“What can I tell you? The guy was a real prick…and now he’s dead. Maybe he had it coming,” he said.
I stared at Grimes for a split second, roughly the same amount of time it takes for a few synapses to fire. Eureka.
“Wait—where the hell are you going?” he asked.
Before he could light another cigarette I’d already grabbed my helmet, strapping it on.
“Tell Elizabeth I had to go home,” I said.
I should’ve been dead tired as I rode off into the sunrise. Instead I was wide awake, stoked.
A killer idea will do that to you.
Chapter 56
ELIZABETH MARCHED straight past me when I opened the door, never mind that it was her first time in my apartment. She had her case file in one hand, a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts in the other, and an immediate question for me. Actually, two questions.
“Glazed chocolate or vanilla frosted?” she asked first, holding up the bag.
“Glazed chocolate,” I said. A no-brainer.
She handed me my doughnut and hit me with the second question, her real one. “Why’d you take off on me last night?” she asked.
Last night was only five hours earlier, but who was counting?
At least she looked as if she’d gotten a few hours of sleep. I looked exactly like the number of hours I’d gotten. Zero.
“I was in a hurry to make sure,” I said.
“Make sure of what?”
“Assholes.”
“Excuse me?”
“All the victims,” I said. “They’re all assholes.”
Elizabeth took a bite of her vanilla frosted. “So are half the people in this city,” she reminded me.
“I know, but this isn’t a coincidence.”
“Even if it isn’t, what are you suggesting? The Dealer personally knows all his victims?”
“It was a possibility at first,” I said. “Now it’s highly unlikely.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Step into my office,” I said.
I led her across the living room toward the extra bedroom that Tracy and I had converted into an office. We shared it, complete with two desks.
“Nice place,” she said, looking around as we walked. “Where’s your better half?”
“It’s weird for you to say ‘husband,’ isn’t it?”
“Hold on a minute…you’re gay?”
“Very funny,” I said. “Tracy’s at the gym.”
Simultaneously we glanced down at our half-eaten doughnuts. The gym? All we could do was chuckle.
“How’s he handling all this, by the way? I mean, you told him, right?”
“Not at first,” I said. “I think that’s why he was a little mad. Then he immediately called our life insurance company and tripled the policy on me.”
“Smart guy,” she said. “Seriously, is he okay with your helping with the investigation?”
“He understands, given that my book’s involved, but we’re talking about a serial killer, so obviously he’s a little concerned for me. Maybe even very concerned.”
We reached the office, Elizabeth stopping dead in her tracks. Her jaw dropped. “That makes two of us,” she said.
Chapter 57
FUELED BY a couple of twenty-ounce Red Bulls and an overzealousness that academics politely call intellectual curiosity, I had basically turned the office into one big bulletin board, every inch of all four walls covered with everything I could possibly find online about all the victims. This was the drill-down stuff, the things that wouldn’t necessarily show up in their case files, all of which I’d read multiple times without seeing any connection. I’d been googling for hours on end, nonstop, and the result was one big giant collage of papers, each one taped to any flat surface there was, windows included. The Internet and a printer can be a dangerous thing.
“Okay, so maybe I got a little carried away,” I said.
Elizabeth shot me her deadpan look. “No—Carrie on Homeland got a little carried away,” she said. “This is…”
Her voice trailed off. She didn’t quite know what this is.
“Thorough?” I offered.
That was one word for it. But there was a method to my madness, and it went by a different word.
“Wait: this is your Bayesian thing, isn’t it?” asked Elizabeth.
I overlooked the way she pronounced Bayesian, as if it were something you needed to get vaccinated against. The point was she’d clearly done some googling herself. Bayesian inference: a modeling approach that updates the probability of an event or a hypothesis based on ongoing evidence and observations.
“Very impressive,” I said.
“Yeah. Just don’t quiz me on it.”
What I gave her instead was more of a review session of what I had so far, walking her around the room as we finished our doughnuts.
It was a lot to chew on.
All the victims had a raised profile; they were “known” to a certain extent. Colton Lange was the only household name, but Jared Louden was certainly famous in the world of finance. As for the kid, Bryce VonMiller, he had more boldface mentions on Page Six in the Post than Lange and Louden combined. That’s what being the bad-boy son of a renowned restaurateur and dating a constant stream of models and budding actresses will get you.
Even those two of hearts—cheating hearts, as they were—had some notoriety. Both were star editors at Knopf, the publishing house, working with some of the most highbrow authors.
“They acted like it, too,” I said. “In every article and profile written about them they came across as arrogant, stuck-up snobs. That’s when I was sure about there being a connection between all the victims.”
“But you’re not saying—”
“No. This isn’t vigilante justice against jerks. Here’s what I am saying. We start with two theories. The first is that the Dealer is killing indiscriminately. The second is that he’s choosing his victims specifically and with good reason, at least in his own mind. Then we update the probability of both theories with everything we’ve learned since that package arrived on Grimes’s desk—names, sexes, ages of the victims, locations of the murders, occupations…all the things you’d typically see in a police report.”
“In other words, everything about the victims on the surface makes the killings look random,” she said. “Except for the ways in which he kills them, of course. Each one had to be planned well in advance.”
“Right. Only he still wants us to think the victims are chosen at random,” I said. “So what does he do?”
“The cards,” said Elizabeth. “He uses them as if they’re dictating the action, leading the way on who he decides to kill. Almost like it’s the hand he’s been dealt.”
“And the more creative he gets—the nine of diamonds, for instance—the less it looks as if there’s any real motive tying it all together.”
“Okay, so what’s the motive?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said. “But he hasn’t killed a nun or a child or someone who’s been named teacher of the year. That’s not by accident.”
“Maybe not. It doesn’t get us any closer to catching him, though, does it?”
“Actually, it does,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
“I don’t follow,” said Elizabeth.