C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FIVE
F
iona asked Lee to drive out early on Friday for the weekend, before Kylie got home from school. She said there was something she wanted to talk about but refused to elaborate. After a morning meeting with Butts and the rest of their team, he picked up a rental car in the Village and was on the road by one, after stopping by Myers of Keswick for some Cornish pasties. Fiona had recently discovered the British import shop in the West Village owned by a colorful Englishman by the name of Peter Myers. She said his meat pies reminded her of her childhood in Scotland.
Rush hour hadn’t started yet, so traffic was light, and he reached Stockton a little after two thirty. The small town was quaint at any time of year, but it seemed tailor-made for the Christmas holidays. Every store on the main street was outlined in white fairy lights, and the lampposts were festooned with large red bows. The tall blue spruce next to Errico’s Market was decorated with old-fashioned Christmas bulbs glistening in the damp air. The sky was a dull gray—an opaque shade that local forecasters on the radio said was a sure sign of another snowstorm.
Lee thought about that Christmas so long ago when he and Laura had discovered their mother’s secret sorrow buried amid tissue wrapping paper. There was another, perhaps even more painful secret he had come across more recently, one that affected him even more deeply now that Laura was gone. He had almost had a little brother—the child stillborn to his grieving mother when he and Laura were very young. She had wrapped that secret up along with her other unspoken sorrows, buried it deeply within her heart, and if Lee hadn’t stumbled across the birth certificate last year, he might never have known about it. Though he had died in his mother’s womb, the boy was given a name: Adrian. Lee tried saying the words, the syllables heavy with sadness:
Adrian Campbell.
His little brother—almost. The date of his birth coincided with the time his father was involved with Chloe, so he could only imagine how his mother must have suffered. It pained him that she had never spoken to him of any of this—not for his sake but because he knew that grief borne in solitude could be unbearable.
He turned on to the country lane leading to his mother’s house. The sky looked foreboding as he turned into the familiar driveway. He pulled up next to the overgrown holly bush, its bright red berries scattered like droplets of blood on the shiny green leaves.
High-velocity blood spatter . . . indication of blunt-force trauma.
There was no blunt-force trauma on the Alleyway Strangler’s victims, and no blood. The whole thing was too damn tidy, he thought as he walked up the flagstone path to the house. This killer was in control—or thought he was. There was always a chance he’d slip up—but when? They couldn’t afford to wait until he made a mistake; they had to catch him at his own game.
Lee found his mother in the tiny kitchen in the back of the house. She had cornered a bowl of cucumbers and was dissecting them on the counter.
“Hello, dear,” she said, giving him her usual peck on the cheek. He couldn’t remember Fiona ever giving him a bear hug—not even when his sister disappeared. Fiona Campbell was a handsome woman, tall and slim with dark eyebrows and iron gray hair spattered with black. Lee could remember when it was long and as black as a raven, but now she wore it in a brisk, no-nonsense bob, cut close around her long face with its high cheekbones and strong jaw. She wore a long white chef’s apron over a crisp blue and white striped shirt and black slacks. Even in low heels, she was just an inch shy of six feet tall.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. Food was the currency of love in his family—it was so much easier than emotion.
“Not really,” he replied, inhaling the room’s familiar scent of eucalyptus, apples and polished wood.
“I’m almost done here,” she said as her knife sliced cleanly through the pale green flesh. “I’m making cucumber salad for Stan.”
“He’s coming over?”
“He’s going to have dinner with us before the concert.”
“Great.”
Stan Paloggia lived next door and was in love with Fiona. He followed her around like a one-man posse, being helpful in any way he could, whether it was by offering gardening advice or making plumbing repairs.
“What about George?”
George Callahan was Kylie’s father—a big, bluff and cheerful man of endless good cheer and high spirits but limited intellect. He couldn’t have been more different from Duncan Campbell—which, Lee suspected, was why Laura had chosen him.
“George is with his mother in Pennsylvania this weekend,” Fiona said. “She’s not well.”
“Too bad he’s missing the concert.”
“He’s a good son,” she said, still chopping cucumbers. Lee decided to let go of any accusation lurking behind the remark. He watched as the blade of the knife rapped sharply against the tile countertop.
Rat-a-tat.
His mother leaned over the counter, her mouth pursed, concentrated on her task, as if it was an important scientific experiment. Her thick salt-and-pepper hair bobbed as she worked.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course,” she said, but her tone was clear.
Go ahead, but don’t expect me to like it.
He took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell us about the death of our brother?”
He had to hand it to her. The question must have been completely unexpected, but she didn’t stop slicing the cucumbers. Her knife continued its relentless motion, and she didn’t so much as glance at him.
“You were
children,
for God’s sake!” she muttered between clenched teeth.
“So we didn’t have a right to know?”
Swoosh, slap.
She pressed so hard on the knife, he could hear the blade scoring the wood of the cutting board. Then she dropped the knife onto the counter and turned to him.
“He died in the womb, Lee—
my
womb. Can you imagine what that was like?”
“I think I can, actually.”
She hugged herself, wrapping her long arms around her body.
“I
wanted
to tell you, but the time never seemed right. It’s hardly the kind of thing you open a conversation with.”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing you open a conversation with, Mom.”
She picked up the knife again, but there was nothing left to slice. The cucumbers lay dismembered, their shredded flesh strewn all over the cutting board.
