"How did we get this?" Jessica asked.
"Courier," Buchanan said.
"Courier?" Jessica asked. "Is our doer changing his MO on us?"
"Not sure. But there was a partial rental sticker on it."
"Do we know where it was from?"
"Not yet," Buchanan said. "Most of the label was scraped off. But some of the bar code remained intact. The digital imaging lab is looking at it."
"Which courier service brought it?"
"Small company on Market called Blazing Wheels. Bike messengers."
"Do we know who sent it?"
Buchanan shook his head. "According to the kid who delivered it, he met with a guy at the Starbucks on Fourth and South. The guy paid cash."
"Don't you have to fill out a form?"
"All false. Name, address, phone. Dead ends."
"Can the messenger describe the guy?"
"He's with a sketch artist now."
Buchanan held up the tape.
"This is a wanted man, people," he said. Everyone knew what he meant. Until this psychopath was shut down, you ate standing up, and you didn't even think about sleeping. "Find this son of a bitch."
39
The little girl in the living room was barely tall enough to see over the coffee table. On television, the cartoon figures bounced and gamboled and zoomed, their manic movement a loud and colorful display. The little girl giggled.
Faith Chandler tried to focus. She was so tired.
In that space between memories, the bullet train of years, the little girl became twelve, about to enter junior high school. She stood tall and straight, the last moment before the boredom and utter misery of adolescence took over her mind; the furious hormones, her body. Still her little girl. Ribbons and smiles.
Faith knew she had to do something, but she could not think. She had made a phone call before she left for Center City. Now she was back. She was supposed to call again. But who? What had she meant to say?
There were three full bottles on the table, a full tumbler in front of her. Too much. Not enough. Never enough.
God, grant me the serenity…
There is no serenity.
She looked to her left once more, into the living room. The little girl was gone. The little girl was a dead woman now, cold in some gray marble room downtown.
Faith lifted the glass to her lips. She spilled some whiskey on her lap. She tried again. She swallowed. The fires of sorrow and guilt and regret flared within her.
"Stephie," she said.
She lifted the glass again. This time he helped her bring it to her lips. In a little while he would help her drink straight from the bottle.
40
As Jessica walked up broad street, she considered the nature of these crimes. She knew that, generally speaking, serial killers go to great lengths-or at least some lengths-to conceal their deeds. They find out-of-the-way dump sites, remote burial grounds. But the Actor was putting his victims on display in the most public and private of arenas: people's living rooms.
They all knew that the case had just become much bigger. The grip of passion needed to do what was done on the Psycho tape had become something else. Something cold. Something infinitely more calculating.
As much as Jessica wanted to call Kevin, to update him and get his take, she was ordered-ordered in no uncertain terms-to keep him out of the loop for the time being. He was on limited duty and the city was currently fighting two multimillion-dollar civil suits regarding officers who, even though cleared by doctors to return to work, had come back too soon. One had swallowed his barrel. The other had been gunned down in a drug raid when he could not run. There were enough detectives available, and Jessica was told to work with the team on duty.
She thought about the look on the young woman's face in the Fatal Attraction video, the change from anger to fear to paralyzing horror. She thought about the gun rising into the frame.
For some reason, she thought mostly about the T-shirt dress. She hadn't seen one of them in years. She'd had a few when she was a teenager, of course, as did all of her friends. They were all the rage when she was starting junior high. She thought about the way it made her look shapely in those gangly scarecrow years, the way it gave her hips, something she was willing to give back now.
But mostly she thought about the blood blossoming on the front of the woman's dress. There was something unholy about that stigmata of bright red, the way it spread on the wet white fabric.
As Jessica neared city hall she noticed something that unnerved her even further, something that cloistered her hopes for any sort of rapid solution to this horror.
It was a hot summer day in Philly.
Almost all the women wore white.
Jessica browsed the racks of mystery fiction, thumbing through some of the new releases. She hadn't read a good crime novel in a while although, ever since she joined the Homicide Unit, she hadn't had much tolerance for crime as entertainment.
She was in the huge, multilevel Borders on South Broad Street, right near city hall. She had decided to walk instead of eating lunch today. Any day now, Uncle Vittorio would close a deal for her to be on ESPN2, which would mean she would have a bout set up, which would mean she'd have to go into training-no more cheesesteaks, no more scones, no more tiramisu. She hadn't run in nearly five days, and she was pretty pissed at herself about that. If for no other reason, running was a great way to relieve the stress of the job.
For all cops, the specter of weight gain loomed large, due to the hours, the pressure, the ease of living a fast-food life. Not to mention the booze. For women cops, it was worse. She had known many fellow female officers who had entered the force a size four and left a twelve or fourteen. It was one of the reasons she had gotten into boxing in the first place. The steel mesh of discipline.
Of course, as soon as these thoughts crossed her mind, she caught the aroma of warm pastries wafting down the escalator from the cafe on the second floor. Time to go.
She had to meet up with Terry Cahill in a few minutes. They were going to canvass the coffee shops and lunch counters near Stephanie Chandler's office building. Pending identification of the Actor's second victim, it was all they had going.
Near the checkout counters on the main floor of the bookstore she saw a tall, freestanding rack of books labeled LOCAL INTEREST. Displayed were a number of volumes about Philadelphia, mostly small-press editions covering the city's history, attractions, colorful citizens. There was one title that jumped out at her:
Gods of Mayhem: A History of Murder in Cinema.
The book was about crime film and its various motifs and themes, from black comedies like Fargo to classic noir movies such as Double Indemnity to bizarre fare like Man Bites Dog.
Aside from the title, what caught Jessica's eye was the short blurb about the author. A man named Nigel Butler, PhD, professor of film studies at Drexel University.
By the time she reached the door she was on her cell phone. FOUNDED IN 1891, Drexel University was located on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia. Among its eight colleges and three schools was the highly respected College of Media Arts and Design, which also included a screenwriting program.
According to the brief biography on the back of the book, Nigel Butler was forty-two, but he looked much younger in person. The man in the author photo had a salt-and-pepper beard. The man in the black suede blazer in front of her was clean-shaven, and that seemed to take a decade off his appearance.
They met in his small, book-filled office. The walls were lined with well-framed movie posters from the 1930s and '40s, mostly noir: Criss Cross, Phantom Lady, This Gun for Hire. There were also a number of eight-by-ten head shots of Nigel Butler as Tevye, Willy Loman, King Lear, Ricky Roma.