Head to Head (20 page)

Black insisted that we take his Cobalt Cruiser down to Harve’s. Fine with me. It’d be faster. I’d sent Harve an e-mail while Black was pulling himself together, telling him I’d be over later, most likely with Nicholas Black in tow. I also explained about Buckeye’s discovery so we wouldn’t have to go into it in front of Black. He’d suffered enough, and more problematic, he was angry enough. Surprisingly, I no longer looked forward to slamming a steel door shut on him.

Tied up at my shabby little dock, in all its glory, bobbed one of Cedar Bend’s Cobalt 360s, the twin of the one sported about by the hunky Tyler. Designed for the whims of pampered guests, it was all long, clean lines, with the same global positioning system/radar unit, not to mention the main cabin outfitted with a table and berth, refrigerator/freezer, stove, and microwave, and the head compartment with a shower. Just in case you wanted to whip up a home-cooked meal or doll yourself up while catching a bass, I guess. Dottie would go ape over this rig.

Black was quiet and introspective, but man, who wouldn’t be? All the arrogance and self-confidence had been stripped from him. I hadn’t seen him act vulnerable before, and I liked him better for it. More importantly, I was 99 percent sure he wasn’t a murderer. I found myself wanting to eliminate him completely as a suspect. He wasn’t all bad, and there was still that attraction problem, but I was throwing cold water on that spark, right here, right now. It was that strange chemistry between certain men and women that makes your heart pound when they walk into the room and your fingertips tingle when you touch them. Not that I planned to touch him, unless I had to frisk him again. No, ma’am, no tingling was going to happen, not while I was investigating this case.

“There’s Harve’s place. We’ll tie up at the end of the dock.”

Black maneuvered the boat in opposite Harve’s ancient bass boat with the expertise of a man who’d had lots of practice on the water. I glanced up at the house and waved to Harve, who was watching us from his desk in the sunroom. I jumped out and secured Black’s boat to the dock pilings. Black followed, glancing at Harve’s old boat, which looked pretty darn pitiful beside the Cobalt. The Cinderella story, before and after. Yep, Harve’s boat needed a fairy godmother to show up toting some kind of powerful wand.

Black said, “Your friend doesn’t still take that thing out on the lake, does he?”

My protective gene began to spin and vibrate. “You’re a little uppity when it comes to boats, you know that, Black? It floats. You can catch fish out of it. But to answer your question, Harve’s handicapped. He can’t go out anymore, so his nurse uses it. Dottie loves to fish more than anything.”

“Dottie of the knock-you-out-like-a-light hot toddy?”

I nodded. “She’s a lady of many talents. Nurse and companion, and angel as far as I’m concerned. She’s off on the weekends, or you’d get to meet her. Actually, you did meet her once, at a book signing.”

“Is that right?” He looked at the wheelchair ramp leading up to the back door. “How did your friend become disabled?” Black stepped back down in the boat and retrieved his dark glasses and a black Windbreaker. He already had the file folder in one hand.

Well, there was a question I didn’t want to answer. “He was a cop. Got hit in the line of duty.”

“So he’s a hero.”

“Yes.”
More than you know
, I thought, as we walked up the sidewalk, with me leading the way. I could tell him how it happened, I guess, but that would unnecessarily open doors into dreaded nightmares, and I wasn’t willing to do that. Tonight had been one heavy scene. We didn’t need another one.

“Hey, I’m back here!” Harve was still in the sunroom, and he rolled his chair into the doorway, with his usual welcoming grin. He was always glad to have company when Dottie took off on her minivacations. But it was good for her to get away. Even angels needed occasional R & R.

“How you doing, Harve?” I leaned down and hugged the guy. He smelled of Old Spice and Domino’s pizza. He wasn’t as obsessive as Bud about his appearance, but he kept himself well-groomed and neat whether Dottie was around or not.

“Ready for company. Doctor Black, I presume. I’m Harve Lester. Welcome to my humble abode. I’ve heard a lot about you. My nurse reads your books. She’ll die when she finds out she missed you.”

