Mister X

5

"You're tearing open old wounds," Rhonda Nathan's mother said.

Pearl thought the elderly woman might begin to cry, but the unblinking gray eyes remained calm behind what looked like cheap drugstore eyeglasses.

The Nathans hadn't been difficult to trace, but the effort had been time-consuming. When their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rhonda, had been killed by the Carver seven years ago, they'd lived in a spacious condo in the East Fifties. Rhonda's father, who'd been struck and killed by a bus three years ago, had been the family breadwinner with a partnership in a Wall Street firm. His widow, Edith Nathan, had fallen a long way to this cramped apartment on the Lower East Side.

Pearl did feel sorry for the woman. Her thinning gray hair was unkempt, her complexion sallow. The flesh beneath her chin dangled in wattles, and her figure, if she'd ever had one, had become plump in a way that reminded Pearl of infants still in the crib. Breasts seemed nonexistent beneath her stained blue robe with its mismatched white sash.

The woman's eyes were fixed straight ahead. Her soul seemed to have wandered.

"Edith?" Pearl said softly.

The unnaturally calm gray eyes trained themselves on Pearl.

"We don't mean to cause pain," Pearl said.

"But you do cause pain," Edith said. "Like a scab being ripped from a wounded heart that will never completely heal."

Pearl glanced around the humble apartment. Geraniums in plastic pots on a windowsill were obviously dead, as were roses in a cracked vase on top of the television. Live flowers in another pot in the middle of the kitchen table, barely visible to Pearl, saved the apartment's plant life from being a sad metaphor. On a shelf that ran along a wall near a cabinet full of glass curios, a color photograph of a young dark-haired woman with a bright smile was propped in a silver frame. Pearl recognized Rhonda Nathan from her photos in the newspaper clippings of seven years ago that had been delivered by Chrissie Keller.

"Like most of the families of the monster's victims," Edith said, "I long ago accepted the reality that my daughter and only child was gone from the world. Nothing will bring her back. Not fate or a prayer or a deal with God or the devil. Not you reopening the investigation. Would I trade my life for the monster's death? Yes. Would I gladly kill him slowly in the most dreadful way? Yes. But not in the heat of vengeance. More in the balancing of scales." Edith sighed and leaned back into the flowered sofa cushions. "There is a numbness in me, Detective Kasner. Has been for years. Not a depression. A numbness because something is missing."

Edith hadn't looked closely at Pearl's ID when Pearl had identified herself as a detective. It wasn't ethical for Pearl to let the woman go on assuming she was with the NYPD, but Pearl was afraid the interview might not be granted otherwise.

Seven years ago in June, Rhonda Nathan had worked late at the advertising agency where she wrote copy, alone in her office cubicle. Her body had been found there by the office cleaning service just before daylight the next morning. She was slouched dead in her desk chair, nude, her nipples removed, the grotesque and bloody X carved deeply into her torso beneath her breasts. Her panties had been removed and knotted into a gag, stuffed deeply in her mouth in such a way that leftover material allowed for a leg hole to be looped around her neck and knotted to hold the gag firm. It was a method that had to be the result of planning and practice. A pencil had been placed between the victim's fingers, doubtless after death, as if she'd been taking notes throughout her torture and demise. A small thing, but it carried a jolting incongruity. It was one of several examples of a gruesome sense of humor that the Carver sometimes exhibited to the police at his crime scenes. A taunter, was the Carver. Not unusual in a serial killer who assumed he was much brighter than his pursuers.

Pearl decided not to go into the details of Rhonda's murder.

"In the intervening years since…it happened," she said, "have any new thoughts come to you, any recollections that might be of help? Even those that you might not think important?"

"Such as?" Edith asked softly.

"Anything that became clearer to you, or that you remembered about the week or so before the tragedy."

"I'm sorry, but there's nothing. And I think about that time every night, and sometimes I dream."

"Do you recall your daughter acting strangely-or simply out of character-in the time leading up to her death? Is there someone you can think of who could have had some disagreement with her? Someone who might have had a motive?"

"Motive?" Edith seemed mystified and slightly angry. "My daughter was a girl well liked. I would say very well liked. Rhonda was slain by a deranged monster, Detective Kasner. It's as simple and horrible as that."

"I think you're right," Pearl said, "but the monster doesn't necessarily seem like one when he's not being…himself. It's possible you knew him at the time, or at least had met him."

"Rhonda had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Charles Correnwell. It would be difficult to see Charles as a killer. Anyway, he moved to live with his mother in California weeks before Rhonda was killed, and has an alibi."

