Eve laughed softly. “I’ll do my very best.”
Friday, February 26, 3:00 p.m.
“The real Carleton Pierce was a poor kid from a small Colorado town,” Abbott said when they’d all rejoined around Abbott’s table the next day. Olivia and Kane were there, Ian and Micki. And Eve. She sat at Noah’s side, listening as everyone brought a little bit of the story together.
The only one not here was Jack. Nobody was sure when he’d be back at work. But he was alive and that’s all that mattered for now.
Dell Farmer had been charged with the attempted murder of Jack, along with the murders of Katie Dobbs, Harvey Farmer, and Kurt Buckland. MSP planned to do a follow-up article to be sure everyone knew what had really happened.
Noah didn’t plan to buy a copy.
In the last month, Pierce had taken the lives of six women as the Red Dress Killer and four others to cover his tracks-Ann Pierce, Jeremy Lyons, and the Bolyards. Then there were all the women in his pit. Noah pushed them to the edge of his mind for the moment, concentrating on Abbott’s summary of what they’d discovered in the last twenty-four.
“The real Carleton Pierce graduated from high school the spring after Eddie Black hung his mother,” Abbott went on. “His home address was on a copy of the acceptance letter the university had sent. The real Carleton’s parents had died in an accident. He was taken in by a local family and the town came together to care for him. He graduated valedictorian, earned a full scholarship to the U. His town pitched in, bought him a used car, had a nice pot-luck to see him off, and never saw him again.”
“He sent a thank-you card,” Kane said, “and a few Christmas cards. But he never came home. They had old high school yearbooks in the town library and they faxed us his picture. Their Carleton Pierce looked nothing like ours.”
“So what happened to the real Carleton Pierce?” Ian asked.
“We may never know,” Noah said. “Based on what we know of the real Eddie Black, the real Carleton Pierce is dead.”
“We found a.22 slug in his wife’s head,” Ian said. “Same as the gun he used on Jeremy Lyons and the Bolyards.” He looked at Eve. “And to shoot you.”
Noah pushed that image away, too. Eve was fine, but she almost hadn’t been.
“We’ve pieced the story on Ann Pierce,” Noah said. He’d talked with her employer that morning. “She’d borrowed cash from a friend at work to book that flight to LA, the one she never showed up for. Apparently Ann Pierce had friends that Carleton didn’t know about. We think she dropped off the cat because she didn’t want to leave it alone, because she may have planned to kill Pierce herself.”
“We found another gun in their bedroom closet,” Micki said, “with Ann’s fingerprints on it. We’re guessing she figured out what he was doing and Pierce killed her first.”
“What I don’t understand,” Ian said, “is why he kept the cat?”
“Pierce kept souvenirs,” Micki said. She was pale, her eyes drawn. They weren’t close to being finished processing Pierce’s basement. “Shoes, driver’s licenses, wallets, cell phones. I think he kept the cat as a souvenir of his Red Dress murders.”
Abbott sighed. “We found three dozen pairs of shoes in his basement. From the driver’s licenses, he hunted these women from as far east as Chicago and south as Omaha. He consulted on a few of his own murders of local prostitutes, as part of the homicide investigation. Brian Ramsey is pulling his hair out. Innocent men in prison, every case Pierce testified in up for appeal. This isn’t going away for a long time.”
“We’ll be able to close some of our own cold cases,” Noah murmured. “Including the disappearance of Roger Eames, twenty years ago. He was a laborer, did odd jobs. We found his driver’s license at the bottom of Pierce’s drawer.”
“And his work boots in the pile of shoes that fell off his shelves,” Olivia added flatly. “Still had cement in the treads. Apparently, Roger Eames dug the pit.”
“The deed to the house was in his name,” Abbott said. “We never would have found the house that way.”
“How did he find out about your study, Eve?” Ian asked.
“When Donner was diagnosed with cancer, his doctor recommended a list of therapists,” Eve said. She’d talked with Donner’s wife and mother that morning, trying to understand how her study had gone so wrong. “One of them was Pierce. Over the course of his therapy, Donner mentioned the study, said he needed an independent third-party consultant. Pierce was intrigued and he volunteered.”
“When Pierce knew we had the participant list,” Noah said, “he knew Jeremy Lyons had to go. As Donner got sicker, he’d passed more authority and access to Lyons.”
“We found Jeremy’s laptop in Pierce’s New Germany house,” Micki said. “He’d sent an email to Pierce with the list as an attachment. We found all the Red Dress victims’ computers in the New Germany house, in fact.”
“Martha used her stool at Ninth Circle to solicit business for Siren Song,” Abbott said. “We’re not sure if she became obsessed with the World to support her phone sex business or turned to phone sex because it allowed her to never leave her PC. Her heaviest call volume was in the hours the other victims were killed, so that’s probably why she met Pierce so much earlier than the others.”
“Which turned out to be important,” Micki said, her brows raised.
“As did the cat and the shoes,” Noah said. “You were right. And Kane, you were right about Jeremy. Pierce used his phone to leave the text and voicemail for Eve. Sitting right outside Abbott’s window as he did so. One more of his up-yours.”
“Like Das Ich,” Eve said. “Dasich. I can’t believe I didn’t see that. All my avatars’ names had meaning. I never looked at his.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Eve,” Abbott said kindly. “For all of us. We’ve checked out Pierce’s computers, too. He had two, and accessed Shadowland from both so he could have two avatars active at once, never considering anyone was watching him.”
“Why Axel Girard?” Ian asked. “How did he pick him?”
Noah sighed. “Axel was his optometrist. Eve realized Pierce resented us for the MSP attention, that he never got credit, but he used that anonymity, believing Axel would never have cause to link him to this case.”
“The trigger was MSP,” Eve said. “For both Pierce and Dell Farmer.”
“We’ll think twice before granting any more interviews,” Abbott said.
“And then we’ll just say ‘no way in hell,’ ” Noah added.
“When will you release the bodies of Pierce’s victims?” Eve asked Ian.
“Today,” he said. “Why?”
“I plan to go to their funerals,” she said.
“Eve,” Abbott said, “you don’t believe any of their deaths are on your head, do you?”
“No.” She gave Abbott a sad smile. “But they were vulnerable to Pierce because all they had was a virtual life. They looked for happiness in an imaginary world because they couldn’t find it in the real one. There but for the grace of God…”
Abbott’s gaze was respectful. “If you’d like someone to go with you, I will.”
Eve looked surprised and touched. “I’d like that. Thank you, Captain.”
“What about you, Eve?” Olivia asked. “Have you heard from the university?”
“Yes. Pierce was lying to get me to leave with him. The dean never contacted him. Dean Jacoby called me this morning. Under the circumstances, there will be no sanctions. We’ll regroup, retool the study with appropriate checks, and begin again.”
Abbott blew out a breath. “I think we’ve covered everything. Everybody go home.”
Eve rose, leaning on the cane the hospital had given her until her leg healed. “Actually, we’re on our way to Sal’s. We’re having a baby shower there for my friend. You’re all invited and Sal says the drinks are on him today.”
Except for me, Noah thought. He’d decided not to go and after he’d explained, Eve’s family had offered to change the venue. But it meant a great deal to Sal and therefore to Eve, so they’d kept the shower there. They’d have an early dinner with her family before they all went back to Chicago and they’d planned an alcohol-free meal.