“What?” asked Luke.
She pulled the glass out of the dispenser and plucked the red octagon off the fridge. She set the water in front of Matthew and the magnet in front of his brother.
“My Suicide Stop Line,” Luke mumbled.
“You call if you have thoughts of suicide?” she asked.
“Yes.” He lifted his head. “Why?”
“Professor Wakefielder has been passing similar stickers out. A couple of the dead girls had this number. There’s the intersection between the prof and Dr. VonHader.” She walked around the kitchen table. “Who staffs the hotline?”
“Volunteers,” Matthew answered. “I’ve done it a few times.”
“Who else?”
“A slew of people,” answered Luke.
Garcia asked, “Where are you going with this?”
Bernadette said, “Do any of the volunteers also work in your office?”
“Several,” said Luke, his eyes wide and unblinking.
“Do any know the real story behind your sister’s institutionalization?”
“What?” Matthew blurted.
“It would have to be someone who knew how she first landed in the nursing home,” said Bernadette. “Who else knew about the … water discipline?”
“No one else,” said Matthew. “She was taking a bath by herself. Somehow went under. That was the story. We stuck to it all those years, even after Mother and Father passed away. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t the truth, we’d been saying it for so long.”
“You never told anyone else?” asked Garcia.
“We confided in no one,” Luke offered. “We trusted no one. It was only the two of us, and … Ruth.”
Bernadette noticed it was the first time anyone in the kitchen had uttered the dead woman’s name, and the word seemed to hang in the air like a cloud left behind by a smoker. Ruth. She was dead, as were so many other women. Shelby. Kyra. Corrine. Monica. Alice. Judith. Laurel. Heidi. She had no idea if Zoe belonged on the same list. Now another one was out there, waiting to be rescued—or buried. Regina.
“Think,” Bernadette said impatiently. “Perhaps someone overheard the two of you talking about Ruth. Someone at your office who also worked on the help line. Maybe you didn’t know they heard, but this person took a sudden interest in your sister. Asked questions. Even started visiting her in the nursing home.”
“Oh, God,” blurted Luke.
“What?” Garcia and Bernadette asked in unison.
“He had a crush on her,” Luke said. “Always had a crush on her, since they were kids.”
“Who?” Bernadette asked.
“But he never saw or heard anything,” Matthew said to his older brother.
Luke, his voice tremulous, added: “I caught him in the hall once, after one of her punishments. A bad one. He’d come into the kitchen and wandered upstairs. I didn’t think he saw anything. But his face, it was euphoric.”
“Is that when he started coming over more?” Matthew asked him.
“Yes,” Luke said numbly.
Garcia frowned at Bernadette. “Who are they—”
She held up her hand to silence her boss. The brothers were immersed in a trancelike exchange with each other. An outsider interrupting with a question might break the spell. Make them clam up.
Matthew, nodding slowly, said, “I remember. Suddenly, he was hanging around more. Our new best friend. Always walking in like he owned the place.”
Luke replied, “Mother and Father didn’t mind because both his parents were patients. Some sort of post-loss depression. They went to our church, too. Nice family.”
“Bullshit,” said Matthew. “The Araignees were as fucked up as our parents. Don’t you remember how they beat him? He’d come over with welts and bruises.”
“He got work as an aide at the nursing home,” said Luke. “He was always hanging around her room, even on his days off. I thought he was being a friend. After she died, he lost interest in the job. Came to work in my office.”
“Told you there was something wrong with him, but you trusted him because he plays golf and listens to public radio.” Matthew sneered at his older sibling. “You had him answering your phones, talking to those needy women, working on your precious suicide line.”
“I didn’t know,” Luke rasped.
Matthew snarled into his brother’s ear: “You’ve been his goddamn dating service.”
“Oh my God,” said Bernadette. It made sense.
“What?” asked Garcia, looking from Bernadette to the two handcuffed men. “Who are they talking about?”
“Wasn’t enough you hooked him up with the women in town here,” Matthew sneered. “You had to send him across state lines, to those classes in Wisconsin. How many girls there do you suppose he—”
“When?” interrupted Bernadette. “When was he in Wisconsin?”
Luke shook his head.
“July and August,” Matthew said.
“The La Crosse murders,” Bernadette said numbly.
“Who are they talking about?” asked Garcia.
“C.A.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Snaky son-of-a-bitch.”
Chapter 39
GARCIA STEERED THE Pontiac back on interstate 94 heading east and came to a dead stop as they neared the outskirts of downtown St. Paul. “Terrific,” he said.
“There must be an accident,” she said, trying to look around the minivan in front of them.
Traffic inched forward enough for Garcia to take an exit. “I’m getting off this parking lot.”
The downtown roads were as snarled as the interstate. “Don’t people stay in anymore?” Bernadette muttered, glaring through the passenger window at a knot of diners leaving a restaurant.
Garcia, screeching around a slow-moving compact, said, “Some folks have a life.”
She relaxed a little when they finally got on the Wabasha Bridge, aiming for a St. Paul neighborhood just south of downtown. Bluffs dotted with trees overlooked downtown and the river. Beyond the trees were homes, including one belonging to Charles Araignee, receptionist moonlighting as a serial killer. She’d considered him a bit player in this drama—the doctor’s errand boy—and now he was turning out to be the main attraction. The first time she’d even heard his last name was when the brothers uttered it at the kitchen table. The spiders in her dream finally made sense: Araignée was French for “spider.”
Unlike downtown, there were few cars on the road and no one on the sidewalks. On the right was a green tower containing steps that started at the top of the bluffs and led straight down to Wabasha. The structure reminded her of a forest ranger’s fire lookout.
When they got to Prospect Boulevard, the street that topped the bluffs, Garcia pulled the Grand Am to the curb and turned off the engine. The agents silently surveyed their surroundings. A knee-high stone wall ran along the top of the bluff, and at one end of the stone barrier was a sidewalk that led to the green tower. The lighting in the neighborhood was like that around the rest of the city, with green poles topped by antique-looking lamps. While there was enough light to see down the streets and sidewalks, the wooded bluff beyond the stone wall was black. No homes were perched along the sides of the hill itself. At the very bottom were caves dug into the sides of the hill. They were once used for a variety of ventures (Bernadette remembered reading something once about a mushroom grower), but now most of them were filled in. It was a strange slice of St. Paul that seemed better suited to a wilderness area than to a city.
“What was the address again?” asked Garcia as he shoved his car keys in his coat pocket.
She fished a yellow square out of her pocket and tipped the note toward the light cast by the streetlamp. “The doc said Chaz doesn’t live on the boulevard. He’s on one of the streets running behind it.”
Garcia reached under his seat and pulled out the Hudson’s Street Atlas, flipped until he got to the neighborhood, and handed it to her. “We should have called for backup.”