Redheads (4 page)

“You touch this, take it out, or anything?”

“No.”

It hadn’t taken Chris long after he’d come awake to decide he probably wasn’t in the same room as the man who’d held this fork and used it to eat Allison Clayborn’s breasts. He was pretty sure he’d already be dead if that were the case. But still, Westfield could be dangerous.

“Good. You’ve got no idea what I went through to find this.”

The man grunted.

“Or maybe you do,” Chris said. He reached for a tissue from the box on the small table between the beds and used it to wipe the vomit from around his mouth. He dropped the tissue on the bedspread and took another for his chest.

“Let me ask you something. What was the respirator thing for?”

“Precaution. I never dosed anybody with Pancuronium. Wasn’t sure what it would do. They use it in lethal injections—keeps the guy from writhing around. I thought maybe it’d completely shut down your diaphragm and you’d die of asphyxiation without a little extra help.”

Chris looked at the machine on the floor where it was still half tangled in the wheels of the old office chair. Then he recognized it as a forced-air breathing machine, the kind sold on late-night television. A snoring cure.

“Some precaution. Was it your wife?”

“Yeah.”

“What year?”

“1978.”

“Jesus. That’s thirty-two years ago.”

“I know. It’s what first clued me in you weren’t him. After I had you in the van and I got a look at you. You’d have been what…?”

“Three,” Chris said. “Your wife was a redhead, green eyes?”

“Yeah.”

The cell phone chimed and Chris looked at it. It was an incoming photo and text message from Mike. He opened it and looked at the text.
Photo is Aaron David Westfield on day promoted to Captain. From website for
USS White Plains
vets. Other sources confirm. More info by regular email in five minutes.
Chris scrolled to the picture of Captain Aaron Westfield in his dress whites. The picture showed the same face as the man on the floor, the beginnings of crow’s foot wrinkles just touching his eyes. Chris guessed it was twenty years old.

The phone chimed again, this time just a simple text message.

Chris read Mike’s message, which answered the biggest question he had left.
The guy was on his ship in the Strait of Taiwan when Tara Westfield was killed at Sasebo. Never a suspect.

Chris added the unwritten last sentence: no one ever caught Tara Westfield’s killer. He reengaged the safety on the Glock, tucked the gun into the back of his jeans, then bent to put on his sweatshirt.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”

Aaron Westfield rolled over and sat up. He put his hand up against his nose and massaged it gently. It was already swollen, but the blood had stopped flowing.

“Maybe I should wash my face first.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe you should too.”

Chapter Six

They found a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Strand Street, empty but for the college kid behind the cash register. The cashier put his book down when they came in, giving Westfield’s broken nose a long second look. They ordered black coffee and took seats around a low table in the far corner. Unframed paintings of abandoned-looking buildings hung on the brick wall next to Chris’s chair. They had an unfinished quality to them, blank spaces on the canvas like overexposed photographs. The painting on the wall nearest Chris was the abandoned warehouse that eventually became Allison Clayborn’s condo. Chris looked at it and blew on his coffee.

The drive over had been mostly quiet. Chris sat in the passenger seat of the beat-up van with the window down. At red lights he could hear the waves rolling onto the beach. At one point he’d asked Westfield if the van belonged to him or if he’d stolen it for the job, and Westfield said it was his. He’d only stolen the Texas plates. The discarded fast-food wrappers and old army blanket told of a long drive from Washington without many stops.

Chris took a sip of his coffee, looked away from the paintings, and saw Westfield watching him. He seemed to be waiting, so Chris said the first thing that came to mind.

“If he killed Tara in ’78, he must’ve just been getting started. He can’t have been much older than eighteen, and I’d bet he was more like in his twenties.”

“Why?” Westfield asked.

“As far as we know he’s not from Japan, right?”

“No reason to think that.”

“If he’s out at night doing his thing, he probably wasn’t there on a trip with his parents. So he’s definitely older than eighteen in ’78.”

“But not too much older than that, or else, thirty-two years later, he might not be able to stay at it.”

“Exactly,” Chris said. “Maybe he was military?”

“Maybe. That only narrows it down to a few hundred thousand people.”

“True. And he kills women all over the world, so there’s no reason to think Japan was any more significant to him than anywhere else he’s been.”

“Unless it was his first,” Westfield said.

“Any reason to think that?”

“No.”

When Westfield frowned, the lines on his face made him look older. In the hotel room, Chris thought of Clint Eastwood. The kind of hard-ass who’d keep coming at you even after a bullet should’ve put him down. But now, whatever Westfield was thinking just made him look old. And tired of it.

“That’s the problem with this whole thing. We’re so far behind the situation, all we can do is react. That’s not where you want to be.”

Westfield took a sip of his coffee and winced, then stood and walked to the counter. Chris watched him talk to the kid, who bent beneath the bar and came up with a plastic cup of ice and a napkin. Westfield put a few chunks of ice in the napkin and held it to his nose. He dumped the rest of the ice in his drink.

“Hot coffee’s not the ticket, huh?”

“Not with this.”

“Sorry,” Chris said, and meant it.

Westfield shrugged. “It’s okay. I’d have done the same.”

“You did. How many have you gone to?”

“Six. I know about others, but a lot of them are overseas and I don’t have the funds.”

“When’d you first figure it out?”

“The pattern? In ’96, after I got out of the Navy. I mean, I’d never stopped thinking about it. How could you?”

“You can’t.”