“Nice to meet you, Harve.” Black took the hand Harve extended and glanced around the sunny room with its lemon yellow walls and white woodwork. So often people didn’t know how to treat the handicapped, acted like they were deaf or dumb, or nonexistent, but Black was completely at ease. He smiled. “Nice place you have here. A good place to work, I’ll bet.”

“The land around this cove’s been in my family for fifty years. Gave me a good place to retire to.”

He swiveled his chair around and rolled across the hardwood floor to the desk in front of the windows. We followed, and Black asked, “You serve somewhere here in Missouri?”

“I was one of Los Angeles’s finest, and proud of it. Didn’t Claire tell you? We worked Robbery/Homicide at the same time.”

Black gave me a searching, psychiatrist look. As if I were one of the inkblots he liked to hang everywhere. “Claire holds her cards pretty close to the vest, Harve, but I suspect you already know that. Maybe you can give me the scoop on her.”

“I sure as hell know better than to do something like that.” Harve laughed, but he knew where my secrets were buried like no one else. Although they were joking around, I felt uncomfortable enough to nip that conversation in the bud.

“Let’s get started. I can’t stay long. Black, take a seat.” Sometimes I’m bossy.

There was a round table with a white tile top near the windows, and Black and I both took matching Windsor chairs as Harve eased his wheelchair on the other side. Harve had been studying the autopsy photos, because they were spread out in plain sight. Out of respect for Black’s shaky emotions, I gathered them quickly together and turned them facedown. Black looked at me, blue eyes grateful, almost tender, and I felt embarrassed that he looked at me like that in front of Harve. Or at all. As if reading my mind, he smiled slightly and carved all those damned dimples of his. Something moved inside me that was downright saccharine. So I concentrated on Harve.

“You got my e-mail, right?”

Harve nodded, then looked at Black. “I understand you have quite a reputation in forensic psychiatry, Doctor Black. I’ll be interested in your take on this perpetrator.”

“I’m Nick, okay? I can’t seem to persuade the detective here to go that informal, so maybe you’ll do me the favor.”

“You bet. Nick it is.” Harve shook his head, but he was a straightforward, hardened, and experienced retired police officer, and he got right to the point. “I realize you’ve had some real bad news tonight, and I want you to know right off the bat that I’m sorry for your loss.” He glanced at me. “Claire told me the victim was your niece, and she also said you didn’t want anybody to know it. Whatever your reasons are for hiding the connection, they are none of my business. Rest assured that nothing we talk about here will ever leave this room.”

Black looked surprised, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d told Harve or because Harve was willing to keep the secret. “I appreciate that, Harve. It’s a complicated situation, but I have very good reasons.”

“So what do you think?” Harve said. “Have you gone over the evidence?”

“First off, I want both of you to know that I can’t solve this case for you. All I can do is help you understand who the offender is and why he behaves the way he does. I don’t track down killers or apprehend them. That’s not my job; that’s Claire’s job. But I’ve had some success identifying why offenders choose to perpetrate crimes when and where they do.” Black glanced at me, as if reassuring me that if we danced this case together, he wasn’t going to step on my toes. “I study the victims’ lives and figure out who they were and why somebody wanted them dead.”

“Victimology,” Harve said.

Black nodded and drew in breath. “Unfortunately, this time I already know a great deal about Sylvie. That doesn’t mean she shared everything she did with me. Not even in our sessions did she open up completely. She was intimidated by her father and afraid I’d tell him her secrets. I wouldn’t have, of course, but she still held things back, things she felt were private. I’m particular about my privacy, too, so I understood how she felt. I know she trusted me, but I was her uncle, and if she was into anything sleazy or illegal, she wouldn’t have wanted me to know.”

“Do you have reason to believe she was into something sleazy?” I said.

“No,” he answered a little too quickly, but that could just be the protective uncle coming out. “Not really, but I’ve treated enough young starlets who led similar lives to know they’re tempted by drugs and alcohol and sex from the moment they hit Hollywood until the day they’re deemed too old to be in films.”

“What’s that, twenty-one?” I said.

