Full dark, no stars

“Did my husband know you had a… a particular interest in him?”

“No. Far as he was concerned, I was just old Limpin’ Le

I fear you plenty.

“It’s not much of a case,” she said. “Assuming you were trying to make one.”

“No case at all!” He laughed cheerily, but his hazel eyes were cold. “If I could have made a case, me and Mr. Anderson wouldn’t have had our little conversation in his office, Darcy. We would have had it in my office. Where you don’t get to leave until I say you can. Or until a lawyer springs you, of course.”

“Maybe it’s time you stopped dancing, Holt.”

“All right,” he agreed, “why not? Because even a box-step hurts me like hell these days. Damn that old Dwight Cheminoux, anyway! And I don’t want to take your whole morning, so let’s speed this up. I was able to confirm a Toyota 4Ru

“That’s right. He liked it, so he traded for the same kind.”

“Yep, men will do that. And the 4Ru

“Not immediately,” Darcy said with a smile. “He had that 4Ru

“I know. He traded in 2004, not long before Andrea Honeycutt was murdered down Nashua way. Blue and gray Suburban; year of manufacture 2002. A Suburban of that approximate year and those exact colors was seen quite often in Mrs. Honeycutt’s neighborhood during the month or so before she was murdered. But here’s the fu

“Bob’s had Maine plates,” Darcy said. “As you very well know.”

“Acourse, acourse, but plates can be stolen, you know.”

“What about the Shaverstone murders, Holt? Was a blue and gray Suburban seen in Helen Shaverstone’s neighborhood?”

“I see you’ve been following the Beadie case a little more closely than most people. A little more closely than you first let on, too.”

“Was it?”

“No,” Ramsey said. “As a matter of fact, no. But a gray-over-blue Suburban was seen near the creek in Amesbury where the bodies were dumped.” He smiled again while his cold eyes studied her. “Dumped like garbage.”

She sighed. “I know.”

“No one could tell me about the license plate of the Suburban seen in Amesbury, but if they had, I imagine it would have been Massachusetts. Or Pe

He leaned forward.

“This Beadie sent us notes with his victims’ identification. Taunting us, you know-daring us to catch him. P’raps part of him even wanted to be caught.”

“Perhaps so,” Darcy said, although she doubted it.

“The notes were printed in block letters. Now people who do that think such printing can’t be identified, but most times it can. The similarities show up. I don’t suppose you have any of your husband’s files, do you?”

“The ones that haven’t gone back to his firm have been destroyed. But I imagine they’d have plenty of samples. Accountants never throw out anything.”

He sighed. “Yuh, but a firm like that, it’d take a court order to get anything loose, and to get one I’d have to show probable cause. Which I just don’t have. I’ve got a number of coincidences-although they’re not coincidences in my mind. And I’ve got a number of… well… propinquities, I guess you might call them, but nowhere near enough of them to qualify as circumstantial evidence. So I came to you, Darcy. I thought I’d probably be out on my ear by now, but you’ve been very kind.”

She said nothing.

He leaned forward even further, almost hunching over the table now. Like a bird of prey. But hiding not quite out of sight behind the coldness in his eyes was something else. She thought it might be kindness. She prayed it was.

“Darcy, was your husband Beadie?”

She was aware that he might be recording this conversation; it was certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Instead of speaking, she raised one hand from the table, showing him her pink palm.

“For a long time you never knew, did you?”

She said nothing. Only looked at him. Looked into him, the way you looked into people you knew well. Only you had to be careful when you did that, because you weren’t always seeing what you thought you were seeing. She knew that now.

“And then you did? One day you did?”

“Would you like another cup of coffee, Holt?”

“Half a cup,” he said. He sat back up and folded his arms over his thin chest. “More’d give me acid indigestion, and I forgot to take my Zantac pill this morning.”

“I think there’s some Prilosec in the upstairs medicine cabinet,” she said. “It was Bob’s. Would you like me to get it?”

“I wouldn’t take anything of his even if I was burning up inside.”

“All right,” she said mildly, and poured him a little more coffee.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Those women… all those women… and the boy, with his whole life ahead of him. That’s worst of all.”

“Yes,” she said, passing him the cup. She noticed how his hand trembled, and thought this was probably his last rodeo, no matter how smart he was… and he was fearsomely smart.

“A woman who found out what her husband was very late in the game would be in a hard place,” Ramsey said.

“Yes, I imagine she would be,” Darcy said.

“Who’d believe she could live with a man all those years and never know what he was? Why, she’d be like a whatdoyoucallit, the bird that lives in a crocodile’s mouth.”

“According to the story,” Darcy said, “the crocodile lets that bird live there because it keeps the crocodile’s teeth clean. Eats the grain right out from between them.” She made pecking motions with the fingers of her right hand. “It’s probably not true… but it is true that I used to drive Bobby to the dentist. Left to himself, he’d accidentally-on-purpose forget his appointments. He was such a baby about pain.” Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. She wiped them away with the heels of her hands, cursing them. This man would not respect tears shed on Robert Anderson’s account.

Or maybe she was wrong about that. He was smiling and nodding his head. “And your kids. They’d be run over once when the world found out their father was a serial killer and torturer of women. Then run over again when the world decided their mother had been covering up for him. Maybe even helping him, like Myra Hindley helped Ian Brady. Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

“Never mind, then. But ask yourself this: what would a woman in a difficult position like that do?”

“What would you do, Holt?”

“I don’t know. My situation’s a little different. I may be just an old nag-the oldest horse in the firebarn-but I have a responsibility to the families of those murdered women. They deserve closure.”

“They deserve it, no question… but do they need it?”

“Robert Shaverstone’s penis was bitten off, did you know that?”

She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the warm tears trickling through the lashes. Did not “suffer” my ass, she thought, and if Bob had appeared before her, hands out and begging for mercy, she would have killed him again.

“His father knows,” Ramsey said. Speaking softly. “And he has to live with that knowledge about the child he loved every day.”