She closed the door loudly behind her.
Tatum put down the folder and looked at the papers scattered on the table. They were handwritten; some looked aged, some fresh. He leaned forward to get one of them. Zoe nearly leaped at the pages, slapping her hand down onto them.
“That’s private,” she said.
“Is it?” Tatum asked calmly. He suspected he knew what these were. “I saw you writing down notes when you were doing the profile for the Chicago killer. That page over there looks suspiciously like those notes.”
“I composed the profile into a report,” she said sharply.
“You did.” He nodded. “But this is the raw material.”
“So?”
“I want to see it,” he said.
“No.”
He sighed. “Zoe, we were tracking this guy together. The only reason everything went to shit is that you didn’t tell me everything.”
Her mouth tightened into a line so thin it was nearly two dimensional.
“Listen,” he said, his voice softening. “I admit I didn’t really have a lot of faith in your . . . profession. But watching you work this past week opened my eyes. You’re the real thing. You can read a crime scene in a way I would never be able to.”
Her face softened, her eyes widening.
“But even you can make mistakes,” he said. “Can you please share your notes with me? We can talk them over. I promise you I won’t tell anyone about these notes, okay?”
She hesitated for a moment, then took her hand off the pages. “This is the Chicago serial killer.” She pointed at three pages. “And those”—she pointed at the rest of the pages, some of them yellowed or crumpled—“are the notes for the profile I wrote for Rod Glover. Over the years.”
He thumbed through the old pages until he reached the one that seemed most ancient. It was written on a page ripped from a spiral notebook. Her handwriting was more circular on that page, and there were doodles of cats on the bottom.
He scanned it. Some sentences were underlined several times, like Lied about fire and about meeting Sarah Michelle Gellar. She had circled the words Durant Pond several times. And one of the bottom lines was Gray Ties!!!!!
“That’s what I wrote when I was fourteen,” Zoe said. She looked uncomfortable, like a person whose secret poems were being read by someone else for the first time. “I keep it mostly . . . for sentimental value.”
“Remembering the good ole innocent days when you chased serial killers?”
“This was a mistake. Give that back—”
“Sorry,” he said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. I’m sorry.”
She was letting him in, allowing him to read what was tantamount to a journal. This was no time for idiotic jokes. He began reading the other pages, confusion sinking in.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “You wrote these for Rod Glover. Some are more than ten years old. But I see you mentioning envelopes with ties, so how is that—”
She stood up abruptly and walked off. “Wait here,” she said, not looking back. He heard her walking into another room and then something like a drawer being opened. She returned, holding a stack of brown envelopes. She dropped them on the table. Two slid onto the floor, and he picked them up. He opened one of them and looked inside.
A gray tie.
He checked two more. All had gray ties in them. Some of the envelopes seemed very old; some were newer. They had all been sent by mail, one to Maynard, several to Harvard, then to two different addresses in Boston. The top one, one of the two that had fallen to the floor, was addressed to the Dale Forest Apartments. All had Zoe’s name on them.
“There are eleven envelopes here,” Tatum said, dumbfounded.
“He sent fourteen,” she said, her voice firm, challenging. “I gave the first one to the cops at Maynard. They did nothing with it. When I started working for the FBI, I gave one to the agent in charge. She nearly stopped working with me because she thought I was obsessed with some teenage memory. I burned the third one. Then I began collecting them. I tried several times to check them for fingerprints and DNA. There was nothing.”
“And every envelope has a gray tie?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said sharply. Then she added quietly, “Some had drawings as well. Of me, being violated. Glover is a pretty decent artist. I, uh . . . threw them away.”
Tatum struggled with the sudden impulse to hug her again.
“You can’t tell Mancuso about this,” she said. Her voice was cold, toneless, but there was desperation underneath. “I stopped reporting them because no one took me seriously.”
He knew Zoe well enough to realize there was nothing she hated more than people not taking her seriously.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “So . . . Rod Glover seems to be obsessed with you. Why?”
“The very short version is that I suspected him, broke into his house, found the stash of mementos he had, and reported him to the police,” Zoe said.
“I would be happy to hear the long version in a few minutes, but if that’s the case, why didn’t they arrest him?”
“They didn’t believe me,” she said, her mouth twisting in anger. “They thought I was just hysterical about his porn stash. And they had a suspect. And Glover had a tight alibi for the last murder.”
“How tight?”
“Very. He was part of the search party that went looking for the third victim at the exact time she had been killed. My dad saw him there several times. Other people as well. I talked to several of them.”
“And how do you explain it?”
“I don’t know.” Zoe shrugged helplessly. “Maybe there was another murderer. Maybe he sneaked away from the search party, killed her, and came back. If the police had looked into it, they would have figured it out.”
“All right,” Tatum said. “Now I want the full story, not the one-line abstract. How do you know Rod Glover, and what exactly happened in Chicago?”
She told him everything, and he listened in disbelief as she described how, as a fourteen-year-old girl, she had gotten herself involved with this serial killer. It was almost surreal . . . yet it made sense with this woman. She outlined what had happened just before the attack in Chicago. He nodded.
“Okay,” Tatum said. “One more question: Why do you think Rod Glover is the person who killed and embalmed those women in Chicago?”
“What?” She looked at him in shock.
“I mean, I get the superficial reasons. He left those ties at the body-dumping locations. He followed you. He tried to rape and kill you. But there’s nothing to connect the embalming to Rod Glover. The signatures in the last killings are very different—”
“Serial killers change their signature all the time.”
“Come on! Sure, they change it a bit, try new things, but nothing so radical.”
“All the killings had something to do with water—”
“No, they didn’t,” Tatum said. “Glover’s victims were in the water. The Chicago killer posed the victims near water. And Veronika Murray, the earliest victim of the embalming serial killer, wasn’t close to water when they found her.”
“Maybe I was wrong about her. She hadn’t been embalmed.”
“You weren’t wrong. This killer doesn’t care about water. He picked those locations because they were abandoned at night and because they fit the poses he gave the bodies.”
“I’m right,” she said. “Rod Glover is the killer of all these women.”
“Look at your initial profile.” Tatum tapped the paper violently with his finger. “Remember this? Methodic? Obsession for control? Does this really fit your Maynard serial killer, who simply grabbed women who were wandering around in a remote location, raped them brutally, killed them, and left them in the same location?”