail so well? “That’s just the age when they’re beginning to understand that death is forever.”

“Do you have children?”

“No,” he said. “Didn’t have time. We were only married a few months.”

“And?” she asked softly.

He shrugged. “Cancer.”

“She must have been very young.”

“Just twenty.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, it was. But no worse than what’s going on now.

And maybe even a little easier to accept. At least it’s an act of God, even if you can’t help wondering why God would do a thing like that.”

He really must have wondered, she thought. He must have been very bitter, never to have married again.

“So it’s over and done with,” he said as their pizza arrived, “for you and me both. You were lucky to find another good man.”

She was silent, and discovered she was not particularly hungry as she delicately nibbled on a crust.

“What do you think of that civilian patrol idea?” she asked, scooping up a dripping rope of mozzarella cheese. “Is it a good thing, or do they just get in the way?”

“I don’t know, in a place like this. In a basically rural situation, it’s hard for the police to cover the whole area. You don’t know when or where he’s going to strike. The best part about it, though, is citizen involvement. You’ve got them watching, you’ve got them alert, the girls will be more careful, we hope, and we might even come up with a lead this way. It could act as some kind of deterrent, too.”

“Did you find where the murders took place?” she asked. “Carl, my husband, said that’s what you were looking for.”

“The first two. We had the place under surveillance, and then the third one happened.”

“In a different place?”

“Yup.”

“Where—You aren’t going to tell me, are you? Was it near there? In the woods? It can’t have been Mr. Lattimer. You’d have arrested him by now.”

His face was unreadable as he reached for another slice of pizza.

“You don’t arrest somebody,” he said, “just because a murder took place on his property.” “It did?”

“We found pieces of clothing, and we found a place where the body might have been kept before it was put out there in the woods.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Doesn’t matter now. We thought we could get him to come back there, but somehow he must have known. That’s why we kept it from the press.”

“Where is the place?”

“You know the Lattimer property? He’s got a lot of little outbuildings. There’s a sort of stone shed where the brook comes up. It’s built around the spring, very cool inside. They must have used it for refrigeration.”

They
. The Lattimers. For one exultant moment she thought they had found the killer. But they couldn’t have. Another murder had happened under their noses.

“Are you watching anybody in particular?” she asked.

“Anybody and everybody. Now I told you this as a friend,” he added, “because, like I say, it doesn’t matter anymore about the killer, he knew we’d stumbled on the place. But I’d appreciate not having the general public all over.”

“I won’t say a word.” She was still amazed that he had mentioned it to her at all.

“Mr. D’Amico—”

“Frank,” he said. “If we’re eating together, we should skip the formalities. Unless you don’t want to.”

“You’re right. I’m Joyce.”

“I have a cousin named Joyce.”

“Really?”

“No, come to think of it, it’s Joy. I’ve got about fifty cousins. Hard to keep track.”

“Frank—what sort of person do you think it is?”

He set down his coffee cup. “You heard what the shrink said. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I want to know what you think. I want to know how there can be a person like that, with the people around him,

his family, if he has one, the people who see him every day, not realizing it. Wouldn’t there be something about him? Wouldn’t he—Do you think they’re protecting him, maybe? His family? And what about the blood? Wouldn’t he get blood on himself sometimes?”

Frank picked up the coffee cup again, drank from it, stared at it for a moment, then set it down.

“There could be a lot of things,” he said. “There are a lot of people walking around who are kind of flaky. Would you necessarily think they’re homicidal? Especially if it’s someone you know well, you probably wouldn’t think so. There was a woman who worked right next to Son of Sam at the post office, talked to him every day, even talked about the murders, and never guessed he was the guy.”

She nodded. He took another slice of pizza, chewed a bite and swallowed it.

“Then a lot of times,” he went on, “these people disassociate themselves. They commit a homicide, and afterward they honestly have this feeling that it was somebody else that did it. There was a guy in Chicago back in the forties. He blamed it all on a person named George. He really believed George existed, even had letters from him, but in fact, George was only a part of himself.”

“How weird.”

“Sometimes they try that sort of thing to cop an insanity plea, but usually these random killers are bananas to begin with, or they wouldn’t be doing what they do. Right?”

“Do you think he wrote that letter to the newspaper?”

“I think so. I think it was probably genuine. I think he was trying to copy Jack the Ripper. He wrote letters, you know.”

“It sounded like somebody who’s not too well educated.”

“Joyce, anybody who’s educated can write like someone who’s not. It’s the other way around they can’t do it.”

“Then you think he—he disguised himself—that way?”

“That’s what I think. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. It just bothers me. I don’t know why.”

“You think an educated person wouldn’t commit that sort of murder?”

“No, I don’t mean that. Educated people can be crazy, too. It’s just—I don’t know.”

She picked up a piece of mushroom that had been left on the plate. It was cold. She dropped it.

“What about the blood?” she asked. “How can he do it without getting blood on himself, and why doesn’t somebody see it?”

“Who knows? But look, he kills by strangulation, right? After the body’s dead, there’s no pulse, so the blood doesn’t spurt like it does from a living artery. Hey, am I making you sick?”

She sighed. “No, I just wasn’t all that hungry to begin with.” She saw the newspaper pictures in a row, the three smiling faces, then saw them contort as their necks were squeezed, saw the corpses sliced open.

