“I really want to help, Mr. Thorne. It hurts me, knowing you suffer so bad about this girl and all.” The tears in his right eye remained contained, but one slipped free from his left and slid down his smooth pink cheek.
| 8 |
The encounter with Maddison Sutton had so shaken David Thorne that he was ready to take a step that Dr. Ross Dillon had advised against. He opened the manila envelope that he had put on the table . . . but hesitated to withdraw the contents.
Although he couldn’t explain why, with the sudden appearance of Emily Carlino’s double, he sensed that getting answers from Jessup was a more urgent matter than it had been twenty-four hours earlier. Maddison’s presence in that restaurant was something far stranger and darker than mere coincidence, and David sensed a pending momentum to events that might sweep him toward a mortal precipice.
The single tear curved down the prisoner’s face to one corner of his perpetually pouting lips. The tip of his tongue licked the droplet into his mouth, and he seemed to savor it.
As though some sixth sense made him aware of the intensity of David’s emotion, he fixed his attention on the envelope. If he felt he could risk offending, he might have raised his one free hand and torn it away from his visitor.
David produced a photograph, a head shot of Emily.
A dreaminess came over Jessup’s face. His eyelids drooped. His full lips parted, and he breathed through his mouth.
“This was her, Ronny.”
A quickening pulse appeared in Jessup’s right temple, but he said nothing.
David was loath to allow this man to covet Emily. He felt as though he was betraying her, and he was certainly using her image to inveigle this brutal rapist, this murdering beast, to at last speak what truth he might know about her.
“Tell me, Ronny. Do the right thing. It won’t cost you anything to tell me. Is this woman one of the fourteen bodies you’ve hidden?”
Although he couldn’t know what was in the envelope, the killer either intuited what awaited him or could read David’s distress with uncanny clarity. “Show me the other one.”
After a hesitation, repressing his anger, David removed from the envelope a second eight by ten, this one of Emily on the beach, in a bikini. Her physical form matched the perfection of her face.
He had selected the most erotic photo he had of her, hoping that the impact of it would crack Jessup’s reticence and cause him to reveal what happened to her and where her body might be found.
“Pretty girl,” said the murderer.
“What happened to her, Ronny?”
“Very pretty girl.”
“Where is her body?”
Jessup shook his head. “She can’t be dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“Such a pretty girl being dead is too sad.”
David waited.
With his gaze, Jessup fondled the girl in the photograph.
At last David said, “Her car broke down sometime after midnight on Highway 101, about twenty-two miles north of Santa Barbara.”
“She shouldn’t ever been out alone so late. Why might a pretty girl like her be driving alone so late?”
Instead of answering that question and revealing the anguish for which the killer thirsted, David said, “It was raining hard that night. A hard, cold rain.”
Jessup remained focused on the picture. “What’s she driving? What kind of car? Maybe I’d remember the car.”
“Don’t snark me like that, Ronny. It’s not worthy of you. She was a beauty. You’d remember her before the car.”
“There was a lot of girls, Mr. Thorne, and I kept on stealing them for more than twenty years.”
“Twenty-seven isn’t so many that you’d forget this one.”
Jessup’s left eye produced a second tear, his right a first. “I pled to twenty-seven. That’s not the all of it. Tell me . . . were she a good girl?”
David answered before he considered the pleasure his reply would give Jessup. “She was the finest person I’ve ever known.”
At last Jessup raised his eyes from the photograph, alert to the settled sorrow in his visitor’s statement. “This book of yours—if there is any book—it’s going to be about her more than me.”
David was determined to maintain his composure and give the killer nothing more to feed upon. “That stretch of highway can be lonely. In those days, cell phone coverage in that area wasn’t so good, little chance she could call for help.”
“If she was one of my girls, she’d be the first I’d make alive again.”