“Oh, God, a corkscrew?” I say, as if there were a nice way of disemboweling someone.
I look at the remainder of the sheet. “So then, in 2010, we have Sally Pfiester. And then we move up to 2011, to Melanie and Zach, Bonnie Stamos, and my uncle. That’s interesting.”
“Why’s that interesting?”
I look at Ricketts, who is watching me carefully. She’s a pup, looking to learn a thing or two, so I explain my thoughts. “We don’t know if this is the same offender,” I say. “But if it is, look at the timing. He kills in 2007. Then, in 2008, he kills again. Then he doesn’t kill again until 2010, with Sally Pfiester.”
“So—what does that mean? He didn’t do anything in 2009.”
“Well, he did do something in 2009,” I correct. “He planted Dede Paris’s finger for us to find. Clearly, he’d preserved that finger, or it would have been badly decomposed. And just in case we had trouble identifying it, he made sure her high school class ring was on it. He might as well have posted a sign saying, ‘Look, everyone, this is Dede’s finger!’”
“He wanted us to know,” she says. “Why?” Ricketts sits quietly, her eyes moving around the room, her mental machinery fully in gear.
“He was struggling,” I say. “He didn’t want to kill anybody else. But you know what else was bothering him?”
“What?”
“He wasn’t getting any attention,” I say.
She draws back. “Attention? You think he wants to get caught?”
“Oh, no. This guy does not want to get caught. Quite the opposite—this guy gets off on the thrill of getting away with it. Of doing something so terrible and walking away scot-free. I’m sure the stories about Annie and Dede were all over the South Shore papers in 2007. Two Yale undergrads gone missing? It was probably huge news on the South Shore. And the murder of the prostitute in 2008? Well, not as big, but still a gruesome murder, right? So once again, he’s getting attention, he’s reminded of how powerful he is. Big, newsworthy crimes, crimes that he committed, and he’s reading about them in his bathrobe with a cup of coffee.”
“But his conscience was bothering him,” she says.
“Right.” I point to her. “So in 2009, he’s struggling. He doesn’t want to kill again. But he needs the adulation, the feeling of power. So what does he do?”
“He reminds everyone of what he did in 2007.”
“Exactly. He plants Dede’s finger with the class ring, and voilà! There were probably a ton of stories, all over again, this time assuming the Yale students are dead, how tragic, how horrible, how mystified the police are—”
“And how powerful he is.”
“How powerful and impressive he is.” I sweep a hand. “He gets the thrill of it without the bloodshed or the risk.”
“That’s fascinating,” she says, leaning her head on one hand. “How your mind works.”
I wave it off. “I could be all wrong. Might not even be the same person.”
Her eyebrow rises slightly. “Well, it makes sense to me. Especially when you see what he did to Sally Pfiester in 2010.”
BOOK IV
THE HAMPTONS, 2010
51
HE IS COLD, though the sun beats down on him at this beach café, the temperature nearing ninety degrees.
He has to piss, though he just went twenty minutes ago.
His stomach churns like rusty grinding gears, though he’s just eaten.
He sees her through his sunglasses, basking in the white-bright sunlight, a bronzed, lithe body, the backpack over both shoulders, a white tank top and denim shorts, sunglasses perched atop her white-blond hair, as she takes a photo of herself on her smartphone with the Atlantic Ocean in the background.
He watched her. Watched her as she ate at this very café—vegetables and hummus, a glass of Chardonnay—and texted on her smartphone, and told the waitress what she’s doing this summer, and got a recommendation for a good beach to “crash on” tonight. She and the server even talked music briefly—she likes the modern pop stuff but prefers classical, cello music mostly, of course Yo-Yo Ma and du Pré but also a newer crop, like Alisa Weilerstein, whoever that is.
He likes the name Alisa. It would be cool to have a girlfriend named Alisa.
He wrote down everything she said. The beach where she will sleep, her musical preferences. And this, too: Sally. She told the waitress her name was Sally.
Not quite as exciting a name as Alisa.
He reaches for the check the waitress has left and notices the tremble in his hand. His fingernails chewed down to the point of bloodiness. He shouldn’t chew his nails. He knows that. His mother would say it makes him look “unrefined.”
But he’s got lots of … refinement. Is that a word? He’ll look it up later.
He feels the pressure building in his bladder, a dam on the verge of bursting.