“When I got out, I was in Guam.
White Plains
was grounded there by Typhoon Oscar. When it was over I stayed ashore. First decommissioning the ship, then a job in the staff office. I stuck out four more years. I’d been in the Navy since I was eighteen. After Tara was killed, the Navy really was a family. They closed around me like brothers. The men in Sasebo, we’re talking enlisted guys—Marines—took up a collection after she was found. She was a civilian, but the Navy paid for her funeral. Then I got out, and didn’t know what to do. I decided to go to New Zealand and just think for a while. I could fly free on any Navy plane that had a spare seat, and there was a seat going to Wellington. I’d worked nonstop since she’d died and then I was out and had nothing. You know what it’s like.”

Chris hadn’t worked since the day he’d gotten the call about Cheryl. He’d left his office with half a sentence typed on a document he never thought about again. Six months later, when his partners finally realized he wasn’t coming back, a secretary brought him the things from his office. He’d never even looked in the boxes. They were from another man’s life.

“You went to New Zealand and before you knew it, you’d been on a barstool for a month and a half. Yeah. I know about that.”

Westfield took another swallow of his iced coffee.

“I was renting a room in Wellington, near the docks. Downstairs was a bar. At first when I got there, I did some hiking. Went out in a small sailboat, fished for snapper. It all seemed fake, like I was in someone else’s body. You know that silence, when you’re alone on the sea or in your house and the only thing breaking it up is the wind, or a clock ticking in some other room? And you think to yourself, is this really it? Is this really what’s happening to me? Then I started stopping in the bar before bed. Then, before lunch. Finally I just stood outside the door before breakfast and waited for them to open. They had a little TV in a corner. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was just drinking. I don’t know how long I’d been there. Maybe three weeks, maybe a couple months. I looked up and saw a news story on the TV. They had a picture of the victim.”

“She looked just like Tara.”

Westfield nodded. “Like Tara. Like Cheryl and Allison Clayborn. They could’ve all been sisters. There’s this reporter standing on the street outside the house where she’d been found. Says the police are getting counselors for officers who’d worked the scene. That it was so bad no one who’d been inside would talk about it. And that he’d—I heard this clearly, because he’d done it to Tara.”

Westfield paused and looked around. They were still alone in the coffee shop. The kid behind the bar was sitting at a stool reading his book. Westfield lowered his voice anyway.

“He’d eaten her face.”

Chris nodded and closed his eyes. Westfield went on.

“I learned more later. Found the doctor who did the autopsy. I didn’t have to get him drunk; he already was. I just told him what I knew and he told me the rest. The killer took her face off with his teeth, just ripped it off. She was still alive. The other parts, he cut off and took away.”

“And then you knew,” Chris said. He didn’t open his eyes.

“I knew. But I didn’t know where to start. How do you explain something like that? Who do you explain it to?”

A group of five college-aged kids came in and set up laptop computers around one of the tables on the other side of the coffee shop. Chris thought they might have been medical students. He remembered with a shiver the coffee shops where he’d spent late nights with Cheryl in his last year of law school while she was in her first year of medical school. They’d thought the future was a wide-open road. He pushed that away.

“That’s something that always bothered me,” Chris said.

“That there’s no official investigation?”

“Each one’s handled by local cops who’ve got no idea what’s going on in the town next door, let alone what happens in New Zealand or Japan or Vladivostok.”

“You’d think at least the FBI would keep track,” Westfield said. “What’s it they have? VICAP? That computer tracking system?”

“We picked it up. The thread’s just sitting there where anyone could find it.”

“Maybe because we wanted to see it.”

The sun was coming up. Chris looked at his watch and was surprised it was only six in the morning. He felt like it should be mid-afternoon. He drank the rest of his coffee and pushed his chair back from the table.

“I’m going to walk back to my motel, get some sleep. I’m dead on my feet.”

“I’ll drop you off.”

Chris shook his head. “I’d rather walk. But let’s talk later.”

“Punch in your number.” Westfield handed over his phone.

It was a mile back to his motel. He stopped in his room to drop off his Glock and pick up his wallet and cell phone. Then he went back out and bought a burrito from a breakfast truck and sat on a bench on the seawall opposite his motel. He was too tired to think coherently. He ate the burrito and felt the sunlight warm his face. When he was done he balled the foil tightly and tossed it into the trash can next to the bench. He took out his phone and called Mike.

“You all right?” Mike asked, as soon as he picked up.

“Yeah. We had coffee and then I walked back to my motel. I don’t know where he is now, but I’m not too worried about him.”

“I think he’s legit.”

“I agree.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come to Galveston. There’s a direct flight to Houston that’ll get you here tomorrow morning. Can you do it?”

“I’m on it.”

“Bring all the files on a laptop. We’ll sit down with Westfield and compare notes. He’s not as thorough as us, but he’s been at it longer. Maybe he thought of things we haven’t.”

“You’re working with him, from here on?”

“Both of us are. Call me when you get a car, and I’ll tell you where I’m staying.”

He moved to hang up the phone and then brought it back to his ear. “Mike, you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“See what you can find out about the FBI’s VICAP network. How’s data entered, how’s it disseminated, who has the power to make entries, who decides what goes in.”

“VICAP…okay.”

“I’ll see you when you get here.”

He went back to his room, put the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door, and turned the air conditioner up to full blast. He took a shower and came back to the cold, darkened room, and got into the bed.

It must have been an hour later that he heard the knock. He wrapped a towel around himself and went to the door, quietly, to look through the peep hole. A redhead in her late twenties or early thirties was standing there. She was reaching out to knock again when he opened the door.