J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“Did he ever hurt anyone else?”

“No,” she says. “Not that I know of. Not really. When he left home for college, I thought, finally we can start living our lives again . Finally I could start living. Dave was gone so much, he expected me to be the one to. .”

She glances at Mainz, noticing the distance between them for the first time. Her cheeks flush.

“It’s easy to assign blame,” she says, “but I did the best I could. He wasn’t mine.”

I give her a nod of encouragement.

When a witness opens up against her better judgment, against her own self-interest, I’m the most understanding person in the world. But Mainz can’t help himself. The deeper into my world he’s drawn, the more uncomfortable he grows, all his urbanity and wit evaporating on the hot skillet of reality. The recognition dawning that all these years, he’s lived a few doors down from an unfathomable evil, a darkness beyond his comprehension.

As his sympathy fades, mine burns brighter and brighter.

Talk to me , it says. Open your heart to me. Confide all your secrets and sins. I am your confessor. You don’t need to hide anything from me. There is nothing I have not heard, nothing I have not seen.

“Mrs. Bayard,” I say. “Your stepson was stalking a woman in College Station a year ago. I’ve talked to her. He followed exactly the same pattern then as now. Watching her. Taking photographs of her. He even got her alone and started touching her. He did it like this.” I hold my hand up, fingers spread. “He just pushed. Gently at first, with his fingers wide like that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“The man who killed Simone Walker, he did the same thing. He put his hands on her, and he stabbed her like this.” I grasp an imaginary ice pick in my free hand, bringing it down like a piston, again and again. “The same six wounds, over and over. In a half-moon pattern. That’s what he did to Agnieszka, too. That’s how he treated them.”

Her burning eyes follow every movement, seeing the scene in her mind. She knows what he did. She knows her own guilt. She wants to unburden herself.

“Tell me what happened,” I say. “Tell me everything.”

She opens her mouth to speak.

A chime sounds inside her purse. She freezes. She takes the ringing phone out, holding it at arm’s length.

“It’s him,” she says. “David.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Should I answer?”

I nod.

She puts the phone to her ear-“Hello? Hello?”-then lowers it to her lap: “He hung up.”

“Mrs. Bayard-”

“No,” she says. “I can’t. I shouldn’t even be here.”

She wrenches herself out of the chair.

“If he does know, then you aren’t safe. You realize that.”

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

She stamps across the floor, breezing past me with a sob. Mainz stands. I motion him not to follow. We stare at each other, listening to her footsteps disappear down the corridor. The front door creaks open and crashes shut.

“Well,” Mainz says, dropping back into his seat.

I switch off the recorder and return it to my pocket. I gather the rest of my things. We share a last awkward moment, not certain what to say to each other.

“Good night, Emmet,” I say. “And thanks for your help.”

He makes no move to escort me, so I let myself out.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17 — 8:14 P.M.

There’s no sign of her outside. She roared away in her car, heading in the opposite direction from her house. I slip behind the wheel, pondering my next move. She’s convinced of her husband’s innocence. I’m not. But I am convinced of her stepson’s guilt.

I stood there in the funeral home parking lot and didn’t see it. I urged him on in hushed, sympathetic tones. I felt sorry for him. It’s not the first time a suspect’s played me.

This one hurts.

My phone rings and it’s Hanford on the line. His voice charged with excitement.

“I apologize up front,” he says. “I got my eye off the ball. There’s been a development, though. A big development.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you checked your email recently?”

My pulse quickens. “Not in a couple of hours.”

“Well, he did it. He used Simone Walker’s laptop. There’s probably a message waiting for you right now-”

“What about your email to him? Did it work?”

A pause. “ Yes .”

“You got a photo?”

“ Yes .”

“And a location?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he says. “I can’t believe it really worked. I didn’t even have to trace the IP addresses, because I recognize the location from the picture. He was at Brasil, the coffee shop on Westheimer. It was still light out when the picture was snapped. His hand is covering part of his face-but it’s a very distinctive hand.” He stops to catch his breath. “I’m sorry, though, about the delay, and I know you’ve already got someone else in custody-”

“Don’t worry about that. How old is the photo? If it was still light outside. .”

“There was a lag in the message going out, and a lag in me checking. I realize time was of the essence, but-”

“Never mind. We need to get people to that coffee shop right away.”

“I took the liberty of alerting some units. I sent a copy of the photo to Dispatch. I figured that’s what you’d want.”

“You figured right. I’m on my way.”

I put the shifter in drive and hit the gas. A car rushes past on the street-I didn’t see it-forcing me to mash down on the brake. Up ahead, the driver flicks on his headlights. No wonder I missed him. I take a deep breath, check the mirrors, and get going.

I take Kirby all the way to the right turn on Westheimer, making a mental note to get a warrant for David’s high-rise apartment. I turn on Dunlavy, parking behind a line of patrol cruisers on the curb. Nguyen is there, and just inside the patio I run into Sergeant Nixon himself, the shift supervisor. He smirks at me, palms up.

“Here for your coffee fix, Detective? Or are you having a late dinner with the missus?”

“None of the above. I take it he’s not here?”

He shakes his head. “But look around if you want.”

About half of the tables are packed and things seem busy at the bar. The pack of loners who infest such places during daytime, earbuds inserted, faces lit up by the glow of computer screens, has considerably thinned out. The patrons eye us with interest, sitting mostly in groups. Out on the town. Surprised at the sudden arrival of the police.

A couple of uniforms stroll through the tables, double-checking faces. I do likewise, determined to make the effort.

Nix is right, though. David has left the building.

I go back outside to my car, the uniforms coalescing in my wake. I grab my briefcase from the passenger seat, open the laptop right there on my hood. The Outlook software chugs along, filling my inbox with recent arrivals.

“You mind if I release these units?” Nix asks. “I guess I’ll write this one up as a wild goose chase.”

The banter irritates me. “That’s the nature of the game, except when it isn’t.”

He chuckles. “If the law enforcement thing doesn’t work out, you might have a bright future in the exciting world of fortune cookie writing.”

The message from Simone Walker’s email address is there, just as Hanford said. I glide the cursor over her name. I click. The pretense from before is dropped: he hasn’t bothered to pretend the message is from Simone. The strange chattiness is absent, too. There’s just a single veiled threat:

I GUESS THINGS ARE ABOUT TO HEAT UP

As the cruisers pull away, Nix returns to my side. With no subordinates to impress, he adopts a sober expression. We’ve known each other a long time. He leans over to squint at the screen, nodding as he reads the line of text. Then his eyes cut over and he recognizes the name.