The discovery of the skeleton and the skull on Ludlam Avenue had added fresh impetus to her search for a link that would tie together the two killers, old and new.
She had the same feeling that she experienced when she was working on a defense—the sense of being on the right path, the certain knowledge that somehow she would find what she needed to prove her theory.
She was also absolutely certain that, unless he was stopped, the copycat killer would take another life on Saturday, the 31st.
At nine o’clock, George Lawrence phoned. “Emily, my mother and I went through all those photograph albums and memorabilia that she has stashed away in the attic. We didn’t want you to have to wade through any more of this stuff than necessary, so we culled anything that wasn’t relevant. If it’s all right with you, I’ll drop off the rest of it in a half hour or so.”
“That would be wonderful.” Emily rushed upstairs to shower and had just finished dressing when the doorbell rang.
George Lawrence entered with two heavy boxes. He was wearing a windbreaker and slacks, and Emily’s immediate impression was that he appeared far more vulnerable today than his composed exterior had suggested when she met him on Saturday.
He carried the boxes into the dining room and set them on the floor. “You can go through them at your convenience,” he said.
He looked around the dining room, taking in the piles of papers on the chairs, the drawing board on the table. “You look pretty busy. Don’t feel rushed to return this stuff. Mother hasn’t looked at it for at least twenty years. When you’re ready, give her a call. The housekeeper’s husband will pick it up.”
“That’s perfect. Now let me show you what I’m trying to do here,” Emily offered.
George Lawrence bent attentively over the table as she showed how she was recreating the layout of the town in the 1890s.
“There were a lot fewer houses then, as you would know better than I,” Emily told him, “and the records aren’t complete. I’m sure I’ll learn something from your material that I don’t have yet.”
“This is your home?” he asked, touching the top of one of the Monopoly houses.
“Yes.”
“And this is ours?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly are you trying to do?”
“Figure out how three young women could have vanished without a trace. I’m looking for a house of one of their friends—one of the young male friends, perhaps—where they might have been enticed inside. For example, I met Carolyn Taylor at your luncheon the other day. She told me that her relative Phyllis Gates, who was a friend of my ancestor Madeline and your ancestor Julia Gordon, thought Madeline’s fiancé Douglas Carter killed her.”
Emily pointed. “Think about this. Here’s the Shapley house, and here, right across the street, is the Carter house. Supposedly, Douglas missed the early train home the day Madeline vanished. But did he?”
“Surely that was checked out at the time?”
“I’ve been promised a look at the police records. I’ll be very interested to see what they show. Visualize that day. Madeline was sitting on the porch, waiting for Douglas. I don’t think she would have just gotten up and gone for a walk without calling in to tell her mother. But suppose Douglas suddenly appeared, on his porch, and she ran down to greet him?”
“And he pulled her into the house, killed her, and hid her body until he could find a way to bury it in her own backyard?” George Lawrence looked skeptical. “What would his motive be?”
“I don’t know, and admittedly it is a farfetched theory. On the other hand, I’ve found indications that his cousin Alan Carter was in love with Madeline as well. His family lived in the house on Ludlam Avenue where the bodies were found yesterday. Suppose he came by in a closed carriage and, perhaps, told Madeline that Douglas had been in an accident?”
“We heard about the discovery yesterday, of course. Now the Harper family has to face what we faced last week. They’re from the Philadelphia area. We don’t know them personally, but we do have mutual friends.”
The stark pain George Lawrence was experiencing was evident to Emily as, in a tone that was both bitter and sad, he said, “Maybe the Harpers and Amanda and I will end up in the same support group.”
“How is Amanda doing?” Emily asked. “I admired her so much on Saturday. It must have been so terribly difficult for her, for all of you.”
“It was, and as you saw, Amanda was wonderful. Having the baby here was a big help. But Christine and Tom and the baby went home on Sunday. We visited the cemetery yesterday, and Amanda absolutely fell apart. I think that was probably good. She needed to let it out. Well, I’m on my way. We’re starting home this afternoon. Mother said to call her if you have any questions.”
As she closed the door behind George Lawrence, the phone rang. It was Nick Todd.
Emily was somewhat chagrined to realize that her emotions on hearing his voice were mixed. On the one hand, she was glad that he called. On the other, she was disappointed that he had not bothered to phone since the weekend to ask if she had had any more problems with the stalker.
But then his shy explanation pleased her: “Emily, I realize I had a hell of a nerve to try to practically drag you out of your house the other night. It’s just that I was terribly troubled when I realized that the stalker had left that photograph. I would have called before, but I didn’t want to become a public nuisance to you.”
“You mean a private nuisance. Trust me, that’s the last thing I’d ever consider you to be.”
“No more incidents with your stalker, I hope?”
“Not a one. And Monday, my friend Eric Bailey came down from Albany and installed security cameras around the outside of the house. The next time someone tries to slip something under the door, he’ll soon see his own picture on a mug sheet.”
“And you turn your security system on when you’re alone in the house?”
It’s not on now, Emily thought. “Always at night.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have it on during the day as well.”
