The Prettiest Feathers (16 page)

“You mean at Miss Sinclair’s house? Oh no. She was the only one who was ever around there. Very solitary. Kept to herself.”

I gave one of my cards to the woman. “Well, if you happen to think of anything, would you mind giving me a call?”

She assured me that she would and I was about to walk back down her front steps when she said, “Of course, there was that man the other day.”

I stopped.

“What man?”

“The one sitting in his car, watching her house on Saturday. He was parked back a little ways, over there. I remember it was in the afternoon because my sister always calls me between two and five o’clock, to make sure I’ve taken my heart pills. After we got off the phone, I looked out my window again and saw that he was still there.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“I didn’t get a good look at him at all. His windshield was filthy. And I don’t know one kind of car from another. But I have something that might help.”

She disappeared into her house. When she returned several minutes later, she was carrying a piece of scrap paper. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “I wrote down his license plate number. Just in case.”

When I got back to my car, I scribbled down the few notes that might require some additional footwork.

“Frustrating case?” a man’s voice asked just behind me.

I whipped my head around to see the DA’s investigator.

“Oh. You startled me. Robbins, right?”

“Yes. Sorry,” he said. “I was in Sinclair’s and noticed you were out here.”

“Get anything from the scene?” I asked him.

I didn’t know what was distracting me more—Robbins’s eyes, or his silent approach behind me.

We walked to a diner at the end of the block.

“No, but I’ve been thinking of the woman in the cemetery. Harris. It seems like these killers follow a pattern. I’ve read some of the books—the true crime stuff. You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but it’s almost like you can plot what they do. Where. When. How they kill. There’s a logic to it.”

“What does the logic tell you?” I asked.

“That there’s somebody else on his list. That’s easy. But who?”

Robbins reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a book—
Hunting Humans—
by Elliott Leyton. “Read it. Like I said, this isn’t my bailiwick. Then again, maybe I’ve just given you the answer to who’s next.”

On my way back to the precinct, I called in the plate number that the old lady had given me. By the time I arrived, a printout was sitting on my desk. The plate belonged to Robert Sinclair.

When I got the call from Fuzzy, three hours later, I was still trying to figure out what my partner had been up to, keeping his ex-wife under surveillance only a day before her death.

“Sinclair’s been in an accident,” he said. “He’ll live, but he’s got some injuries. You’ll find him in St. Paul’s ER.”

I’d been going all day on nothing but coffee and about ten minutes’ sleep. I figured the doctors and nurses could do a lot more for Robert than I could at the moment, and besides,
the woman who answered the phone in the ER said that Robert had been transferred to a room on one of the regular med floors. Not intensive care. He was going to be fine.

I thought about going home, grabbing a nap, showering, getting into some fresh clothes, then following up on a couple of loose ends. But I was even too tired to make the drive. I knew that I had something worse than the standard flu. I’d already been through the aches and pains, and the low-grade fever. I decided to stretch out on the couch in the women’s rest room, my makeshift bed for the past two nights.

Even though I was exhausted, I didn’t fall asleep right away. There was something nudging at the back of my mind, something I couldn’t identify—but it made me nervous. And I felt a whirlpool in my stomach, just like I always do when I realize that I’m in over my head.

When I was in college, I watched as most of my classmates prepared for careers in making money. A few of my friends had a different idea. They wanted to teach, or work as community organizers—to contribute something to the quality of other people’s lives by improving “the social order.” I figured that somebody had to help maintain what order there was if things even had a prayer of getting any better, and I loved the idea of living in a
real
city for a couple of years. The NYPD had a high staff turnover rate, and they were quota conscious, so I called a family friend, Ray Bolton, a detective in Boston.

“You’re crazy, and your father will kill me,” Ray said.

“Two years and I’ll be in grad school,” I swore.

So he called a friend in New York, wrote a glowing recommendation for me, and I got the job. Because I’d been on the college track team, I was in better shape than most of the male applicants—also taller—and I’d known how to handle weapons since before I got my first driver’s license. It seemed like a natural—something that was right. And, the years I spent in uniform
were
right. I was a good street cop. Quick on my feet, and capable in a confrontation.

But then I followed Robert over to Homicide, and it’s
been one frustration after another. I don’t think I’m cut out for the mind games that murder demands.

I was in a blurry, floaty fugue—with half my brain cells drifting off to sleep and the other half wide awake, wired, and ready to go. I needed to sleep, to get my head clear—but something still nagged at me, trying to emerge from the fog in my brain. The harder I tried to remember what it was, the more elusive it became. Just as I was giving up the struggle, succumbing to sleep, it hit me. John Wolf. The shootout in the alley. I hadn’t checked Robert’s file.

