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  “Proposed? They were married?”

  “I don’t think it ever came to that. Carol’s death put a stop to it, you might say.”

  “I assume you’re telling me all this because you believe James de Campo was more than just a suspect,” I said. “You think he murdered Carol Thompson.”

  Peter Sloane’s eyes sparkled above the rim of his beer glass.

  2

  The crab cake arrived and, in Dottie Sloane’s defense and despite my rapidly diminishing appetite, it was fantastic. I said as much after she came by the table to gauge my assessment. Pleased but not surprised, she bowed her head, satisfied, like a defense attorney who’d just proven her client innocent.

  After she had left, Peter Sloane said, “They’d had a fight that night.”

  “Lynn and Jimmy?”

  “Jimmy and Carol,” Sloane said. “It seemed that once he and Lynn became engaged to be married, the damn fool had become instilled with some sense of proprietorship over Lynn’s girls. And not in the protective sense, mind you. Often in public he’d smile and hug them and call them ‘my girls.’ He didn’t say it with any sense of pride or anything, more like a butcher posing with his best hog just before the slaughter. Back before they were engaged, his aggression was meted out whenever the girls happened to be around, but for the most part, I don’t think he bothered too much with them. After he and Lynn had gotten engaged and he was living in the house full-time, he began to take, I’d guess you’d say, more of an interest in them. And not in a healthy way.”

  “Jesus,” I said, holding up a hand. “If this is headed in the direction I think it is…”

  The look on Peter Sloane’s face suggested I wasn’t too far off the mark. “How about I just cut to the chase,” he said. “The night Carol was murdered, she got in a fight with Jimmy. He’d been drinking all day and was primed for it. Along with his beer muscles, he’d developed an unexpected sense of modesty, and laid into Carol for, well, let’s say for her penchant for entertaining various boyfriends.”

  “This fucking guy,” I muttered, shaking my head.

  “Yeah, exactly,” Sloane commented. “The fight got physical. Jimmy struck her across the face, shoved her against the wall. Lynn stepped in, tried to douse the fire, but he got handsy with her, too.”

  “He admitted to hitting them?”

  “No,” Sloane said. “It was Allison who came forward and told me what she saw. Once Carol’s body was found, something changed with her. She was no longer keeping her mother’s secret.”

  “Good for her.”

  “That’s right,” Sloane agreed. “Her sister’s death changed her, all right.”

  More than you know, I thought.

  “Carol ran from the house that night and never came back,” Sloane said. “We didn’t get a call at the station from Lynn until two days later, when Carol hadn’t come home and none of her friends knew where she had gone. Some officers went out to the house, took statements. They all knew the problems that were going on in that house, so no one thought anything of it. Carol had run off before. But then later that night, one of our guys radioed in to dispatch. He’s got a body in the Elk Head. I went down there, and yeah, I didn’t need a coroner to tell me it was Carol Thompson.” He paused here and seemed to study my eyes. “How much do you want to hear, Aaron?”

  “All of it,” I said.

  He nodded, satisfied. “The girl was naked from the waist down. Her wrists were secured behind her back by a length of electrical wire.”

  “Wire,” I muttered, the word nearly sticking to the roof of my mouth.

  “There was heavy bruising around her throat and a wound in her scalp; blood had dried in her hair and in streaks down her face. Later, the coroner confirmed the cause of death was strangulation. Her killer had choked her to death and then dumped her in the river.”

  “Her pants had been removed? Was she raped?”

  “No, no indication that she was raped. No sign of any molestation whatsoever.”

  “Then why had her pants been removed?”

  “Well, now you’re asking questions I don’t have answers to. Maybe it was a crime of passion and the killer couldn’t get it up in the heat of the moment. I don’t mean to be crude, but, well,” and he shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe it was meant to confuse the authorities. I can’t say. All I can confirm is that she wasn’t raped.”

