Full Dark, No Stars(110)

Then Bob Anderson had walked into her life with a smile on his face—Bob who had asked her out and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not three months after the plow had uncovered the body of Beadie’s last “early cycle” victim, that must have been. They fell in love. And Beadie stopped for sixteen years.

Because of her? Because he loved her? Because he wanted to stop doing Big Bads?

Or just a coincidence. It could be that.

Nice try, but the IDs she’d found squirreled away in the garage made the idea of coincidence seem a lot less likely.

Beadie’s seventh victim, the first of what the paper called “the new cycle,” had been a woman from Waterville, Maine, named Stacey Moore. Her husband found her in the cellar upon returning from Boston, where he and two friends had taken in a couple of Red Sox games. August of 1997, this had been. Her head had been stuffed into a bin of the sweet corn the Moores sold at their roadside Route 106 farm-stand. She was naked, her hands bound behind her back, her bu**ocks and thighs bitten in a dozen places.

Two days later, Stacey Moore’s driver’s license and Blue Cross card, bound with a rubber band, had arrived in Augusta, addressed in block printing to BOOB ATTORNEY JENRAL DEPT. OF CRINIMAL INVESTIGATION. There was also a note: HELLO! I’M BACK! BEADIE!

This was a packet the detectives in charge of the Moore murder recognized at once. Similar selected bits of ID—and similar cheerful notes—had been delivered following each of the previous killings. He knew when they were alone. He tortured them, principally with his teeth; he raped or sexually molested them; he killed them; he sent their identification to some branch of the police weeks or months later. Taunting them with it.

To make sure he gets the credit, Darcy thought dismally.

There had been another Beadie murder in 2004, the ninth and tenth in 2007. Those two were the worst, because one of the victims had been a child. The woman’s ten-year-old son had been excused from school after complaining of a stomachache, and had apparently walked in on Beadie while he was at work. The boy’s body had been found with his mother’s, in a nearby creek. When the woman’s ID—two credit cards and a driver’s license—arrived at Massachusetts State Police Barracks #7, the attached card read: HELLO! THE BOY WAS AN ACCIDENT! SORRY! BUT IT WAS QUICK, HE DID NOT “SUFFER!” BEADIE!

There were many other articles she could have accessed (o omnipotent Google), but to what end? The sweet dream of one more ordinary evening in an ordinary life had been swallowed by a nightmare. Would reading more about Beadie dispel the nightmare? The answer to that was obvious.

Her belly clenched. She ran for the bathroom—still smelly in spite of the fan, usually you could ignore what a smelly business life was, but not always—and fell on her knees in front of the toilet, staring into the blue water with her mouth open. For a moment she thought the need to vomit was going to pass, then she thought of Stacey Moore with her black strangled face shoved into the corn and her bu**ocks covered with blood dried to the color of chocolate milk. That tipped her over and she vomited twice, hard enough to splash her face with Ty-D-Bol and a few flecks of her own effluvium.

Crying and gasping, she flushed the toilet. The porcelain would have to be cleaned, but for now she only lowered the lid and laid her flushed cheek on its cool beige plastic.

What am I going to do?

The obvious step was to call the police, but what if she did that and it all turned out to be a mistake? Bob had always been the most generous and forgiving of men—when she’d run the front of their old van into a tree at the edge of the post office parking lot and shattered the windshield, his only concern had been if she had cut her face—but would he forgive her if she mistakenly fingered him for eleven torture-killings he hadn’t committed? And the world would know. Guilty or innocent, his picture would be in the paper. On the front page. Hers, too.

Darcy dragged herself to her feet, got the toilet-scrubbing brush from the bathroom closet, and cleaned up her mess. She did it slowly. Her back hurt. She supposed she had thrown up hard enough to pull a muscle.

Halfway through the job, the next realization thudded down. It wouldn’t be just the two of them dragged into newspaper speculation and the filthy rinse-cycle of twenty-four-hour cable news; there were the kids to think about. Donnie and Ken had just landed their first two clients, but the bank and the car dealership looking for a fresh approach would be gone three hours after this shit-bomb exploded. Anderson & Hayward, which had taken its first real breath today, would be dead tomorrow. Darcy didn’t know how much Ken Hayward had invested, but Donnie was all in the pot. That didn’t amount to such of a much in cash, but there were other things you invested when you were starting out on your own voyage. Your heart, your brains, your sense of self-worth.

Then there were Petra and Michael, probably at this very moment with their heads together making more wedding plans, unaware that a two-ton safe was dangling above them on a badly frayed cord. Pets had always idolized her father. What would it do to her if she found out the hands which had once pushed her on the backyard swing were the same hands that had strangled the life out of eleven women? That the lips which had kissed her goodnight were hiding teeth that had bitten eleven women, in some cases all the way down to the bone?

Sitting at her computer again, a terrible newspaper headline rose in Darcy’s mind. It was accompanied by a photograph of Bob in his neckerchief, absurd khaki shorts, and long socks. It was so clear it could already have been printed: