My Boss is a Serial Killer (23 page)

I felt very sad, it was true. I told him that
I was fine. I asked, “What kind of connection are you looking
for?”

“
It could be anything.” He continued to
peer at me. “It could be that they all used the same gardening
company or something.”

“
How could a gardening company cause a
woman to overdose on pills? How could anyone?”

“
I guess that’s something I have to
discover.”

“
Nine women,” I said, staring down at
my plate with my appetite gone.

“
This is upsetting you. You think I’m
being opportunistic?”

“
No, of course not.” I tried to smile.
My face wouldn’t play along. Gus did something then that almost
broke my heart, although I think it was an unconscious gesture. He
mimicked my facial expression thoughtfully, as if he’d like to take
my misery into himself. Well, that was quite enough of that. I
certainly wasn’t going to let this example of terrific male
perfection believe that he was hurting me. I told him at least part
of the truth when I said, “It’s a shock to hear about real death
happening to real people. I’m anesthetized by television
detectives, and I never expected to learn about serial murder
involving someone I actually know.”

Of course, Gus thought I meant Adrienne
Maxwell when I said that. He took on an attitude of apologetic
teasing, trying to lighten my mood. “I’m really sorry. That’s the
hardened-and-bitter cop talking there.”

This guy never stopped surprising me with the
same damned trick: he remembered things that I said. Like his
killer smile, this talent seemed like a simple thing until he
struck with it, sending me reeling. If Bill Nestor hadn’t racked up
a considerable amount of devotion in the Carol Frank Book of
Loyalties, I would have spilled everything to Gus, right then and
there.

“
God, what did they do to you at that
office today?” Gus asked me pointedly. “No offense, Carol, but you
look absolutely wrung out.”

“
Yeah, it was a rough one,” I admitted.
“But office work is so boring. Don’t let me start blabbing about
it.”

“
And then I come at you with serial
murder. Nice combination. I am sorry.”

“
I really am interested,” I insisted.
“I do want to know. But what I’m accustomed to are TV killers who
like to leave elaborate clues behind, like puzzle games, and the
detective has to solve riddles or decipher codes, and then there’s
a game of cat-and-mouse and probably some sexy but fairly twisted
romance thrown in. Plus I know the victims are paid actors who can
invite all their friends over to see them die on DVD. So you see
how it’s different.”

“
But I like to think of myself as a
sexy but fairly twisted romantic,” said Gus. He waited for me to
smile, and I couldn’t help myself. Bolstered by that, he went on to
assure me. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think the
women had really bad deaths. If someone really is coercing them
into overdosing, it’s happening in a relatively gentle
way—otherwise someone would have cried foul a long time ago.
Assuming that another person is involved in the deaths, these
circumstances remind me more than anything else of the few cases of
assisted suicide that I’ve seen, where the ‘killer’ believes he’s
doing the victim a favor.”

A caring killer. Just someone doing a favor.
Well, great. Up until now I’d been keeping my suspicions at bay
with the belief that Bill Nestor would never harm another human
being, but murder as a perceived act of kindness put a whole new
spin on things. I laughed, sounding brittle in my own ears. “A
favor? And he believes this strongly enough to convince nine women
to overdose on pills?”

“
Well, that’s the million dollar
question, isn’t it?” Gus decided that I was recovered enough that
he could eat his dinner. “So tell me, what a TV detective would say
about solving this one? I like the line about the game of
cat-and-mouse.”

“
You’re so sheltered, Gussie. After you
mention a game of cat-and-mouse, then you have to ask, dead
seriously, ‘But which one of us is the cat?’ and then we fade to
black. How are you going to proceed with your
investigation?”

In his exuberance, Gus couldn’t help but
continue. “Some of the case files are rather old. They’re just
suicide files, so they won’t be very big, and the remaining
relatives might be hard to find. I don’t know how long it will
take. The Hooper case is ten years old, and the Voigt case is
nine…”

Hooper and Voigt. My Gus was practically
standing on the firm’s doorstep, warrant in hand.

“
Oh, God. I’m sorry. I have to go,” I
said, scooting abruptly out of our booth.

“
What?”

“
I forgot something I have to do at
work. It’s very important.”

“
Really?”

Oh, I almost couldn’t bear leaving him like
that. He looked so sweet and confused. I reached out to put my hand
on his cheek and said, “Can I call you tomorrow?”

“
Did I do something wrong?”

“
It’s work,” I tried to assure him,
though I didn’t succeed. “Thank you for dinner.”

“
Carol!” He tried to rise to come after
me.

“
Tomorrow!” I called back over my
shoulder.

I went back to the office. No Bill. So I went
home, my phone in my hand as I drove, and throughout the evening, I
repeatedly called Bill’s cell phone and home phone numbers. I left
messages until his voice mail was full. I waited up until after one
that morning for him to call me back, but he never did.

Bill was not at work on Tuesday.

My boss Bill was not a guy who just didn’t
show up at work. He craved structure too much. Every day since I’d
come to work for him, he’d either been at work between 7:30 and
8:00 a.m. or he’d left me a voice mail saying where he was, if we
hadn’t already discussed it the day before. I always knew that if
he ever did a no-show, it was because he was in trouble. His car
had wrecked or his heart had failed or he’d been abducted by
aliens. That kind of trouble. Or this kind, the kind we had now.
Dead clients and suspicion. And a detective about to discover the
things that I already knew.

When an attorney produces estate documents
for a client, the attorney’s name is not necessarily anywhere on
those documents. In the state of Missouri, and I assume in most
other states, the attorney is not required to sign off or register
any sort of acknowledgment. Of course an attorney can put his or
her name all over these documents if he or she wishes to do so, but
it’s not required, and Bill was never nuts about putting his name
anywhere it didn’t have to be.