  “Maybe she was struggling too much.” I found that I wanted to believe this, Allison—that your sister had, in the final moments of her life, fought enough to dissuade her murderer from that particular brand of heinousness.

  “Doubtful,” Peter Sloane said, dashing apart that last bit of hope I’d held onto. “Coroner determined that Carol Thompson had been incapacitated—that the contusion on her head was from some blunt object that suggested her killer had knocked her out, or at least attempted to—and then her hands were bound behind her back, most likely after she’d gone docile. The hands behind the back, it could be a fetish thing, or in a more practical scenario, it would have prevented her from fighting back while he strangled her. You can’t gouge at someone’s flesh if your hands are tied behind your back while you’re being strangled. There was no skin or DNA under Carol’s fingernails.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. I was thinking of what Bobbi Negri had relayed to me regarding the state of Gabby’s body when she’d been found—how there’d been no evidence beneath her fingernails, either. How she’d been naked from the waist down but not raped. The same pattern, so many years apart…

  “There were bruises alongside her flank,” Sloane continued, running a hand down the length of his own ribs for illustration, “and also on her thighs and shins. Coroner surmised this was from the weight of her attacker, bearing down on her while he strangled her. It takes some effort to kill someone like that, you know. It’s not something that’s over in a handful of seconds.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said, my own throat suddenly feeling very tight.

  “There was a broken bone in one of her hands, too, which suggested that she’d been lying on her back with her hands tied while she was being strangled. The weight of her body, along with the weight of her killer who was probably on top of her, straddling her, would’ve broken the bone.”

  “Any chance she remained unconscious the whole time?”

  The look Peter Sloane gave me suggested that anything was possible, although he didn’t personally believe it to be in this particular case.

  The prospect of such a death caused the back of my own throat to seize up even further. I imagined a woman, any woman, on the ground with her hands tied and pressed into the small of her back, while some faceless monster straddled her, squeezing the life from her with such force that it caused a bone in her hand to snap. I could almost hear the sound of it giving way: a shameful clacking sound, like snapping a chopstick in two.

  “So, now we’ve got a murder investigation on our hands,” Sloane said. “Crime-scene guys came in from Pittsburgh, did a workup of the scene, but ultimately came away with nothing. Meanwhile, I targeted de Campo.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing at first. Told me to pound sand. That was when Allison came forward and told me about the fight he and Carol had the night Carol ran out of the house. Allison told me that Jimmy had left the house soon after Carol had that night. In a rage.”

  “No shit.”

  “So, I readdressed Jimmy. Brought him down to the station. He admitted they’d had a fight, but he tried to play it off like he was the victim—that Carol had come swinging at him, unprovoked, and that Lynn had joined in. Pity this poor hardworking man, right?”

  “Fuck him,” I said.

  “He said he was furious after the fight and left the house to go get a drink at a local pub. But he was already so piss-drunk by the time he showed up that they turned him away. He caused a bit of a ruckus there, too, when he was told to hit the bricks.”

  “So that was true,” I said. “He really went
to a bar.”

  “Yeah, he did. He also wound up driving to a liquor store and picked up a six-pack of Iron City. It was after that when he was unable to account for his hours. No alibi, in other words. According to him, he’d spent the rest of that night in his truck getting shitfaced in the parking lot behind the local movie theater. He said he fell asleep out there, drunk off his gourd, and didn’t get home until the next morning, sometime after Lynn had already begun making phone calls to Carol’s friends.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Peter Sloane rubbed again at the small, dark cleft in his chin. He stared down at his beer, where the foamy head had dissipated. “I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t charge him with anything. I tried to entice him to come in and take a polygraph, but he shut me out. I went back to Lynn, asked her to tell me about the abuse, the times he’d hit her and the girls. I thought I might leverage her grief against any twisted loyalty she had toward de Campo. I was hoping to get enough for an arrest warrant. But she was useless, was in shock. She refused to believe that Jimmy could have anything to do with Carol’s death, and she refused to acknowledge any of the physical abuse. I tried the same thing with Allison, but she was so messed up over her sister, I felt like I was making things worse for her, so I gave her some space. Maybe in hindsight that was a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I ran out of time. By the end of the month, James de Campo had packed up his shit and moved out of town, never to be seen again.”

