His heart was racing in strange anticipation.
He opened his eyes and they fell on the white love seat. Her dress had been draped neatly over the back, not tossed on the floor as if in haste. Her underwear, including the stocking mate, sat beside the dress. She had disrobed while standing up—like a stripper—and was careful about the garment as opposed to letting her lover tear it off in the heat of the moment. The techs had confirmed no rips or tears. And the M.E. noted negligible alcohol in her system and no drugs.
Yet she had died in a moment of fury with no time to scream. According to Ottoman, for ten brutal seconds Terry Farina knew that she was being murdered. When she blacked out, the killer continued the choke hold until her brain died. He then set up the autoerotica charade.
It all seemed so clear.
The stockings. Something about the stockings was not right. He rested his head against the window and stared into the darkness. He tried to see her standing there in the dress and stockings. But it wasn’t coming to him. Something didn’t jibe.
He pulled out his PDA communicator and clicked Dana’s number. She answered on the fourth ring. He explained he was working on a case. “Would you wear black stockings with a small black spaghetti-strap dress with black shoes?”
“Not unless I was going to a funeral. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Especially not in June. In fact, most women don’t wear stockings this time of year.”
When he clicked off he stared at the bureau. The next moment he snapped on a pair of latex gloves and began to go through the drawers. In the second drawer down, he found several pairs of stockings in different colors and textures, including a few black pairs with elastic stay-up tops. Also other undergarments, including bras, garter belts, thongs, and panties.
Going through the belongings of a victim always made him feel a little grubby because he was violating a domain intimate to the identity of a stranger. But clawing through the underwear of Terry Farina was worse because it created an uninvited titillation. It wasn’t so much the sexy underwear. It was her sexy underwear—and he could almost detect the warmth of her body, the scent of her flesh. And he could recall the intimate thoughts that had flickered across his mind while on coffee break.
He punched a second call on his PDA, this one to Nelson Wu, a friend in the crime lab. “Nelson, I need a reading on the Farina stockings.”
“Okay, but give me a minute.” And he put Steve on hold while he got the sheet of specs. A minute later he clicked back on. “What do you want to know?”
“If they’re new or used.”
“From the look under the scope they look brand-new. The fibers showed no microfraying from wear or washing. Also, the mate still has its packing fold visible, which means it was never worn.”
Steve’s eye slid to the nightstand and the framed photograph of Terry and her sister. In the photo a pair of sunglasses was perched on top of Terry’s head. “What’s the brand?”
“Wolford and the model is…and are you ready? Satin Touch Evening Thigh High. It’s the kind that stay up without a garter belt.”
“Elastic tops.”
“Yeah. And in case you’re interested, they’re top of the line—forty-eight bucks a pair.”
“So we’re not talking your basic L’eggs off the rack at CVS.”
“Nope. They’re a specialty item found in fancy lingerie shops or online. And in case you’re interested, they’re a patented chemical combination from DuPont Chemical, 87 percent nylon, 13 percent elastane.”
Steve went back through her dresser and the smaller chest of drawers in her closet. He found no other Wolfords. He pulled out his PDA again and called Nelson Wu back. “One more question. In her trash was there any packaging for the stockings?”
“I’ll have to call you back.”
While he waited, Steve checked the rest of the apartment, then went down to the garage and rechecked the trash barrels. The contents had been collected by C.S.S. He headed back up.
Just outside the kitchen door on the back landing sat a table stacked with newspapers and magazines that reminded him of something odd from yesterday. He went back into the kitchen and opened every drawer and cabinet. In a cabinet to the right of the sink, mail had been stacked up on dishes along with Saturday’s newspapers. The killer wouldn’t do that, which meant that that the victim was probably in a rush to straighten out the place for company—or for her last-minute guest.
The mail consisted of bills, a clothing catalogue, a copy of Entertainment Weekly, flyers, Psychology Today, Newsweek, and a UPS envelope with a return address on the label that said the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. The envelope was open, and inside was a letter congratulating Terry Farina for having received a five-thousand-dollar fellowship.
His phone rang. It was Wu. “Negative. No stocking packaging.”
Steve thanked him and clicked off. Maybe the killer had brought the stockings with him and left with the packaging. So, despite the explosive violence, he was cautious not to leave any trace of himself, then set up the autoerotica to look like an accident.
As Steve stood in the kitchen and processed that, he looked down at his PDA. As if on some weird autopilot, his finger pressed the button listing recent outgoing calls. Wu’s number was on top, then Dana’s. Then several others he had made over the last few days. He scrolled back to Sunday. Then Saturday the second.
For a moment he stared at a number that did not look familiar. A number he had called at 5:53 P.M. Without a thought, he pressed the recall button. Like a half-glimpsed premonition, from across the room Terry Farina’s telephone rang.
13
The phone was still ringing in his head as he drove to Carleton.
And slowly memory began to condense out of the fog. Terry Farina’s number was on his scroll of outgoing calls because he had telephoned about her sunglasses.
Yes. He had called to tell her that she had left them in the pub. Conor Larkins on Huntington Avenue Across from the NU quad. It’s where he had bumped into her.
That was it. And it came back to him with a shudder.
Last Saturday afternoon. He was off-duty and did his grades at home. Then he drove to campus to drop them off. Because it was the weekend, the night school office was closed, so he went to the grade sheet drop-box in the open lobby. It was late afternoon and he was hungry so he went to the pub for a sandwich. To his surprise, Terry was in a quiet booth in the corner doing a final on her laptop. She was just finishing but invited him to join her. She had already eaten and he didn’t want to eat alone, so he ordered a draft of Sam Adams and she had a glass of white wine. They chatted for a while until she had to leave to run off her exam in the library then slip it under her instructor’s door. Then she would head home because she was going out of town the next morning. They said goodbye, and he stayed behind and ordered a sandwich. Before he left, he noticed that she had forgotten her sunglasses. Because he didn’t have her home number, he called Information, then gave her a call to say he could drop them off.
As he turned off Route 2 into Carleton, all he could remember beyond that was parking across the street from Terry’s apartment building. Until Reardon’s call the next morning, everything else was a dead blank.
The good news was that there was no listing of his call in the subpoenaed records from her carrier. The only way the call was untraceable to his PDA phone was if he had first dialed *67 to block caller ID. The bad news was that he had.