The Last Kind Words (22 page)

“Don’t drink milk in front of him. You got any Mace?”

“What? Mace? No. Why would I have Mace? What the hell do you want Mace for?”

I got up and headed for the door. “Forget it.”

Coming
out of Wes’s neighborhood, I took a corner too fast and Collie’s folder came sliding out from under the passenger seat. The papers scattered across the floor mat. I tried to ignore them but they kept drifting, whispering, and drawing my attention.

I pulled over into a strip mall and watched folks going in and out of the stores. Kids still playing on those nickel rides that had been set in cement twenty-five or thirty years ago. A mini-helicopter that went up six or eight inches, then down, a couple of lights flashing. And the children excited as hell and clambering all over it while their mothers did their business in the stationery, the bakery, the laundromat.

I drew the butterfly knife and whipped the blade out, twirled it shut, then snapped the point out again. Dale would get the feel of it in five minutes. If she was going to hang around Butch and his crew and felt better with a little protection, then I wasn’t going to deny her. I’d have to get her clear of them some other way. I didn’t know how. She was on the edge, trying to decide which way she wanted to go. My stomach twisted at the idea of her getting in deeper with the crew, even if she wasn’t running heists yet. Maybe the blade would wake her up to the fact that she wasn’t playing a game. I thought how easy it would be for women to defend themselves if only men taught them a little about how it was done.

I put the paperwork back in order and paged through it. I wondered how much of it Collie’s wife had access to. I remembered her in the prison, the way she used her hands to form compact, brusque gestures. The way her glossy black hair lashed the air. The way he had shrunk from her like a child being punished. She wasn’t afraid of him. She had
control over him. Maybe because he loved her. Maybe because he was locked up and needed someone on the outside to help.

How much help was she giving him? And what kind?

All I knew was that her first name was Lin. I dug through the file, hoping there’d be additional details. I didn’t find any. I had to get to a library or hop on the Internet. I had to do a little research. Dale would have a laptop. I wondered if Collie’s wife knew how to use a pistol or a blade. She seemed like the type who would.

Then I realized, Jesus Christ—Lin. Her last name would probably be Rand. Why not? Anyone who felt the need to go through a formal marriage even within the walls of a prison might be traditional enough to take her husband’s last name.

I drew out my new cell phone and called information. They gave me her number and I punched it in.

There wasn’t any ringing, just music. I waited for voice mail or an answering machine but nothing came up. Finally a woman answered with a crisp, “Yes?”

“Lin … Rand?”

Hearing her own name made her even more irritated. “Yes. Who is this? What do you want?”

I said, “This is Terry Rand.”

“Oh.” She brightened instantly. “Oh, Terry, yes, pardon me. My God. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear from you. I’m so glad you called.”

“I’d like to meet with you if I can.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Are you free for dinner? We could—”

I didn’t feel like spending an evening talking with a woman who had married a child-killer behind bars. “I’d like to meet now, if that’s okay.”

“Certainly. You could come by my apartment. I live in West Islip, off Sunrise Highway.” She gave me directions. I knew the apartment complex. I’d boosted a few TVs out of there years ago. Who knows? Maybe I’d juked her place before.

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” I said, and hung up.

It took me fifteen. She had a ground-floor corner unit in the rear. Outside her door was a small but impressive garden and a couple of
wrought-iron chairs that looked charming but impractical. I knocked and got an eight-count wait.

She opened the door, smiled at me, and said, “Terry, it’s such a pleasure.” First she held out her hand, and as I went to take it she drew me into an embrace. I didn’t return the hug.

I’d noticed her killer heels in the prison, and now I saw how petite she was. She couldn’t be taller than four-eleven and she wouldn’t hit a hundred pounds if she had rocks in her pockets. I imagined Collie opening her letters, finding snapshots of her that would make him flinch after so much time in the can. She had a resolute poise but also seemed little more than an attractive wisp, her shining black hair gliding about her as if in slow motion, so that you felt if you looked away even for a moment you’d turn back and find that she’d evaporated.

