“Rachel?” Jo remembered her promise to Becca. She set the tulips and the letter on the stoop and came down the steps slowly. “I brought up some painful memories for you the other night. I apologize if I was insensitive.” She blew out a breath. That had sounded okay to her. “I know you worry about Becca. I want you to know I’ll take every precaution to make sure she’s all right.”
Rachel watched her face, reading her as if she were as adept with microexpressions as Jo, as she might well be. “I do worry about our friend, I admit it. But if my feet were held to the flames, I’d have to admit Becca is an intelligent and perfectly capable woman, and I trust her. And she trusts you, Joanne.”
Rachel stepped closer, and her voice was soft but clear. “I hope I’m not saying this for the wrong reasons; because I’m tired, or not at my best, these days. But I’m going to allow myself to be completely selfish for a moment. If there is any—
any
explanation for the death of Becca’s parents other than Maddie Healy’s psychosis, I want you two to find it.” She paused. “I care for Becca very much, and I want to believe she can find some kind of peace with this. And I admit I would love to live, just one day, without feeling I failed her family. I’ll do anything I can to help you learn what happened that night.”
Jo nodded. She watched Rachel walk to her car, her mind clicking through every nuance of her expressions. She was sure of it. Rachel was telling the truth.
*
The rolling hills of Lake View Cemetery were sparsely populated again today, at least by the living. Jo could hear distant rhythms of reggae from adjacent Volunteer Park, a vast, friendly montage of playing fields, museums, and stages. Seattle was gearing up for the weekend’s Gay Pride celebration, and the endless pre-parties were well underway.
As expected, Becca waited for her in the friendly shadow of the Lady of the Rock. In spite of the distractions of her trashed office and the interview with Voakes, Jo experienced a moment of simple pleasure at the sight of her. Becca was sitting back on her hands in the lush grass, gazing up at the Lady’s strong face. Her own expression was thoughtful and calm.
“Rachel provided a letter of reference.” Jo wished she had opened this conversation less abruptly, but Becca only smiled up at her.
“Yeah, she thinks seeing Voakes won’t be a problem.” Becca extended one hand to Jo. After a brief silence, she said, “Um, catch a clue, please? I eat four pounds of chocolate every day.”
“Oh.” Jo took Becca’s hand and pulled her gently to her feet. She rose gracefully, in spite of her claim of gluttony.
Becca brushed grass from her hips and nodded at the Lady. “Do you ever wonder where she’s pointing?”
Jo looked up at the statue’s extended right hand, the delicate fingers gesturing into the distance. She turned and peered over her shoulder in that direction. “It seems she’s pointing toward the cemetery’s restrooms.”
Becca laughed. “Yes, I realize the restrooms lie over there. But this statue must have been cast a century ago, and far away from here. I’ve always wondered what her sculptor wanted us to see.”
Jo remembered the line from Derrida that Mitchell Healy had quoted the other night. “Another question of ghosts to be solved.”
Becca smiled her understanding. “Can I show you something?”
“You may.”
They began walking north, away from the fading music from the park, until Becca nudged Jo slightly east.
“I’d like to avoid that patch, if you don’t mind.”
The distant field was dotted with life-sized memorial statues, and Jo understood. Becca led her down a winding path of smaller gravestones to a wide plain of recessed metal plates. She wondered if Scott and Madelyn Healy lay beneath this sad ground; Becca had never said where her parents were buried.
But they stopped beside a larger plot, a gathering of four plaques, all the same size, of the same cold brass and bearing identical dates of death. The Walmac family. Voakes had been fleeing their home when he was caught.
“These graves were as popular an attraction as Bruce Lee’s, for a long time.” Becca spoke with the hushed tone reserved for the dead. “Being the victims of a notorious serial killer brings a little unwelcome fame.”
They winded Jo, these stark, unexpected remnants of four lives lost to the insanity of John William Voakes. Two parents and two young children, obliterated in one night. Jo stared at the graves, gripped by horror and sympathy that felt visceral. She cursed herself for leaving her sunglasses on the table in the house. She must still be as shaken by the day’s events as Becca had been, though Becca seemed relatively centered, right now.
