J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

I thank him for his time and turn to go.

“Now, if you’d asked about Joy’s husband, I could have told you a thing or two. The girl he ran off with, she lived with them. I used to call her the au pair , but that was just my little joke. They didn’t have children, you see.”

“Dr. Hill’s husband left her for a girl who lived in their house?”

His fingers dance lightly over the keys. “The Polish girl. . Agnieszka. Now she was a beauty and very musical. A former student of Joy’s, too.”

“And Mr. Hill married her?”

“Oh, no.” He laughs at the thought. “She was only having her fun. He did marry another girl eventually, but no, Agnieszka dropped him, I’m afraid. She doesn’t visit anymore, but I know she used to work in a dress shop in the Village. She’s the sort of girl you’d want standing around in a dress shop, though she did more than stand around. Her dream was to be a designer.”

“Does she have a last name?”

Emmet nods. “And it’s full of consonants, too, but if you’re asking whether I remember it, again, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask Joy, though, she’ll know.”

“She might be sensitive about that subject.”

“Not her,” he says. “I think you’ll find that Joy was relieved more than anything else. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a loveless marriage. For my wife and I, though, there were the children to consider. I’m sure Joy would have divorced him ages ago if she hadn’t been so consumed with work. She’s a very driven woman, but sometimes it’s the driven ones who are most complacent.”

“It sounds like you’re fond of her.”

“Does it?” He smiles and plays me another enigmatic tune. “The human situation has always fascinated me, which I suppose is just a fancy way of saying I like people, and the best sort of people in terms of entertainment value are the characters, the eccentrics. You must run into all sorts of eccentrics in your profession.”

“Not just the criminals, either.”

“You might just be one yourself-an eccentric, I mean, not a criminal. I don’t imagine normal policemen dress that way.”

“My wife’s father was the eccentric in this case,” I say, skimming my hand over the brown check jacket. “He was an attorney in Austin who had all his clothes made for him in England and shipped over. When he’d had too many gimlets, he used to tell me he could make my career by revealing where all the bodies in Texas politics were buried.”

He gives me the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, the first thing since “Chopsticks” I’ve recognized.

“That sounds like Lyndon Pellier,” he says. “Did you marry Charlotte or Ann?”

My stunned expression draws a melodious laugh. “Don’t be so surprised. After all, I do know a lot of people around here. I should have realized. He always was a snazzy dresser. So which girl was it?”

“Charlotte.”

He wags a finger at me. “The pretty one. I should’ve guessed.”

For the next ten minutes he regales me with stories of Lyndon Pellier, each punctuated by a tune on the piano, by which time I’m convinced that while he got the name right, he has confused the man. Either that or Charlotte has concealed from me some of the family’s juiciest gossip. Strangely enough, it’s hard to make excuses and leave when a chance personal connection like this crops up. My ringing phone eventually extricates me.

“I’m looking at the forensics report from your scene,” Bascombe says. “You want the summary, or are you coming back in?”

“Hold on just a second.”

I make my apologies to Emmet and head for the sidewalk. He follows me out, waving as I walk down the street.

“Sorry about that. Go ahead.”

“You’ve got nothing on the prints. Some belong to your victim, some belong to Dr. Hill, and there’s another set that doesn’t match anything in the system. We do have Young’s prints on file, by the way. He was arrested on a misdemeanor battery in 2004 after a brawl outside a nightclub. Pled no contest and did community service. That would have been before he married your victim in ’07.”

“Thanks, I did the math.” I fill him in on the story the Silk Cut manager gave us, which suggests a pattern. “Anything else?”

“We’ve got her cell phone records, so you can start working your way through. Just skimming through them I can see some recurring numbers.” He shuffles papers on the other end of the line. “And how about you, March? You got anything for me?”

Now that I have Aguilar’s confirmation on the photo from the Fauk scene, I’m half tempted to bring the subject up. But I decide to wait on that one for fear of setting him off again. “There is one thing.” I repeat the story Emmet Mainz told me about Joy Hill’s husband running off with a former student who lived in the house. “I have reason to believe she’s in much better financial shape than she let on-meaning she didn’t need a tenant for the money-and there’s also this: apparently she was named in some kind of sexual harassment suit a while back. I don’t have the details, but I’m thinking I should follow up.”

“A female student?” he asks. “March, I can’t see a woman doing this. I doubt she’d even have the strength.”

“Maybe not. But if she’s lying to us, I should at least check it out.”

“That’s your call. My advice would be to tread softly, though. If your new theory is that the professor butchered this woman in some kind of lesbian breakup, you might want to keep it low-key. I’m thinking specifically of the captain.”

“What does Hedges care? He’s barely tuned in on this one.”

Bascombe sighs over the line. “I’m glad I can’t reach out and touch you right now, or next they’d be puttin’ a charge on me.”

MONDAY, DECEMBER 7–2:34 P.M.

Always follow up. On everything. No exceptions . Good advice from the lips of Buddy Fitzpatrick, Irish Catholic cowboy and all around burnout, a self-proclaimed legend in HPD Homicide who actually had cleared more than his share of cases, though he didn’t exactly shine his last time out.

It was Fitzpatrick who ran the original investigation of Nicole Fauk’s murder into the ground, who infamously carried the case file over to the FBI field office and tried to sell her as yet another victim of the recently apprehended Railroad Killer. It was Fitzpatrick who had to come clean to then-Lieutenant Hedges about the fact he’d misplaced the file on his way back.

When I inherited that case a few hours before his retirement party, Fitzpatrick repeated the mantra in my ear, his breath thick with fumes: “Always follow up. On everything. No exceptions.”

If Buddy had lived by those words, he might have gone out under a brighter cloud.

With his slurry voice in my head, I work my way through Simone Walker’s phone records, matching numbers to names, breaking the news of her death to a few out-of-town friends she’d recently chatted with. There’s a cluster of calls to Young over two weeks’ time in November, corresponding to their night together. The only suspect number is a mobile phone with an 832 area code. When I dial it, a computerized voice repeats the number back. I leave my details and ask for a return call.

I work through the postmortem and the other forensics reports waiting on my desk. The only new information is Dr. Green’s speculative description of the murder weapon: a wide, single-edged blade approximately eight inches in length and quite sharp. Probably with a clip point. Perhaps a bowie or survival knife. Not something the killer would have found at the scene. He brought it with him, reinforcing the impression that this was a carefully planned crime.