Her place was clean and stylishly furnished. There were touches of formal Chinese setting. Mats, silks, bamboo, and a large framed painting of what appeared to be Hong Kong, taken from a junk in the harbor at sunset.

“What can I offer you?” she asked. She reached out and put three fingers lightly on my wrist. I could barely feel them. “A beer? A glass of wine?”

“You sounded terse on the phone,” I said.

She nodded. Her glossy hair took a second to follow the motion of her head. “I’ve recently started getting a lot of crank calls.”

“Because of Collie.”

“Yes. Please sit.” She directed me to a settee that was uncomfortably hard. She poured two glasses of wine and sat one in front of me. I didn’t touch it. “He’s in the news again all the time now. There’s been a resurgence in interest. I did a few interviews with reporters, but they trim the coverage and edit out anything I have to say about the new details in Collie’s plight. They make me appear to be an unbalanced … groupie.”

I thought, Plight.

She went on. “People phone and tell me how next week they’re going to be sitting in the dark, saving electricity to make sure there’s plenty of voltage for his electric chair. They don’t realize he’s going to—”

“Get the needle.”

“Yes.”

She sipped from her glass, and her hair folded over her face like curtains at the end of Act I and she started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t believe you could fall in love with a mass murderer through prison letters scanned by guards. I didn’t believe you could have a legitimate relationship with a killer of nine-year-olds. But I’d abandoned the woman I’d loved and spent an entire afternoon watching her and her child from another man, jealous and sick and wishing I could steal her away, so what the fuck did I know?

“He told me to talk to you. He said you had information.”

“Excuse me, Terry. I don’t often get a chance to speak with someone who … understands. It’s a relief.” She wiped her eyes with her index fingers and took a slow deep breath. “And you look so much like him. It’s a bit startling. Yes, information. About the other girls. Yes. Even so, it’s nice to finally meet his family.”

I smiled vapidly. Family. This was Lin Rand. She got up and walked out of the room. I wondered how she’d do feeding Gramp. I imagined her and my mother cooking together in the kitchen, boiling cabbage, providing plenty of leafy greens to my uncles. Her on the porch sharing beers with my old man. Giving JFK a flea bath. Paging through the photo albums, laughing at Collie when he was a kid.
Look at him here without his front teeth. Here with a foot up on the bumper of his first muscle car, wearing a T-shirt, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth
. Me in the background glaring, brooding, always angry with him. Her sitting with us on Christmas Day, opening presents, handing me a box.
Here, Terry, he wanted you to have this; he made it himself
. Me opening it and finding a license plate.
TERRIER
1. I looked down and saw that the wine in my glass was full of tiny thrashing waves. I realized I was nearly panting, practically snorting.

Lin returned with an accordion folder like the one I’d grabbed at the precinct. She sat it in front of me and said, “This is some of what we’ve discovered.” I flipped it open. Instead of official reports inside, there
were dozens of pages of handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, obituaries. I took my time. I read through a lot of the data. I recognized the women that Gilmore had talked about. There were another three women listed, two who’d died before Collie’s spree. I didn’t know what to make of it. I had a hard time seeing one guy snuffing all these women without anyone catching on, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. On the surface of it I saw a lot of disparate deaths, some clearly murders, others possible accidents. There were a lot of angry men in the world. So much of the focus of that rage would be women. I pictured insecure boyfriends diving onto these girls in a fury. I saw bitter, defeated men prowling, hunting, snickering, sneaking up. I saw my brother beating an old woman to death with his fists. I saw him strangling Rebecca Clarke and leaving her body in the grass.

“Terry,” Lin said. “Your face.”

“My face?”

“You’re very flushed.”

“Right.” I shut the folder. “Why these women?”

“Pardon?”

