“I’ll be with an agent. You guys—”
“Let’s order breakfast. I’ve another plan—just a cautionary plan,” Nancy said. She hesitated. “I’m calling my cousin, Andrea. She’s dating a Peabody cop. She’ll find out if this too-good-to-be true agent is really an agent. I mean, if he’s not undercover or anything. Someone must know something.”
Nancy disappeared into the bedroom again. Corrine called room service for breakfast and they all decided they needed to start with a giant pot of coffee. They’d have eggs and bacon and pancakes and fruit—a nice mix for a good start to the day.
When Nancy reappeared, she looked a little surprised.
“No. Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with him,” Kylie said.
Nancy shook her head. “Quite the contrary. Jonathan Wolf Dickson was born right here in Salem. He went to Yale after a stint in the military. He’s been with the Bureau almost ten years, and he was selected for an elite unit. He’s also good friends with an Essex County cop, a guy named Ben Miller, who is friends with Andrea’s boyfriend, Ernie. So, yeah, he’s the real deal.”
Kylie was grateful for the information. “So, he’s a local?” she asked.
Nancy nodded. “He’s been elsewhere since he was eighteen, but yeah, he’s from right here. And... Corrine, she should invite him to our dinner at the brewery tonight, don’t you think?”
“Yes, she should invite him!” Corrine said. “It will be wonderful.”
“To our girls’ night out?” Kylie asked.
Corrine laughed softly. “In my mind, he’s way better than any stripper. But back to me being basically boring and strange, let’s get going to the Salem Witch Museum. While you’re on your graveyard trek, we’ll head to the wax museum and the New England Pirate Museum—gotta love me some pirates, too—and we’ll probably be into dinnertime by then. Keep in touch, okay?”
“Of course,” Kylie said. They were all still staring at her. “Yes, yes, I will,” she promised again, and she turned quickly to answer the door to the suite; their breakfast had arrived.
* * *
Lizzie Borden took an ax
and gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Jon couldn’t keep the old rhyme from rushing through his head as the medical examiner spoke to him and Ben about his findings regarding the death of Annie Hampton.
Lizzie Borden hadn’t really given her mother forty whacks—she had given her nineteen. And she had hacked up her father with ten or eleven—assuming she had done the deed, despite the fact she’d been acquitted. Just about any kid who had grown up in Massachusetts had heard the facts regarding the murders.
As for Annie Hampton...
The killer never touched her face, a fact Jon had noted at the crime scene the day before.
She had been twenty-eight years old, with a round face and soft blond hair. The damage done to her appeared to have been done in fury as well. Both methodical and determined.
She’d received exactly twenty-two blows from the knife that had killed her. It had pierced her heart—causing the pools of blood—and also ripped into her abdomen, tearing apart her liver, stomach, and pancreas.
This was the first time the killer had completely missed the victim’s face. It had never appeared before that he had purposely destroyed the face, but a person being murdered usually tried to stop the knife from piercing their chest area or vital organs; there would be slashes on the arms as the victim tried to avoid the blows. In every case, including this one, there were slashes on the arms.
But there had also been at least one wound on the faces of the previous victims. Was his aim getting better? Was he improving his method of killing?
There would be tests on her blood and stomach contents; the results from the lab wouldn’t be back immediately.
The medical examiner, Dr. Custis Margolin, shook his head when he left his assistant to sew up the body. He looked at Jon and Ben and said, “This is truly sad. I know the family. This was a lovely young woman.” He studied them both and added, “Please, get this bastard.” He stared at Jon, and he clearly attempted to keep his tone bland, but there was something of an accusation in it as he asked, “You were here on the trail of this man, or so I understand. There should have been warnings out. This is a serial killer, and he’s been heading up the coast.”
“Dr. Margolin, we’re still trying to ascertain if we’re looking for one man or not,” Jon told him.
“Seems to me you might as well move on,” Dr. Margolin said. He had a hangdog face, heavy in the jowls, thinning white hair. “Doesn’t he make one kill each place, and then move north?”
Whether he should or shouldn’t feel it, Jon felt a rush of guilt. Could he have stopped this? “I’ve got no excuse to offer,” he told Margolin flatly. “I arrived yesterday, just hours before...hours before Annie met her death.”
“My office had been informed,” Ben pointed out. “We were trying to arrange our facts and sort them from rumor before having a press conference.”
Dr. Margolin studied them both and turned away. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.
Jon and Ben were both silent as they walked back to the car; it was a good twenty-five miles back to Salem from the morgue and they’d have plenty of time to talk.
“That’s not on you, you know,” Ben said at last. “You came to me. I’m the county detective here. I should have had a press conference. Thing is—”
“All we had was a matchbox,” Jon finished for him. “I know you had to notify the family and you interviewed some of her friends. Was there any suggestion at all she’d been to the Cauldron?”
Ben shook his head.
They drove in comfortable silence for a while. After several minutes, Ben glanced over at him, barely taking his eyes off the road. “How do you like DC? Are you ever coming back?”
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Jon said lightly.
“To stay?”
Jon grimaced. “I love my unit. We’re based in northern Virginia. I have a great director and I find incredible satisfaction in thinking that, at least sometimes, I can make a difference.”
“And it’s eating you alive that you feel you failed Annie Hampton. You didn’t. I did.”
“I don’t think either of us failed her,” Jon said. “We did, and we didn’t. I can’t touch it, but...there’s something different here.”