“When I was working for Lansford, she’d call my cell, tell me where to meet her.” He shrugged, but it hurt and he grew very still.
After several minutes, he spoke again. “I met her in New York on Sunday, checked out Enrico’s that night. We left Monday night, after Kirsten was done with Genny, to drive here. We only had two nights together, and now she’s gone from me.”
Genny—Comafield had called Kirsten’s victim by her first name, like she was a friend.
“I really tried to hate Lansford, because Kirsten did, but when he finally accepted his political future was wrecked, I kind of felt sorry for him. The old bastard. She told me how he was terrified of her, she could see it in his eyes, and she’d laugh.”
“Is that how you met Kirsten? Through her stepfather?”
“It was back three years ago.” He stilled a moment, then said, “I’d seen her before, at his office once or twice, but never met her. She didn’t live at home, but she crashed there occasionally, for the fun of it, she told me, to think about her mother going into her old room and wondering.
“But one time I couldn’t sleep even though it was really late. I looked out the window, saw Kirsten unlock the back door and slip inside. I snuck down to her, saw she was covered in blood and she was smiling so wide I could see her molars. And you want to know what? All she had to do was say my name and we ran back to my room. I tore those bloody clothes off her, and we had at it until I heard people moving around the next morning.”
“Do you know who she killed that night?”
“I know her first name was Arnette. Kirsten kept saying it over and over, said it sounded tasty on her tongue. I think her last name had something with a rug—Carpenter, that was it. She was a model, like Kirsten, and a pretend artist, Kirsten said. Kirsten despised her because she was a fake and a snob, said she had put her lights out right and proper, and she deserved it.
“We were together whenever possible from then on.”
“Did you know when she killed other women? Did she come to you afterward?”
“If she killed anybody else, she didn’t tell me. I never got to see her come in fresh from a kill again until—well, until she left San Francisco. I realized I missed it, missed the planning of it, watching her work the woman at the bar, watching her change her hair and her role whenever she stepped in to put her name on another lady’s dance card. I was her front man, always checked things out, kept an eye on what was going on while she was working. She never made a mistake until last night, with that redhead. I thought when she hooked up with that redheaded girl, she’d really hit the jackpot. I’ve never before seen her so involved; she was nearly thrumming with excitement—”
“With the thought of killing her?”
“Of course.”
Savich held himself still as a statue, couldn’t trust himself not to rip the IV lines from Comafield’s body. To listen to him talk so calmly about murdering Sherlock. He said very quietly, “The redhead is my wife. They had to pump her stomach.”
Comafield stared at him for a moment, then grinned. “Go figure that. That girl really is your wife? So she was in on the setup, too,” and he fell silent again.
Savich smoothed himself out. He didn’t know why he’d even told Comafield; it had just come out. He said, “Since you worked for Lansford, you couldn’t see her all that often when she left San Francisco.”
“Yeah, since I had to stick with him, it was difficult to get away to join her.” His voice trailed off, and Savich feared he’d fallen into a drugged stupor, but then he whispered, his eyes tightly closed, “I remember one night we were together in Cleveland. She told me she sometimes warmed her hands over the fires. ‘What fires?’ I asked. ‘In hell,’ she said, where she was sitting cross-legged next to her daddy while he told her what he did to have the most fun. And he’d ask her when she was going to get serious about her own work, when was she going to hit the road, like he did?
“Then she’d talk about how sexy her daddy said dead people were, but only when you were the one who put out their lights. Then that made them yours, and it was a fine thing to come back to visit your works of art and enjoy them, over and over, until they fell apart, and then they weren’t art anymore, they were trash. I didn’t want to know exactly what she meant, but deep down, I knew.”
Comafield’s words were slurring. Savich knew he didn’t have much more time before he was out of it. “Of course you knew, since I’m certain you’ve read everything written about Ted Bundy, including his taste for necrophilia.”
“Yeah, lots of it. Maybe it scared me a little, and then she’d shrug and look at me like she was—” He closed his eyes again—from the pain or the image?
“Like she was picturing you with catsup?”
That snapped Comafield’s eyes right open. “No, you bastard!” He swallowed, and Savich knew the morphine was slurring his brain as well as his speech. “Well, maybe, but I knew she’d never hurt me. Do you know, after her kills, she’d come back to our hotel and she’d always be flying high? She’d want sex and booze, and she’d want to dance and hoot. You know what else she did? She always dressed up like the woman she’d just killed. She liked to play that role as well as play the lead, she’d say. She had all these wigs, and she’d put on the one most like her woman-of-the-hour, she called them. And she’d sometimes let me play the kill and she’d—” His voice faltered.
“Yes?”
“—pretend to strangle me with the wire. But she never really hurt me—” His voice was fading.
“Bruce, were you her acolyte?”
Comafield’s eyes focused on Savich’s face. “Her acolyte? That sounds like I wore a black robe and chanted. No, you’ve got it all wrong, damn you. I didn’t wear robes and chant Latin. I was her rock; I tethered her to the world so she wouldn’t fly off the planet. She needed me. She loved me.”
“Did you love her?’
Comafield whispered, “Oh, yes. She could do what I never could. She was a whirlwind, always racing to catch her daddy. She was doing a countdown. I asked her how many women she had to kill to catch up to her daddy, and she said one hundred. She never told me how she came up with that number.
“Now it doesn’t matter. I won’t ever see her again.” His eyes were suddenly hard on Savich’s face. He whispered, “At least I know she’ll kill you. Wherever she was going, it’s off now, because she’s coming to kill you. Sweet Jesus, I’m going to die and I’ll never see her again.”
“You’re not going to die, Bruce.”
“Yes,” Comafield said very quietly, his voice nearly singsong with the morphine. “I know I am. I feel it. I wish I could see Kirsten just one more time, but I know I can’t.”
And Bruce Comafield turned his head away.
Savich went back to Sherlock’s room, ordered her to stop moving around and lie still, no arguing, and listen. Then he said to her, Coop, and Lucy, “Let me tell you about a very strange and sad couple.”
CHAPTER 47
They spoke to Mr. Ricky Levine, skinny and tall, standing at attention behind the small reception counter of Handler’s Inn. Savich thought he could still be in high school, with the acne on his chin, his belt pulled tight to keep his tan uniform pants up. He was so nervous his hands shook when they introduced themselves. He kept chewing on his lower lip, and had a hard time meeting their eyes. No, he told them, no, really, he didn’t know a Mr. Bruce Comafield. He’d remember a dude saddled with a name like that. He offered to let them see that he wasn’t registered in the computer.