A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(98)

“We just want to talk to them,” Tatum said again.

“Well, I always knew they’d get in trouble. You don’t get to grow up like Bertha’s kids did and turn out fine.” The hag cackled as if this were the best joke she had ever told. Maybe it was.

The woman’s speech pattern—starting every sentence with the word well—was getting on Zoe’s nerves. “What do you mean? Was she abusive?”

“Well, I don’t know what you call abusive, but she sure walloped her sons a lot. Her daughter even worse, I think. And she’d scream at them and throw things at them . . . and that was when she was sober. She got real nasty when she was drunk.”

“Ma’am,” Tatum said, “we really need to—”

“Nasty how?” Zoe asked. She felt as if this wrinkled, gnarled hag might hold all the answers. And she seemed to be happy to share.

“Well, she was damn crazy when she was drunk. Said she could hear the devil speaking to her, or sometimes it was her ex-husband. She sprayed one of her boys with hairspray once, tried to light him up with a match. It was out in the street too. I called the police.”

She said the word police strangely, pausing after saying po for a whole second, then half screaming lis. Zoe began to suspect Bertha wasn’t the only crazy person who had lived in the neighborhood.

“And, well, of course, there was the thing with her daughter. Surely you know about that.”

Her tone was gleeful, as if she knew they didn’t and was dying to tell them, but they had to ask.

“What about her daughter?” Zoe asked.

“Well, I thought everyone knew ’bout that. Her daughter died when she was thirteen. It turned out she had lung cancer, probably because Bertha kept smoking in the house. The crazy thing was, when her daughter died, Bertha didn’t tell anyone about it. Just left her there for more than a week. She said the girl was resting. Later we all found out Bertha made her sons keep their dead sister company. She locked them inside, told them their sister was finally behaving like a good little girl. And that they had to pray she’d get better. They were all locked in with that rotting body for over a week. In the damn summer.”

Zoe glanced at Tatum, and he looked back at her, his eyes full of horror. There it was.

“There was a terrible smell coming from there. I had to call the po . . . lis. They barged in, found the daughter covered in maggots, the boys half-sick, vomit all over the place, Bertha drunk and unconscious. Yeah . . .” She became silent. “Thought everybody knew about that,” she finally said.

“What happened to the sons?” Zoe asked.

“Well, they’re both still around.”

“What are their names?”

“Well . . .” The neighbor stared for a moment. “I’ll be damned. Can’t remember. One of them changed his last name; he hated his mother so much. The other kept the name. I’ll remember in a second . . .” She licked her gums and smacked them. “Nope. Nothing.”

“Do you know where we can find them?”

“Well, one of them owns a business. Some sort of handyman. An electrician, I think. Yeah, definitely an electrician.”

Zoe’s brain cells sparked, a flurry of ideas emerging all at once. Her heart raced. Lily hadn’t been saying “Hummer” or “trucker.”

“I think he’s a plumber,” she said.

“Well, I think you’re right,” the old neighbor agreed loudly. “A plumber, not an electrician. His name is—”

“Clifford Sorenson.”

“Yes. But when he was a young boy, his mom used to call him Cliff.”





CHAPTER 70

Tatum’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, squeezing it angrily as the traffic moved at a snail’s pace.

“It all fits,” he told Zoe, his voice sharp and tense. “Sorenson believes the perfect woman is a dead woman. That’s what he learned from his psycho mother. His dead sister was the only one who didn’t make his mom angry. And she kept them inside for a week, holding the body’s hand, combing her hair, God knows what else. I mean, of course he turned out crazy.”

“So he kills his fiancée,” Zoe said.

“Right. Body decays—he has to get rid of it, or the neighbors will complain. He dumps it but becomes obsessed with the idea of having a dead spouse.”

“He could have known Susan Warner because he fixed the pipes at her home,” Zoe said. She stared ahead, biting her lip. “Remember what her friend said? That the apartment’s sewage kept overflowing? She must have needed a plumber multiple times. Plenty of time to look around, see that she lived alone.”

“You met the man. Does he look like the person in the security footage?”

“It could be him. It was really hard to get a good look at his face in the video. But he did look familiar. Maybe his body language or his stance.”

“Fits your profile nicely too. Early thirties, works with his hands . . . does he own a van in addition to his mom’s car?”

“Yeah. There were two vans when I stopped by. His employee was loading a sink on one. It had Sorenson’s Plumbing painted on it, which explains how Lily knew he was a plumber . . .” She slowed down, frowning.

“What is it?” Tatum asked.