I got up and walked down the hallway, back to Homicide. Robert has status: his own phone and his own desk. As it turned out, he also had everything put away, and all his drawers were locked.

I grabbed a paper clip from the communal desk just outside Robert’s cubicle and, by unbending it and maneuvering the tip just so, I was able to get two of the drawers open: the wide one in the middle, and the bottom drawer where he kept his file folders.

The middle drawer had nothing in it but two ball point pens, some rubber bands, a telephone message from two Julys ago, and the caps off a dozen beer bottles.

But the bottom drawer held exactly what I was looking for: the dossier on the fictitious Mr. Wolf. I read through all the material—including Robert’s report, which was more confusing than helpful. But one note penciled on the file cover did catch my attention: “Check Wallingford.”

I went down to the evidence room, retrieved the business card for Wallingford Antiques that I had found at Sarah’s—the one with Chadwick’s prints on it—and returned to Robert’s cubicle so that I could give Mr. Wallingford a call. A woman answered with a simple hello, no company name.

“Is this Wallingford Antiques?” I asked.

There was a pause before the woman said, “Well, yes. But the store is closed.”

“What are your hours?”

“No, I mean closed. Out of business.”

“Could you please tell me how to reach Mr. Wallingford?”

It sounded like muffled sobs on the other end of the line.

“I guess I’ve called at a bad time,” I said.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that my brother John—Mr. Wallingford—has passed away and I …” With that, the woman broke down again.

I could hear the phone being passed to someone else, then a male voice said, “May I help you?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I was hoping to speak with Mr. Wallingford.”

“I’m his brother-in-law. Are you calling about the ad that was in the newspaper?”

“The ad?”

“The shop we have for sale?”

Sounded good to me. “Yes,” I said. “I was wondering if I could stop by and see it.”

Wallingford’s brother-in-law gave me the address and assured me that it wouldn’t matter how late I arrived. They’d be there long after midnight, packing up the items that his wife wanted to keep.

As I hung up the phone, I realized that I was floundering, no closer now to solving Sarah’s murder than when I walked into her living room and found Robert looking so sad and so lost. Nothing was adding up. Leads that looked like they might go somewhere ended up right back where they began—like that license plate that had come back to Robert. What did it mean? I was yearning for street duty. That feeling of competence I used to have.

So I did what I always do when I feel most lost. I wrote to a forensic psychiatrist—a man for whom I have the most profound respect. He’s prematurely retired, living in a cabin in northern Michigan—where he heats with wood and draws water from a well, yet remains connected to the rest of the world via a Group III fax machine.

He is twice my age, with an IQ that sometimes seems to be triple mine. He insists that he likes people, but I’ve heard him speak highly of only two or three who are now living.
His heroes tend to be long-departed legends like Milton Erickson, Yeats, Lenny Bruce, and John Lennon. He was in love, once, with a woman named Savannah, but she left him years ago to live on another continent—where she pursues her interest in wildlife. She’s a veterinarian, and also his wife, though he hears from her only once each year, on their anniversary.

In the four years since he walked out of his Boston office, never to return, he has refused even to look at case files that are routinely sent to him—the Unabomber, the Tamiami prostitute murders, a series of child killings in California.

Investigators can’t believe—or accept—that a profiler of his stature could drop out of the law enforcement loop and mean it. They can understand the need for a temporary rest, a time-out from all the psychos and sickos that kept turning up in his in box uninvited, but no one with such a magical gift could simply close up shop forever. Profiling is in the blood—a skill that takes command of the one who possesses it, giving him no choice but to keep on keeping on. Or so investigators have thought, and hoped, in his case.

But I know better. I know his resolve, and I understand his motivation. It’s a matter of survival. He fears that if he opens his mind to one more killer, there’ll be no more room for himself. And he’s afraid that he’ll lose touch with that other side of life—the one he sees in nature, hears in music, and feels whenever the one person he loves most in the world is near.

I know this because I
am
that one person—his daughter, his only child. I also know what his work has done to him, how the lives of the damned have invaded his mind, distorted his reality, turned his dreams into nightmares. That’s why I’m always reluctant to ask for his help. I hate the thought of pulling him back into the quicksand that so nearly swallowed him. But this time I had to ask. I had wronged Sarah, and felt that I owed her something. Maybe it was too late for me to apologize for sleeping with her husband,
but—with my father’s help—I could at least put away her killer.

This is what I faxed to my father: