The Death Dealer (13 page)

Later she slept again, and he lay beside her knowing that he had kept the truth from her. That she didn’t know he was crazy. That he had gone to Hastings House and heard the whisper of the woman with whom he’d once been falling in love.

Leslie.

A dead woman.

And Gen didn’t know that he kept seeing her eyes as the life was choked out of her.

She didn’t know that the man she was depending on was slowly losing his mind.

In the morning, he left before she woke up.

He was suddenly anxious, because Lori Star had never contacted him.

At Lori’s apartment, he once again got no response to his knocking. Before he could move on to Susie’s place, her door opened and she came out to speak to him. She was clearly distressed. “I was going to call you today. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think Lori ever came home.”

He frowned. “You haven’t seen her since Sunday?”

“No. And I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m not her next of kin or anything. And I always heard that a person had to be missing for forty-eight hours before anyone could fill out a missing-persons report, but I don’t even know if she
is
a missing person. Oh, God, I’m so upset. I just don’t know what to do.”

“It’s all right. But it’s definitely time to fill out a missing-persons report. I’ll go down to the police station with you.”

“Police station?” she said, and cleared her throat. “Um, Mr. Connolly, you should know…I’ve been arrested before.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he assured her.

But she wasn’t going to go down to the station with him, he quickly realized, so he put through a call to Raif.

“That’s Missing Persons,” Raif told him.

“Raif, this is the woman who was on television after that pileup on the FDR, saying she was psychic.”

“Then talk to Traffic,” Raif said.

“Raif, dammit, Sam Latham was in that accident. It might be connected.”

“And it might not!”

Exasperated, Joe held his temper. “So do you have any answers on the Thorne Bigelow murder yet?” he demanded.

“No,” Raif admitted after a moment, then sighed. “All right, I’ll get someone from Missing Persons and come over.”

“We’ve got to get into the apartment,” Joe added.

“Ask her friend if she has a key,” Raif told him. “Maybe she’s supposed to water the plants or something like that.”

Raif turned to Susie. “Do you have a key to the apartment?” he asked.

She shook her head, and Joe went back to his call.

“She’s a missing person, Raif. Can’t we get a warrant on probable cause to find out if she happens to be lying dead inside?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Raif said. “All right, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Eventually Raif showed up with, as promised, an officer from Missing Persons. Susie did her best to answer all the necessary questions, but it was difficult. If Lori had living parents or other family, Susie had never met them. She didn’t even know if Lori Star was her real name.

While the officer worked with Susie, Raif, who had the warrant in his pocket, entered the apartment. Joe followed him in without asking permission.

“There’s nothing out of order,” Raif said. He sighed, turning to Joe. “Look, I know you thought there was something believable about her, but…the woman is a prostitute. Who knows? She wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe she found someone she could, um, ‘work’ for a while. Maybe she’s shacked up in a motel somewhere.”

“She didn’t leave with any of her belongings, not according to what Susie told us,” Joe said. “She went ‘to see a man about a horse.’ It sounds to me like she went out to meet someone, and that it didn’t go very well.”

“Either that,” Raif argued, “or she went to meet someone and it went
very
well. Didn’t you see
Pretty Woman
?”

“Raif, are you serious?” Joe demanded.

“No, but…I don’t know what to tell you.”

Frustrated, Joe looked through Lori Star’s apartment, but try as he might, he couldn’t see anything out of order, either. Nor had she left a note of her destination scribbled down on her phone pad.

“Can you trace her phone records, at least?” Joe asked Raif.

“I’ll get someone on it,” Raif promised.

At last, with nothing else to do, Joe left, still entirely frustrated.

But as he left Lori’s apartment, he thought of the first time Genevieve had come to him about Thorne Bigelow’s murder.

Quoth the raven: die.

New York City hadn’t been especially good to Poe. The man had been self-destructive, true, but he had come to New York to make his fortune. In the end, the city hadn’t afforded him the fame he had craved, much less any riches. Down and out, he had left the city to take a job in Philadelphia.

After he had left the city, a murder had occurred, that of Mary Rogers, known in the papers of the day as the beautiful cigar girl. She had disappeared on a Sunday.

Just like Lori Star.

Mary had left her home of her own free will.

Just like Lori Star.

Suddenly a sense of panic seized him, and he was desperate to see Genevieve, to make sure she was all right. He raced to her building, gave his name to the security guard and was cleared to go up. She met him at her door, an anxious look on her face.

“Joe, what is it?” she asked.

“Lori Star never came home,” he told her.

He barely noticed that she returned to the phone on the counter and told someone, “I’ll call you back later, okay?”

“Did you call the police about her?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.” He met her eyes. “I’d like to go to my apartment,” he told her.

“All right.”

“And I want you to come with me.”

“Sure,” she agreed.

He felt some of the tension easing out of him.

Genevieve was fine. There was no reason for him to keep feeling this awful sense of panic.

