He looked down at his boots, as if seeking wisdom. When his gaze met hers again, his eyes were bleak. “I think I’ve found out who this Will character is.”
“Who?”
He didn’t reply. Instead he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cheap cardboard photograph cover. It looked just like the one she’d found among Gerda’s things, the one that held the picture of her on the Shoot-the-Chutes ride. He handed it to her.
She opened the cover, and for a moment she thought it was the same picture. In the dim light of the church, it might well have been. The boat was the same, and it was filled with people, just like the other photograph. But closer inspection revealed that the occupants of the boat were different. She tilted the picture, trying to catch the light. After a moment she found Lisle. She was trying to look frightened but anyone could she was having the time of her life. She was clinging to a man’s arm, and unlike the man in Gerda’s photograph, this fellow was looking up, his face full to the camera.
He was Dirk Schyler.
12
“IT’S DIRK,” SHE SAID STUPIDLY. HER MIND couldn’t quite grasp the significance.
“Yeah, it’s him all right. And he’s with that girl, Lisle.”
She still wasn’t certain what it meant.
“Turn the picture over,” he suggested.
She turned the cover over and found nothing on the back. He took it impatiently from her hands, pulled the photograph from its frame, and handed it back to her. She recognized Lisle’s handwriting from the note she had left with Mrs. Elsworth. The words were scrawled in pencil, but they might as well have been written in blood: Me and Will at Coney Island.
“Dear heaven,” Sarah breathed, and then she couldn’t breathe anymore. She felt as if all the air in the church had suddenly evaporated.
She could see Dirk’s face, laughing and smirking at her efforts to find the man named Will out at Coney Island. She remembered how he’d stood there winking at the photographer when she’d inquired about him. Had the photographer recognized him and just pretended not to?
Then she remembered how he’d kissed her, pressing his mouth against hers so insistently, and how angry he’d been when she’d resisted his advances. Someone made a small, moaning sound, and she vaguely realized it was she.
“Sit down,” Malloy said gruffly, laying one of his beefy hands on her shoulder and forcing her down onto the pew.
Dirk had touched her. Dirk had kissed her. She felt unclean. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her lips in a vain effort to wipe away the memory of him.
Malloy, who missed nothing, said, “Did you kiss him?” His voice held equal measures of disbelief and disgust.
“Not willingly,” she informed him, equally disgusted.
“He tried to force himself on you?” Was that outrage? Malloy hardly seemed capable of such a thing, so Sarah must be imagining it.
“He tried to steal a kiss when we were in the tunnel on one of the rides,” she recalled, feeling sick to her stomach at the memory. “I pushed him away and told him to stop, and he did.”
“He didn’t get angry?” Malloy was sitting beside her now, leaning close, watching her face as if for clues.
Sarah tried to remember every detail. “I couldn’t see his expression because it was dark, but he sounded angry, at least at first. Not for long, though. He said something about my being a lady, and how he didn’t encounter many real ladies. He’d forgotten himself, he said.” She looked into Malloy’s dark eyes, searching for some reassurance. “I made him angry, Malloy. If he was the killer, then he would have killed me, too, wouldn’t he?”
She wanted so desperately to be right. She needed to be right, because if she wasn’t, then a man she’d known all her life was a killer.
But Malloy shook his head. “All the other girls let him have his way. He didn’t even have to force them. That’s when he beat them to death.”
“But we still don’t know for certain that Dirk is the one who killed them,” Sarah reminded him almost desperately, “even if he really is the man they all knew as Will.”
“I believe I’ve mentioned that before,” Malloy reminded her, although she could see it gave him no pleasure to be right. He wanted Dirk to be the killer, and not just because he wanted the killer caught. He wanted Dirk especially to be the guilty one, because he didn’t like him. “We need some proof.”
Sarah remembered what she’d learned yesterday. “I met with Bertha and Hetty yesterday. They said Lisle knew a man named Will, but she’d stopped seeing him because he hit her.”
“When was this?”
“It must have been earlier this summer, just after Coney Island opened on Memorial Day,” she guessed, glancing at the photograph she still held. “They said she let him… let him have his way. Then he got angry and called her a whore, and he hit her. She fought back, though. Apparently, she’s stronger than she appears. Was stronger,” she corrected herself, her voice catching. “Somehow she managed to get away.”
“Did Gerda know about this?”
“That’s the strange part. They said she did, which should have made her wary of him, but they also said she was the kind of girl who’d think something like that would never happen to her. She may not have told the others the name of her new benefactor because she didn’t want a lecture from Lisle.”
Malloy considered this for a moment. “It fits what we know about the killer. Maybe he gets mad at women who give in to him because he thinks they’re immoral or something and deserve to die. But why would he have gone after Lisle again? He must’ve known she’d be wary of him.”
“Oh, dear heaven!” Sarah exclaimed, covering her mouth as if she could stop the words that may have led to Lisle’s death.
“What is it?” he demanded, his voice too loud for a church.
“I… I led him to her!”
“What do you mean?”
“I… He was asking me about the crimes. I thought he was just interested!” she cried in her own defense.
Malloy nodded. “Go on. What did you tell him?”
“He asked me… No, he told me! He was the one who came up with the theory that Gerda hadn’t told anyone her new beau’s name because she wanted to keep the others from knowing who he was. He suggested they might want to steal him or maybe that Gerda had already stolen him from one of the others. He knew that’s what had happened!”
“Maybe,” Malloy reminded her. “What else?”
“He asked me… He wanted to know which of Gerda’s friends was most likely to have had a beau that Gerda would want to steal. I told him Lisle. Oh. Malloy, I led him right to her!” she wailed.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Malloy said with a kindness that surprised her. He was trying to assuage her guilt, but it wasn’t working.
“Yes, we do! I killed her, Malloy, just as surely as if I beat her myself!” The tears were welling in her eyes, hot as lava, burning and stinging and begging to be shed.
“Don’t be a fool! He would’ve figured it out himself eventually. Or else he would’ve just killed every girl who might’ve led us to him. You probably saved some lives by giving him Lisle’s name.”
She couldn’t bear his vindication, and she certainly didn’t deserve it. She’d caused Lisle’s death, and she would carry the knowledge to her grave. The only hope she had for retaining her sanity was to put a noose around the killer’s neck.
“What can we do now?” she asked. “Will you take him in and question him?”
“Not likely, a man in his position,” Malloy said. “If I did and couldn’t prove he was the killer, he’d have my job. More important, he’d be free to keep on killing, because he’d know the other detectives wouldn’t dare detain him again either, for fear of what he’d do to them.”