I felt like the sky was gone from above me. I felt like everything beautiful in the world had been stabbed to death and thrown in the ocean, weighed down with concrete blocks or whatever it might be.
At one thirty I left the theater and walked to Paris’s condo. It wasn’t that close; it took me a while. And the whole time I was seeing these awful images. Seeing her screaming for help as a knife entered her stomach. That kind of thing.
“Just what she deserves,” said the voice. “******* whore.”
“Oh shut up,” I said.
Amazingly, the voice did shut up.
I turned the corner onto Paris’s street and what I saw there made my heart clench like an oyster closing. A cop car, pulled up at an angle to the curb, like it had been parked quickly, carelessly. I started running, then. I entered the building and took the stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator.
I got to the front door out of breath. Julie opened it before I even knocked; she must have heard my footsteps in the hall. She was wearing a pink sweater and a short skirt, polka-dotted, a headband in her hair—like she was going to a dance in 1959. But she had been crying; her eyes were red rimmed.
“Cass,” she said, and her voice was a hand desperately reaching for the side of a boat, to pull itself out of dark sucking water.
“Julie, what—”
But she launched herself forward and put her arms around me. I hugged her tight. “Julie, is she … is she …”
“We don’t know.”
She pulled back, straightened her hair. I looked past her and saw the young agent from after I found the foot.
“Horowitz,” I said.
“Cassandra. You knew Ms. French?”
My mind was blank for a second. “Oh. Paris. Yes. I knew her.”
Wait.
“You said knew.”
Horowitz looked down. “Slip of the tongue. Agent’s habit. At the moment she’s just missing.”
“What happened?” I asked.
It was Julie who answered. “She had a … a bachelor party last night. Or maybe it was a birthday party, I can’t remember. I drove her. I always drive her, if she goes out to an … engagement. For safety, you know?” She started crying; wiped her eyes brusquely with the sleeve of her sweater. “When she started … I didn’t want her to get into it. But she was Paris, you know? She always got her way. In the end, I said she could only do it if I drove her to every … appointment. I said it was the minimum safety requirement. But I … I …”
She broke down in tears.
“Go on,” said Agent Horowitz gently, after a pause. “You drove her?”
“Yeah. It was a house up by the shore. On the north side of town, in Bayview, before you get to the Cape—an okay area, not a great one. A row of clapboards. There’s an old rotten pier behind? Just a small one. I parked and she went in. Then … then I think I must have fallen asleep. But not for long. I woke up because I heard an engine—a car turned in front of me, onto the road, swept me with its headlights. Then a few minutes after that Paris called me. She was … she sounded …”
I took her hand and squeezed. “Go on.”
“She sounded terrified, Cass. Scared for her life, you know? But it was hard to hear what she was saying—the line was really bad. Like, a kind of shhhhhh sound like the ocean, you know? She screamed for help, told me to come quick. I said I was calling the police. And then that was the weird part.”
“Weird part?”
But Julie had her eyes closed and was choking up. She shook her head and walked quickly to the kitchen, to get some tissues, I guessed.
I looked over at Horowitz.
“Evidently Ms. French told her roommate not to call the police. Was very insistent about it. She—”
“She said it over and over,” said Julie, appearing at the kitchen door. “ ‘No, Julie! Not the cops! Don’t call them!’ And then the line suddenly went quiet. Then there was this heavy metal sound and then a thunk and then the line went dead.” Her impression of Paris was eerie; it was like Paris was in the room. But of course she wasn’t.
I shivered.
“Why do you think she said not to call the police?” said Agent Horowitz.
“I don’t know! Because … because of what she was doing?”
Agent Horowitz spread his hands. “Possible,” he said. “But stripping? I mean, it’s not exactly illegal.” His face looked like it had acquired a couple of new lines since I’d first met him. Around his eyes, his mouth. Stress?
“No, but she didn’t want her dad to find out,” said Julie.
I wondered if that was true. Her Instagram was pretty public. But anyway it didn’t seem logical to me.
“What,” I said, “she’s afraid for her life and at the same time she’s worried her dad’s going to find out she’s stripping?” I said. “Really?”
“I admit it seems implausible,” said Horowitz.
“So then why would she say not to call the cops?”
“I have no idea. That is what we are going to have to try to establish.”
“But you think she’s gone,” I said. “You think it’s the Houdini Killer. Of course you do—you’re FBI or whatever you are.”
Julie was looking from me to him, from him to me, like a metronome. “You’re not police?”