  For some reason, I thought about you in that moment, Allison, and the circumstances surrounding your own death—about how the officer had come over to me in the fire station to tell me that you were dead. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream and shout and throw things. What I did was float along the sidewalk with the officer to a police car, where they showed me your purse and the ID within it. It was you; I’d told them this with perfect clarity and an unanchored sense of serenity that, in hindsight, felt like a dream, an anesthetization. Later, when I was brought to the morgue to identify your body, I did so with the perfunctory motions of an android summoned into reality from some dystopian science-fiction novel. I did all this while some part of my brain continued to insist that it was all wrong, all a mistake, and that you would be coming home that night, no matter what the reality of the situation was. The crying and the throwing of things didn’t happen until much later, once the initial shock had worn off.

  A group of men cheered at something on the TV from across the bar, rousing me from my memories. I looked up and saw a group of patrons high-fiving each other.

  “Whatever happened to him?” I asked, still watching the people across the bar. I felt aloof, disembodied, and needed to watch other people in real situations just to anchor myself to the real world.

  “Last I heard, he took up with some woman from Atlantic City. If there could be anything halfway good that comes from something so tragic as that girl’s death, it was that the son of a bitch disappeared from their lives after that. He left them alone. Far as I know, anyway.”

  The people across the bar settled back into their table. Conversation was jaunty and alcohol-fueled.

  Peter Sloane leaned closer toward me over the tabletop. His voice lowered, he said, “What’s this about, Aaron? There’s something more going on here with you that you’re not telling me.”

  I looked at him. My mind whirred like industrial machinery. “After Allison died, I learned that she’d spent the past fifteen years or so trying to hunt down her sister’s killer. And not just that. Somewhere along the way, she began to look into unsolved murders of other teenage girls. Girls who looked somewhat the same as Carol and had been killed in similar fashion. Allison died believing that whoever killed Carol had also been killing other young women up and down the east coast for the past fifteen years. Someone who’s still out there.”

  Sloane sat back in his seat. “You’re talking about a serial murderer,” he said.

  I unloaded on him, told him about the similarities in the murders you had uncovered during your own investigations, Allison. I led him from your sister’s murder in 2004 to the death of Margot Idelson in 2006, the young woman from Norfolk, Virginia, whose body was discovered half submerged in a shallow river and in a fashion that was nearly identical to the way Carol had been found. I told him about Gabrielle Colson-Howe, and how there had been ligature marks around her wrists. Same as Holly Renfrow last fall, her hands bound in wire. Same as your sister.

  “A reporter friend of mine tried to confirm that some of the other girls had been found with ligature marks on their wrists, too,” I said, “but the police weren’t telling her anything over the phone. But I’ll bet you a thousand bucks all of these girls died from strangulation with their hands tied behind their backs.”

  “Jesus Christ, Aaron.”

  “The most recent victim, Holly Renfrow, her cause of death was listed as drowning because she’d fallen into the river with her hands bound. She could have been unconscious. But according to her mother, who’d read the coroner’s report, there was bruising around her daughter’s neck. At first, I wasn’t sure why her death was different from the others, but after going out to the spot where I believe she was killed and where she’d fallen into the river, I think I pieced it together.”

  “Okay,” said Sloane, which I took as a prompt for me to continue.

  “It was left unfinished,” I said. “He’d been following Holly Renfrow, watching her for days. He’d been outside Holly’s house a few nights before she was killed. Her mother told me that Holly had seen him there, across the street. He called to her by name. And although I can’t be sure, I think he was parked behind the gas station the night she was killed—the last place Holly was seen alive. He was waiting for her to leave, waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. Just like with Carol. Just like with all the others.”

  Sloane gave a slow nod of his head. I couldn’t read his expression.

  “He abducted her, and drove her to a place he believed to be secluded. I was there. It’s like a scenic overlook, high up on a wooded ridge overlooking the Potomac River. He managed to bind her wrists up and probably started to strangle her but at some point she happened to get away from him before he could actually kill her. I think another car showed up that night—some kids looking to park, who also happened to be Holly’s friends—and it spooked him. Holly saw her chance, got away from him, running down the slope toward the edge of the ridge. But the hillside is really steep out there and it had been dark. I think she accidentally fell over the cliff and went into the river. With her hands still tied behind her back. Christ, I nearly went over the edge myself when I was out there.”

  “Aaron, how the hell do you know all this?”

  “Like I said, I went out there, spoke to some folks—the girl’s mother, the local police, a potential witness. Just like my wife had been doing.” I refrained from adding behind my back, even though that was exactly how I felt. That was the truth of it.

  “Was Allison in law enforcement?”

  “No, she was a reporter,” I said, “but she was also tenacious as hell. And obsessed. Here, let me show you this.”

  I opened my satchel, removed the fat accordion folder, and slid out the mini-files of each murder. Paperclipped to the top file—the one concerning the death of Holly Renfrow—was the school photo Holly’s mother had given to you, Allison. Platinum hair, the collar of a suede jacket popped, petite features that looked so fragile. I’d stuck it to the top of the packet because it seemed wrong to bury her likeness beneath all that dense, morbid paperwork. The photo caught Peter Sloane’s eye; he picked up the packet, stripped the photo from it, stared at it.

  “That’s Holly,” I said. “Physically, the similarities between all the girls are—”

  “I see it,” he muttered, staring at the photo. “I remember what Carol looked like. Allison, too.” He set the packet down on the table and looked at me hard. “I’m at a loss here, Aaron,” he said. “I’m a bit blindside
d, I guess. I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “Whoever he is, he’s smart and he’s careful,” I said. “No more than one victim a year, and he always skips a year, sometimes two. If Carol Thompson was his first victim, then the rest all look very similar to her because I think he’s recreating that first experience with her, over and over again. I’ve read stuff like this online about serial killers; they do that. That’s how Allison knew to key in on certain girls. The girl who was killed in southern Maryland? Gabrielle? Allison went down there when she’d first gone missing, before a body was ever found. She was scouring the internet, searching for similarities. Gabrielle Colson-Howe had the same look as Carol, as Holly Renfrow, as Margot Idelson from 2006. All the others. If they looked like Carol and they disappeared or were murdered, Allison keyed in on them.”

  Peter Sloane just stared at me.

  “Do you think this is something James de Campo is capable of?”

  “Son,” he said, “I can’t fathom this is something anyone is capable of.” He sifted through the documents I had placed on the table. “This is a large hunting ground for a serial killer,” he said, shuffling through the papers and noting the various locations where the bodies had been found over the years.

  “How much do you know about serial killers?” I asked him.

  He glanced up at me. “I saw those Hannibal Lecter movies,” he said, then returned his attention to the printouts and newspaper articles spread across the table. The maps with the crosses on them. Everything you had collected. “Have you shown this stuff to the police?”

  “I tried to explain it to the police chief in West Virginia, the guy who investigated Holly’s death, but he shut me down. He said this wasn’t proof of anything and he had his own ideas about who killed Holly. Someone who could not possibly have killed these other girls. A guy who conveniently died of a heroin overdose.”

  “I don’t know, Aaron,” Sloane said, sifting through the paperwork. “That thing about the wires used to tie their hands, that’s pretty specific. I mean, Jesus Christ. Yeah, okay. But that’s just two girls, right? Two of the six? We’d need more than two to establish a pattern.”