Pearl knew that to be true. Charles Correnwell, on the other side of a continent, had attended a college lecture and was later drinking with friends at the approximate time of Rhonda's murder.

"Your husband…" Pearl began.

Edith stared at her sharply. "He's dead."

"I know, ma'am. I know the circumstances."

"We were both shattered by the loss of our daughter," Edith said, "but I'm sure Aaron's death was an accident. He wouldn't leave me, leave the world, that way."

"I wasn't thinking that," Pearl said. "I was wondering if there might have been someone with an irrational motive to get at your husband by murdering his daughter."

"I'm sure there was no one that sick among our social or business acquaintances."

Pearl said nothing, and she and Edith exchanged glances. They'd established that monsters didn't always seem like monsters.

"Someone with protective coloring, you mean?" Edith said.

"Yes, ma'am."

Edith shrugged beneath the blue robe. "I'd have no way of knowing, would I?"

"Not unless a way came to you. Sometime when you were doing something else, or just before falling asleep, or waking up. The human mind works that way, catches us by surprise."

"I've fallen asleep and awakened thinking about Rhonda almost every night and morning since she died," Edith said. "The horror always plays out the same way, and I always wish I could have done something-anything-to prevent it. That's the worst thing about the past, that it can't be changed."

Pearl felt stymied for a moment. "Mrs. Nathan-Edith. There's so much about a person that never makes it into a police report." She leaned forward. "What was your daughter's favorite food? Did she smoke? What sort of music did she listen to? Might she have met someone online? Did she have a lot of male friends? Did she like movies?"

Edith sat more rigidly and stared hard at her, then seemed to relax. "She liked junk food-hamburgers, French fries, anything greasy and bad for her health. She didn't smoke. Drank some, but not much. Music? She liked to listen to that little girl from Brooklyn."

"Cyndi Lauper?"

Edith seemed to brighten. "That's the one."

"So happens I'm also a fan," Pearl said.

"Rhonda used her computer, the Internet, but she didn't go to chat rooms or that sort of thing. She had mostly female friends but some boys. They'd talk a lot on their cell phones. She had her cell phone pressed to her ear too much, like they all do, like it was growing there. I told her she might get brain cancer, but she didn't listen."

"None of them do," Pearl said.

Neither woman said anything. Neither wanted to hear that it hadn't mattered whether Rhonda's cell phone would have given her cancer.

"These don't sound like the kind of questions that solve murder cases," Edith said.

"Oh, but they are," Pearl told her. "Almost always it's something that didn't seem important at the time that turns out to be the key."

"Rhonda had just gotten her degree in psychology and was spending most of her time waiting tables at Sporter's, the restaurant in the next block, while she was looking for a better job. She didn't have a lot of spare time." Edith rubbed her palms on her temples, her fingers rigid. She looked exhausted. "I've sometimes wondered if that's where she met the monster, at the restaurant."

"It's possible."

"The police looked into it and found nothing."

"That doesn't mean there was nothing," Pearl said.

Seeing that Edith was almost too tired to remain awake, Pearl stood up and thanked her for her time.

"Do you really think there's a chance, after all these years?" Edith asked. Her eyes were bloodshot, swollen, and without hope.

"A chance," Pearl said. "A slight chance."

"I saw when you showed me your identification that you weren't a real detective," Edith said. "I mean, with the police."

Pearl smiled. "I'm a real detective."

"Private," Edith said. "Who hired you? Who's paying for this?"

"Twin sister of one of the Carver victims," Pearl said.

Edith flinched slightly, as if assailed by a bright and sudden light. "Twins…my God, how she must have suffered." She stared directly at Pearl. "She's still suffering, isn't she?"

"She is." Pearl reached into a pocket, drew out one of her cards, and handed it to Edith. "If you do think of something…"

Edith accepted the card and studied it. "Quinn and Associates. Is that Captain Frank Quinn?"

"It is," Pearl said. "You know him?"

"By reputation. I'm glad he's one of the people looking for Rhonda's killer."

Pearl was reminded, as she often was, of Quinn's high standing with the public because of his success in apprehending serial killers. He was halfway famous.

What next? Pearl thought. A book contract?

"I'll call you," Edith said.

Her voice brought Pearl back from her thoughts.

"If I think of something," Edith reminded her.

"Yes," Pearl said. "Please. Anything, however trivial. It might make all the difference."

"Reopening the investigation can't be cheap," Edith said. "The surviving twin, is she rich?"

"Not usually," Pearl said, "but she recently came into some money."

"She must feel she has to do this."

"She feels that way right now," Pearl said.

"She won't change her mind," Edith said.