“If I’d stabbed him, I would have had blood on a lot more than just my hands,” I pointed out, even though I was talking when I should have stayed quiet.
“I don’t recall mentioning that he’d been stabbed.”
“I talked to my mother-in-law,” I said. “I know you did, too. She told me what happened.”
“Ah, sure. Of course. But you admit fighting with Mr. Ryan?”
“I’m not admitting anything.”
The detective nodded. “Sure. I understand. What about your wife? Did you fight with her about her cheating on you?”
I still said nothing, but I felt my heartbeat take off again.
“I mean, if my wife did that to me, I’d break a few windows and probably some other things,” Detective Bushing went on. “And you’ve got a temper, right, Mr. Moran? I know about your assault arrests. People who mess with you get their faces bashed in, don’t they?”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Yeah. They probably all had it coming. I get it. Say, you work at the LaSalle Plaza Hotel, don’t you?”
My brow wrinkled with puzzlement at the shift in the conversation. “Yes, that’s right.”
“You handle their events?”
“Yes.”
“Nice place.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I went to a wedding there a few years ago.”
“We do a lot of weddings,” I said.
Detective Bushing dug his fingers into his open briefcase and pulled out a photograph, which he laid on the coffee table in front of me. The picture showed a pretty twentysomething blond woman in a jogging outfit. In the background, I spotted Lake Michigan and the planetarium.
“Do you recognize this woman, Mr. Moran?”
“No.”
He extracted another photograph from his briefcase. This one showed another young, attractive blonde, seated in a restaurant with a drink in front of her.
“How about her?” he asked.
“No.”
He dug into the briefcase again. Another photograph, another blonde.
“This one?”
“No,” I said again.
And once more. Again I told him I had no idea who the woman was. That was the truth. They were all strangers to me.
“None of these women look familiar?”
“No, they don’t.”
“It seems to me they all look a lot like your wife,” Detective Bushing said.
I glanced at the photographs again, and I realized that he was right. There was no denying the resemblance. The hair, the look, the smiles — they definitely all had a touch of Karly in them.
“A little, I suppose. Who are they?”
“They’re murder victims, Mr. Moran.”
I began to feel dizzy. “Murder?”
“Yeah. All four stabbed to death in the past few weeks. We figured the cases were connected, because the method was the same and the victims all looked so much alike. We couldn’t figure out what they had in common, though. Their homes, work, background — all different. It was driving me crazy, because I couldn’t find any overlap, nothing that would suggest how the same killer would have come into contact with them. Until very recently, that is.”
“I hope you don’t think the connection is that they look like Karly. Because they look like a million other blond women, too.”
“True. That’s true. No, that wasn’t the connection. I mean, it’s interesting, but only because of what else we found. Actually, I stumbled onto it mostly by accident. A witness mentioned something to me in passing, and that tied in with a restaurant receipt I remembered from one of the other victims. See, what links these women together is that they all attended an event in the ballroom of the LaSalle Plaza Hotel within a few days of when they were killed.”
I couldn’t stop myself. I gasped. “What?”
“That’s right. So I’m sure you see the problem here, Mr. Moran. Four women who look an awful lot like your wife got murdered right after they went to your hotel. And now your wife is dead, and so is the man who slept with her. Stabbed. Just like my other vics. To top it off, today we get a 911 call from someone calling himself Dylan Moran and saying he’s ready to confess to murder.”
I bolted out of the chair.
“You going somewhere, Mr. Moran?”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
I turned around and stumbled down the hallway. I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. My eyes were drawn to the knife on the floor. The faces of the women in Detective Bushing’s photographs smiled at me in my head. I didn’t know them. I had never met them. And yet, now that I was alone, something about them stirred echoes. I remembered them. Worse, the echoes in my head weren’t of these women alive. I could see them dead. Their faces drained and pale. I could see my hands, covered in their blood.
They all looked like Karly.
My stomach turned over. I didn’t need to fake it. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door, and I fell to my knees at the toilet and vomited, once, twice, three times. When my stomach was empty, I rinsed my mouth. I stared at myself in the mirror, but the man staring back was the stranger I had seen for days. Exhausted. Out of control, out of my mind. I didn’t recognize who I was anymore.
From outside the bedroom, I heard a pounding on the door. “Mr. Moran?” Detective Bushing called.
“I’ll be right out.”
As soon as I said that, I went to the bathroom window. I slid it open silently and studied the walkway between my building and the neighbor’s next door. I didn’t see any police. As quietly as I could, I slithered through the opening and dropped to the concrete below me.
I grabbed hold of the adjacent fence and threw myself over.
Somewhere close by, the rottweiler began barking again. I heard voices, saw streams of light coming my way. A man shouted.
“Stop!”
I took off running and didn’t look back.
Chapter 12
An early sunrise broke over the lake and made pink slashes in the clouds. I sat on a bench by the water at the far end of Navy Pier. The old brick pier building behind me was closed, and I had the boardwalk mostly to myself. On my left, overnight lights lingered in the downtown skyscrapers. The wind made whitecaps on the dark surface of the lake.
Physically, I was tired from running and from lack of sleep. I’d barely made it out of the neighborhood without being captured, but fortunately, I knew the area better than the police did, from my teenage days exploring the riverbank with Roscoe. I assumed they’d be looking for me throughout the city now. The serial killer, on the loose. Get him before he kills again.
A bus took me downtown. When I got off, I stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store to clean myself up. I assumed it wasn’t safe to use any of my credit cards, but fortunately, my wallet was flush with cash. I shaved and washed my hair and sponged off the sweat. I bought a pair of sunglasses, but the whole effect didn’t make for much of a disguise. From there, with my head down and my mind spinning, I walked the empty streets to the pier.
I’d been waiting for an hour now. I was getting nervous about staying in one place for so long. I’d called Eve Brier, but I didn’t know if she would come, or whether she’d send the police after me instead. But when I glanced down the pier, I saw her heading my way, her steps quick and determined.
She wore a knee-length navy-blue dress, which the fierce wind was playing with, plus the same dark trench coat she’d worn when we met in Grant Park. She had a beret tugged low on her forehead, and she had to keep it in place with one hand while her long hair swirled around her face. She sat down on the bench a couple of feet away from me, as if we were strangers, which we still were. At least to me. Her eyes were lost in the lake, but then she turned to stare at me with a passionate intensity.