He fastened her to the chair’s curves with a jump rope. Her own, Tess realized, the one she kept in the trunk of her car. She hadn’t even noticed it was missing. It had been there in Sharpsburg, the night she checked into the Bavarian Inn, but she hadn’t thought to look for it since. There had been so little time for jumping rope. Or for rowing, for running, for long walks with her dogs. There had been so little time for everything, and now there might not be time for anything ever again. When had he taken her jump rope? Figuring out this one thing suddenly seemed crucial. Had he taken it as she slept that night in West Virginia and then continued to the graveyard to leave the stones on Hazel’s grave? How long had he been a part of her life, how long had he been watching her, waiting for her? She had been so easy for him to follow.
But then, he had mapped her course through Maryland. He knew where she was going because he had sent her there.
When he tightened the knot on the leather rope, Tess tried to swell her chest as much as possible, so there might be some slack when he was done, but she was weak and light-headed. Had she lost that much blood? Was she in shock? He wore a denim work shirt over his white T-shirt and he took it off, tying the arms around her leg to make a bandage. All this time he had not spoken, but he had removed his baseball cap, so she could finally see his face. He had a nice build, not unlike Crow’s: slender but muscular. He looked to be her age, but then that was one of the few things they had known about him. He was thirty-two. From identity to identity, Billy Windsor had been consistent about his age. He picked men with the same birth year as his, which gave him one less lie to keep track of.
Did he live here? There was a cot, neatly made, with a lightweight blanket and a pretty patchwork pillow. There was an old card table, and he had rigged up electricity and hung a floodlight that threw a circle of light over them. But there was no sign of a bathroom and the rest of the space was stacked with canisters and boxes.
“Shouldn’t I be lying down? In case of shock?”
“Possibly,” he said. “But that would interfere with what I have to do.”
Even now, with her trussed up, he was taciturn about his motives.
“Carl’s not really alive, is he?”
He considered her question. “I doubt it. If he is, it won’t be for long. He’s probably busted up good, inside. But I didn’t want to kill you out there.”
Again, she tried to divine his intentions. Did he not want to kill her? Or was it simply that he didn’t want to kill her out there? He had never tortured his victims, she had that faint consolation, and his witting victims-Tiffani, Lucy-had been granted the quickest deaths. He was good to the women he loved.
“Still, you can’t be sure he’s dead. People do survive getting hit by cars.”
She wanted him to go back outside and check and-well, then what? The jump rope was leather and leather had some give, even when knotted. But Billy had grown up on the water, knew his way around boats. He was probably excellent at tying knots.
“It’s a method that hasn’t failed me yet.”
“You mean with Michael Shaw.”
He smiled. It was a fond smile, warm and affectionate, as if he knew her. She thought, for a moment, that he might reach out and tousle her hair. “Not just Dr. Shaw.”
“Who-?” But she knew the answer. It was the answer that explained everything, or began to. Jonathan Ross. She was sitting opposite the man who had killed Jonathan Ross. Billy Windsor had driven the Marathon cab that foggy morning. Tess had told herself that only Luisa and Seamon O’Neal knew how Jonathan had been killed. But of course they had hired someone. They had hired Billy Windsor, and he had used that tit for tat: to blackmail Luisa O’Neal into being his accomplice when he decided to track Tess down. Even with Seamon dead and her own life almost over, Luisa O’Neal would not want anyone to know what her husband had done.
“How did you and the O’Neals ever meet?”
“Seamon O’Neal helped me out of a jam. It was a little more than two years ago, and I was trying to turn over a new leaf.”
“After you burned down Hazel’s house.”
He let that pass, but he didn’t protest or deny the fact. “I got picked up for criminal trespass on a job. And it turned out the name I was using, Ben Colby, had a prior for robbery. I don’t know how Hazel missed that. I told her to run criminal checks.”
“Is that why you killed her?”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “So what was I going to do? I couldn’t say I wasn’t Ben Colby because then I’d have had to say who I was. But the prior meant I might serve time, and I’d never survive that. O’Neal was my lawyer.”
“O’Neal didn’t do that kind of petty criminal work. He represented asbestos manufacturers, big firms involved in civil suits.”
“We had a client in common, O’Neal and I. A local developer who cut some corners-hired kids to haul asbestos away, wasn’t careful about the way he stripped lead paint from old buildings. He didn’t want me going into court, telling why I was found on private property. Because I was there on his behalf, and I knew too much about how he did business. He got me O’Neal, and O’Neal got me off. But O’Neal knew I was keeping secrets. So when he asked me to make one of his problems disappear, I had to return the favor. It was business.”
“Killing Jonathan Ross was business.”
“Yes. I didn’t like it much. But it had to be done. I do unpleasant things, sometimes, in my work.”
“And in your life.”
“It’s not the same. Don’t confuse what I do for money, or out of necessity, and what I do for love.”
Billy Windsor walked over to the small card table by his cot and began rummaging through an old canvas bag. He pulled out a black leather case and unzipped it, revealing a pair of scissors and a razor. They picked up what little light there was, giving off a shine that was almost blue.
“It’s better wet,” he said. “But I can do it dry, if I have to.”
Tess worked her mouth, but no words came out. This was not what he did, she reminded herself. He did not slash throats, he had never done any ritualistic cutting or stabbing. Lucy Fancher’s head had been removed postmortem.
He looked at her, perplexed by her expression. Then he understood.
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Tess. I’m just going to cut your hair.”
If her arms had not been pinned by the coils of rope, her hands would have flown to her head. As it was, she felt her arms strain against their bindings. There was a little slack there, but not much. Not enough.
“Don’t worry. I’m quite good. I cut my mother’s hair as a boy. Then Becca’s. I had to talk her into it-she liked tossing her curls around. But she was much more beautiful with her hair short. I cut all their hair, and they were all more beautiful for it. You will be, too. Women’s faces are like flowers. When you cut their hair, they open up.”
“But they”-she did not want to characterize them as his girlfriends. Such normalcy seemed obscene. “They didn’t all have short hair.”
“Not when I met them, sure. But you must not have looked at the autopsy photos. I cut Tiffani’s hair three days before, Lucy’s about a month before. I left Julie before we got that far. As for Mary Ann- well, she said she’d rather be dead than have short hair. And I thought, No, you wouldn’t. But I didn’t give up on her until I found out she wasn’t raising her own child. I found that unnatural. That was over two years ago, and I decided I’d never have what I really wanted, that I had to live a different kind of life. Then I met you.”
He came around behind her. She flinched at his touch, but it could not have been more gentle. Apparently, he really did intend to cut her hair. He was unbraiding it, sectioning it, running his fingers through it. Soon enough, she heard the scissors’ husky rasp and saw a hank fall to the floor. The brown locks looked so alive, so vital, so much a part of her. It was going to take a long time for him to cut this unruly mass.