“Great,” I say with a sigh. Circling the table once, I glance at each stack in turn and then decide to start at the beginning: Valerie Heagle. Taking a seat, I pull her file close. “Anything else we should know before we start?”
Diane nods. “Valerie Heagle,” she says, her eyes indicating the file. “She’s the odd one out. The age, height, weight, hair, and most of the MO match, but there’s one distinct difference.”
“What’s that?”
“She was a prostitute. Not the street-walking type, either. She advertised her services through various online forums—Craigslist, Backpage, the usual—and then met her clients at local motels.”
I close the folder. “That … that doesn’t make sense. Serials who target prostitutes generally stick to prostitutes; look at Gary Ridgway, Joel Rifkin, Lorenzo Gilyard, Jack the Ripper.” Turning to Jimmy, I say, “That doesn’t make sense, right?”
He’s got a curious look on his face, as if he’s puzzling it out. “At first glance, no, it doesn’t make sense. It’s a complete change of victimology.” He starts pacing slowly up and down the table, his eyes never leaving the stacks. At last he stops and turns to Diane. “Valerie was the first, you’re sure of that?”
“That’s what it looks like, at least in this part of the country. I haven’t extended the search beyond northern California, southern Oregon, and western Nevada.”
He paces to the end of the table, turns, looks at me, shrugs his shoulders. “She was practice.”
“Practice?”
He nods. “I think Diane’s right. This guy’s been locked up somewhere, probably for a while. Valerie was an easy target, someone to cut his teeth on, so to speak.”
“Bad choice of words,” Diane scolds.
“How so?”
“You’ll see when you start going through the files.”
“What makes you so sure she’s one of our victims?” I ask.
Diane walks over to the folder and flips it open in front of me. Leafing through the pages, she stops on an eight-by-ten glossy of Valerie’s car and points to the rear window.
“Crap.” I just stare at the image.
Instead of stones in the high desert scrub, as was the case at Lake Washoe, or clothes nailed to a tree, the pattern is drawn into the dirt and grime on the back window. Whether Redding PD intended to document the image or just got lucky while photographing Valerie’s car, who could say? It really didn’t matter.
“That’s what he drew on the back of Alison’s car, too,” I say. “We just couldn’t see it after he pressed his face all over it.”
Jimmy moves around the table to take a look and the muscles around his mouth visibly tighten when he sees it. After a moment, he says what I’ve already thought.
“They’ll call him the Sad Face Killer. Just watch.”
*
At precisely four o’clock, Diane corners me in my office. I know exactly what this is about; Diane was kind enough to inform me an hour after Heather left. Since there are no windows to dive out of, I just sit behind my desk and smile politely.
“Don’t forget you have a date at six,” she says sternly.
“I forgot to go.”
“What do you mean, you forgot to go? It’s not till six.”
“I’m planning ahead.”
She gives me a scowl and then turns her disapproving eyes to my clothes, looking at them as if they just came off some syphilis-ridden leper. She doesn’t need words; her downturned mouth and upturned eyebrows say it all.
Twenty minutes later I’m at Big Perch changing into “something more appropriate,” which means another excursion into Jens’s closet.
A date with Heather at the Hearthfire Grill.
I could kill Diane.
What makes this worse is that she’s recruited Jimmy to make sure I actually show up. They’re like a matchmaking Bonnie and Clyde, using a restaurant in place of a tommy gun as they march me off to my doom … though perhaps doom is too strong a word.…
“Technically, this is kidnapping,” I tell Jimmy as he backs out of my driveway and throws the black FBI-issued Ford Excursion into drive.
“You don’t have a drop of Viking blood in you, do you?” he shoots back.
“I’m Norwegian; of course I have Viking blood.”
“Your mother is Norwegian. I think that bloodline skipped over you somehow and just left the Scottish. Frankly, I’m disappointed.”
“Because I don’t want to have dinner with Heather Jennings I suddenly lack the Viking pedigree?”
“Yes!” Jimmy roars, his voice rolling off in laughter. “She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s got legs up to here—” He smacks me with the back of his hand and I look over as he puts his hand at chest level and repeats, “Up to here.” He wags his index finger at me, saying, “She’s smoking hot in every way and you’re like a third-grader at recess.” He pauses. “You do like girls, don’t you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m just saying,” he purrs, shrugging his shoulders.
I look at him hard. “Don’t you remember what she wrote about me?”
“Something about gonorrhea…” he begins, laughing even louder as I throw my hands up in exasperation. “Come on, Steps. It wasn’t that bad; some of it was actually pretty flattering. You’re the only one who was upset with it.”
“She revealed details that could have compromised us … that could have compromised several of the cases.”
“You’re just upset because she came a little too close to the truth.”
There it is.
I should have guessed that Jimmy would figure it out. He knows as well as I that Heather has this uncanny way of separating fact from fiction, even the fiction we build up around ourselves, say, to hide some secret ability we don’t want anyone to know about.
I was mad about the article, that part is true.
She wrote about things she shouldn’t have, things she promised not to. It was that dishonesty, that betrayal of trust that hurt the most; it wasn’t like her. Or maybe I just didn’t know her as well as I’d thought. In the end, though, the article was just an excuse; a means to an end. The real reason I pushed her away was raw fear. Fear of what she’d learn.
Heather Jennings.
I loved her.