I could have Bill put together a last will
and testament for me, and I would get the original document to put
in my safe deposit box. Five years down the road, you might be
hard-pressed to figure out who had done the work for me,
particularly if I were dead and therefore unable to chat about it.
And nowhere on my death certificate would it say, “Bill Nestor was
this woman’s lawyer” or anything like that. The path to finding out
who prepared my will would be a little thornier than that. My
family might be able to say, “Oh, sure, we happen to know that
Carol used Bill,” or you might find a canceled check that showed I
paid MBS&K for Bill’s time. You might find a business card
somewhere in my personal effects.

Witness signatures might be another way to
discover where a will was created. Wills required two witnesses and
a notary public to sign along with you, and at our firm, the
witnesses and the notary were typically whoever had the time to
hurry into a meeting and sign. The wills of these women were
produced so far apart in time that there was no guarantee that the
same witness or notary signatures would be used. Turnover at a law
firm is frequent. However, when a witness signed a will, he or she
included an address, not usually the business address but a home
address. An industrious detective would only have to track down the
will’s witnesses or notary public to discover where the will had
been produced.

The next question became, then, whether the
industrious detective, meaning Gus, would think to look at the
wills of these women. If he didn’t, he might not discover their
connection of sharing an estate lawyer for several days or even
weeks. And if he did, it might take him about half an hour.

My roundabout point here is that I didn’t
know how much time we had before Gus found us out. I don’t know who
would think to find a connection based on who produced someone’s
will—I’d never seen that on television. If I were a detective, I
might be looking at the beneficiaries but not the mostly unrelated
lawyer.

Assuming that all these suicide widows had
the same lawyer, that is. Nothing said that Gus’s list of widows
matched mine. Yeah, right. Of course it didn’t match mine. He had
extras. He had women that I’d missed.

But Bill was not at work when I arrived, and
nothing on his calendar indicated that he had a reason to be
absent. I gave him some wiggle room. I wasted an hour at my desk,
hoping he’d turn up eventually But when he did not, I called his
cell phone again and his home phone again, and I was met with the
same dead ends I’d encountered the night before. If he was
screening his calls, he knew it was me, and he just didn’t want to
talk to me. Either that, or he was dead.

Sitting at my desk, I made a plan. First, I
would go to Bill’s apartment and see if I could find him. I should
have done it the night before, I realized, but I’d been operating
under the assumption that unchangeable Bill-Law was still in
effect, and that I would surely be seeing him in the morning. So,
live and learn. I’d go check there. If he was home and just
avoiding me, I’d tell him what Gus knew and that time was of the
essence. I would recommend that he and I meet with Gus and decide
on the best course of action to clear Bill’s name.

If he was not there, then I supposed I’d
better just tell Gus by myself. Then maybe he and I could meet with
the Quality Control people here. Maybe Donna, my supervisor, could
advise us on the steps we should take. I thought that if we could
all just share our information freely and in the spirit of good
faith, we could avoid all manner of trouble. I felt in my gut that
there had to be,
had
to be, a reasonable explanation for the
suicide widows.

I often wished I had a television job, where
I could just stroll out of work whenever the plot required it. On
television shows, characters with grunge jobs (meaning those that
aren’t the point of the entire program, unlike doctor, lawyer and
cop shows) always have some kind of job but you seldom see them do
much actual work; TV-show jobs like this are character-defining
(He’s a garbage truck driver!) or comedic devices (She’s a sexy
housemaid!) or just handy sets (He’s a waiter at the diner where
all the characters hang out). Since the characters and, obviously,
their bosses, all know how unimportant work actually is to the
storyline, they have almost unlimited freedom to chat and meander,
come and go at convenient times, and use their place of business
for fabulous parties or sexy encounters.

But I worked in a real office under the
supervision of Junior Gestapo Brent, who was unfortunately sitting
behind Donna’s desk when I hurried over to tell her that I was
going to Bill’s place. Junior Gestapo Brent liked to sit at Donna’s
desk when she wasn’t using it, because then he could dream about
the day he took over.

Seeing his greedy little weasel-face made me
stutter. I caught myself and said as frankly as possible (for my
last name is, after all, Frank), “Bill is home sick today, and I
have to go pick some things up from him. I’ll be back in an hour or
so.”

“
What now?” Brent picked up a pen and
clicked it thoughtfully.

If Donna had been there, I would have been
more forthcoming. Donna, I trusted. This guy, no. I wouldn’t have
told Junior Gestapo Brent anything, not even under torture. I
repeated what I had said before, slowing down a little to account
for his mental deficiency.

“
Bill is sick?” The question expressed
his doubt that an attorney would ever become ill. In my experience,
attorneys became ill just as much as the next person, but they
didn’t believe in staying home sick. They liked to come to the
office, infect everyone else, cough loudly and distractingly, moan
about how sick they were, and continue to charge the clients for
their time.

“
Yes.” I summoned patience because a
creature like Junior Gestapo Brent could sense how badly I needed
something and then proportionally invert how much time it took for
me to get it.

“
What does he have?”

“
I don’t know. But he asked me to come
fetch some things from his apartment.”

“
What things?”

“
Work, I assume. I didn’t
ask.”

Clicka, clicka, went the pen. Junior Gestapo
Brent asked, “Are you sure this is something that you need to make
a trip for?”

“
He asked me to come.”

“
Maybe I should just call Bill and find
out the details.”

Why, that little bastard. Was he actually
suggesting that I was lying about it? My boss is home sick, so I’ll
take this opportunity to go shopping and say it was a work-related
run? Donna wouldn’t do this to me. I had been here almost three
years with not a single smudge on my work record, and now this. I
could barely keep myself from flinging my purse at him.