I took a minute to think about that. “But you don’t think he killed her.”
“Not a chance,” she said.
“Why ‘not a chance’?”
She took the photo back from me. “I shot that in the hotel where he came to meet me. I hadn’t planned on confronting our mysterious Mr. Lee, but when I saw him...let’s just say I decided I could handle him. We talked for an hour. We would’ve talked longer, but he had to get to Social Studies. He had a paper due. You get the picture? He wasn’t terrified I’d tell his wife—he was terrified I’d tell his parents.”
I was trying to make it add up in my head. “I don’t know, Susan. Terrified of his parents, lonely, a misfit—seventeen’s not too young to be a killer.”
But she was shaking her head. “He was crazy about her, John. Not crazy bad—he was...he liked her. And not, you know, obsessively. Just very, very earnestly. He was really broken up by her death.”
“Could be an act.”
“You think I can’t tell the difference? It wasn’t an act. He misses her. Like he lost his best friend.”
“He misses her so much so that he agreed to meet you at a hotel.”
“He thought I was going to blackmail him.”
“He thought you were going to give him a handjob, Susan. Big tits, remember?”
“Yes,” she said, “I remember.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry.” I lay back, stared up the sky. The clouds didn’t care. “Maybe he didn’t do it,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“It does happen once in a while.”
“What about the other two?” I said. “Adams. Smith.”
“Adams I’ve heard nothing. Zero. Smith I got an auto-response saying he’s out of town, he’ll answer his messages when he gets back, which is supposed to be today. I’m going to try again later.”
“So one of them could be our man.”
“Or they could be horny seventeen-year-olds too.”
“You think so?”
“No, John,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re teenagers and I don’t think they’re killers. I think they’re unhappy men who sometimes pay women to make them a little happier for an hour.”
“Somebody killed her, Susan.”
“Or not,” Susan said.
I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “What she wrote in that letter she left with Sharon...there was something going on. Something she felt she couldn’t tell me. Something bad enough to make her decide to go on the run—only her killer got to her first.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” Susan said, “but that doesn’t make it true. Any more than when her mother does the same thing. It’s an act of faith.”
“Or maybe I’m right. That happens once in a while, too.”
She didn’t say anything. I heard her cram the sheet of paper into her bag.
“Can you do me a favor?” I said. I was almost embarrassed to ask.
“What.”
“My cell phone...it’s dead.”
I heard her rummage through her bag, then a click. A slim rectangle of plastic landed on my chest. I sat up, swapped the new battery into my phone, handed her the dead one.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I guess I should be grateful you didn’t steal it,” she said.
I started to say “I’m sorry” again but she waved my words away.
“So,” she said. “You going to stay out here all day?”
“No,” I said. “I have to keep moving.”
“But you’re going to want me to meet you here again tomorrow, right? Deliver my daily report, like a good little soldier? Or do you want to pick a different rock for tomorrow?”
“This one’ll be fine.”
“John—for your own good. Please let me get you some help.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise. But not yet.”
Despite what I’d told her, I stayed where I was. There was no better place I could think of. All I’d have accomplished by moving was to put myself at risk. At greater risk.
I made two phone calls, then put my phone away. One was to check my voicemail, which was filled to capacity, but not with anything I needed to hear. The other was to Kurland, who told me Julie had checked out of the hospital and was staying with him. He must’ve known I was on the run—how could he not?—but he didn’t say anything about it. He put Julie on the phone when I asked him to. We didn’t talk long.
It got colder as the afternoon wore on, but with my sweater and my hat, it wasn’t too bad, at least until the sun went down.
My eyes got used to the dark, my body to not moving. No one bothered me. Once I saw a cop pass on the path beneath me and I was tempted for an insane moment to call out to him. A voice from the rock. A voice from on high crying, “Here I am!”
But I stayed silent and he passed, and the time passed, and then it was 11:20 and I had somewhere to be.
Chapter 26
There was a different woman at the front desk, but she was cut from the same bolt. Willowy. Slender. Glossy lips, slightly parted. Soft voice.
“Have you been here before?” she said.
I told her I had.
“Would you prefer a massage or a scrub?”
I had too little money for either; I didn’t even have enough to use the facilities.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m just here to meet someone. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes. I was hoping you’d let me wait for him back there.” I nodded toward the changing area. I could see her getting ready to say no. Before she could get the word out, I held out two folded bills, a twenty and a ten. It was the last of my cash.
She took it, spread the bills, and took a minute to consider whether it was a respectable bribe or an insult. She pocketed the money. “Stay in the changing area,” she said. “Keep your clothes on.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Thankfully this time there was no one else there. I pulled one of the high-backed couches toward me to block the view a bit more. It was five minutes to midnight.
The train ride downtown had been excruciating. I’d kept my hat pulled low and my jacket collar high and a copy of the Village Voice in front of my face, but all the same I’d been expecting to feel cuffs cinched around my wrists every time the doors opened, every time someone got on or off.
Now I was indoors and alone, but if anything the tension was worse. Because now I was waiting for a man who’d told me he’d kill me if he ever saw me again. A man who’d killed two people because of me.
I asked myself why I was here. I’d asked it all the way down. The answer was because he’d killed Di. (Candace, I reminded myself. He’d killed Candace.) I’d believed Ardo when he’d said they didn’t kill women. In his own crazy way, he’d meant it—it seemed to be a point of pride with him, of integrity, maybe dating back to when he’d been a child and seen his sister shot by the Arrow Cross.
But Miklos hadn’t seen his sister shot. And Miklos didn’t seem to have a problem killing women.
He’d certainly attacked Julie, and I was confident he’d been the one who’d strangled Candace—why the hell should I believe he wouldn’t have killed Dorrie?
If nothing else, he was my leading candidate for who Dorrie had been preparing to leave the city to get away from. I already knew Dorrie had been afraid to tell me about him once—she hadn’t said a word to me about the incident with Julie’s hand. That didn’t guarantee it was Miklos she’d been too scared to tell me about this time...but how many people that frightening could she have known?
The clock on the wall ticked slowly toward true north.
I was carrying nothing I could use as a weapon. I thought for a moment about tracking down the barber’s shears Lisa had found for me the last time I’d been here—at least they had a sharp point. But realistically I might just as well have asked her for the manicure scissors, for all the good they’d do me. Might as well ask for a toothbrush.