“Until he got around to finally killing the wife?”
Trent could almost smell the hot tang of blood mixing with the scent of spruce trees and blooming lilac bushes. He’d never failed so spectacularly. And for that, he’d never forgive himself.
“And that’s when you caught him, right?” Schneider continued. “After he killed the wife?”
Trent nodded.
“So if his whole thing was killing women who looked like his wife, he wouldn’t be turned on by a brunette,” Cassidy said.
“No.”
“How about men?” Chief Schneider asked. “Like Murphy driving the garbage truck?”
“He’ll kill men to get something he wants, to further his goals.”
Schneider nodded. “And he kills women for pleasure. Got it.”
Cassidy studied the crime-scene photos and the snapshots of Farrentina Hamilton side by side, tapping his pen on the table. “Didn’t I read something in one of the Hamilton woman’s letters about coloring her hair? Maybe she dyed it blond for him.”
Trent skimmed through the letters until he found the one Cassidy was referring to. He read aloud. “As you can see, I colored my hair for you, Ed. The red lingerie looks nice on a brunette, don’t you think?”
“But that sounds like she dyed her hair brunette for him,” Schneider said. “Not blond.”
Trent stared at the files littering the table. A serial killer didn’t change his signature. The emotional need his crime fulfilled was always the same, crime after crime. He might change his modus operandi as he learned more efficient ways of committing his crimes, ways he could avoid getting caught. But he didn’t change the emotional satisfaction, the sexual charge he got out of the act. With every hunt, every kill, Dryden dominated the wife he felt rejected him. The wife with long, blond hair.
“The sequence of this hair color change is important,” Trent said. “Are there any other photos? Any of Hamilton as a blonde?”
Cassidy flicked through the stack of photos they’d found in Dryden’s cell. He handed a photo to Trent then resumed his abuse of the table top. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Schneider leaned over the table to get a glimpse of the photo.
In the picture, Farrentina Hamilton’s platinum blond hair flowed over her shoulders. She wore a trendy suit, the style outdated by current 1996 standards, and she looked appreciably younger than she did in the lingerie shot.
Trent didn’t know what to make of this. Dryden couldn’t have changed his signature. But if he hadn’t, why had he asked Farrentina Hamilton to dye her hair brunette?
Like Risa, Nikki was a natural brunette, but she had colored her hair blond for as long as Trent had known her. He picked up the wedding picture and the mutilated picture from the table. In both photos Nikki’s hair was platinum and arranged in ringlets falling to her shoulders. If Dryden’s preference had changed to brunettes, why had he married a blonde only thirty days ago?
Trent jutted to his feet and walked to the door.
Risa was perched on the edge of her chair. “Find something?”
“We need your help.”
Rather than wasting time with a satisfied snort or an I-told-you-so smile, Risa scurried across the reception area and through the door he held open, as if afraid his request had a time limit. She slipped into one of the empty chairs.
Trent closed the door and circled the table. “Has Nikki changed her hair color recently?”
“No. Why?”
“You’re sure?”
“What’s going on, Trent?”
Cassidy’s pen ceased tapping. “Dryden seems to like brunettes now.”
Risa stared at the table top. She looked as if she might be sick.
“What is it, Rees?” Trent asked.
“Something Nikki told me.”
“What?”
“She said Dryden wanted her to be herself. He loved her just the way she was. Including her natural hair color.”
Trent could almost hear Dryden whispering those words to Nikki, his voice thick with false charm. He had a talent for sensing what someone wanted to hear and delivering just the right words in just the right tone.
Cassidy leaned forward across the tabletop. “But she didn’t dye her hair back. Why? She didn’t buy it?”
“She bought it fine. Was almost giddy with how much he loved her. She just liked being a blonde.” Risa turned to Trent. “He told other women the same thing?”
It wasn’t exactly a question. Risa knew the answer. But Trent nodded anyway. “He asked Farrentina Hamilton to dye her hair brunette too.”
“The woman in the red lingerie?”
“Yes,” he said.
“A killer doesn’t just up and change his signature. It doesn’t make sense. Unless…”
Obviously Risa was thinking along the same lines as Trent, so he finished the thought. “Unless hair color was never really part of Dryden’s signature.”
“You think that’s the case?” Cassidy asked.
Trent looked at Rees’s long brunette hair, shining under the fluorescent lights. Hair that had once flowed through his fingers and puddled on his pillow. Hair that smelled of lavender. “Tell me about your interviews with Dryden.”
“My interviews? What about them?”
“Did you say anything to Dryden that he could have misconstrued? Anything that made him angry?”
The jolt that ran through Rees’s body was unmistakable.
“What was it, Rees?”
She drew in a slow, deep breath. “About four months ago I published an article in an academic journal.”
“An article about Dryden?”
“I didn’t use his name.”
Schneider held up his hands. “Wait. You’re saying you wrote about him in a psychology magazine?”
“Yes. In general terms.”
“How would he get something like that in prison?” Cassidy asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Your sister?”
“I don’t know,” Risa repeated. “Probably. And he figured out he was the subject.”
“How did he react?” Trent asked, although he had a pretty good idea.
“I only visited him once after that. He refused to speak. Just stared.”
“There’s something else.” Trent prompted.
“That was when he started writing to Nikki.”
It made a horrible kind of sense.
Dryden’s wife was dead. Her humiliation was over. And instead of clinging to the fantasy of killing her over and over, he had moved on.
He’d found another woman who’d humiliated him.
He’d focused on her, obsessed about her.
He’d manipulated women who looked like her.
And now that he was free, he would play out his game—kidnapping, letting his victim loose in an isolated forest, hunting her down, slitting her from neck to pelvic bone, and gutting her like a deer. With each woman he killed, he fantasized he was asserting his power and dominance over the woman who’d humiliated him—the true target of his hatred.
And this time, Ed Dryden’s true target was Rees.
Nikki
The man lived alone, although Nikki wasn’t sure what it would have meant if he hadn’t. Or maybe she just didn’t want to know.
It didn’t take long for Eddie to take what he wanted from the man’s house and load it into the sedan parked in the garage. Food, of course. A few bottles of booze. Street clothes from the man’s closet. A toothbrush, floss, and mouthwash.
He gave Nikki time to shower off the blood. It was spraying off easily enough, but she still didn’t feel clean. The engraving in her locket was more difficult to manage, blood deep in crevices. She hoped it hadn’t soaked into the tiny photo she kept inside, but she couldn’t check under the shower stream. And really, she didn’t have the heart to look.