My Boss is a Serial Killer (22 page)

“
What reason would I have to come to
your house anyway?” When I didn’t answer his question right away,
he folded his arms and glared at me. Bill was not a stupid man. He
could make as many leaps of logic as I could. “Well Carol, we have
some work to catch up on. If you’re not too nervous around me to
work, that is.”

I pressed my lips hard together, turned on my
heel and left him. This is really what chaps your hide about
working in an office. Regardless of what happens, be it disaster or
tragedy or serial killer, everyone is still expected to get their
work done.

I tried to type the dictation tapes and
couldn’t even concentrate on that. I couldn’t focus on my
computer’s monitor. I couldn’t make myself pay attention to the
morning’s mail.

What I felt was not comfortable or even
familiar; I had reached what I think they called a fork in the
road. I had to make a decision, and it wasn’t an easy one, not like
would I rather watch
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries
or
Angel
, Season 5 this weekend, not like would I rather paint
my kitchen orange or green.

No, this was would I rather press the issue
of the dead women or not. Bill Nestor was lying to me, but I didn’t
know why. In life sometimes it is okay to know that people are
lying to you. I’ve been lied to before and known that it was done
in an effort to protect me from something far less pleasant; hell,
sometimes it is pleasant and preferable to hear lies. Like: “No,
honey, I never even notice other women.” Or, “Gosh, Kay, I thought
your poem about playing volleyball for God was terrific.” Or, “Of
course, the employees here wash their hands before serving my
meals.” Even the time I spent in philosophy class learning about
the value of veracity didn’t convince me otherwise. Lies have their
good side as well as their bad.

I was very upset, and the root of it all was
not whether I was being told lies or whether I was involved in some
vast evil conspiracy of widow-killing, but whether I was obligated
to do anything about it all. I was just a secretary, for crying out
loud. If a woman wants to take the world in her hands, she probably
does not become a secretary. We secretaries like to do our typing
and then go home, leaving the big decisions and the big
responsibilities to someone else. I wanted to do that then. My
mistake in this whole mess was getting involved. How to become
un-involved, at this juncture, was the biggest, most unfathomable
question in my mind.

In my distress over the chasm between me and
Bill, I forgot completely about Suzanne. So she had quit; I didn’t
really care. So she had declared her intentions to Bill—big deal.
That was only news to him. Lucille caught my attention by the
reception desk as I listlessly wandered off to lunch at my allotted
time and said, “Ah can’t believe that Suzanne’s quitting. What
happened?”

I dared not utter a word of what I knew to
Lucille, or the knowledge would spread throughout the office at
goddess-speed. I was noncommittal in my response. “I haven’t talked
to her.”

“
She’s not even working today.” Lucille
looked miffed. “So much for two weeks’ notice, if you don’t even
bother to work them.”

I considered the humiliation I might feel in
Suzanne’s place and didn’t find it so strange. I wouldn’t want to
face Bill Nestor, either, if I’d been the one rejected. Charlene
Templeton appeared unexpectedly behind me, and Lucille turned the
same question to her. “Do y’all know why Suzanne quit?”

“
I only knew she was unhappy,” replied
Charlene, who appeared to be genuinely saddened. “I hate that. I
just hate it when we lose good people who have been here for so
long. It’s a blow to the whole firm.”

I exchanged a glance with Lucille, whose
thoughts had apparently gone the same direction as mine. Charlene
caught it and asked, “What?”

I admitted, “We, well, I, anyway…I didn’t
think you and Suzanne got along very well.”

Charlene stared at me. “Why would you think
that?”

Helpless in the face of all this denial I
swung back to Lucille, looking for help.

“
Well, y’all are always sniping at each
other,” answered the brazen Lucille. The term “y’all” softens a lot
of the force behind a phrase, and I wished I knew how to use
it.

Charlene gave a slow shake of her head. “No,
that’s just how Suzanne talks. It’s all right. I feel sorry for
her. She’s had a hard time. I know she’s unhappy.” Perplexed still
by our behavior, Charlene walked past us and went to the elevators.
“Are you coming, Carol?”

