He wiped down the bathroom with alcohol. Cleaned out the drain traps. Found a bottle of Drano and poured it into both the sink and the tub drains. In the kitchen, he wiped down the telephone handset and placed it back in the cradle. He left no signs of the struggle.
He found the door to the basement, put a load of laundry in the washing machine-the ragman’s clothes and Christine Neal’s clothes-added detergent and half a bottle of bleach, and started the machine.
Back on the first floor, Karl picked up Christine Neal’s blond wig and went back into the bedroom, into the walk-in closet, to dress.
From a drawer of panty hose and knee-high socks, Karl chose a pair of opaque brown tights. He put them on, taking great care not to run them, then tucked his money into the crotch and tucked his privates away as best he could. Then he chose a brown knit calf-length skirt and pulled it on.
From a drawer of underwear, he chose a bra. But it was too tight around his rib cage, digging into him. How women put up with the discomfort was beyond him.
Instead, he found a stretchy, tight-fitting T-shirt and fashioned the illusion of small breasts with two pairs of athletic socks, each pair rolled into a ball. The tightness of the T-shirt held them in place. A boxy brown cotton sweater went over the T-shirt.
Shoes, he expected, might present a problem. But when he started comparing the length of his foot with the length of Christine Neal’s shoes, Karl found that wasn’t the case. He selected a pair of low-heeled brown boots and pulled them on. They fit as well as any shoes he’d had.
In the bathroom once more, he set about transforming himself. He had once worked as a stagehand in a playhouse in St. Louis and had watched the actors carefully as they applied the layers of color and shading, creating characters on the bland canvas of their own faces.
He applied foundation, concealed the bruises and shadows, created eyes with brown liner and shadow and dark mascara. With a shade called Dolce Vita, he painted his swollen lower lip and gave himself the appearance of having a fuller upper lip, using a colored pencil.
When he had finished, Karl stood back and studied his masterpiece in the mirror. He stretched Christine Neal’s blond wig over his bald head.
Just like that, he had become a woman.
Karla.
No one was on the lookout for a blond woman in a brown skirt and sweater.
His finishing touches were a brown and blue print silk scarf, which he tied around his throat to hide his Adam’s apple and the red marks on his own throat where Snake’s handcuffs had bitten in the night before, and a pair of large-framed brown tortoiseshell sunglasses, the kind President Kennedy’s wife had always been photographed in.
Karl went back into the bedroom, bent over, lifted the dust ruffle. Christine Neal’s sightless eyes stared at him; her mouth was open, her swollen tongue sticking out at him. She looked like a spare mannequin that had been discarded in the back room of a store, forgotten under other unneeded props and racks.
“Thank you, Ms. Neal,” Karl said respectfully. “I’m sure you was a real nice lady.”
He put the dust ruffle back in place and walked out, stopping at the coat closet in the hall to choose a brown poncho. In the kitchen, he picked up Christine Neal’s handbag and car keys before he let himself out the back door.
The car in her garage was the dark blue Volvo. Nice. Leather seats and all. A car that wouldn’t stand out in this part of town. She had kept it real clean too. It smelled like lemons.
Karl backed out of the garage and put the garage door down with the remote. With luck no one would come looking to visit Christine Neal over the weekend. But even if someone did, they would simply find her gone. No Christine, no car, no handbag. She was out. Shopping, maybe, or at a movie. If she worked somewhere, she wouldn’t be missed until Monday at the earliest. If she didn’t work, it could be days before someone noticed she wasn’t around.
Days and days of freedom to use Christine’s car, to do what he wanted, to go where he pleased.
He turned down the street and headed out on the next leg of his quest: to find the place that would please him most-the home of his champion, Carey Moore.
22
“NO USABLE PRINTS on the judge’s handbag. At least half a dozen people touched the car. So far none of those prints have come back with a rap sheet,” Tippen said.
He paced back and forth at the end of the conference table, tall and thin, with a long caricature of a face, all angles and hollows, craggy brow, bristly salt-and-pepper mustache. He had been a detective with the sheriff’s department for years before making the move to work Homicide with the city cops.
As a sheriff’s detective, Tippen had first teamed with Kovac and Liska on a multiagency task force to solve the Cremator murders-a killer who had targeted primarily prostitutes, tortured and killed them, then set their bodies on fire in a public park. They had worked well as a team and had become drinking buddies after.
“Judge Moore gets more than her fair share of hate mail.” Elwood Knutson, another of the Cremator task force. A man roughly the size of a small brown bear, Elwood was their philosopher in a too-small porkpie hat.
“That’s hard to believe,” Liska said sarcastically.
Kovac said nothing.
“Her clerk has it separated by degrees: crazy, crazier, and certifiable.”
“Threats?” Kovac asked.
“Veiled and not so veiled. Anything she gets that looks legitimately scary goes to the sheriff’s detectives.” Elwood glanced at Tippen and said, “Really, it’s a wonder she wasn’t killed a long time ago, considering.”
“Don’t look at me!” Tippen said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I changed teams.”
“Then why hasn’t the quality of their work improved?” Liska asked.
Tippen fired a chocolate-covered coffee bean at her. He had recently acquired an addiction to them, despite the fact that he was the last guy in the department in need of caffeine to wire himself up.
“I had all the letters copied and brought them over,” Elwood went on, tipping a big hand in the direction of the file folders stacked in front of him. “A little bedtime reading, if anyone’s interested.”
“What about ex-cons?” Kovac asked. “Any bad guys recently released who might think they have a big ax to grind?”
“I’ve tracked some of the more obvious candidates through their parole officers,” Liska said. “So far I don’t like any of them for the assault. Despite all efforts by the Department of Corrections, it seems several of them have actually reformed, and can be accounted for by their bosses at the time of the judge’s attack.
“But,” she continued, “I do have a hot prospect in Ethan Pratt, the father of the foster kids who were murdered.”
Tippen arched a shaggy brow. “He’s been out of the picture since conception, but now he cares so much he assaults a judge?”
“He’s of a type,” Liska said. “One of those guys who only wants to be around to make the big, dramatic scene.”
“An asshole,” Kovac declared.
“Pratt’s done jail time for minor assault. He punched out a guy in a sports bar for being a Dallas Cowboys fan-”
“That’s a crime?” Elwood asked.
“-knocked around a girlfriend. Big temper, small brain,” Liska said. “He made the news when Karl Dahl was arrested, giving a loud, obnoxious statement outside the courthouse after the arraignment. Demanded the death penalty. It somehow escaped his notice that we don’t have the death penalty in this state.”