“I guess it wouldn’t. But I don’t want to live my life in a cage. I don’t want to step out on the porch for a breath of air and have that banshee wail go off because I forgot the alarm was on.” A slight edge had crept into her voice.
“Emily, I’m sorry. I don’t know what makes me think I have the right to act like some kind of damn monitor.”
“You don’t need to apologize. You sound like a very nice, concerned friend. I intend to be very careful, but there is a point where I begin to feel as if whoever is doing this is winning. I’m trying not to let that happen.”
“Believe it or not, I do understand. The papers are full of what happened in Spring Lake yesterday.”
“Yes, it’s become quite a sensation in the media. I was out jogging and taking a few mental notes for that project I mentioned I was starting when I saw them digging in that yard.”
“The stories say the police got an anonymous tip. Have you any idea where it came from?”
As soon as they were spoken, Emily would have taken back her next two words if it were possible: “From me,” she said, then immediately had to explain about the postcard.
From the shocked silence at the other end of the phone, she realized that Nick Todd had the reaction to that information that she would have expected from her parents.
Finally he said, “Emily, do you think there is even the slightest chance that this Spring Lake killer is also the guy who stalked you in Albany?”
“No, I don’t. And neither does Detective Browski.”
Mentioning the name of the Albany policeman meant filling Nick in on Ned Koehler’s confession.
When the conversation ended, she had firmly refused Walter Todd’s offer of a bodyguard, and accepted Nick’s invitation to have a return brunch at the Old Mill on Sunday.
“I only hope we won’t be talking about another murder,” she said.
Long after they had said go
od-bye, Nick Todd sat at his desk, his hands folded. Emily, he thought, why are you so smart and still so dense? Has it never occurred to you that you might be targeted as the next victim?
fifty-one ________________
TOMMY DUGGAN and Pete Walsh began the morning in Elliot Osborne’s office, where the desk was covered in newspapers. “You’re not very photogenic, Tommy,” Osborne commented.
“I hadn’t seen that one,” Tommy muttered. The picture had been taken yesterday and showed him leaving the Ludlam Avenue house. Studying it, he began to consider paying more attention to his diet.
Walsh, of course, photographed like the all-American jock. “Too bad you didn’t try out for Law & Order,” Tommy observed tartly, looking at a photo of his partner.
“I should have. I was Joe Fish in the fourth-grade school play, Joe Fish and His Toy Store,” Pete told him. “That was the lead.”
“All right, let’s leave it at that,” Osborne decided.
The moment of levity vanished. Osborne nodded to Duggan. “You first.”
Tommy had his notebook open. “As you know, we now have a positive ID on the skeleton we found yesterday. The dental records confirm it to be the remains of Carla Harper. The section of scarf apparently used to strangle her is part of the same scarf that was used to strangle Martha Lawrence. The killer used one end piece on Martha, and the center piece on Carla. The third piece is missing.”
“Meaning that if the killer follows what seems to be his plan, he’ll use the scarf again on Saturday.” Osborne frowned and tilted back his chair. “No matter how many cops we have patrolling Spring Lake, we can’t be on every street, in every backyard. How’s the background check on Wilcox progressing?”
“So far there’s nothing much more than we had before. To go over it quickly, he was an only child, raised in Long Island. Father died when he was a baby. Very close to his mother, a schoolteacher, who helped him with his homework, I guess. Anyway, he was always at the head of his class.
“His father’s sister lived in Spring Lake, which is his connection here. He visited her every summer, for years. His mother died when he was thirty-eight, and a couple of years later, he married Rachel.” Tommy paused. “Chief, if she were my wife, I’d get a job as a traveling salesman.
“He went up the usual academic ladder and was finally offered the presidency of Enoch College in Ohio. Retired twelve years ago at age fifty-five. He writes for academic journals and has done considerable research on the history of this area and written articles about it for the local papers. He recently told the Spring Lake librarian that he’s writing a novel with the old Monmouth Hotel as the setting.”
“No smoking guns there,” Osborne observed.
“If Emily Graham is right, there may be. She thinks we have a copycat killer who found explicit details of the 1890s murders and is basing his actions on them. Something else. We’ve learned that Wilcox abruptly resigned his presidency of Enoch College. At the time, he’d just had his contract renewed and had all kinds of plans for further expansion, lecture series with major speakers, all that stuff.”
“Any explanation?”
“Ill health was the official reason. Apparently a serious heart condition. Got a big, tearful send-off. They named a building after him.”
Tommy smiled grimly. “Guess what?”
Elliot Osborne waited. He knew Tommy Duggan liked to present juicy information with a flair. Like pulling a rabbit from a hat, he thought.
“Let’s have it, Tommy,” he said crisply. “You’re on to something.”
“Well maybe. It’s more of a hunch than anything concrete. I’d bet the ranch that he has no more heart trouble than you or me or Pete. My guess is that either he was told to resign, or resigned on his own because he had a big problem that he didn’t want made public. Now our job is to squeeze out of him what it was.”
“We’re seeing him at three o’clock,” Pete Walsh volunteered. “We thought it would be a good idea to let him squirm a little while waiting for us.”