“
Yeah, not just yet.” Once Charlene was
gone, I looked back at Lucille and said, “I can’t cope with
magnanimous people.”

“
Ah think you’d get a different story
from Suzanne,” was Lucille’s response to that. Her eyes were
glittering. “There’s unhappy, and then there’s just plain catty.
We’re shed of her, whatever the reason, and Ah’m not
sorry.”

After the longest damned day of my whole
stint at MBS&K, during which time dragged so badly that I
thought I might have actually died and been consigned to Hell, Bill
poked his head out his office door and said, “Carol, can you come
in here for a minute?”

I hadn’t seen him since that morning. I took
his stack of letters, larger than usual because it contained makeup
work from those two days I was out the week before, and one of his
favorite pens, and went into his office. Once inside I set the
letters on his credenza and said, “If you hurry up and sign those,
I can have them out in the mail by 5:00.”

“
Just forget the letters for a minute.”
He didn’t take the pen from me. He didn’t close the door, either.
Leaning on his credenza, he folded his arms over his chest. Not
defensively this time, but shyly, like a man who just didn’t know
what to do with his hands. “I’m sorry about this
morning.”

Pensively I waited.

“
I was wrong to speak to you that way.
You’ve got to understand. I’ve been very concerned about this
situation, and you know that I don’t cope well with things that
feel threatening.”

I surveyed his office and saw a perfect line
of large paperclips end to end across his desk, and I wondered how
many times that day he had placed them, and how long it had taken
him to break out of the cycle. He didn’t miss that and tried to
laugh it off, shrugging his shoulders. “All right,” he said, “we
have a situation. It might help for us to talk about it. Outside
the office, even. If you didn’t have any dinner plans, I
could—”

Suddenly Lucille’s voice crackled on the
overhead saying, “Carol Frank, call the operator please.”

Bill rolled his eyes, moving toward his desk.
“I think she likes to hear herself over that intercom,” he said,
almost coaxing a smile from me. Pressing the button for his
speakerphone, he called the front desk and said, “Carol’s with me,
Lucille. What do you need?”

Lucille’s voice over the speakerphone sounded
delighted. “Detective Haglund is here to see her.”

Bill’s eyes flashed at me.

“
Tell him I’ll be up in a second,” I
said, returning my boss’s gaze anxiously. Once we were disconnected
from Lucille, I said, “This is unexpected.”

“
Did you call him?” Bill asked sharply.
“Is he out there with a search warrant? Or maybe a warrant for my
arrest?”

I glanced sharply at his office door, which
was still wide open to an office that was still relatively full of
our coworkers. I fiercely whispered, “Stop it, Bill. I haven’t
called anyone.”

“
I wondered today how long it would be,
before your detective boyfriend heard about our research project.”
He shook his head at me, disappointed in a way he’d never been
before. His fingers reached for the paperclips again, to move them
into a new line, and his body was tense like a bridge cable. “Thank
you for your faith and loyalty, Carol. I guess you should go talk
to the detective.”

“
Bill, you know that I’ve gone out with
Gus a few times. Socially. I’m sure that’s all it is.”

“
Of course, socially,” said
Bill.

“
We don’t talk about work,” I
said.

“
Of course.”

“
Bill.” I forced him to look at me in
return. “It’s social.”

But the color was gone from his face. My
stressing to him that the whole arrangement between Gus and me was
extremely social in nature had done nothing, except assure him that
I was fully aware of something extremely anti-social going on.

“
I’ll go find out what he wants. I’ll
tell him we’re still working.”

“
No,” snapped Bill. This was the first
time he’d ever spoken to me that way. He spat a hard little laugh
out at me. “Go on and talk to your detective. By all means,
go.”

My Gus was all smiles, all big, placating
hand gestures. “I know, I should have called, but I thought I might
surprise you.”

“
It is a surprise,” I said.