“I took the clinical track in my graduate work. You focused on research.” Becca clasped her hands behind her, studying the plaques. “By personal history and professional training, I know more about the nuts and bolts of mental illness than you. The families my foster kids come from are rife with it. I’ve seen craziness up close before. It doesn’t scare me.”
“Neither of us has anything to fear from Voakes.”
Becca nodded. “That’s why I’m coming with you to see him.”
Jo blew out a slow breath. “This isn’t just mental illness, Becca. This is being in the presence of a man who murdered eight people.”
“And there’s a small possibility, no matter how faint or unlikely, that he murdered ten.” Becca paused. “I think my knowledge and experience could be helpful to you today. I also think I have the right to see the face of a man who might have killed my parents.”
Jo tried hard to summon a logical response to either or both of these arguments, and a dimple appeared in Becca’s cheek.
“I see we’re going to have to hold another session of Becca School. Class?” She took Jo’s hands, making it no easier for her to be logical. “Look, I love you wanting to look out for me. I really do. Marty and Khadijah can be protective, too. I don’t know what it is about me that brings out this…shepherd thing in you guys.”
I can’t stand the thought of anything hurting you
, Jo explained silently.
“But my friends don’t get to infantilize me. I’m not five years old anymore.” Becca pressed her hands. “Watch my back, by all means. I appreciate it. But if you try to baby me, you’re only going to piss me off. Okay?”
Jo summoned another sigh from the soles of her shoes. “Okay.”
Becca lifted herself on her toes to kiss Jo’s cheek. “And stop looking so miserable. I can defend both of us with my mighty chobos better than you can with your spooky Spiricoms, anyway.”
“That’s probably true.” Jo resisted the urge to touch her cheek. “Well. Rachel told me today that she trusts you, and she’s known you longer than I have. I guess I can do no less.”
“She said that, huh?” Becca glanced over her shoulder, and her smile faded. “There’s something else you should see.” She took Jo’s hand, and they walked slowly down a small rise, beyond all that remained of a slaughtered family.
The graves here were older, but without the antique quaintness of earlier decades. Jo placed these headstones in the mid-eighties, reasonably well kept, their epitaphs still readable as they passed. Becca didn’t have to point out the grave they were looking for. Jo saw the cut tulips resting on the sparse grass beneath the stone.
Loren Mitchell Perry
1968–1983
Jo did the math swiftly. “Rachel’s son?”
Becca nodded. “Rachel gave him my uncle’s name, to honor their friendship. Loren was a little older than me, I only met him a few times. I guess he turned into a pretty wild kid. He had problems with drugs. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was fifteen.”
Jo looked at the wilting flowers Rachel had left on her son’s grave. “And his father?”
“He left the picture early on. Rachel hardly mentions him. She raised Loren alone.” Becca folded her arms, as if cold. “She was devastated. My aunt and uncle were really worried about her. It took her years to come back from this.”
“I can only imagine. I’m sorry she had to go through it.” The words came naturally to Jo, an encouraging development.
“Rachel was strong when I needed her, when I was five years old. And she’d found herself by the time I needed her again, when I was sixteen.” Becca’s voice had been warm, but now it grew more halting. Jo kept her eyes on the grave, sensing Becca needed privacy for this. She was
sensing
now, with this woman.
“Heroin was pretty cool in this town in the nineties.” Becca’s posture was elaborately casual. “Though most of my friends had the sense to avoid it. Not so with brains, here.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking, what possessed me. I’d always been such a
good
little dweeb. But smack is unforgiving stuff. I shot up once, with an impossibly cute girl whose name I can’t even remember now. Then I shot up a second time, alone. I was in trouble very quickly.”
Jo grasped the seriousness of the trouble Becca had flirted with at the tender age of sixteen. Seattle was shamed by a sad history of loss stemming from the periodic, intense romances its youth held with chemicals. Heroin had been the go-to hit for the wealthier set in the nineties, just as meth was the fix sought by street kids in the past decade. The casualties could be gruesome. “Rachel helped you with this addiction?”