“Look, Joyce, I’m sorry.” Unconsciously, it seemed, his hand reached out and closed over hers. “You probably think I get used to these things. I never do. It’s always a human being. But this is my daily work. I get so I can talk about it, but it’s not very nice at the dinner table, is it? And I sort of forgot you weren’t a colleague.”

“I suppose that’s a tribute.” She smiled weakly.

“Right, it is. But after what you went through with your first husband killed, I sure wish you didn’t have to have this now.”

He took his hand away from hers, and as much as a solid man like D’Amico could, seemed flustered to have found it there.

He demolished the last of the pizza, then drove her home, insisting it was not out of the way at all.

“Thanks for coming with me,” he said as she left the car. “I enjoyed your company.” In the dark, she thought his eyes searched her face.

“I enjoyed it, too,” she said. “And I hope you get that break real soon.”

She turned to go into the house, and saw Carl in the darkened kitchen doorway.

“Who was that?” Carl asked. “That wasn’t the Farands’ car.”

“Oh … no… I left early. It got so hot in there I couldn’t breathe, and the Farands were staying forever. Somebody else gave me a ride.”

“Who?”

“Oh—a policeman.”

Carl’s mouth opened to ask another question, but no sound came out. What he wanted was an explanation, she was sure. Why couldn’t he ask?

“He was coming up here anyway,” she said, and brilliantly added, “I guess they’re keeping an eye on Mr. Lattimer. And naturally they’re terrified when they see a woman going around by herself. They don’t want any more bodies.”

As she spoke, her mind was far away, for it had suddenly occurred to her that Mr. Lattimer could not possibly be the killer. None of the murdered girls had lived around there, none would have had any reason to be there, especially Toni Lemich, coming home from work on the train and living not far from the station.

The killer would have had to have a car.

The police, of course, already knew that, and therefore all their talk about forcing girls into a car at gunpoint.

She slipped off her shoes and started toward the stairs, giving wide berth to the naked, black picture window, which seemed to be an eye staring in from outside.

Carl followed her. “So you just got into a car with a strange man—”

“He’s hardly a strange man,” she replied. “You met him

yourself, he’s the chief of police. He was only doing his job of protecting the women in this town. Otherwise you might have a murdered wife by now.”

She did not like this jealousy. She did not like anything about him at the moment that seemed exaggerated or abnormal.

She even began to wonder if she still loved him. But her mind balked at that question. She was not ready to face it—or anything else.

16

They went swimming again the next Wednesday afternoon. When they came home, Mary Ellen took a shower to wash off the lake water. They could hear her singing to herself. Gail was playing on the floor of the master bedroom, near Adam’s crib, setting up a paper doll family. “Mommy, the telephone’s ringing.”

Joyce had not heard it. She slid onto her bed to pick it up from the night table. “That you, Joyce?”

It was what her mother always said. Joyce’s heart gave an anxious bump. “Mom! Where are you calling from?”

“Home.” A long distance call in the middle of the day. “Honey, Dad’s gone to the hospital. It’s his kidneys again. He just collapsed this morning and they had to operate.” “Is it bad?”

“Can’t tell yet. That’s why I’m calling. They had to do an emergency operation. … Hello?”

Joyce was busy making plans. Could she take the children with her? Was Adam old enough to travel? And what would she do with Mary Ellen?

“I’m coming,” she said. “I—guess I’ll fly.” It was expensive, but she could not see Adam on a train for all those hours. “Maybe tomorrow, if I can get reservations. Is that okay?”

As far as her mother knew, it would be. Dad had at least pulled through the operation. Her brother Pat would meet her at the airport.

She hung up the phone, feeling sad and empty. It wasn’t time yet for this kind of thing. Her parents, although she rarely saw them, were fixtures in her life. She expected them to live forever.

She called the airline, sure that they would be unable to give her reservations, but it was the middle of the week and they had seats.

At five-thirty she began calling Barbara. She knew Barbara worked in the office of a department store not far from her home. She was unclear whether department store offices kept office hours or department store hours. In any case, Barbara was not yet home.

She tried again every fifteen minutes, and finally asked Mary Ellen when her mother usually got home from work.

“About a quarter to six,” Mary Ellen answered dreamily, “but I don’t think she’s there right now.”

“I know she’s not there. I—”

“I mean I think she’s away on vacation. She was going away for a while.”

“Alone? She’d take a vacation alone?” Meaning without Mary Ellen.

“She’s not alone.”

“Oh.”

Mary Ellen did not know where she had gone. Nantucket, or Atlantic City. She did not even seem to know her mother’s tastes. Joyce asked, “Is there anybody near where you live—?”

Mary Ellen shook her head. “Everybody’s away. All my friends.”

“And you couldn’t stay here, you’d be alone all day.”

A violent shake of the head. “I don’t want to stay with Daddy. Please, Joyce?”

Joyce hadn’t time to think about it now, but the vehemence disturbed her. She suggested Olivia. Mary Ellen rejected that, too. “She’ll make me come back to Daddy. He’ll say he wants me, and she does everything he wants. Please, Joyce, couldn’t I go with you? I’ll help. I’ll take care of Adam for you.”

Joyce was touched. The child sounded desperate. But, really, it was all they needed, in a house crowded with her brothers and sisters and their families, a house where death hovered. If Mary Ellen were really a part of her new family, it would have been different, but she was only a visitor who could not share their emotions about Dad.