He read my face and looked apologetic. “No,
I’ve caught you at a bad time. Look, sorry, I thought I would take
you to dinner. You know, like we talked about last week. I have a
little something to celebrate, and I want to celebrate it with
you.”

“
She’s about done for the day,” said
Lucille quite loudly. “You can go, can’t you, Carol?”

“
It’s okay,” Gus assured me. This was
perhaps the first moment we shared that wasn’t completely
compatible. “We can do it another night.”

“
No, wait.” I caught his arm. “No, I’d
like to go. I was just concentrating on a project ,and you
surprised me. I didn’t mean to be weird.”

“
Stop being so weird, Carol
My-Last-Name-is-Frank,” said Gus. He looked very happy. “Finish up
whatever you need to finish, and I’ll just wait out here, if that’s
okay with the lovely Lucille.”

Of course, it was okay with the lovely
Lucille. After giving her that descriptive name, he could have
probably slapped me around in front of her without causing any
consternation. I parked him in a lobby chair and promised to be
back in ten minutes. As I left them, I heard Lucille ask, “Where
are y’all going to take Carol to dinner?” She could ask bold and
nosy questions because of her accent and the “y’all” thing.

I hurried back to Bill’s office to tell him
that it was just a dinner invitation. But Bill was gone.

Gus walked me across the street to a fragrant
and atmospheric Italian restaurant that was very popular with my
office crowd. This thoughtful gesture kept me near my car. In fact,
most everything Gus did that evening was thoughtful, but Bill’s
behavior had me preoccupied enough that I, for example, did not
notice until the pizza was placed in front of me that Gus had
preordered for us. Our food was ready as soon as we were seated in
our cozy, red leather booth. I looked up and expressed my
gratitude; women like men who think a little bit ahead. I’ll resist
the temptation to compare him yet again to my stupid ex-husband,
because so far Gus had managed to trump him in nearly every
category.

“
Here, eat.” Gus served a slice to me,
its cheese leaving delectable ropes from pan to spatula to plate.
“Hope I remembered the kind you like.”

“
Am I on some kind of reality
television program?” I asked, picking up a fork. “Because I didn’t
know human males could be this terrific.”

“
I’m not terrific,” Gus said. He looked
flattered, though.

“
Oh, honey, if you’re not, then there’s
no such thing.” I scalded my mouth on pizza, then whistled and
grimaced and gulped iced tea. I didn’t recall if I’d eaten
breakfast. Gus was more careful than me, and he seemed to think my
gluttony was amusing and my punishment deserved. I smirked at him,
then asked, “Okay, so what are we celebrating?”

Gus set down his fork and smiled broadly,
cat-swallowing-canary style. “Today,” he announced, “I took eight
old suicide cases to Sergeant Paige and asked her to review them.
When she was finished, she agreed with me that we should open an
investigation, and I have been made the lead detective. It’s my
baby.

My whole anxious, unhappy day came whooshing
back to me. “Eight? Meaning Adrienne and eight others?”

“
That’s right. In the Jackson County
coroner’s database, I’ve found eight suicides in the last fifteen
years that all match the MO of Adrienne Maxwell’s.”

“
That MO being what,
exactly?”

“
Death by overdose of painkillers and
sleeping medication. All of these women lived alone, had been
widowed for two to four years, were roughly the same age, and, this
is the big thing, they all decided to off themselves on a Saturday
night.”

“
Is it…” I hesitated to even say the
words. “Is it a serial murder case, Gus?”

His eyes gleamed. “I’m not supposed to use
that term. But everybody’s thinking it. This is big for me, Carol.
Hell, it’s big for Kansas City. But I’ve got to be careful. None of
those eight deaths were considered suspicious at the time because
nobody was looking any further than the current death. They were
all ruled by the coroner as death by suicide. So what happens if I
discover a link between them and it’s something that the coroner’s
office or the previous investigators never picked up? You have to
be careful not to step on anyone’s toes, if you want to come
through something like this looking good.”

“
As if you could ever look bad,” I said
wistfully.

“
Are you sad?” Gus asked with sudden
concern.