“Yes.” Darcy folded her hands and looked at Ramsey calmly. They were almost down to it. The only question was which partner in the now-dissolved Anderson marriage this sharp-eyed old man was more interested in.
“Don’t suppose you still have that Suburban, do you?”
“No. I sold it about a month after my husband died. I put an ad in Uncle Henry’s swap guide, and someone snapped it right up. I thought I’d have problems, with the high mileage and gas being so expensive, but I didn’t. Of course I didn’t get much.”
And two days before the man who’d bought it came to pick it up, she had searched it carefully, from stem to stern, not neglecting to pull out the carpet in the cargo compartment. She found nothing, but still paid fifty dollars to have it washed on the outside (which she didn’t care about) and steam-cleaned on the inside (which she did).
“Ah. Good old Uncle Henry’s . I sold my late wife’s Ford the same way.”
“Mr. Ramsey—”
“Holt.”
“Holt, were you able to positively identify my husband as the man who used to flirt with Stacey Moore?”
“Well, when I talked to Mr. Anderson, he admitted he’d been in the Sunnyside from time to time—admitted it freely—but he claimed he never noticed any of the waitresses in particular. Claimed he usually had his head buried in paperwork. But of course I showed his picture—from his driver’s license, you understand—and the staff allowed as how it was him.”
“Did my husband know you had a… a particular interest in him?”
“No. Far as he was concerned, I was just old Limpin’ Lennie looking for witnesses who might have seen something. No one fears an old duck like me, you know.”
I fear you plenty .
“It’s not much of a case,” she said. “Assuming you were trying to make one.”
“No case at all!” He laughed cheerily, but his hazel eyes were cold. “If I could have made a case, me and Mr. Anderson wouldn’t have had our little conversation in his office, Darcy. We would have had it in my office. Where you don’t get to leave until I say you can. Or until a lawyer springs you, of course.”
“Maybe it’s time you stopped dancing, Holt.”
“All right,” he agreed, “why not? Because even a box-step hurts me like hell these days. Damn that old Dwight Cheminoux, anyway! And I don’t want to take your whole morning, so let’s speed this up. I was able to confirm a Toyota 4Runner at or near the scene of two of the earlier murders—what we call Beadie’s first cycle. Not the same one; a different color. But I was also able to confirm that your husband owned another 4Runner in the seventies.”
“That’s right. He liked it, so he traded for the same kind.”
“Yep, men will do that. And the 4Runner’s a popular vehicle in places where it snows half the damn year. But after the Moore murder—and after I talked to him—he traded for a Suburban.”
“Not immediately,” Darcy said with a smile. “He had that 4Runner of his well after the turn of the century.”
“I know. He traded in 2004, not long before Andrea Honeycutt was murdered down Nashua way. Blue and gray Suburban; year of manufacture 2002. A Suburban of that approximate year and those exact colors was seen quite often in Mrs. Honeycutt’s neighborhood during the month or so before she was murdered. But here’s the funny thing.” He leaned forward. “I found one witness who said that Suburban had a Vermont plate, and another—a little old lady of the type who sits in her living room window and watches all the neighborhood doins from first light to last, on account of having nothing better to do—said the one she saw had a New York plate.”
“Bob’s had Maine plates,” Darcy said. “As you very well know.”
“Acourse, acourse, but plates can be stolen, you know.”
“What about the Shaverstone murders, Holt? Was a blue and gray Suburban seen in Helen Shaverstone’s neighborhood?”
“I see you’ve been following the Beadie case a little more closely than most people. A little more closely than you first let on, too.”
“Was it?”
“No,” Ramsey said. “As a matter of fact, no. But a gray-over-blue Suburban was seen near the creek in Amesbury where the bodies were dumped.” He smiled again while his cold eyes studied her. “Dumped like garbage.”
She sighed. “I know.”
“No one could tell me about the license plate of the Suburban seen in Amesbury, but if they had, I imagine it would have been Massachusetts. Or Pennsylvania. Or anything but Maine.”
He leaned forward.
“This Beadie sent us notes with his victims’ identification. Taunting us, you know—daring us to catch him. P’raps part of him even wanted to be caught.”
“Perhaps so,” Darcy said, although she doubted it.
“The notes were printed in block letters. Now people who do that think such printing can’t be identified, but most times it can. The similarities show up. I don’t suppose you have any of your husband’s files, do you?”
“The ones that haven’t gone back to his firm have been destroyed. But I imagine they’d have plenty of samples. Accountants never throw out anything.”
He sighed. “Yuh, but a firm like that, it’d take a court order to get anything loose, and to get one I’d have to show probable cause. Which I just don’t have. I’ve got a number of coincidences—although they’re not coincidences in my mind. And I’ve got a number of… well… propinquities, I guess you might call them, but nowhere near enough of them to qualify as circumstantial evidence. So I came to you, Darcy. I thought I’d probably be out on my ear by now, but you’ve been very kind.”
She said nothing.
He leaned forward even further, almost hunching over the table now. Like a bird of prey. But hiding not quite out of sight behind the coldness in his eyes was something else. She thought it might be kindness. She prayed it was.
“Darcy, was your husband Beadie?”
She was aware that he might be recording this conversation; it was certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Instead of speaking, she raised one hand from the table, showing him her pink palm.
“For a long time you never knew, did you?”
She said nothing. Only looked at him. Looked into him, the way you looked into people you knew well. Only you had to be careful when you did that, because you weren’t always seeing what you thought you were seeing. She knew that now.
“And then you did? One day you did?”
“Would you like another cup of coffee, Holt?”
“Half a cup,” he said. He sat back up and folded his arms over his thin chest. “More’d give me acid indigestion, and I forgot to take my Zantac pill this morning.”
“I think there’s some Prilosec in the upstairs medicine cabinet,” she said. “It was Bob’s. Would you like me to get it?”
“I wouldn’t take anything of his even if I was burning up inside.”
“All right,” she said mildly, and poured him a little more coffee.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Those women… all those women… and the boy, with his whole life ahead of him. That’s worst of all.”
“Yes,” she said, passing him the cup. She noticed how his hand trembled, and thought this was probably his last rodeo, no matter how smart he was… and he was fearsomely smart.
“A woman who found out what her husband was very late in the game would be in a hard place,” Ramsey said.
“Yes, I imagine she would be,” Darcy said.
“Who’d believe she could live with a man all those years and never know what he was? Why, she’d be like a whatdoyoucallit, the bird that lives in a crocodile’s mouth.”
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