Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Afternoon
Su-Moon stepped back, almost as if pushed in the chest by Waverly’s words, and said, “I can’t believe you’re even talking about killing someone. If that’s your goal, count me out. I’m all for doing whatever it takes to get this guy off the streets-I think I’ve already proved that-but I’m not going to turn myself into one of his kind to do it. You shouldn’t either. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
Waverly lowered her eyes to the ground.
Then she looked up.
“I had a sister,” she said. “Her name was Carmen Key. In August of 1950, she was murdered. Someone dressed her up in a red dress and dropped her off a roof. It happened in Chicago.”
“I had no idea.”
“No way you would,” Waverly said. “The police got nowhere. I hired a private investigator, a man named Drew Blackwater, who didn’t get much further than the police, but did get something. He found out that a woman named Emmanuelle LeFavre was in the vicinity at the time it happened. Emmanuelle in turn remembered seeing Carmen with a man that evening. They were entering the alley that ran alongside the building. She got a glimpse of the man. It wasn’t a good one but it was at least something.”
“Okay.”
“I flew to Chicago and met with her,” Waverly said. “She felt my pain. She agreed to help me in any way she could. The police didn’t know about her. She didn’t want to get involved with them. She thought they weren’t confidential enough. She thought that if the guy found out there was a witness, he’d be able to get that person’s name.”
“Through a bribe?”
Waverly nodded.
“A bribe, a leak, whatever,” she said. “I agreed to keep her identity secret and not tell the police about her. She spent two weeks combing the city on foot, hoping to run into the guy by blind luck. Their paths never crossed.”
“Too bad.”
“Right, too bad,” Waverly said. “She was a model from New York. She returned home. Meanwhile, my investigator, Drew Blackwater, kept pressing forward. He came up with a second piece of information. He found out that another woman-a lady by the name of Brittany Pratt-had been killed in an identical manner exactly one year before Carmen, meaning August 1949.”
“In Chicago?”
“No, in New York,” Waverly said.
“Where Emmanuelle lived.”
“Right,” she said. “I flew there, hired a local private investigator, and stayed with Emmanuelle for three weeks, trying to get a lead on that prior murder.”
“Because the same guy did both.”
“Exactly,” Waverly said. “That turned out to be a waste of time. In the end, we got nothing, no witnesses, no leads, no motives, no nothing.”
“Damn.”
“The hardest part about it was that I knew that there was something there somewhere to be found. We just never found it.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Well, I figured if there were two, maybe there were three,” she said. “My Chicago investigator-Blackwater-actually came up with another victim, a woman named Geneva Robertson who was murdered in Las Angeles in March of 1950. Again, the woman was dropped off a roof wearing a red dress.”
“So August wasn’t set in stone.”
“No, now we had two in August and one in March,” Waverly said. “I did the same as before, flew to Los Angeles, hired a local investigator, the whole bit. Emmanuelle met me there.”
“That’s quite a friend.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Waverly said. “She paid all the bills, too. She had the money, from her modeling. I had hardly anything. She paid for the plane tickets, the hotels, the investigator fees, everything. In the end though it was a giant waste of time. We didn’t get anything useful.”
“Damn.”
Waverly grabbed Su-Moon’s hand. “Come on, let’s walk,” she said. They headed for 16th Street, where the buzz was. “Last weekend, we had a similar murder in Denver. My boss, Shelby Tilt, saw it as a big story, not because it was a murder, but because he was personally aware of a similar murder that had happened out in San Francisco when he worked there,” she said.
“Meaning Kava Every.”
“That was the first I’d heard about a fourth victim, fifth actually, if you count the one in Denver,” Waverly said.
“Did you tell Tilt about everything you already knew?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew from the start of all this that I might have to personally kill the guy if there wasn’t enough information to take to the police,” Waverly said.
“So you’ve had revenge in mind from the start.”
“Yes, if by revenge you mean justice,” Waverly said. “My goal is to ruin this guy’s life and get him off the streets. If that can be done through the cops, then great. That’s my route of choice. If it has to be done through alternative means, though, then I’m prepared to do that as well.”
Su-Moon let the corner of her mouth turn up.
“Don’t let me get on your bad side.”
Waverly frowned.
“You know, from the beginning I’ve really had no second thoughts about killing the guy if it came to that,” she said. “Now that I’m getting close, I’m not so sure I’m up for it.”
“What we need to do is figure out a way to trap him,” Su-Moon said.
“How?”
“I don’t know. There must be a way, though, if we think hard enough.”
They walked in silence.
“Why didn’t Emmanuelle meet you in San Francisco? Is she dropping out?”
“No, she’s playing a role.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we had two murders to cover at the same time,” Waverly said. “I went to San Francisco, Emmanuelle came to Denver.”
“She’s here?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She hired a dick named Bryson Wilde to investigate the murder here,” Waverly said.
“Why would he take the case?” Su-Moon said.
“Money.”
“I know, money, what I’m say is, why wouldn’t he scratch his head and say, What’s your interest in all of this? What do you care about who killed someone?”
“Okay, I see what you mean,” Waverly said. “She made up a cover.”
The words hung.
“Which is what?”
“Which is she pretended like she saw it from a distance, pretty much like what actually happened to her in Chicago. She’s hoping that the investigator will crack it. If that happens, her plan is to view the guy from a distance, without him knowing it, and see if he’s the same guy she saw in Chicago.”
Silence.
“If she saw him back in Chicago, maybe he saw her too.”
Waverly nodded.
“That’s possible. So?”
“So, what if he sees her by some random happening while he’s out walking around?” Su-Moon said. “What if that happens and she doesn’t know it happened?”
The city was full of life.
Cars moved.
People moved.
Everything made its own special little noise.
Su-Moon stopped, then looked into Waverly’s eyes. “Have you ever considered that maybe Emmanuelle is the killer?”
Waverly laughed.
“Good one,” she said. “How do we trap Bristol? That’s what I want to know.”
Su-Moon grabbed Waverly’s elbow.
“I’m serious,” she said. “She was in the vicinity when Carmen got killed. After you found out about her, she got you to promise not to tell the police about her.”
Waverly started to open her mouth.
Su-Moon cut her off.
“Hear me out,” she said. “Another murder happened in New York, where she was-again. She paid all the bills for all the investigations, including the investigators themselves. Maybe that was her way of being sure they didn’t find anything, or if they did, they only told her about it and not you.”
Waverly wasn’t impressed.
“We need to trap Bristol,” she said. “That’s what we need to focus on.”
Su-Moon frowned.
“Maybe she’s been tagging along not to help you but to be sure you don’t get anywhere,” Su-Moon said.
“Stop it.”
“I’m just saying-”
“And I’m saying I heard you,” Waverly said. “So stop saying. Enough’s enough. Emmanuelle didn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t hurt a fly.”