“That’s a control issue?”
“Yes. I have to learn to let go, to trust someone else without giving up who I am. And you have to learn to trust yourself in order to be who you need to be.”
Somewhat cautiously, Rafe said, “Are you channeling this Bishop of yours?”
“I know how it sounds, believe me. Why do you think I’ve been fighting this so hard? But the truth is, neither one of us has enough faith in ourselves.”
“Isabel, that sounds to me like something that will take time to get itself resolved. We don’t have time.”
Isabel began moving down the hallway toward the conference room. “No, we don’t. Which is why we’ll have to take care of our issues on the fly.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Don’t worry. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last few years it’s that we can make giant leaps when we have to.”
“That’s the part that worries me,” Rafe said. “Why we might have to.”
“Alan, I don’t have time for this,” Mallory told him as they stood just inside the foyer of the police department.
“Make time,” he insisted. “Look, Mal, I know you don’t want us publicly linked, but I’ve been doing some digging, and there’s something you need to know.”
Warily, she said, “About the case? Then why tell just me?”
“Call it a good-faith gesture. I could have put it in today’s paper, but I didn’t.”
After a moment, she said, “I’m listening.”
“I know there were two other sets of murders, one five and one ten years ago, in two other states.”
“How did you-”
“I have sources. Never mind that. I also know that the FBI has sent investigators back to those towns to ask more questions.”
Mallory hesitated, then said grudgingly, “We don’t have the reports yet.”
“There hasn’t been time, I know. But one of my sources had occasion to talk to an investigator from the second series of murders.”
“‘Had occasion’? Alan-”
“Just listen. The investigator said there was something about the first murder that bugged him. It was just a little thing, so minor he didn’t even put it in any of his reports. It was an earring.”
“What?”
“They’d found her body out in the open, of course, the way all the others would be found. But the investigator checked out her apartment. And when he searched her bedroom, he found an earring on her dresser. Never found a match for it.”
“So? Women lose earrings all the time, Alan.”
“Yeah, I know. But what bugged the investigator was that the victim didn’t wear earrings. She didn’t have pierced ears.”
Mallory shrugged. “Then a friend must have lost it.”
“None of her friends claimed it. Not one. A valuable diamond earring, and nobody claimed it. It was an unanswered question, and it bugged him, has ever since.”
Patiently, she said, “Okay, he found an earring he could never explain. How do you expect that to help us?”
“It’s a hunch, Mal, and I wanted to let you know I was following it up. I’ve already talked to a friend of the second victim in Florida, and she claims to have found a single earring among her friend’s things. I have somebody checking out the Alabama murders too. I think it has something to do with how he got the women to meet him.”
“Alan-”
“I’m going to check it out. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Mallory thought he said something else, but a crash of thunder made it impossible to hear whatever it was, and a moment later he was gone.
She stared after him.
4:00 PM
“It’s no use,” Hollis said finally. “I don’t know if it’s the storm or me, but I just can’t concentrate. And the energy of you two is not helping. If anything, it’s hurting.”
“We were with you the first time you saw Jamie,” Isabel reminded her. “Right here in this room.”
“Yeah, but it was before you two started seriously sparking,” Hollis reminded her.
“Just tell me we don’t have to hold hands or light candles,” Mallory begged, pulling another folder toward her and looking through it with a frown.
Hollis shook her head. “What I’m telling you is that if Jamie is hovering anywhere around a doorway, it isn’t mine. Or I can’t open the door. Either way, it’s not going to happen today.”
Rafe leaned back in his chair, saying, “Look, there has to be another way to do this. Plain, old-fashioned police work. If Jamie had a secret place, there has to be a way for us to find it.”
Hollis said, “And we need to do it before the six o’clock news. But no pressure.”
Mallory said, “Reports coming in from all area banks have been negative. Nobody has recognized Jamie’s photo or her name, and there’s no way for us to guess what alias she might have used. If she’s been socking away money for years with her little S amp;M sideline, she’s had plenty of time to construct a really solid one we may never find. And I can’t find anything about stray or missing jewelry, so I think Alan’s off track with that one.”
“It’s that note I don’t like,” Rafe said.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Isabel said. “We knew I was on his list.”
She pulled the note toward her and frowned down at it. “Our trust. They weren’t worthy of our trust.”
“Maybe he really is schizophrenic,” Mallory said.
“Yeah, but even so, the first note made a clear distinction. He wasn’t killing them because they were blondes. This note links the one who wrote the note and the killer. They weren’t worthy of our trust. If he’s schizophrenic, then I’d say he’s on the edge of a major identity crisis.”
“He didn’t have one before?” Hollis murmured.
“I don’t think he knew he had one. I mean, I think there was a part of him listening to whatever it was urging him to kill, and another part of him that had no idea that was happening.”
“A split personality?” Hollis asked.
“Maybe. They’re a lot more rare than people realize, but it is possible that’s what we have in this case. One part of his mind, the sane part, may have been in control most of the time.”
“And now?” Rafe asked.
“Now,” Isabel said, “I think the sane part of his mind is getting lost, submerged. I think he’s losing control.”
“It’s all about control.”
“No, it’s all about relationships. It’s still all about relationships. Look at this note. He believes these women have violated-or, in my case, will violate-his trust. There’s a secret he’s protecting, and he’s convinced the women he kills threaten to expose that secret.”
“So they know him.”
“He thinks they do.”
Rafe looked at Isabel steadily. “Then he thinks you know him.”
“I think I do too.”
The looming storm only fed their sense of urgency, at least in part because it seemed to surround them all day long without actually hitting Hastings. Tree limbs were blown around, power crews were kept busy repairing downed electrical lines, and thunder boomed and rolled while lightning flashed in the weird twilight.
It was as if the whole world was on the verge of something, hesitating, waiting.
By five o’clock that afternoon, they had paperwork scattered across the conference table, pinned to the bulletin boards, and stacked on two of the chairs. Forensics reports, background checks on the victims, statements from everyone involved, and postmortems complete with photographs.