Amaia exhaled slowly, mastering her rising excitement. “Do you happen to know how long his wife has been expecting? Over.”
“Umm . . . no. But she must be due about now. There’s a note here that he’s just taken a few days of paternity leave. Over.”
The pencil she’d been tapping on her notebook slipped out of her fingers, hit the floor, and rolled under the boat’s dash panel.
Landis apologized. “Sorry I didn’t notice that before, when you asked about vacations. Our firm doesn’t count maternity or paternity leave as vacation time, so it doesn’t go into the vacation accounting. Over.”
Amaia didn’t reply because she was incapable of speaking. Her mind was going a mile a minute, making calculations and checking correlations. Natalie Davis was in her third trimester, so her fortieth week, give or take. Since the pregnancy was problematic, they might have scheduled an early birth, either induced or cesarean. If they’d recognized the pregnancy the first time the wife missed her period, that would have been eight months earlier. Just about the time the murders began—and in the same city where Davis had a vacation home. She turned to Johnson and Dupree.
Johnson raised both hands, four fingers on each, and mouthed, “Eight months.”
Amaia pressed a hand to her stomach, feeling an emptiness that had nothing to do with hunger. This was the key piece of the puzzle.
She’d had this feeling before, but it took her by surprise. A discovery made when she least expected it, as she was buckling down to work, determined to gut it out . . . and then zap—a lucky shift, a telling realignment of available and hidden information. “You’ll have all the answers if you can formulate the right questions,” her aunt liked to say. And suddenly there came the solution, hidden in plain sight.
An expected new birth would complete the cycle. Three children once again, the same mistakes, the same sins and offenses.
“You mentioned he’s been with the firm for a long time. How long? Over.”
“Just a moment.” Landis checked. “Seventeen years. And a half. Over.”
Amaia grinned broadly at her colleagues, and they nodded.
She’d correctly predicted the shape of Lenx’s new life.
Martin Lenx had murdered his family in a house outside Madison eighteen years earlier. Only six months later, he took a job in Texas with the American Insurance Association. New name, new job, new city, new life—new family.
“Do you know Mrs. Davis personally? Over.”
“I’ve seen Natalie a couple of times at the firm’s Christmas parties. Over.”
“Would you describe her as an attractive woman? Over.”
“Hmm,” Landis temporized.
In her two conversations with him, Amaia had learned to recognize that hesitant sound as indicating Landis had an opinion he was reluctant to share.
“I suppose she is attractive, in her own way. She’s a very thin lady, in good shape for her age, pretty well preserved. Over.”
“I need to know if she’s beautiful or at least if she used to be. Over.”
“Now, I hope you understand, I’m not saying she’s ugly, it’s just that . . . well, she’s not the sort who would catch your eye. I really think that’s mostly because she’s so shy. Over.”
That fucker! she thought. He re-created every goddamned facet of the profile. Amaia pressed a trembling hand to her stomach to counteract the surge that threatened to suck her into the abyss. Her breathing had accelerated, and she knew she risked hyperventilating if she didn’t keep it under control.
“Mr. Landis, do you have access to Mr. Davis’s claim for the damages in Galveston? The one he didn’t pursue? Over.”
“Hold on,” Landis said. For several seconds, despite the distance and the problematic connections via phone and radio, they heard the distinct clatter of a keyboard. “Aha! Here it is.”
“Was it damage to the garden? Over.”
“How did you know? Says here, ‘Intentional destruction of a landscape of tropical flowers.’ Over.”
What had Landis said? “He’s a good guy, reliable, very serious.” Lenx was the stern but understanding neighbor who’d withdrawn a complaint against a boy when he learned the child was having trouble adapting to a new home. The good neighbor who offered selflessly to help the older son after the massacre. For Christ’s sake, he even paid out of pocket to have the crime scene cleaned up! And he insisted on accompanying Joseph into the house. She could imagine the shock the man must have gotten when he saw Joseph’s reaction to the unknown violin.
“Landis, this is very important: do any of Mr. Davis’s personal days coincide with the list of days I sent you? Over.”
Five seconds went by as he searched the files.
“Oh, my God! They’re a perfect match!”
Amaia left the bridge and grabbed the deck railing, seeking warmth to counteract her chills. She was shaking hard, even though the temperature had risen almost into the nineties over the course of the morning. Her hands trembled, and the aching void in her belly filled with certainties as she obsessively went over the new revelations.
Johnson followed her on deck, but Dupree lingered in the cabin to study the notebook she’d left behind. A few scrawled words, a rough sketch of a heart that intrigued him. Usually when someone draws a heart, it looks like a valentine heart, two curves that meet in a point. Amaia had drawn an almost anatomical heart with oddly distorted ventricles and a lumpish apex. Dupree folded the sheet and took it with him.
Johnson stood on one side of Amaia. Dupree took the other. The noon sun reflected from the rippling surface of the water, stirred by the bayou current and the backwash of the hurricane tide returning to the Gulf of Mexico. Amaia wondered how many corpses it was carrying to the depths. Dozens? Hundreds? How many had met a horrible fate during the raging storm? How many had been murdered under cover of the tempest? And how many could have been victims of something infinitely worse?
“We have to go back,” Amaia said, looking out into the distance.
“Agent Johnson, please go get Detectives Bull and Charbou. We should all be here,” Dupree said.
Dupree studied Amaia as Johnson stepped, and sometimes leaped, from boat to boat. After concluding the call with Landis, she’d called another number Landis had provided, that of the gynecologist treating Mrs. Davis. It was recorded in documents filed with the company’s health insurance plan.
Steve Owen, MD, hadn’t volunteered any information. He’d insisted on maintaining doctor-patient confidentiality as if his life depended on it. But, even so, his silences and negative answers had given them something to go on.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help you out. I’ve cooperated in the past when the Bureau contacted me about other matters, but I can’t imagine any investigation that would justify revealing medically privileged information. Maybe if you can tell me what sort of crime you’re looking into . . .”
Amaia smiled wryly, wishing she could. Of course, Doctor! I suspect the patient’s husband is a serial killer who murdered his previous family. They’d disappointed him, so he decided they’d be better off in heaven. And since he discovered his current wife was pregnant, he’s been reliving that experience, killing families all across the country. If the baby his wife is carrying turns out to be male, he’ll kill them both. And the rest as well.