“It is a good idea.” Osborne made a move to get up, but Pete Walsh had more to say.
“Just to keep you posted, sir, I spent last evening going through the records of the police investigation about the disappearance of those three girls in the 1890s.”
It was obvious to Osborne that the newest detective on his staff wanted to impress him. “Did you find anything at all useful?”
“Not that I could see. It’s like what’s been happening now. The girls seem to have vanished off the face of the earth.”
“You’re giving a copy of those records to Emily Graham?” Osborne asked.
Pete looked worried. “I cleared it with the first assistant.”
“I know you did. I’m generally not in favor of any records, even if they’re over one hundred years old, being made available outside the usual channels, but if you’ve promised them to her, I’ll let it happen.”
Elliot Osborne stood up decisively, a signal that the meeting was over.
Duggan and Walsh got to their feet. “One piece of good news,” Tommy added as he headed to the door. “Dr. Madden’s killer is better at strangling people than at whacking computers. Our research people were afraid the hard drive had been damaged, but they’ve been able to get it going. With any luck we’ll retrieve Madden’s files—and maybe find out that a guest at the Lawrence party that night four and a half years ago also spent some of his time with a shrink who specialized in regression therapy.”
fifty-two ________________
“BOB, WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO PULL ON ME?”
“I wasn’t aware that I was trying to pull anything on you.”
“Where did you go last night?”
“When I couldn’t sleep, I went downstairs as usual, and read. I came up about five o’clock, took a sleeping pill, and for once it worked.”
It was nearly noon. Robert Frieze had come downstairs to find Natalie, his wife, sitting in the living room, obviously waiting for him.
“You look very nice,” he observed. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I have a lunch date.”
“I was thinking of inviting you to lunch.”
“Don’t bother. Go over and gladhand your customers at The Four Seasons. If you can find any, that is.”
“The name of my restaurant is The Seasoner. It is not The Four Seasons.”
“No, it sure isn’t. No argument about that.”
Bob Frieze looked at his beautiful wife, taking in her shimmering blond hair, her near-perfect features, her catlike turquoise eyes. Remembering how exciting he had once found her, he was amazed at how detached he had begun to feel about her now.
More than detached, he realized. Fed up. Sick to death of her.
Natalie was wearing a tailored dark green pantsuit that he had never seen before. Obviously new. Obviously pricey. He wondered how she found room for it in her closet.
“Since I’m not to have the honor of your company, I’ll be on my way,” he said.
“Not yet, you won’t.” Natalie got to her feet swiftly. “Believe it or not, I’m not sleeping very well myself. I came down here at two this morning. You weren’t here, Bobby. And your car was gone. Now will you please explain to me where you were?”
She wouldn’t tell me that unless it’s true, Frieze thought frantically. I don’t know where I was. “Natalie, I was so tired I forgot. I did go out for a spin. Wanted to get some fresh air and do some heavy thinking.” He groped for words. “It’s going to be a setback, but I’ve decided to take Bonetti’s offer, even though he’s low-balled me. We’ll sell this house and move to Manhattan, maybe take a smaller apartment than we’d planned, and—”
Natalie interrupted. “When you were taking your spin last night to clear your head, you apparently thought that a drink would clear it more. A drink with a friend, I mean. Here’s what I found in your pocket.” She tossed a piece of paper at him.
He read what was written on it. “Hi, handsome. My number is 555-1974.
Don’t forget to call. Peggy.”
“I don’t know how that got there, Natalie,” he said.
“I do, Bobby. Someone named Peggy put it there. I have news for you. Get rid of that restaurant. Sell this house. Pay off your stock loans and cash out your holdings. And then figure out what you were worth the day I became your blushing bride.”
She stood up and walked over to him, brought her face to within inches of his.
“Let me explain why. It’s because half of what you were worth that day is what I intend to take out of this marriage.”
“You’re out of your mind, Natalie.”
“Am I? Bobby, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the night at the Lawrence party. You were wearing that boxy jacket that you think is straight from the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly. You could have hidden that sash under it. And the next morning when I got up, you were digging in the garden. Any chance you were getting rid of Martha’s body until you could move it to the backyard of the Shapley house?”
“You can’t believe that!”
“Maybe I can. And maybe I can’t. You’re a strange man, Bob. There are times when you look at me as if you don’t know me. You have a way of just disappearing without telling me where you’re going. Maybe it’s my civic duty to tell Detective Duggan that I’ve become concerned about your behavior and, for your own sake as well as for the safety of the young women in this community, feel I have to report it.”
The veins in Robert Frieze’s forehead began to bulge. He grasped Natalie’s wrist and tightened his grip on it till she cried out in pain. His face was flushed with rage.
Between clenched teeth he spat out, “You tell Duggan, or anyone, a story like that, and you’d better start being concerned for yourself! Got it?”
fifty-three ________________
AT 3:00 A.M. on Wednesday morning, the missing Joel Lake was found. He was in the process of burglarizing a house in Troy when the police arrived, summoned by the silent alarm.