Ed Gorman: Cold Blue Midnight

'I'll bet Mother wasn't happy about that.'

'Mother,' Jill said, 'was furious.'

'How about Peter?'

'He was furious, too. He comes from a family where the women are blindly obedient. Whatever the husband says is the law. I told him we should move to Chicago and get our own placehis mother would send him on various business trips to make him feel that he actually had a career, but it was mostly makework thingsand for a while there, I think he was actually considering it. But then the letters started coming.'

'Letters?'

'His mother paid somebody to write them and send them to me, I'm convinced of it.'

'What kind of letters were they?'

'Love lettersfrom this man who claimed to have slept with me several times while I was in Chicago working on photo shoots. Mother showed them to Peter, of course. Any idea he had of breaking away from her… Well, he wasn't going to move away with a woman who was a "harlot" as Mother liked to call "easy women." I think that's when he started killing those girls. He may very well have been using them as surrogates. He probably wanted to kill me.'

'Or Mother.'

Jill nodded. 'Or both of us. By that time in his life, he didn't like women very much.'

From there she detailed the sad years that followed soon after, Peter's arrest, the trial, the appeals, the execution. She finished by talking about the assault of Hard Facts on her privacy and life.

'God, that sounds terrible,' Marcy sympathized.

'That's why I want to find out who's been watching my place.'

'How'd you come to notice him?'

Jill shrugged. 'Ever since 'Hard Facts' I look around at my surroundings: I try to notice everything. I started seeing this blue Volvo and got suspicious, so today I snuck down and took some photos of him.'

She handed Marcy an envelope and smiled. 'You won't find anything in there with great artistic merit.'

Marcy looked through the photos. 'No artistic merit, maybe, but these will be very helpful.'

'When I called you earlier, you said you hoped you could get to it right away.'

'Turns out I can. I have an industrial client who wanted me to handle something for him but now he needs to put it on hold for a little while.'

'So you can start today?'

'Soon as you leave here, I'll call my old buddy in the Driver's License Bureau.'

'Great.' Jill stood up, remembering her appointment with Eric Brooks. 'I'd better get going.'

She put forth her hand. Marcy shook it.

'I sure hope that Biker Mama gets Hog Face back,' Jill smiled.

'Gee, I'm so pleased you liked what I did. A pro like you, I mean.'

'If your investigation business gets a little thin, there's always dinner theater.'

Marcy walked Jill to the door. 'You'll probably be hearing from me later tonight.'

Jill nodded and left.

Rick Corday had no problem getting into Jill Coffey's place. He owned a number of burglary tools.

Wearing a pair of latex gloves, he spent half an hour searching through her closets and drawers. He didn't need to do this but he enjoyed it. There was something sweetly pornographic about spying on somebody else's life.

A week ago, the range of his spying had increased when he'd let himself in here and installed a bug in her telephone, one he could pick up on an FM receiver from his motel room or, as earlier today, from his car. He'd heard her make her appointment with Eric Brooks.

A lot of dirty fun, spying on people.

The hell of it was, Jill Coffey seemed to be a pretty tame person. One time in New York, searching through the apartment of a highly-regarded female broadcasting executive, he'd come upon some of the most vicious S amp;M appliances his knowing and cynical eyes had ever seen. The belt with the tiny metal thorns had been the really impressive one. God, you could shred a guy's back with two lashes.

The bathroom offered even fewer revelations. Not a single vibrator in sight.

He went back into the bedroom to do what he'd come here for.

Find a skirt and blouse.

He selected a sandwash silk in electric blue for the blouse and a royal blue wraparound for the skirt.

Pantyhosethat would be a nice touch.

He searched through three drawers before he found a pair that had already been worn.

He wrapped these inside the skirt.

By this time, he had already made up his mind.

A better opportunity might never come.

It had to be tonight.

Before he left, he picked up the long scissors with the rubberized orange handles. He'd set them next to the phone the other day, knowing she'd be bound to pick them up. He dropped the scissors carefully inside a Ziploc bag.

Then he let himself out, reconstructing the security system that no doubt gave Jill Coffey such a great sense of well-being.

Church wasn't something Mitch Ayers had planned on. He wasn't the churchgoing type. From his Catholic boyhood he had a sentimental belief in a personal and caring God, but when he looked around at the predators he saw every dayMitch being a homicide detectivehe wasn't sure that Anybody was up there at all. At least, Nobody who cared much about all the sad, maimed, despairing creatures who crawled around in the mud below. But he needed a place to think and he'd been driving by and so, on impulse

Took him three tries to remember the Hail Mary and he finally had to resort to a prayerbook to remember the second part that began, 'Holy Mary, Mother of God.' That part. The Our Father he had no trouble with at all, nor the Glory Be.

After he was finished praying, he sat back in the pew that was very near the front of the church. He liked the way the blue and red and green and yellow votive candles flickered in the dusky shadows. He liked the faint smell of incense on the quiet air. He liked the dignified beauty of the altar, sad Jesus on His cross looking out on His flock. He saw himself at three different times of his life in this very same churchas a twelve year old in white-and-black surplice and cassock serving High Mass with Monsignor O'Day, who always massacred the Latin language; as a twenty-four-year-old police rookie standing next to Sara Byrnes, the most beautiful girl in their graduating class at St Malachy's; and as a twenty-six-year-old father watching Monsignor O'Day sprinkle Holy Water on the forehead of tiny pink Frances, their first daughter. Following that there was the funeral of his father, and then the death of his beloved Aunt Lavina, and then the funeral of a one-time good friend and classmate Phil O'Herlihy, and

And then Mitch and Sara Ayers moved away from the old neighborhood, out to a suburb where everything was sleek and sophisticated, and where over a period of a few years they seemed to change, somehow. At least Sara had. She took a job in administration at a hospital; she started flying to conferences and meetings all over the country, leaving the two girls more and more to Mitch; and three years ago, this same kind of lingering smoky autumn, she took a lover. He was a doctor and a handsome bastard and a rich bastard to boot and he seemed to represent something to Sarasome kind of approval that Mitch could never give her. To Sara, the doctor had been everything; to the doctor, Sara had been just one more affair. One night Jessica ran downstairs and told Mitch that Mommy was making funny noises up in her bedroom. Thank God for seven-year-old Jessica. Sara had intentionally overdosed on Xanax. Mitch called an ambulance. They got her to the hospital in time to pump her stomach. A week on the psych ward. A marriage counselor for them. Then a six-month trial separation. Sara's idea.

It had been during this time that Mitch met Jill Coffey. He'd liked her right away. There was a curious mixture of amusement and sorrow in those pretty dark eyes that fascinated him right away. And she was something of a smart-ass, so she made him laugh a lot of the time. He hadn't been honest with her. Told her that his impending divorce was a sure thing. Told her that he didn't much care about his wife anymore. They went out for several weeks and it was like being in high school again, the intensity of the romance and all the laughter. Jill surprised him one night by telling him that she was in love with him. And he'd been touched. For all her good looks and poise he saw that she was a very vulnerable person for whom loving and trusting someone was a very difficult prospect. But then Sara gradually decided that maybe it was time she gave her marriage another serious shot and if Mitch was willing…