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“I told you. It’s for a college fund for her grandkids—Samantha, Nina, and Ryan.”

“That’s not my question. If the rent was paid, what else is she doing for Dodd that nets her a thousand dollars a month?”

“That’s none of my business. You’d have to ask Lucille. Do you need her address?”

“No, sir, we don’t. Thank you for your time, Mr. Bruno.”

We stood up and started to leave.

“Detectives,” he said, “I shared Lucille’s information with you because I don’t think she and I have a lawyer-client relationship. But she may see it differently, and to be honest, she can be sort of a … a difficult person.”

“That would be putting it mildly, sir,” Kylie said.

“Maybe you can do me a favor, then. Even though it’s after the fact, maybe you could issue me a subpoena. Then I’d have no choice but to tell you what I told you.”

“Understood,” Kylie said. “We’d be happy to do it, sir.”

He flashed us a victory smile. “Thank you.”

The Mayor of Crosby Avenue may well have been beloved by all, but he was also smart enough to cover his ass.

CHAPTER 63

LIFE FOR LUCILLE SPERANZA had changed dra-matically since we’d last seen her. Newspapers printed her picture. TV networks ran her sound bites. Magazine editors wanted her story. Overnight, she had become to Bobby Dodd what Kato Kaelin had been to O.J. Simpson.

Even now, five days after she’d become known around the world as the Kidnapper’s Landlady, several news vans were parked outside her home.

“She’s quite the celebrity,” Kylie said as we walked up the stairs. She rang the bell. “You think she’ll still remember her old friends Jordan and MacDonald?”

I barely recognized the woman who opened the door. Gone was the mop of unruly orange hair. It was now a soft brown and styled. Gone was the baggy red-flowered dress. She now wore one that was navy and tailored. Someone—probably a TV producer—had gone to the trouble of getting her camera-ready. But of course, no makeover artist in the world could change Lucille’s unique brand of charm.

“What the fuck are you two doing back here?” she said. “I thought this case was closed.”

“That’s fake news,” Kylie said. “Don’t repeat it next time you’re on TV.”

She turned away from Kylie and squared off with me. “How the hell do you put up with her?” she said.

“She’s an acquired taste,” I said. “We need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

“No. I have nothing more to say. I told you everything I know.”

“You may have left out a few things. Like why the man you said you barely knew is sending a thousand dollars a month to Samantha, Nina, and Ryan’s college fund.”

That blindsided her.

“Your silence speaks volumes,” Kylie said. “Now, can we come in, or would you rather the TV cameras filmed us escorting you to our place?”

Speranza opened the door, and we followed her to the living room.

“I don’t know why you damn cops keep hounding me about this Bobby Dodd shit,” she said.

“Let’s get back to the question about the money he’d been sending you every month,” Kylie said.

“He was a tenant. It was rent money.”

“You told us he was paid up through the end of August,” I said. “Why was he sending more money in June?”

“It must be a mistake. I’ll send it back.”

“Do you care about your grandchildren, Mrs. Speranza?” Kylie said.

“My grandchildren? Why the hell would you drag them into this?”

“Why the hell would you have a psycho killer funding their college education? We didn’t drag them into this. You did. And if you’ll start spitting out answers instead of venom, maybe they won’t get to see their names in the morning paper.”

Any other seventy-seven-year-old granny probably would have started cooperating to avoid bringing shame to innocent family members, but Lucille Speranza was determined to go down swinging.

“You cops are all alike. You’re all on the take, and you’re all bigots. What do you think, just because I’m Italian, I’m a criminal?”

“It doesn’t matter what we think. But you might want to worry about what your friends who watch the six o’clock news think,” Kylie said, pulling out her cuffs. “Hands behind your back.”

Speranza threw her hands up in the air and backed away. “All right, all right. It wasn’t the rent. That was paid. We had a separate deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He paid me extra for storage.”

“What do you mean, storage ?”

“What do you think storage means? I kept shit for him.”

“In the basement?”

“No. I keep it here. He paid extra because he knew it would be safe in my house.”

“And what did you keep for him?”

Speranza took a deep breath and looked at us with eyes that were brimming with contempt. The woman who had called us bigots hated cops. She probably always had and definitely always would.

She spit out the answer to the question. “He had a box.”

CHAPTER 64

THE BOX WAS an olive-drab metal footlocker with Bobby Dodd’s name and serial number stenciled on it.

“He didn’t leave me no key,” Speranza said.

Kylie bent down and examined the padlock. “Core-hardened steel,” she said. “It looks brand-new except for the scratches on the shank.” She looked up at Speranza. “I hope you didn’t break a nail trying to get it open.”

Speranza responded with her middle finger.

It was unlikely that Dodd had left it booby-trapped, but protocol and good sense dictated that we evacuate Speranza’s house as well as the two homes that flanked hers, cordon off the entire block, and bring in the bomb squad.

That’s not easy to do without attracting attention, and by the time the men in the moon suits lumbered down Zulette Avenue toward the house, the streets on the other side of the barricades had become a sea of news vans.

The entire operation took less than forty-five minutes from discovery to all-clear, but the media circus was just getting started. And in the center ring stood Mrs. Speranza. Her fifteen minutes of fame was going into overtime.

Kylie and I went back to the house. ESU broke the padlock while CSU documented it all on film.

“Now comes the fun part,” Kylie said as a tech lifted the lid.

The inside looked like a survivalist’s wish list, everything a trained Marine would need to bug out and stay gone: guns, knives, ammo, a bulletproof vest, camping gear, fake IDs, even paper maps, because you can’t use a GPS when half a dozen law enforcement agencies are trying to hunt you down.

One by one, the items were photographed, cataloged, and laid out for inspection. Under the weapons was a fat manila folder that was crammed with all things Erin. Magazine covers, feature stories, videotapes, CDs, and hundreds of pictures, some clipped from fan books, but many of them candid shots, most likely taken while he stalked her.

The biggest surprise was the diaries—handwritten journals dating back fifteen years. I picked one up and opened it to a random page.

October 12, 2014

Erin and I drove up to the Berkshires for the weekend partly just to look at the fall foliage but mostly to find a house for us. Not that we’re going to live up in Massachusetts. She’d rather be where it’s warm all year round. It doesn’t matter anyway because none of the places we looked at were right for us. It’s Sunday and she’s got a rerun on tonight. We’ll watch it but I keep telling her that the damn network should be making new shows instead of just repeating the old ones over and over. I sent them fourteen e-mails about it but so far they haven’t written back. What do you expect from a bunch of idiots .