“Tell me something,” she said, getting a bag of carrots out of the refrigerator. “How can you possibly know what to say to a child when you’ve never had any?” She began whacking away at the carrots, the knife hitting the wooden cutting board with a solid
thwack.
Touché
. A skillful playing of the trump card of the fruitful over the childless. He’d seen it before, and it always worked. The unassailable assertion of superior knowledge born of experience, with its subtle implication of moral supremacy. Once again, he had to hand it to her. She would have made a hell of a trial attorney. He didn’t have the energy to punch through her defenses.
Suddenly she stopped what she was doing. The knife fell from her hand and clattered to the counter. She turned to face him, the fear in her blue eyes alarming.
“She’s cutting herself, Lee.” Her voice was low, desperate. “Kylie is
cutting herself.
”
“What?”
“George doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s at his wit’s end.”
“God, Mom,” Lee said. “When did this start?”
“George told me the school guidance counselor called him yesterday, and he went in to talk to them.”
“Have either of you talked with Kylie about it?”
“No. They said not to mention it until she talks with the counselor.”
“What are we supposed to do—just ignore it?”
“I don’t
know
,” she said, anguish in her voice. He hadn’t seen her so upset since Laura disappeared. “Apparently it’s something young people do when they’re feeling out of control and distressed.”
“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “And don’t worry,” he added. “She’s going to be all right.”
Another switch—him comforting her with hollow words of reassurance; usually it was the other way around. He felt like giving her a hug, but Fiona’s body language made it clear that would not be welcome.
The awkwardness between them was defused by three quick raps on the back door. Relieved, Lee opened it to find Stan Paloggia standing on the stoop with a potted orchid and a grin as wide as the Jersey Turnpike.
Stan hovered around Fiona like an eager beagle. Actually, he was a lot like beagles Lee had known—short and stocky, with a voracious appetite, thick around the middle. His voice, too, was a kind of a bray, like the hoarse baying of a hound on the hunt.
“Hiya,” he said, craning his neck to see around Lee.
“Is the lady of the house in?”
“She’s right here,” said Lee, opening the door. “How are you, Stan?”
“Oh, can’t complain,” he said, and Lee waited for the inevitable continuation:
If I did, no one would listen anyway.
But Stan had fixed his eyes on Fiona, neglecting the rest of his usual litany.
“Hello, Stan,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Is that for me?”
“Yep,” he said, handing her the flower. “Dug it out of my greenhouse today. Thought you might like it.” Stan was a prolific gardener. He had built his own greenhouse in back of his home, and his collection of orchids was breathtaking.
“It’s lovely,” Fiona said. “What is it?”
“
Phalaenopsis fuscata
,” Stan said proudly.
The flower was beautiful in the unreal, absurdly perfect way of orchids—so flawless, it looked artificial. The petals were spread out like the blades of a windmill, yellow-tipped, with a scarlet blush on their base. It was sexual and rather obscene. Looking at the flower’s five petals, Lee saw the legs, arms and head of the NYPD’s latest young victim.
One head, two legs, two arms . . . minus a finger. Why?
“What’re you starin’ at, buddy?” Stan asked. “It’s just a flower. You look like you seen a ghost.”
“Sorry,” said Lee. “I was just thinking.”
“I tried that once—ended up in bed for a week,” said Stan, chuckling. Stan always laughed at his own jokes.
“Yeah, right,” Lee said.
His mother threw a suspicious glance at him. “I’ll just go put this in my room,” she declared, marching off with the orchid.
Stan clapped a hand onto Lee’s shoulder.
“What do you say we go into the parlor? I think your mom can manage okay without us. I just love that this house has a ‘parlor.’ People were a lot smaller when this place was built, weren’t they?” he remarked as Lee stooped to clear the low doorway into the dining room.
“Yeah, they were.”
Stan himself couldn’t be more than about five foot five, Lee figured, though he was built like a brick oven—“solid muscle, bone and gristle,” as he liked to describe himself.
They went through the narrow dining room into the tiny parlor. All the rooms in the house were small by modern standards, with thick stone walls, low ceilings and creaking wood floors. It was built around 1740, which was old even for this part of the Delaware Valley, and Fiona loved the place.
“What’s up with your mom?” said Stan. “She’s got that kinda glowering look today.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Stan settled himself comfortably on the horsehair sofa along the far wall, leaning against a red velvet pillow.
“She always does. I call her the Bouncer, on account of her bouncing back from everything so fast.”
Lee laughed. “I’ll bet she loves that nickname.”
Stan grinned. “Not so much.” He leaned back, hands locked behind his head, and studied Lee. “How ’bout you, Slim? You look a little spooked. Somethin’ wrong?”
“No,” he said, sinking into an overstuffed armchair by the fireplace that Kylie called “The Comfy Chair,” after an old Monty Python sketch. “Just working a case.”
Stan shook his head. “I swear, I don’t know how you do that stuff. Doesn’t it drive you nuts? I mean, you must have trouble sleeping.”
“Someone’s got to do it.”
“Yeah, but it must be rough sometimes.”
“It is.”
“How’s that good-lookin’ girlfriend of yours—what’s her name?”
“Kathy.”
“She’s a cutie—love that curly black hair.”
“We broke up.”
“Oops. Fiona’s right—I do put my foot in my mouth too much.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”
“It’s odd that your mom didn’t mention it to me.”
“That’s because I haven’t told her.”
“Why not?”
How to respond? He had learned that dealing with the fallout from a breakup was frequently more draining than the event itself.