He took that kind of money, he might be gone weeks.
Just because he withdrew that much, Gillian thought, doesn’t mean he plans to use it all for his trip.
She looked at the earlier stubs. Most of the checks had been written to pay supermarkets, auto insurance, the monthly mortgage, utilities and credit card companies. None of the checks had been made out to an airline or travel agent.
So he’d probably used part of the two thousand dollars to pay for his transportation to wherever he went.
Unless he drove.
His car is probably parked at the airport, Gillian thought.
She snapped the checkbook shut and slid it back inside the drawer.
Awfully strange that he left it behind. Who would go on a trip without taking his checkbook along?
With that kind of cash, who needs a checkbook?
In the same drawer, Gillian found Fredrick’s savings account passbook. It showed a total of $156,835.46. “Not bad,” she whispered. She had twice that in her own passbook and nearly as much tied up in stocks and bonds, but not everybody gets two wrongful-death settlements to build up that kind of nest egg.
Whatever Uncle Fredrick does for a living, she thought, he does pretty well for himself. Maybe he’s a doctor or a lawyer.
He certainly had quite a modest house considering his income.
“You’d think he could afford a goddamn pool,” Gillian muttered.
She put away the passbook and looked through the rest of the drawers. They held nothing of much interest until she slid open the bottom drawer and found a .357 magnum Colt Python. Whistling softly, she lifted it.
The thing was loaded.
Obviously Uncle Fredrick was prepared to blast away intruders.
That’s me, Gillian thought.
Though she didn’t expect to be taken by surprise, she saw no point in leaving a loaded gun around where it might be used on her.
She broke open the cylinder and tilted the barrel up. The cartridges slid out, dropping into her palm. She dumped them into her shirt pocket and returned the revolver to its drawer.
Finished at the desk, she wandered over to the bookshelves. Three of the shelves were taken up by boxed video tapes. Though tempted to explore the collection, she decided to wait until later and check them out when she was ready to settle down and watch a few.
The books looked fairly normal. At first. The reference collection included a set of the World Book encyclopedia, several atlases, a dictionary, The People’s Almanac, Gray’s Anatomy, and a couple of motion picture encyclopedias. He had several books about body-building, but none that might indicate his profession. Unless he’s a photographer, Gillian thought. There were fifteen or twenty books on that subject, most of them expensive, large format and with glossy pages. Most of them featuring nude women.
His hardbound fiction ran toward best-sellers by Joseph Wambaugh, Robin Cook, Lawrence Sanders, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and so on. He had rows of paperbacks, mostly suspense and horror novels.
And one entire shelf of non-fiction that made Gillian wonder about Fredrick Holden. She felt a chill on her back as she inspected the books: volumes about Jack the Ripper, Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Charles Starkweather, Richard Speck, the Boston Strangler, the Manson family, John Wayne Gacey, the Skidrow Slasher, the Hillside Strangler, and Theodore Bundy. Many of the books contained photographs of the dead victims.
What’s with this guy? she wondered.
Maybe he’s a suspense writer, she told herself, and just had these books around for reference.
Then where’s his computer?
Maybe he’s a true crime buff, into police procedure and that kind of thing.
Sure. What he is, he’s crazy about homicidal maniacs.
And he’s got a water bed. And mirrors all over his bedroom.
“I really picked a good one,” Gillian muttered.
After sliding a copy of Helter Skelter back onto the shelf, she headed for the bathroom to wash her hands.
She was reminded of the Benning house, where Bill and Andrea had shelves of sex manuals, stacks of nudie magazines, an assortment of dildos and vibrators, various devices for which Gillian could only guess at the purposes, numerous oils and lotions, and erotic wardrobes: transparent negligees, G-strings (Bill’s with a leopard-cloth pouch that opened like curtains), loin cloths, frilly garter belts, leather undies and bras, and bras with open fronts.
Gillian had inspected the Bennings” collection, intrigued and a little embarrassed. Though she’d considered trying out some of the devices and clothes, she’d found the idea more repellent than exciting.
She’d washed her hands after touching the things, just as she was washing her hands now.
All you touched this time were books, she thought as she rinsed off the suds. Hardly the same.
But what kind of person would enjoy reading that kind of junk?
Gillian recalled the uneasy feelings she’d had last night before even arriving at the house. Were they premonitions? Nonsense.
How about the way she reacted when the telephone rang? Phones had rung at odd times when she was staying at other places, but she hadn’t panicked.
It was as if a shadowy comer of her mind knew she’d picked the wrong house this time.
“Bullshit,” Gillian-said. She dried her hands and stepped into the hall. “So what if the guy’s a little bent.”
That’s what keeps it interesting, she told herself. Discovering the hidden quirks.
She took her Minolta from the bedroom and returned to the den and touched the books again. After arranging them on the floor with their front covers showing, she snapped a close-up. She put them away. Just to be thorough, she then grouped the photography books on the floor for a shot, then the body-building books.
That, she thought, takes care of his peculiar reading habits.
In books, at least.
The search for Fredrick’s magazine collection took about two minutes. She found it in the bedroom in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, pretty much where she expected it to be. The magazines were neatly arranged in two stacks. True-crime magazines.
Kneeling on the floor, Gillian lifted out half a dozen. Most of the covers featured a woman in peril, usually sprawled at the feet of a man. Only the back of the man was shown. The woman invariably gazed up at him with terror in her eyes. She was dressed in scanty undergarments or a revealing negligee or a torn blouse. More often than not, her hands were tied.
Gillian looked through a few of the magazines. The stories had lurid tides: “Weird MO of the Sorority Killer,” “Death of the Gang-Sex Beauty,” “Rampage of the Peeper.” There were grainy photos of murder weapons, cops investigating cases (usually in wooded areas), apprehended killers and their victims (before and after).
The advertisements seemed as strange as the stories. They pushed pamphlets revealing the secrets of how to build the body you’ve always wanted, how to earn big bucks at home in your spare time, how to become a detective, how to hypnotize girls Secretly!” so they’ll obey your every command. There were several ads for trusses. Other ads urged readers to buy pellet guns, tear-gas guns, “authentic badges” and “durable, reliable” handcuffs.
Gillian had seen such magazines at news-stands, never suspecting they contained such garbage: stories to titillate you with the details of sex killings (including hints on police procedure to help you avoid capture), followed by those ads.
The crime books in the den were sophisticated literary endeavors compared to these rags.
Who reads this shit? she wondered.
Fredrick Holden, for one.
He’s starting to look like a real sicko.
Gillian lifted more magazines out of the drawer. More of the same.