COED AND BOYFRIEND GUNNED DOWN
The story that followed told of a young UCLA student named Anna Marie Colson, who had been gunned down one night while she and her boyfriend were returning from a walk to Westwood Village. Several of Colson’s roommates had been questioned, including one Michael Edward Tolan, a pre-med student whom police said was Colson’s former boyfriend.
While Tolan was initially a “person of interest,” no charges were ever brought, and the official conclusion was that the murders were the result of a random mugging.
A photo accompanied the article. The coed and several of her roommates. Six in all.
One of them was clearly Tolan. Much younger. Happier than Blackburn had ever seen him. And sitting on his lap was a cute brunette with a cheerleader’s smile.
Anna Marie Colson.
“The wife wasn’t his first,” Blackburn said. “The sonofabitch did it before.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Blackburn continued to stare at the photo, looking at all those fresh young faces, none of them knowing that they had a killer among them.
But how could they? How can you look in someone’s eyes and really know what’s behind them?
Tolan had certainly fooled Blackburn. And Blackburn was a professional.
“What’s that?”
He looked up to see Kat gesturing toward his feet.
The tackle box. He’d forgotten about it.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but we’re about to find out.” Folding the article, he stuck it in his shirt pocket.
“Shouldn’t I return that? I thought you said no footprints.”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
Picking up the tackle box, Blackburn carried it to an armchair and sat, pulling it into his lap. Then he took the paper clip from his coat pocket, bent it straight, and went to work on the padlock.
Unfortunately, it was tougher than he’d expected.
“Let me try,” Kat said, crouching next to him.
Taking the paper clip, she attacked the lock, working it like a seasoned pro. Less than half a minute later, it was open.
She saw Blackburn’s look and grinned. “Gym class, senior year. I pulled a lot of locker room pranks.”
“What I would’ve given to be a fly on that wall.”
Her grin widened as he pulled the lock free and set it aside. Flipping up the latch, he carefully swung the lid of the tackle box open and shone his light on it.
There was a tray full of fishing lures on top. Weights. A spool of line. A couple of cork floats. Everything quite innocent and unremarkable.
Blackburn hooked the tray’s handle with a finger and pulled it out, setting it on the floor.
Then he froze.
Holy shit.
“What? What’ve you got?”
“What don’t I have is the question.”
Reaching into the bottom of the box, he pulled out a fat, pen-shaped object, the words PowerBlast 2000 printed on the side.
The cauterizing tool.
Beneath it lay a small hacksaw and a razor-sharp kitchen knife. And next to that was a stack of photographs.
Blackburn pulled them out and stared at them. The same photos he’d seen on the printed web page Tolan had given him. Dismembered bodies arranged in several different configurations. The last of the photos were shots of Abby Tolan. Her eyes cut out.
Kat eyed the contents of the box. “Is this what I think it is?”
Blackburn nodded. “The whole goddamn enchilada.”
“The murder kit, right? Vincent’s murder kit.”
Blackburn nodded again, knowing this didn’t quite fit — that something was off — but was unable to refute the evidence in front of him. There was no other conclusion he could reach.
Dr. Michael Tolan wasn’t a simple wife killer.
Dr. Michael Tolan was Vincent Van Gogh.
But before Blackburn could fully process the magnitude of this sudden revelation, he noticed something else in the box. Reaching a hand under the hacksaw, he pulled out a large plastic Ziplock bag and held it up, shining his flashlight beam at it.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Kat said, her face going pale.
Inside the bag, strung on a piece of nylon fishing line, was a necklace of severed ears, all but one of them as cracked and withered as old orange peels.
That one, however, stood out like a teenager in an octogenarian chorus line.
It was a new addition to the collection. A fresh souvenir.
Pink and raw and bloody.
And it was the sight of that ear — or more precisely, the earlobe — that sent the skittering of tiny feet along Blackburn’s spine.
“No,” he said quietly. “Not this.”
“What?” Kat asked. “What’s wrong?”
Blackburn suddenly felt sick to his stomach, the slop he’d eaten for lunch defying gravity and doing a barrel roll up his esophagus.
His whole body began to shake.
This can’t be true. Please tell me it isn’t true.
But it was. He knew it was. Knew it with unwavering certainty.
Because fastened to that fresh pink earlobe—
— was a tiny red ruby.
A tiny red ruby he’d seen just a few short hours ago.
A gift from a loving father. A birthstone.
Sue Carmody’s birthstone.
50
Tolan was in a daze.
“I was there, Michael. I saw it all.”
It was one thing to believe you might be a monster and another thing altogether to have it confirmed so matter-of-factly. Yet here Lisa sat, telling him what he’d dreaded hearing for a year now.
“You remember those photos Abby took of me on my birthday?”
“Yes,” he said.
“She called me a couple weeks later, told me to come by the gallery and pick them up. I showed up after work, but when I went inside, I heard you two in back, arguing. I should’ve left right there and then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked around the corner and saw you waving that box at her.”
“The condoms…”
She nodded.
“What was I saying?”
Lisa paused a moment. Swallowed. This was obviously difficult for her. “You called her a whore… Then she slapped you.”
Tolan thought about that slap, but was unable to penetrate the darkness that stretched beyond it.
“Keep going,” he said.
“You just stood there, as if you couldn’t believe she’d done that, your face a blank. Then you seemed to disappear into yourself, while someone else took over.”
“Someone else,” Tolan repeated.
Just like his mother.
She’d called it the changing of the guard. And it was usually followed by an attack on his father. A flurry of fists against his chest.
She’d be screaming at him and Tolan would run to the closet and hide, finding comfort in the darkness. But no matter how hard he pressed his hands against his ears, he couldn’t shut out the sound of his mother’s voice. Just as he couldn’t now shut out the truth.
“What happened next?” he asked, not sure he wanted to hear this.
Lisa’s gaze shifted to a spot outside her window, unable to look at him as she summoned up the memory.
“There was a knife on Abby’s work table. She’d been eating apples or something. One minute you were standing there and… and the next you suddenly grabbed it and started stabbing her. She didn’t even see it coming.”
The coldness that had enveloped Lisa earlier was long gone. A tear rolled down her cheek.
“When you were done, you just dropped into a chair and stared at the wall. At one of her photographs. The one you have hanging over your bed now.”