“I’m sure we could get you something. We’re going to Texas, after all, not New York.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t fired a gun since Bill was alive. That was on the last case we worked together. And I didn’t hit what I was aiming at.”
He didn’t speak again until they had merged with the heavy flow of turnpike traffic headed for the airport and Cap City. Once that dangerous feat was accomplished, he said, “Those samples from the barn are at the State Police forensics lab. What do you think they’re going to find when they finally get around to running them through all their fancy equipment? Any ideas?”
“Based on what showed up on the chair and the carpet, I’d guess it will be mostly water, but with a high pH. I’d guess there would be traces of a mucus-like fluid of the type produced by the bulbourethral glands, also known as Cowper’s glands, named after the anatomist William Cowper who—”
“So you do think it’s semen.”
“More like pre-ejaculate.” A faint tinge of color had come into her cheeks.
“You know your stuff.”
“I took a course in forensic pathology after Bill died. I took several courses, in fact. Taking courses . . . it passed the time.”
“There was semen on the backs of Frank Peterson’s thighs. Quite a lot of it, but not an abnormal amount. The DNA matched Terry Maitland’s.”
“The residue from the barn and the residue in your house isn’t semen, and not pre-ejaculate, no matter how similar. When the lab tests the stuff from Canning Township, I think they will find unknown components and dismiss them as contamination. They’ll just be glad they don’t have to use the samples in court. They won’t consider the idea that they’re dealing with a completely unknown substance: the stuff he exudes—or sluffs off—when he changes. As for the semen found on the Peterson boy . . . I’m sure the outsider left semen when he killed the Howard girls, too. Either on their clothes or on their bodies. Just another calling card, like the lock of hair in Mr. Maitland’s bathroom and all the fingerprints you found.”
“Don’t forget the eye-wits.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This creature likes witnesses. Why wouldn’t he, if he can wear another man’s face?”
Ralph followed the signs to the charter company Howard Gold used. “So you don’t think these were actually sex crimes? They were just arranged to look that way?”
“I wouldn’t make that assumption, but . . .” She turned to him. “Sperm on the back of the boy’s legs, but none . . . you know . . . in him?”
“No. He was penetrated—raped—with a branch.”
“Oough.” Holly grimaced. “I doubt if the postmortem on the girls revealed any semen inside them, either. I think there might be a sexual element to his killings, but he might be incapable of actual intercourse.”
“That’s the case with a good many normal serial killers.” He laughed at this—as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp—but didn’t take it back, because the only substitute he could think of was human serial killers.
“If he eats sadness, he also must eat the pain of his victims as they’re dying.” The flush in her cheeks was gone, leaving her pale. “It’s probably extremely rich, like gourmet food or some fine old Scotch. And yes, that could excite him sexually. I don’t like to think of these things, but I believe in knowing your enemy. We . . . I think you should turn left there, Detective Anderson.” She pointed.
“Ralph.”
“Yes. Turn left, Ralph. That’s the road that goes to Regal Air.”
7
Howie and Alec were already there, and Howie was smiling. “Takeoff’s been pushed back a bit,” he said. “Sablo’s on his way.”
“How did he manage that?” Ralph asked.
“He didn’t. I did. Well, I managed half of it. Judge Martinez is in the hospital with a perforated ulcer, and that was God’s doing. Or maybe just too much hot sauce. I’m a fan of Texas Pete myself, but the way that guy poured it on used to give me the shivers. As for the other case Lieutenant Sablo was supposed to testify in, the ADA owed me a favor.”
“Should I ask why?” Ralph asked.
“No,” Howie said, now smiling widely enough to show his back teeth.
With time to kill, the four of them sat in the small waiting room—nothing so grand as a departure lounge—and watched the planes take off and land. Howie said, “When I got home last night, I went on the Internet and read up on doppelgangers. Because that’s what this outsider is, wouldn’t you say?”
Holly shrugged. “It’s as good a word as any.”
“The most famous fictional one is in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘William Wilson,’ it’s called.”
“Jeannie knew about that one,” Ralph said. “We talked about it.”
“But there have been plenty in real life. Hundreds, it seems like. Including one on the Lusitania. There was a passenger named Rachel Withers, in first class, and several people saw another woman who looked just like her, right down to the streak of white in her hair, during the voyage. Some said the double was traveling in steerage. Some said she was part of the staff. Miss Withers and a gentleman friend went looking for her, and supposedly spotted her only seconds before a torpedo from a German U-boat hit on the starboard side. Miss Withers died, but her gentleman friend survived. He called her doppelganger ‘a harbinger of doom.’ The French writer, Guy de Maupassant, met his doppelganger one day while walking on a street in Paris—same height, same hair, same eyes, same mustache, same accent.”
“Well, the French,” Alec said, shrugging. “What do you expect? De Maupassant probably bought him a glass of wine.”
“The most famous case happened in 1845, at a girls’ school in Latvia. The teacher was writing on the blackboard when her exact double walked into the room, stood beside the teacher, and mimicked her every move, only without the chalk. Then she walked out. Nineteen students saw it happen. Isn’t that amazing?”
No one replied. Ralph was thinking of an infested cantaloupe, and disappearing footprints, and something Holly’s dead friend had said: No end to the universe. He supposed it was a concept some people might find uplifting, even beautiful. Ralph, a just-the-facts man for his entire working life, found it terrifying.
“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Howie said, a bit sulkily.
Alec said, “Tell me something, Holly. If this guy absorbs his victims’ thoughts and memories when he takes their faces—through some sort of mystic blood transfusion, I guess—how come he didn’t know where to find the nearest walk-in clinic? And then there’s Willow Rainwater, the cab driver. Maitland knew her from the kids’ basketball program at the Y, but the man she drove to Dubrow acted like he’d never met her. Didn’t call her Willow, or Ms. Rainwater. Called her ma’am.”
“I don’t know,” Holly said, rather crossly. “All I do know I picked up on the fly, and I mean that literally, because I was on airplanes when I did my reading. The only thing I can do is make guesses, and I’m tired of that.”