“Yeah, Hollywood’s driven now by youth and weight. And that’s another thing these young women face: they’re forced to be dangerously underweight to get good parts, and that leads a lot of them to bulimia and anorexia. Sylvie was bulimic for a while, and you wouldn’t believe how many women I’ve treated for these kinds of problems. On top of that, the entertainment scene has a tendency to gobble these young women up, because they’re quickly surrounded by sycophants, suck-ups, and hangers-on, who encourage them to do whatever they want, whatever feels good.” I thought that might apply to Black as well, but I didn’t say so.

“And they’re young and naïve, with money to burn, and they experiment no matter how grounded they were before they hit it big. Sylvie was into coke for a while. That’s when Jacques asked me to get her down to Cedar Bend for rehab and treatment.”

“She did rehab here at the lake?”

Black nodded. “It’s a good place for the big stars to go through detox. I have trained staff to help them kick the habit, while I work with them one-on-one. You’d be surprised the number of well-known people who’ve been here for treatment. Some really big names that you’d recognize.”

Harve said, “I’ve been studying the police reports. What strikes me is the complete lack of physical evidence.”

“Me, too. It’s rare to find nothing helpful, no hair, no threads from clothing. That could be why he chose to leave her in the water.”

Black’s voice revealed nothing now; he’d internalized his emotions and was under steely, and I mean steely, control. He had put aside his personal feelings; he was ready to do whatever it took to find Sylvie’s killer. I doubted if he’d react with passion again until we took down the offender. Then he might very well kill the guy.

Harve, on the other hand, seemed almost excited. He loved nothing more than solving a difficult case. And he was damn good at it. “The most significant clue in my book is the unusual posing of the body. He had a reason for putting her at a dinner table. I don’t know if the fact that he left the victim underwater is pertinent. Maybe, maybe not. Like you say, that could have been merely to eliminate trace evidence. That’s the key, I think, to understanding what’s driving him.”

“Exactly,” Black said. “My sense is that he’s done it before. He’s probably a serial, but a sophisticated one who plans the crimes down to a T. As you probably know, most serial killers are white males in their twenties and thirties who come from lower-to middle-class backgrounds. Physically and sexually abused, sometimes emotionally. A common thread we’ve found is that nearly all of them set fires as children. They also have a tendency to torture animals, and most of them wet the bed.”

“So chances are we’re looking for a young man,” I said. “Are they likely to know their victims personally?”

Black shook his head. “No, it’s usually a random selection, just a stranger at the wrong place at the wrong time. They kill, then have a cooling-off period, when they get off by reliving the murder until the thrill fades and they need to live out their fantasies again. It’s a psychological drive. The motive isn’t greed or passion, but a sadistic need to dominate the victim. That’s what I see the most in this guy and the things he does to his victims.”

When Black’s swallow went down hard, Harve turned to the computer on the desk behind him. “Claire asked me to do a database search for similar crimes, and so far five murders have come up where the victim was found decapitated. One was in North Carolina about this time last year. Some hikers discovered a decapitated female body in heavy vegetation along the Cape Fear River, but the head was never found. The Greenville detective in charge told me they assumed it had been swept out to sea by river currents.”

I tried to be diplomatic. “Did any of the cases have the remains of two different victims at the crime scene?”

“No,” Harve said. “But that doesn’t prove anything. Most of these cases were covered by small town police departments without the means or experience to catch something like that. Buckeye’s an experienced criminalist, and he discovered the discrepancy almost by accident.” Harve was being considerate to Black, too.

I was surprised Black could discuss this so soon, but he was completely focused now. “Small town police departments wouldn’t know the difference unless the victim was a local they recognized or they had dental records to prove identity. It could be why the offender confuses the identity, to hide his tracks.”

“What about missing persons?” I said. “Did anybody go missing around Greenville in the same time period?”

“I haven’t checked that out yet, but I’ll get on it right away.”

I said, “It’s like a game he’s playing. My gut tells me he’s done this lots of times. Did you find victims as obviously posed as in this case?”

“Not yet. One was found on a riverbank, with fishing gear scattered around. In Illinois, a middle-aged woman was tied to a tree, with her head in her lap. Another body was found in an alley in a Pensacola suburb. The head was found two blocks away, tied to a stop sign by the hair. None of the scenarios had much in common.”

“Was there a commonality in cause of death?” Black asked.

“One. All the victims were alive when the head was severed.”