“Why only these particular women? What’s the connection between them?”

“They fit the profile. Young. Late teens to early twenties. Pretty. Brunettes.”

I snorted. “Is that all?”

“We haven’t discovered anything else to connect them.”

I nodded and couldn’t seem to stop. It was like the tendons in my neck had been cut. My chin hit my chest and it rattled my teeth. I couldn’t catch enough air. “What about all the others?”

“What others?”

“The blondes. The ugly ones. The fat ones. The forty-year-olds. What about all of those women who’ve been choked or beaten in the last seven or eight years?”

“That’s not—”

Gilmore had been right. It all looked like bullshit. The young women
all bore a vague resemblance but other than that, there was nothing that tied them together. Maybe they were strangled, maybe not. I could almost hear Gilmore’s finger coming down on the tabletop,
click click click
.

“This isn’t evidence.”

“It’s part of the profile.”

“You watch too much fucking television.” I slid the folder aside. “You can force the facts to fit any profile, that doesn’t mean it’s real.”

“But this—”

“What do you do?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your profession. What do you do?”

“Oh. I’m currently unemployed.”

“You have a nice place. What were you before you were unemployed?”

There was the dull light of discomfort in her eyes, quickly replaced by defiance. “I worked for Child Protective Services as an investigator.”

It struck me hard. I shuddered with the urge to laugh. I tried choking it back but a weird little giggle escaped my lips. I stood and thought, What the hell am I doing here? I took a step toward the door and the laughter came bubbling up, hot and wet, and I couldn’t stop. She didn’t know what to do. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. I leaned over and propped my hands on my knees, gasped until tears filled my eyes. I wiped them away and they kept coming. Then I wasn’t sure if I was laughing anymore. Abruptly, I knew I wasn’t. I faced her calmly and said, “You’re goddamn kidding me.”

“No, I—”

“They fired you when they found out you had married a mass murderer convicted of killing children.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Let me guess. You’re suing them for losing your job. You consider it prejudice.”

“No. I knew what I was doing. I realized I would be discharged.”

I stepped away from her. “There’s nothing here. My brother iced Becky Clarke. He’s still running a game on me. And you too.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I didn’t expect you to be so … combative.”

“It’s the nature of my family. We’re all contrary.”

“Collie isn’t.”

That nearly got me laughing again, but I managed to curb it. She pulled the accordion folder closer, then sipped her wine. She didn’t appear to be upset, merely disappointed.

I got to the door but couldn’t make myself leave yet. I turned and asked, “Why did you write him in the first place?”

She looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t think you would believe me.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She considered it. I drifted back toward the settee but didn’t sit. I was drawn to the picture of Hong Kong. I’m not sure what there was about it. Maybe simply the openness of it. Talk about a city of thieves and murderers, corruption and money and beauty. Lin looked at me like she was looking at Collie. There was the light of love in her eyes, or maybe it was only self-deception.

“I wrote him,” she said, “to tell him that I would be sitting in the dark, saving electricity to make sure there was plenty of voltage for his electric chair. I was one of those people. He killed a child. A little girl. A harmless old woman. All those poor people. I found him irredeemable.”

“And now?”

She lifted her chin as if exposing her throat for the kill. “He’s still irredeemable. But I love him.”

I thought about it. “That’s not why you wrote him. There had to be a reason. Something that set you off.”

She held her glass of wine but didn’t sip it. She looked like a mannequin posed in a beautifully mannered way. “Oh, that’s right, you’re someone who needs reasons. So I’ll tell you honestly. I think it was his face. In the paper. His expression. He was handsome but unrepentant. He wasn’t smirking like some of them do. He wasn’t embracing the spotlight. And yet he also wasn’t ashamed. He wasn’t weeping. He didn’t look suicidal. He didn’t look like someone who would enjoy prison. He
didn’t look like a killer, but he was one. He wasn’t terrifying. He also wasn’t pathetic.”