But they stopped beside a larger plot, a gathering of four plaques, all the same size, of the same cold brass and bearing identical dates of death. The Walmac family. Voakes had been fleeing their home when he was caught.
“These graves were as popular an attraction as Bruce Lee’s, for a long time.” Becca spoke with the hushed tone reserved for the dead. “Being the victims of a notorious serial killer brings a little unwelcome fame.”
They winded Jo, these stark, unexpected remnants of four lives lost to the insanity of John William Voakes. Two parents and two young children, obliterated in one night. Jo stared at the graves, gripped by horror and sympathy that felt visceral. She cursed herself for leaving her sunglasses on the table in the house. She must still be as shaken by the day’s events as Becca had been, though Becca seemed relatively centered, right now.
“I took the clinical track in my graduate work. You focused on research.” Becca clasped her hands behind her, studying the plaques. “By personal history and professional training, I know more about the nuts and bolts of mental illness than you. The families my foster kids come from are rife with it. I’ve seen craziness up close before. It doesn’t scare me.”
“Neither of us has anything to fear from Voakes.”
Becca nodded. “That’s why I’m coming with you to see him.”
Jo blew out a slow breath. “This isn’t just mental illness, Becca. This is being in the presence of a man who murdered eight people.”
“And there’s a small possibility, no matter how faint or unlikely, that he murdered ten.” Becca paused. “I think my knowledge and experience could be helpful to you today. I also think I have the right to see the face of a man who might have killed my parents.”
Jo tried hard to summon a logical response to either or both of these arguments, and a dimple appeared in Becca’s cheek.
“I see we’re going to have to hold another session of Becca School. Class?” She took Jo’s hands, making it no easier for her to be logical. “Look, I love you wanting to look out for me. I really do. Marty and Khadijah can be protective, too. I don’t know what it is about me that brings out this…shepherd thing in you guys.”
I can’t stand the thought of anything hurting you, Jo explained silently.
“But my friends don’t get to infantilize me. I’m not five years old anymore.” Becca pressed her hands. “Watch my back, by all means. I appreciate it. But if you try to baby me, you’re only going to piss me off. Okay?”
Jo summoned another sigh from the soles of her shoes. “Okay.”
Becca lifted herself on her toes to kiss Jo’s cheek. “And stop looking so miserable. I can defend both of us with my mighty chobos better than you can with your spooky Spiricoms, anyway.”
“That’s probably true.” Jo resisted the urge to touch her cheek. “Well. Rachel told me today that she trusts you, and she’s known you longer than I have. I guess I can do no less.”
“She said that, huh?” Becca glanced over her shoulder, and her smile faded. “There’s something else you should see.” She took Jo’s hand, and they walked slowly down a small rise, beyond all that remained of a slaughtered family.
The graves here were older, but without the antique quaintness of earlier decades. Jo placed these headstones in the mid-eighties, reasonably well kept, their epitaphs still readable as they passed. Becca didn’t have to point out the grave they were looking for. Jo saw the cut tulips resting on the sparse grass beneath the stone.
Loren Mitchell Perry
1968–1983
Jo did the math swiftly. “Rachel’s son?”
Becca nodded. “Rachel gave him my uncle’s name, to honor their friendship. Loren was a little older than me, I only met him a few times. I guess he turned into a pretty wild kid. He had problems with drugs. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was fifteen.”
Jo looked at the wilting flowers Rachel had left on her son’s grave. “And his father?”
“He left the picture early on. Rachel hardly mentions him. She raised Loren alone.” Becca folded her arms, as if cold. “She was devastated. My aunt and uncle were really worried about her. It took her years to come back from this.”
“I can only imagine. I’m sorry she had to go through it.” The words came naturally to Jo, an encouraging development.
“Rachel was strong when I needed her, when I was five years old. And she’d found herself by the time I needed her again, when I was sixteen.” Becca’s voice had been warm, but now it grew more halting. Jo kept her eyes on the grave, sensing Becca needed privacy for this. She was sensing now, with this woman.
“Heroin was pretty cool in this town in the nineties.” Becca’s posture was elaborately casual. “Though most of my friends had the sense to avoid it. Not so with brains, here.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking, what possessed me. I’d always been such a good little dweeb. But smack is unforgiving stuff. I shot up once, with an impossibly cute girl whose name I can’t even remember now. Then I shot up a second time, alone. I was in trouble very quickly.”
Jo grasped the seriousness of the trouble Becca had flirted with at the tender age of sixteen. Seattle was shamed by a sad history of loss stemming from the periodic, intense romances its youth held with chemicals. Heroin had been the go-to hit for the wealthier set in the nineties, just as meth was the fix sought by street kids in the past decade. The casualties could be gruesome. “Rachel helped you with this addiction?”
Becca knelt and pulled a small weed from the base of Loren Perry’s headstone. “You know Mitchell and Patricia put me in counseling with Rachel after my parents died. They insisted I see her again when I was sixteen, when they realized my…problem. Khadijah and Marty flat-out finked on me to my aunt and uncle. You can imagine how tickled I was about that at the time, but they did the right thing. They may have saved my life.”
She looked up at Jo. “Rachel did excellent work with me. Not just with kicking, with the loss of my parents, the phobia, everything. I meant it the other night, when I said I consider her one of the best psychiatrists in the city.” She gestured at the headstone. “And she did this work four years after the death of her son, who also struggled with drugs. I was about the same age Loren was when he died. It couldn’t have been easy for her.”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” Becca’s fine fingers smoothed the grass at the head of the grave, and Jo missed the friendly warmth of her hand in her own. “Rachel told me she supports us fully in this study, Becca. She still has your back.”
Becca looked up at her over her shoulder, and the sun sparkled off her smile in a way that made Jo wish for her sunglasses again. “I know she does. As I have before bragged, I have excellent taste in friends.” She held out her hand and Jo took it easily, as if she had been helping Becca rise for a lifetime. “So, amiga. Let’s go visit a serial killer.”
Chapter Ten
Becca kept giving the queen’s wave out the window of Jo’s Bentley, the small, curved-palm salutation that Elizabeth bestowed upon the British masses. Jo eyed her wryly from behind the wheel after Becca blessed their third pedestrian.
“I can’t help it. I climbed ten rungs up the socio-economic ladder the moment I stepped into this thing.” Becca stroked the butter-soft leather of her seat. “This isn’t a car; it’s a royal chariot. Can we drive by Marty and Khadijah’s place? I just want to wave at them before we peel off and leave them in our dust.”
She’d hoped to coax a smile from Jo and it worked, if only briefly, a slight lifting of one corner of her sensual lips. Becca still worried about what the morning had cost Jo, the shock of seeing her prized possessions destroyed.