Holmes rose to his feet slowly. Teddy could tell the man didn’t want his only visitor to leave, didn’t want to return to his cell.
“How did the second one die?” Holmes whispered.
“It’s a different case.”
“How’d it happen?”
“The autopsy’s this afternoon,” Teddy said. “But she was cut.”
Holmes seemed shaky as he took it in. After a moment, they started walking back to visiting room three.
“Would you agree to hypnosis?” Teddy asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“The day Darlene Lewis died. We’d bring in a doctor. We’d put you under hypnosis. Then maybe you could relax enough to remember what happened.”
Holmes stopped in his tracks and that wild look was back. The fear and panic. Teddy noted the guard walking toward them who would escort Holmes to his cellblock. Holmes saw him coming, too, his voice pleading.
“No,” Holmes said. “Please. She was just a girl. I don’t want to remember what happened. I don’t want to know what I’ve done.”
It hung there, with Teddy staring into Holmes’s dead eyes. The nightmares were winning.
He pulled Holmes away by the arm. Tears were streaming down the man’s cheeks and his head was down. Teddy moved closer, whispering into his client’s ear.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You need to pull yourself together and figure a way to sort this out. There’s the chance someone else was there. Do you hear me, Holmes? That’s why we need you to remember. We need your help. There’s a chance someone else was there.”
Holmes didn’t react. He was staring at the picture of Valerie Kram in Teddy’s hand. When he finally raised his head, his face was blank, distant, in the zone. The guard led Holmes away. As Teddy watched them walk off, he doubted Holmes had heard him. Doubted that what he’d said got through. The man believed he’d murdered Darlene Lewis, maybe even Valerie Kram. His mind was a jumbled mess.
TWENTY
Barnett slammed a copy of the Daily News down on his desk, shaking in anger.
“This is bullshit,” he shouted. “This is exactly what I didn’t want. Look at it. It’s not a fucking headline, it’s as big as a sign.”
Teddy read the three-inch headline, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, then glanced at the photo of Holmes in his postal uniform behind the bold text. The picture had been enlarged from Holmes’s photo ID to fill out the page, the blow up so distorted anyone looking at it would think him a monster. In a three box set below the monster’s chin, pictures were included of Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram, along with a shot of the boathouse and an arrow indicating the spot where Kram’s body had been found in the river.
Barnett yanked his desk drawer open. When he found the pill bottle he was looking for, Teddy noted that it wasn’t Tylenol anymore, but a prescription.
“I gave you a simple task,” Barnett was saying as he threw a pill into his mouth and gulped it down. “You knew how we were gonna play this thing. Bring Nash in to scare the district attorney, then do the deal. That’s all I asked of you. That’s all you were supposed to do.”
Teddy closed the door. “Things have changed.”
“What change?” Barnett said, spitting out the words.
“It’s possible that Holmes is innocent.”
Barnett spun around, staring at him as if Teddy was insane. “Innocent? Yesterday Oscar Holmes was a guy with a history of mental illness who went off his rocker and was charged with a single count of murder. Today he’s a serial killer and the whole fucking city’s up in arms. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what’s going on?”
Teddy grabbed the newspaper and sat down on the couch, stunned by Barnett’s attitude but keeping it to himself. As he thumbed through the first three pages, he realized that the headline may have been tongue-in-cheek, but what the articles implied were anything but. Holmes’s connection to the two murders was now in print. He glanced at Barnett slumped in his desk chair, then got started reading.
The connection hadn’t been made by new evidence or even a leak. It had been made by Andrews at his press conference last night just as Teddy feared it would. Both women had been cut. That, along with their age and appearance, was enough to bind the two cases together. Getting to Holmes without confirming anything alleged was even easier. While one reporter detailed the events leading to Holmes’s arrest for the murder of Darlene Lewis, another writer spent yesterday afternoon at Holmes’s former butcher shop, interviewing old ladies from the neighborhood who remembered Holmes, and getting photographs of them buying flank steak and pork sausages. The women recounted stories of Holmes’s talent with a knife, mixed with excited laughter and occasional squeals over what he’d done. Most of the women seemed to be saying that, for the love of God, they could’ve been next. Teddy glanced back at their photos, fighting off an urge to smile as he noted their age and weighty figures. None of them looked quite like Darlene Lewis or Valerie Kram, and he imagined they were safe for now.
He closed the paper, concluding none of it was real. The district attorney may have gotten the headlines he wanted. Oscar Holmes was tagged a serial killer without really saying it, and the case was the talk of the town. But the ground had been fertilized by innuendo. Not a single fact had been leaked and the word cannibalism hadn’t appeared in print. They’d gotten off lucky, Teddy thought. When the details were brought out in court, the headlines would be far worse.
Barnett swiveled his chair around from the window. The pill must have kicked in because his anger had subsided and an almost eerie state of calm had set in.
“Do you understand why headlines are never going to work in our favor?” he said in an unusually quiet voice.
Teddy nodded. “They’ll spoil the jury pool.”
Barnett grimaced and blinked, trying to rein his emotions back in. “No, goddamn it. Because every new headline makes Andrews stronger and moves him farther away from making a deal. I’ve spoken with Nash, and he agrees.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“I hung up the phone when you walked in.”
“What did you say?”
“Just what I’m saying to you. This case is about avoiding the press and getting Holmes to plead guilty. This case is about making sure someone who needs medical attention gets the psychiatric care he so obviously needs.”
While Barnett may have spoken with Nash, Teddy didn’t believe that Nash agreed to capitulate. Particularly now, when they’d just isolated ten more victims, and Holmes’s guilt remained up in the air. It didn’t make sense.
“What did Nash say?” Teddy asked.
“At first he didn’t see it that way. When I brought him back to reality, he did.”
“What’s the reality?”
Barnett gave him a look. “That in a civilized world, we don’t execute the mentally impaired.”
Teddy had to hand it to Barnett. The man had an uncanny ability to dig up a bottom line and make it sound good even if it might be the wrong one.
Holmes stood out. There was no question that he was different, maybe even odd. And he was distraught, confused, teetering on the edge. But he had a right to be, Teddy thought. For two days he’d been told he murdered someone, and like everyone else, he didn’t appear to know what actually happened. He was alone. All he had were glimpses of the murder scene, the dead body, a young girl’s blood on his clothes. Who wouldn’t be having nightmares? Given the circumstances, the gore, who wouldn’t lose faith in themselves? The man needed help, but nothing Teddy had seen in his two visits indicated he was mentally ill.
“How’d you leave it with Nash?” Teddy asked.
“What’s with the twenty questions?”