“Joe, what’s going on with you? What’s wrong?” she asked him.

“Nothing. It’s just…an uneasy time,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m not going to be happy until we find Thorne Bigelow’s killer.”

She looked at him and nodded, but she knew there was more to what was bothering him than that. But arguing with him wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

He tried to keep things light as they drove out to Brooklyn. He asked her about Eileen, making sure she was keeping in regular touch with her mother.

“Of course,” she told him.

“What are we doing here?” Genevieve asked him when they got to his place.

“I live here,” he said as lightly as he could.

“No, I meant what are we going to do while we’re here? What are we looking for?”

He hesitated. “This may be really farfetched and stupid,” he told her.

“I’m listening.”

“All right, let’s suppose that someone really is reenacting Poe’s work with real victims. Thorne was the first victim. And Sam…maybe that was intentional, too, or maybe the killer just saw a convenient chance and took it. But if the two
are
connected, the murderer must have been scared shi—alarmed when Lori Star started getting attention from the media.”

“Even if they’re not connected, Lori Star’s certainty that she knew what happened on the highway might have disturbed someone,” Genevieve pointed out.

“True.”

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?” Genevieve asked him.

He started to deny it, but then he met her eyes and tried not to turn away. Tried not to imagine her being strangled, even though the vision haunted him night after night.

“Yes,” he said.

“And…you think all three deaths are connected, don’t you? Even though you’re the one who told me that Poe’s characters never committed vehicular homicide?”

He stared back at her. “Yes,” he admitted flatly.

“Okay, so what are we doing here?”

“Research.”

“On…?”

“‘The Mystery of Marie Roget.’ You take the story itself. I’ll look up what really happened.”

She looked skeptical, but she accepted his collection of Poe stories, while he turned to his computer. They worked in companionable silence for a while.

The Internet was full of leads, but also sent him from page to page following them up. He made notes as he went.

“There’s a forword to the story in your book, you know,” Genevieve said. She had curled into the extra chair in his office.

“Yes?”

“It was originally published in three segments. Poe probably knew the real girl, but he was living in Philadelphia when she was killed. He thought the story would put him on the literary map. He was convinced that the girl’s first disappearance—she had disappeared for several days a few years before her murder, then reappeared—had something to do with her death. He had planned on making the murderer a Navy man, but then they discovered that she might have gone for an abortion, and that she might have died in a house in New Jersey, a small inn of sorts, owned by a woman named Loss who had three sons. They thought the sons might have tried to dispose of Mary’s body. No one ever went to trial and, according to this preface, no one ever discovered the truth of her death. Poe altered his story before the final segment was published so it would agree with the latest facts in the investigation.”

“When her body was first found,” Joe said, studying his monitor, “the coroner noted that she’d been strangled. That there were bruises around her throat, and a piece of her torn dress was so tightly tied around her neck that it was embedded in the flesh.”

He looked at Genevieve. “I don’t believe Mary Rogers died because of a botched abortion, though that might have been what sent her to New Jersey. I believe the coroner’s initial report was right and she was strangled. But what
I
believe isn’t important. What matters is that I think the
murderer
also believes that she was strangled. And that he acted on that.”

“Joe, we don’t even know for sure that Lori’s dead, much less how she died,” she said.

“Let’s take a ride over to New Jersey,” he suggested.

“We’re going to find her in New Jersey?” she asked doubtfully.

“Her body will turn up in New Jersey,” he said with complete certainty.

Just then his cell phone started to ring. He answered it with a brief, “Connolly.”

“Joe, it’s Raif.”

His friend sounded strange, Joe thought, and asked, “What is it? Have you found something?”

He could hear the deep breath Raif took before answering.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“We’ve found her body.”

Genevieve was staring at him, frowning intently.

“Lori Star?” Joe asked, though he didn’t really need to. He knew that it was her. And he could make an educated guess as to what condition they’d found her in, too.

“Yeah, or so it seems. It’s in pretty bad shape.”

“You found it in the river on the New Jersey side, right?” Joe said.

“How did you know?” Raif demanded.

“I’ve read ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’” Joe told him.

“What? Oh, hell, a Poe story, right? Shit. I’m going to have to brush up on my reading.”

“There was a real murder, too.”

“Great,” Raif said. “Just what we need.” Joe could see Raif in his mind’s eye, sitting in the passenger seat and talking on the phone while Tom drove.

To Jersey?

“So this murder winds up in the hands of the New Jersey police, huh?” Joe said.

“Yeah, but the lead detective isn’t a bad guy. I told him I had an interest, which he understood. I explained that we’re all looking at a connection between Lori Star and our other vics. Folks can be territorial in law enforcement, but not usually stupid, so we’re welcome to be in on it.”

Joe winced, running his fingers through his hair. “Can I tag along?” he asked.

“That’s why I called you,” Raif said. “We’re on our way over to Jersey now.”

Bingo, Joe thought. “Tell me where I’m going and I’ll meet you there,” he said.