I left my things on the desk and wandered around my office.
It wasn’t a small room, nor was it palatial. Fifteen by twenty-two feet, maybe. Space enough for a chunky desk, a file cabinet, a seating area, and a couple of bookcases. Three windows and a solitary French door brought in abundant light. Double doors-not side by side, but back to back-one opening in, one opening out, provided security and soundproofing to the interior hallway that Diane and I shared. We’d spent a bundle during remodeling constructing the interior walls of offset studs and had even set the extra-sound-retardant Sheetrock in channels, all in an effort to reduce noise transmission from the office to the hallway and from office to office. The entire back hallway was separated from the waiting area by a door with a deadbolt lock. After an intrusion years before, Diane’s husband had installed a sophisticated alarm system in the building, too.
I assured myself that there was no way someone could eavesdrop on a psychotherapy session in my office.
What about someone in Diane’s office? Could they have eavesdropped? No, that wasn’t possible. During the course of an average day the only sound I heard through our acoustically deadened adjoining wall was an occasional burst of Diane’s sharp laughter. I couldn’t recall a single instance of overhearing one of her patient’s words. The tones of normal conversation just didn’t make it through the walls.
I plopped down on the sofa and reviewed my day.
No matter from what angle I examined it, I couldn’t remember a solitary indiscretion on my part regarding Gibbs’s admissions to me about the other women. I hadn’t written any of the data in my case notes. And I hadn’t spoken a word about it to anyone.
Not even Sam? No, not even Sam.
Which meant one thing: The cops were developing the same information on their own.
What other conclusion was possible?
The answer to that question would come, unfortunately, soon enough.
FORTY-ONE
Before I left their home, the Wolf sisters invited me to come back in a few days for Thanksgiving supper. They explained that they usually deep-fried a turkey for the large group of family and friends that gathered in their home, but this year they were planning to slow-roast something they called a turducken for the first time, and thought that I would be a perfect addition to their holiday table.
“You deep-fry your turkey?” I said. When I’d first heard about people preparing their birds that way, I thought it was an urban myth, like jackalopes. Then the Boulder Fire Department started answering calls for turkey-fryer fires, and I accepted that it was a real thing, though I still couldn’t figure out what people did with all the leftover oil.
Mary Ellen said, “It’s the best way to do it, absolutely. Moist? Oh, Mr. Purdy. But we’re going to try something new and finally do a turducken this year. Mr. Prudhomme, Mr. Paul Prudhomme from New Orleans”-when she spoke the name of the Louisiana city, it was only one word, and it was absent thew,and when she spoke Mr. Prudhomme’s name, it was with a reverence customarily reserved for heroes or saints-“recommends a very slow oven, so we’ll actually have to start roasting that delight before we go to bed on Wednesday evening. The house should smell like the Lord’s own grandmother’s kitchen when we awaken Thursday morning.”
Mary Pat was the one who recognized the ignorance in my eyes. “A turducken is a Cajun treat, Mr. Purdy. Oyster dressing and andouille sausage and a few other goodies are stuffed into a chicken that is then stuffed into a duck that is then stuffed into a turkey. More dressing is added between each bird during the assembly. It’s all boneless. It’s all delicious.”
I tried to imagine the cascade of flavors that Mary Pat was describing, and I was momentarily lost in the fantasy. My hand crept up the contours of my tummy until my thumb found the lower edge of my sternum. Sculpted in place, my hand could have been a monument to my ambivalence: Part of my hand-the part caressing my gut-honored my usually indulgent appetite, part of it-the thumb on my sternum-honored my cardiologist’s admonitions.
“And you roast this… thing for how long?” I asked. “It must weigh most of a ton.”
“We are doing a large one. Fourteen hours should bring it close to perfection. Then it will need to rest a while to stitch the flavors together before we carry it to the table.”
With a smile as warm as apple pie, Mary Pat said, “And you haven’t had a real Thanksgiving supper until you’ve tasted my sister’s gravy, or her cornbread.”
Mary Ellen savored the compliment. “Red pepper,” she explained. “Our mother’s secret. Abundant red pepper.”
“Can I let you know?” I asked them. “My plans for Thursday are still a little up in the air.”
“No need to call. You just come by if you can. We’ll have a place all set at the adult table for you, and you can be certain that the good Lord willing there will be no shortage of food beneath this roof on the day we give thanks. Mary Ellen will start carving right around two.”
Less than a mile from the twins’ home I stopped on the shoulder of a fallow field of what I was still guessing had been cotton and called Alan Gregory to catch him up on what I was up to in Georgia, and then I called Gibbs Storey to tell her that I thought it was premature to assume her husband was dead.
“He’s alive?” she replied, of course. What else would she say?
I’d told her I thought that was a premature conclusion, too. But I suggested prudence might be warranted, and counseled her to temporarily move someplace where her husband couldn’t easily find her.
“Sterling won’t hurt me,” she said.
“If I had a dollar for every time a woman’s told me that in the past twenty years, I’d be driving a Lincoln.”
She sighed at me and told me she’d think about it.
“Trust me, Gibbs. You’re not thinking straight. After what you’ve been through…”
“I’m fine.”
It’s what I expected. I’d done what I could do. I folded up my phone and started driving again.
An hour later I was on the outskirts of Albany, Georgia, trying to decide between two adjacent motels for a place to spend the night when Lucy paged me using our personal code that indicated an emergency. At full arm’s length I could barely read the code: 911 followed by the phone number. Imaginative, no. But it worked for us.
I picked the motel that wasn’t a national chain and finished checking in before I used my cell to return Lucy’s call. The motel room was full of my grandmother’s oldest chenille, the air was musty, and the background smells in the shadowy room were born of burnt tobacco and constant humidity and were as unfamiliar to me as the accents of all the people I was meeting in Georgia.
Lucy had left me her own cell number, not her office number. I figured that was important.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Hi, Sammy. I really miss you. You okay?”
“Later, what’s up?” She didn’t 911 me to ask me how I was doing.
“Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but Crime Stoppers-yeah, I’m serious: Crime Stoppers-got a tip, anonymous, of course, that Sterling Storey may be responsible for as many as four murders. All women, all in towns where he’s worked over the years. He travels around producing sporting events on cable.”
“I know about his job. Does the story check out?”
“At least one piece of it seems to. There’s a woman in Indianapolis who went missing in the same circumstances that the tipster reported. She’s the same general description as Louise Lake-single, attractive, late twenties-and she worked where the guy said she worked. Donald and I have just started putting it together. There are other teams tracking down all the other women, but I haven’t heard anything about their progress.”