The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 35

Vivian stifled a yawn and shifted in her hard wooden seat. Mr. Kazakov called early and woke her up because he had an unexpected business meeting that took him across town with the weekend bodyguard, so Vivian had to fill in watching Katrinka perform in a school play. This involved a lot of sitting on exactly the parts the ride had tenderized yesterday. She was never going to be a cowgirl.

The show wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The kids on stage were better than anyone in Vivian’s high school had ever been. They probably had a professional acting coach. Upscale private school.

Katrinka was a gifted actress, but not gifted enough to hide her disappointment that her parents weren’t coming to the show’s matinee. Her mother had claimed a migraine and was sequestered in her room, and her father had that meeting. Katrinka had pretended to be too old to care as she put on her makeup backstage. Her red lipstick came in a black and silver case, just like the one Tesla had found. Vivian wondered if the parents of any of the murdered women had gone to their school plays.

Vivian resisted the urge to try to make it up to Katrinka. That would look like pity instead of sympathy. Vivian’s mother had missed a few of her events, too, but only when she couldn’t move her work schedule around to accommodate them. Usually, she’d moved heaven and earth to be there.

Katrinka wore a Victorian-era blue dress and walked across the stage with affected nervousness. She was playing Dr. Jekyll’s fiancé, and her character had started to suspect something was wrong with the seemingly perfect doctor she loved. As worried as she was, she didn’t know the half of what was wrong with him.

Dr. Jekyll was a TV-handsome kid who delivered his lines with an assurance that spoke of plenty of time on stage. He’d probably been acting since he was a toddler.

He reminded Vivian of Slade. Or the killer. That guy must be a pretty accomplished actor, too. Sympathetic enough to lure women into the tunnels with him. The women he tricked were savvy, used to living in New York, probably leery of strangers. It wouldn’t have been easy to convince them to follow him.

But they had followed him. Earlier in the day, she’d received a text from Tesla telling her that the women were drugged. Considering the time of night when the murders occurred, this probably meant he’d spiked their drinks, which indicated he’d met them at a bar or a club.

On stage, Dr. Jekyll collapsed behind his desk with a moan, and Mr. Hyde emerged. He was played by a smaller kid who leaped onto the desk and squatted there like a monkey. He glared out into the audience and picked his nose.

Nobody would let Mr. Hyde pick them up at a club. Dr. Jekyll, on the other hand, wouldn’t have much trouble. Dr. Jekyll looked like he belonged. When Iris and Sandra had been out clubbing, Sandra had abandoned Iris to be with a good-looking guy she met there. He was tall, and he wore a nice suit. She bet Iris knew a lot about expensive suits and the men who wore them. This particular man hadn’t raised any alarm bells. He was the kind of guy she would expect to meet at that club. He was still Dr. Jekyll.

Like the kid capering around on stage, maybe the killer only transformed into Mr. Hyde at certain points. In his case, he became Hyde every October to kill two random women. For the rest of the year maybe he transformed back into the innocuous Dr. Jekyll. Or did he become a monster more often, maybe killing women some other way during other months? Vivian shivered at the thought of more victims, of the man moving undetected through the places where he met his victims, because he was above suspicion.

But he wasn’t above her suspicions. She’d call Iris to get the name of the club where she’d left Sandra and check it out, but she didn’t think the man would be foolish enough to pick up two victims in a row at the same place. If he branched out, that left a lot of clubs. Narrowing it down wouldn’t be easy.

On stage Hyde bounced away from Dr. Jekyll’s office to the other side of the stage, toward a Victorian bar painted on the backdrop. Hyde had gone off to a club to hunt.

What kind of club would these women go to? Vivian hadn’t been to a club in a long time, hating the noise and the crush of people and how, afterward, her hair always smelled like smoke, and she had to scrub some stupid stamp off her arm.

Stamp. Vivian surreptitiously pulled out her phone so as not to seem to be ignoring the performance. She didn’t know why she bothered. Half the audience members were openly checking their phones. She flipped through her pictures of the crime scene, hoping that no one was watching over her shoulder. That would take some explaining.

She stopped when she reached the photo of a delicate white hand. The bloody hand rested palm up on a filthy train tie. Vivian zoomed in on the black tattoo imprinted on the wrist.

The black lines formed a palm tree bent into a crescent as if buffeted by a high wind. The design was almost clean enough to be a tattoo, but a slight smudge a quarter inch above the palm trees gave it away. The image wasn’t a tattoo. It was a nightclub stamp.

Dirk had probably noticed it, but she texted her supposition off to him and Tesla anyway. If the guy had picked the victim up at a club, there might be witnesses. They might get lucky and find someone who knew the victim or the killer. At the very least they might uncover better surveillance videos than what the subway security cameras had been able to record.

Maybe that waving palm tree would catch a killer.