Becca knelt and pulled a small weed from the base of Loren Perry’s headstone. “You know Mitchell and Patricia put me in counseling with Rachel after my parents died. They insisted I see her again when I was sixteen, when they realized my…problem. Khadijah and Marty flat-out finked on me to my aunt and uncle. You can imagine how tickled I was about that at the time, but they did the right thing. They may have saved my life.”
She looked up at Jo. “Rachel did excellent work with me. Not just with kicking, with the loss of my parents, the phobia, everything. I meant it the other night, when I said I consider her one of the best psychiatrists in the city.” She gestured at the headstone. “And she did this work four years after the death of her son, who also struggled with drugs. I was about the same age Loren was when he died. It couldn’t have been easy for her.”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” Becca’s fine fingers smoothed the grass at the head of the grave, and Jo missed the friendly warmth of her hand in her own. “Rachel told me she supports us fully in this study, Becca. She still has your back.”
Becca looked up at her over her shoulder, and the sun sparkled off her smile in a way that made Jo wish for her sunglasses again. “I know she does. As I have before bragged, I have excellent taste in friends.” She held out her hand and Jo took it easily, as if she had been helping Becca rise for a lifetime. “So, amiga. Let’s go visit a serial killer.”
Chapter Ten
Becca kept giving the queen’s wave out the window of Jo’s Bentley, the small, curved-palm salutation that Elizabeth bestowed upon the British masses. Jo eyed her wryly from behind the wheel after Becca blessed their third pedestrian.
“I can’t help it. I climbed ten rungs up the socio-economic ladder the moment I stepped into this thing.” Becca stroked the butter-soft leather of her seat. “This isn’t a car; it’s a royal chariot. Can we drive by Marty and Khadijah’s place? I just want to wave at them before we peel off and leave them in our dust.”
She’d hoped to coax a smile from Jo and it worked, if only briefly, a slight lifting of one corner of her sensual lips. Becca still worried about what the morning had cost Jo, the shock of seeing her prized possessions destroyed.
“They’d only want to come with us.” Jo’s mirrored shades shifted toward the rearview mirror as they merged onto I-5. “Which probably wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
“You think so?” Becca was surprised. “Are you getting fond of my buddies?”
“I like them both, yes. But even more, I’ve always liked the idea of a clan. A family of strong women having our backs, in your words, as we confront a killer. It’s a pity Rachel’s letter only introduced us, and we couldn’t get an entire Amazon tribe through Western’s doors.”
So the woman who abhorred crowds secretly longed for a clan of her own. Becca almost remarked on Jo’s growing ability to talk openly about her heart, but she stopped herself in time. She hoped such personal revelations would become normal conversation between them, not worth special note. “I think that’s why the Amazon tribe in
Xena
appealed to so many lesbians, right? Partnered or not, we’re still searching for a clan, that extended family. That notion has always drawn me, too.”
That slight smile crossed Jo’s face again, and she reached for the dash and clicked a recessed button. A moment later a rich trickle of music filled the posh interior of the Bentley, and Becca grinned. “Oh, you’re kidding. Perfect.”
The iconic theme music from
Xena: Warrior Princess
was a more than fitting soundtrack for the day’s quest, and its familiarity filled Becca with a chiming comfort.
She lay her head against the cushioned headrest, enjoying the music and the cool purr of the elegant car’s all but silent air-conditioner. Seattle was too unjustifiably proud of its sometimes heat-choked summers to feature air-conditioning in most apartments, and the one in Becca’s poor jalopy had gone to its rusty reward years ago. She allowed herself a small, selfish hope that Jo would never grow so uncomfortable with her wealth that she’d dispose of it all, or if she did, that she’d sell Becca this car really, really cheap.
“What about your father, Becca?”
Becca turned her head on the rest and looked at Jo quizzically. She might be talking about feelings more readily, but she still needed help with question clarification. “My father?”
“I’ve heard so little about him. I know the focus of our study is your mother, but it seems odd to me that such a major player in this family drama is so rarely mentioned.”
“Well, from our dinner the other night, you know my dad didn’t always get along with his older brother.” Becca traced a pattern on the cool glass of the window with her fingertip. “A point in his favor, I’ve always thought. But he and my mom fought all the time, too. He had a temper. He tried to take care of me when she was sick. And as far as I remember, he did that pretty well. My dad was always nice to me.”