14. J.T. Ellison
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turned back to them. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. My daughter, Stacy, Sabrina’s mother, was a little girl when the first murder happened. I was reading to her before I tucked her in, a ritual I tried to maintain even when I was working the B-shift on Homicide. I’d read, get her to sleep, then go to work.”
He fingered the cover of the book. Taylor could see that the edges of the pages were gold.
“Well, this was the story I’d read to her that night. It was snowing hard, and I got to work thinking we’d have a slow night. Instead, we got called to the lot behind the old Chute Complex, those gay bars out in Melrose. You know where I’m talking about, off Franklin Road? It’s all built up now.”
Taylor nodded.
“That was Tiffani Crowden’s final resting place. I got on the scene and saw her, lying there in the snow. The story popped right into my head.”
He cracked open the book. No bookmark was necessary; it opened to the page he wanted. The words he read made a chill spread through Taylor’s body.
“‘Once upon a time, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony. And whilst she was sewing and looking out of the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to herself, would that I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame. Soon after that she had a little daughter, who was as white as snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony, and she was therefore called little Snow White. And when the child was born, the queen died.’”
Kimball closed the book, cleared his throat. “Fitting, really.”
They were silent for a few beats. Taylor was the first to venture in. “Wow. I had no idea.”
Kimball offered her the book. She took it and glanced at the cover. Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
“That was my copy from when I was a boy.”
Taylor met Kimball’s eye, gave the book back. “Thank you. This helps. Did you ever think that he’d read the story and was trying to re-create the scenes?”
“Sure. Made perfect sense. Too perfect. I always thought there was more. Hate. Lust. Power. All excellent motives. But why does any killer develop his MO? Maybe Snow White’s mother read to him before she went to work. Maybe he had someone who he read to, and lost her? Attaining the unattainable, always a rich source for motivation. We won’t know unless we catch him, ask him.”
“Can I ask you about the note he sent you? I’m curious about that.”
“Smart girl. I bet you are.” Taylor took the praise and realized she would have enjoyed working with this man, had she ever gotten the chance.
He puffed, sucking the fire into the tobacco, ruminating. “That damn note. I swear, we went over it and over it. Didn’t have all the fancy tests y’all have nowadays, but we could do a fair amount of work back then. The computers were young, and the printers weren’t as plentiful. Just the fact that it came off a computer told us something. He was well-off. It came from an IBM 8580, PS/2 Model 80 386, one of those early desktops, and the printer was a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet Inkjet.”
Fitz shook his head. “You remember that offhand?”
“Yeah.”
Taylor was beginning to understand the reputation Kimball had acquired as the detail man. He continued his recitation.
“Top-of-the-line printer, too. Those things were a thousand bucks a pop when they first came out. At the time, not too many people here in town had one. We traced the ownership, came back to a fellow in Green Hills, man by the name of Mars. Wasn’t him doing the killing, but it was his computer that the note got written on, his printer that spit it out.”
Burt Mars. Taylor knew that name. He was a friend of her parents. An accountant, if she remembered correctly.
“But it wasn’t Mars who wrote the note, right?”
“We never could prove it was him. Never thought so, either. He just didn’t seem capable of pulling off something so elaborate as ten murders. Now, he could bilk Uncle Sam out of a pretty penny, I’ll give him that. No, we always thought it was one of his clients. Someone who had access to his office.”
“Why a client? Why not an employee?”
Kimball gave her a look, then smiled at Fitz, who had rejoined Taylor on the couch. “Because whoever this guy was, he had money. Now, Mars was a generous guy, but not that generous. His employees didn’t have the cash flow that Snow White did. No, it was one of Mars’s clients, all right. Someone who paid other people to do his work for him. I’ve always been confident about that.”
“Why? What was so special about him that you think he came from money?”
“The signet.”
Taylor shook her head. “What?”
“The signet ring. Jesus, that wasn’t in the files, either?”
“I know nothing about it. Fitz, what about you?”
“Don’t remember anything in there about a ring.”
“Found it at one of the last scenes, let’s see, I believe it was Ellie Walpole. When they rolled the body, the ring was caught in her hair. It was a gold ring, scroll work on the sides, big sucker, with a monogrammed F in the crest. That’s all. Just an F. We went through Mars’s files with a fine-toothed comb, interviewed every single person whose name started or ended with an F. Didn’t get anywhere, but that didn’t mean too much. It could have belonged to the killer’s parent, grandparent—hell, cousin or friend, for all I know. It looked old, like it might have been passed down, you know what I mean?”
“Now, that isn’t in the files, I know that for sure. I went through all of the evidence by hand three weeks ago when we pulled some of the boxes for our investigation. There’s nothing about a signet ring. And nothing in the interviews about a ring, either.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, LT. It was there. Saw it with my own eyes. I wrote a lot of those reports myself—that’s why I know they were there. I’m getting the feeling you aren’t working with a full deck on this one.”
Taylor looked at Fitz. This was a problem.
Kimball took a last puff on his pipe, emptied it out in a clay ashtray that looked homemade, and stood.
“You can take these files, just be sure you get them back to me in one piece, okay? I want to go be with Sabrina now. We don’t get to see her as much as I’d like, and she’s growing up too fast. Pretty soon she won’t have any desire to make gingerbread houses with Gramps, you know?”
Fitz carried two boxes, Taylor one. Kimball escorted them out through the kitchen, where Mrs. Kimball and Sabrina stopped them and put cookies wrapped in foil on the tops of the boxes, a treat for later. Kimball saw them to the door, a sad smile on his face as they drove away.
Taylor was three feet tall and fit perfectly into the space between the banister and top step, slightly shrouded by a Doric column that abutted the crown stair. She could see the ball going on below her. There seemed to be hundreds of people, all dressed in the most elaborate of costumes. It was New Year’s Eve, her parents’ traditional masquerade ball, though the house and environs were new. This was Taylor’s second home, but the only one she ever remembered.
The music was loud, and the people twirled around like marionettes, flutes of champagne disappearing at an alarming rate—tuxedo-clad waiters circling the foyer and ballroom, keeping the guests well supplied.
A woman in a large Marie Antoinette wig, powdered face, a black triangle patch meant to be stuck to the corner of her mouth askew and half-unglued, sat down hard on the bottom step—a