Harlan Coben: Stay close

“He was my first kill,” Lorraine, now garbed in that federal-pen orange, told him. “After my husband, of course. I was a little too ambitious, but it paid off.”

“What do you mean, ambitious?”

“See, I liked Stacy. She was a nice kid who’d been battered down by men her whole life. She had this horrible boyfriend named Ricky Mannion. You wouldn’t believe what he would do to her. And then, because sometimes one creep isn’t enough, Stacy ends up attracting the attention of a second total psycho named Ross Gunther. So my original plan was to kill both.”

“What went wrong?”

Lorraine smiled and looked off. “Killing can be a little, well, like sex for most men I know. After you do it once, you kinda lose the urge for a little while. So I killed Gunther and instead of killing Mannion, I found it more interesting to just pin the murder on him. Truth was, killing Gunther alone wouldn’t have freed Stacy. I needed to get rid of both of them. It’s a funny logic, I admit that, but it works.”

“So that was year one?”

“Yes.”

Then Broome got to the real heart of it. “And Stewart Green was year two?”

“Yep. Here’s the thing. I never knew what happened to him. I mean, I knew I killed him. I sent Cassie up there because I wanted her to know she was free. I didn’t think she’d freak. I should have known. That was a mistake on my part, and I learned my lesson. Anyway, when nobody ever found Stewart’s body… well, I never really knew what happened either. It kinda freaked me out. I figured that Cassie hid the body or something. But then she vanished too. I even wondered for a bit if maybe Ray Levine had killed her and hidden both bodies, especially after I spotted him by the ruins a few weeks ago just before Carlton Flynn showed up.”

“Wait, you saw him?”

Lorraine nodded. “I almost called the whole thing off, but I figured, I wouldn’t be alive by next Mardi Gras, so what the hell.”

“So it was you who attacked Ray with the bat and stole the camera. You wanted the pictures he took.”

“Guilty,” Lorraine said. “You’re not going to charge me with assault, are you?”

“We can let it slide.”

“Wouldn’t look like much next to all those dead bodies, would it? Anyway, where were we? Cassie, right?”

Broome nodded.

“I didn’t want to mess up her life or anything, but I needed to know what happened. It haunted me. I tried to find her, but she really managed to vanish. Meanwhile I watched you, Broome, chase your own tail trying to find what happened to Stewart Green. You had no idea what happened. Without a body, you really had no case. See, I learned from that. All that confusion. So I decided to change my MO.”

“You decided to hide the bodies,” Broome said.

“Yep.”

“You made it look like maybe the men had gone missing or ran away.”

“Exactly. If I kept leaving dead bodies up there, the cops would be all over it. I’d have to find new spots every year. It’d be too much, you know what I’m saying? But with disappearances, well, in many cases there was nothing to go on.”

“There’s one thing I still don’t get.”

“Then ask away, handsome.”

Broome shouldn’t be enjoying this. “You told Megan-Cassie-that you always knew where she was. How?”

“Oh, that was a lie,” Lorraine said. “I had no idea until recently.”

That surprised him. “I don’t get it. How did you finally find her?”

“The truth is, Cassie-let’s not call her Megan, that’s not how I knew her-Cassie was the best. I loved her. Truly. And she loved the life. That’s the part they don’t talk about, Broome. You hear about the drugs and the prostitution and the abuse, but that’s not the whole picture. You’ve seen the clubs, Broome. For some of the girls, this is the best they’ll ever get. It’s fun and exciting. It’s a party every night and in this miserable drone of a life, what’s wrong with that?”

“And Cassie was one of those girls?”

“Oh, she was indeed. I knew she’d be missing the life. So, that’s why, even after seventeen years, I wasn’t surprised when she came back to the club for a visit. She told you about that, right?”

Broome nodded. “She did.”

“She pretended to come down to Atlantic City for some stupid convention, but of course she ended up back in La Creme.”

“And you recognized her?”

“Yep. So I followed her back to the Tropicana. I got friends at the front desk. They gave me her real name and address. I went up to her place and figured a way to get her back down here.”

“You pretended that you saw Stewart. You acted like maybe he had something to do with Carlton Flynn.”

“Right. And when I saw her reaction, I knew that she didn’t know what happened to the body either. So now it’s your turn, Broome.” Lorraine leaned forward. “Tell me about Stewart Green. That’s always been the big mystery to me. Tell me what happened to his body.”

So he did. He told her the whole story about Ray Levine cutting up the corpse. Lorraine listened intently.

“Poor, sweet Ray,” she said.

“Which begs yet another question,” Broome said. “How did Carlton Flynn’s Saint Anthony medal end up in Ray Levine’s apartment?”

“I put it there,” Lorraine said. “How else?”

“How did you get in?”

“You’re kidding, right? Ray lived in a basement with narrow windows. I opened one and tossed the medal into the middle of the room. Simple as that. Funny thing, though, about Ray cutting up the body.”

“What about it?”

“It’s like the opposite of what I said.”

“I’m not following.”

“When I experienced violence, I found out I had a taste for it. When poor Ray did, he found out the opposite. It brought me to life. It crushed him. It’s all in how we’re hardwired, Broome. He was too soft. It wasn’t Cassie leaving that destroyed him. It was that he couldn’t live with all that blood…”

Broome wanted to ask more, but she said, “Enough for today, hon. I got a TV thing.”

And that was what Broome had realized. That was her plan.

She was close to getting caught. They had found the bodies. They had found out about her killing her husband on Mardi Gras. The feds were involved. It was only a question of time, and she didn’t have much of that left anyway. But the moment she surrendered, well, a star was born.

Lorraine’s case became an international sensation. That was what Broome hadn’t expected at first. Serial killers are rare. Female serial killers are rarer still. That would have been enough to garner attention, but then you add some professional spin and voila. Lorraine’s lawyer was the famed Hester Crimstein, an expert in manipulating the media. Suddenly, Lorraine wasn’t a murdering monster, as per her media nickname, but an abused woman who became the “Avenging Angel.” The wives and girlfriends of her victims came out, each telling a terrifying tale of abuse, of living in agony and fear, of being saved by the only woman who would help them.

Lorraine.

So now Lorraine did TV interviews. The fascination with her was endless. Her natural likability came out because you simply can’t teach that. Hester Crimstein’s strategy was a simple one: confuse, deflect, stall. The federal prosecutors were pretty much fine with that last point. They didn’t relish trying a dying woman who many viewed as a hero.

Broome thought about that crooked smile Lorraine had given him before he arrested her. She had known. She had known exactly how it would play out in the media.

“Ashes to ashes…”

Back at the funeral of Stewart Green, a man murdered by Lorraine, the mourners bowed their heads.

“We say our final good-bye to our dearly departed…”