“That last one, Marie, that was shit-hot.”
I put my pen on the table, picked up my pad, and started to get up.
“Ms. Lightfoot, I meant to say.” His grin turned little-boyish.
I sat back down and made a second hash mark.
“I figured it wasn’t the ‘shit’ that bothered you,” he said in a teasing tone, making verbal air quotes around the obscenity. “I mean, your books are pretty blunt with the language, so I figure you don’t offend easy that way. Are you offended by your name? That’s kind of sad, Marie. What’s the matter with your name? Don’t you like it?”
Hash mark. Three.
This was where I was supposed to get flustered. This was where I was supposed to turn red and stammer, “There’s nothing the matter with my name. I like it okay.” And he was supposed to smile charmingly at me and press closer to me and say, “I think it’s a beautiful name. That’s why I want to say it...”
“I’m more interested in the names Erin, Jessica, and Caroline,” I said.
He pulled back just slightly, before he could stop himself. It was just enough for both of us to know who was in control here and that so far, it wasn’t him.
“Those are beautiful names,” I said, and this time it was I who clasped my hands together and leaned forward on the table. “They were beautiful girls. But there are a lot of beautiful girls who get killed, unfortunately. Dime a dozen, you might say. As you can probably imagine,” I continued, “I hear about a lot of murder cases. I can take my pick of them to write about, Darren.”
A bit of emphasis on his first name.
There had been a shift. He had heard the threat: Behave yourself or I walk and you lose your only chance to get the world’s premier author of true-crime books to write about you, Darren.
“You write about me, you’ll sell a lot of books,” he boasted.
“I write about anybody, I’ll sell a lot of books.”
A flash of anger passed across his face. I’d hit his ego. What I saw within him in that instant scared the hell out of me, and I hoped he couldn’t see that pass across my face. I had to do it this way, had to push him fast, had to get a glimpse of what he could do, who he could be, before I could lower the boom.
“You want me to write about you, Darren?”
He shrugged, offended.
“You’re an interesting guy,” I told him, feeding him now.
For my trouble I got an unnerving glimpse of something else in him — that canny, intelligent part that Luis Cannistre had alluded to. He hadn’t fallen for my flattery; he had heard it as weakness.
“There are other authors I like, too,” he said, laughing at me now.
“Oh, bullshit. You know I’m the best there is. You would, if you’ll pardon the expression, kill to have me write about you. I’m going to do it, but only on one condition.”
He began to smile. He knew what it was.
“I won’t write the book without knowing where the bodies are.”
I don’t know what I thought he might say to that, but nowhere in my wildest imagination did I ever dream it would be what he did say.
“Here’s the deal,” he said, with a suddenly dead-serious look in his eyes. I wondered what the expression in his eyes had been the last time the women looked at him. I shivered inside. “You show me proof you’re going to write it. Like, a publisher’s contract, okay? And then I’ll give you proof I mean it, too.”
“What kind of proof?”
“I’ll tell you where to find the first body.”
I felt my mouth drop open a little and couldn’t prevent it.
But he wasn’t through shocking and surprising me.
“Finish the book, prove to me that it’s going to be published, and then I’ll tell you where to find the others.” His slow half-smile appeared again and this time when he moved toward me I moved away. “No tricks, Marie. You publish the book, I give you the bodies, do we have a deal?”
“What’s in it for you, Darren?”
He smiled again and shrugged. “I figured it out. If I can’t be free, at least I can be famous.”
“That cold SOB,” Cannistre said furiously when I told him. I had waited to tell him until we had navigated the reverse stages of getting through security. Now we stood by his car in the wind-swept parking lot. He slammed his right fist into his left hand as if he were punching it into Betch’s face. The sharp slap of skin on skin made me jump and I moved back a step from him. “Using those girls as bargaining chips!”
“As we were going to do,” I pointed out.
He gave me a look.
I shivered, though the day was warm. “You’re right, it’s different. Sorry. It rubs off.”
“I know what you mean,” he conceded, and then he took a deep breath in an obvious attempt to calm himself. “What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know who could approve something like that. I told him I’d get back to him.”
“Good. We have to talk to the families. We’ll use your motel room.”
“I don’t have a motel room,” I reminded him, and then I postulated the obvious: “So I guess that means I’m staying?”
“Aren’t you?”
After a second’s hesitation, I nodded.
Of course I was staying. How could I not?
We were meeting in my motel room, Cannistre told me, because he didn’t want publicity “yet.”
“Yet?” I said.
“It could come in handy later. Whatever he tells you, it could jog somebody else’s memory.”
“Or conscience.”
“That would be nice,” Cannistre said in the deeply wry tone I was coming to associate with him. He had calmed down a lot since I’d first given him the news, but I could still feel the waves of anger coming off of him.
I’ve met many friends and families of homicide victims over the years, just as I have met the people who killed their loved ones. But I had never before met them as a group, and certainly never for such a reason.
They all arrived early and then filed through my door to find places to sit in the three chairs, or on the edges of the two beds.
“I’m Erin’s mom,” the first person to come through the door told me.
She wore no makeup save for a dab of lipstick, and she was allowing her hair to go naturally gray. On this warm day she had on a black cotton jumper, a white, long-sleeved blouse with a white cardigan sweater over it, and brown loafers that she wore with hose. She had the gray, hollow-eyed look of someone who has been depressed for years, and her next words gave me an even deeper understanding of why that might be.
“Her dad died the year after she went missing,” Mrs. Belafonte said, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear her. She gave me a forced, reflexive smile that disappeared so fast that I might have thought I only imagined it. “There’s just me now.”
Erin Belafonte, Darren Betch’s first victim, had been an only child.
My heart began to hurt again, in the way it does when I’m confronted with pain I can’t ease.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to her.
She nodded, gently pulled her hand away from mine, and went on into the room.
“This is Billy Sterson,” Cannistre told me by way of introduction to a man in his forties. “He was Jessie’s fiancé. And this is her brother Sam.”
The two men were studies in contrast, and I noticed that they seemed to keep a careful distance from each other, not looking at one another, never touching. The fiancé, Billy, was a tanned, strapping forty-something dressed in black slacks and a pink golf shirt who looked as if he might have just stepped out of the local country club. The brother, Sam Burge, had a leftover hippie look, from his shaggy hair down to his tie-dyed T-shirt and blue jeans and his brown leather sandals. Like the fiancé, he was also probably only in his forties, though, which made him too young to be the real thing.