She just watched him.
“You saw me at the bar that night on Main Street…”
“No, I didn’t. You just said you were there.”
He stood, but didn’t move toward her once he realized she would walk out the door. “You’re not playing well with others. I was there, you saw me.”
“I did not.”
“Don’t you understand the favor I did for you? When I first talked to the police…”
“You said I was your lover. We hadn’t been together for months. That was no favor.”
“I didn’t tell them you were with Christine that night, on Main Street, before she came back to the hospital.”
“So? I told them. They already know.” She was amazed at the effortless way she lied. He started to talk, but she was already out the door, walking fast to the elevators.
Chapter Twenty-three
The next morning Will wheeled himself out to the busy main lobby and lined up at the Starbucks. It was one piece of the normal, outside world in the dreary daily hospital routine. His brother had brought him some money and fresh underwear, and then gone off to his shift as a firefighter. They were not close, and he could sense the discomfort from Mark, that he and his family might end up having to care for an invalid. Will vowed that wouldn’t happen. He would find a way to be self-sufficient. People worse off than him could do it. Cindy—he didn’t know when he would see her again, and didn’t want to care. Their marriage was just a scar now, not a wound. He couldn’t fix it, never could. His physical pain was less—it was noticeable, now more an anxiety he might miss his next dose than the constant vicious companion of recent weeks. Don’t worry about becoming an addict, Cheryl Beth had said. So he wouldn’t worry. He ordered his coffee, got it and rolled over to a table, then he saw the front page of that day’s Enquirer.
“Nurse charged in doctor’s murder,” a large headline said. A smaller one added: “Police suspect a romantic triangle led to killing.” He set the coffee down and read:
Police on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old nurse in the Dec. 6 murder of Dr. Christine Lustig at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital.
Judd Mason, who also worked at the hospital, faces one charge of aggravated murder, according to Cincinnati homicide Det. J. J. Dodds.
Mason, of Deer Park, was arrested at his home around 4 p.m. Tuesday without incident. He is being held in the Hamilton County Jail on $1 million bond. Dr. Lustig, 41, was found dead in her basement office. According to the medical examiner, she died from repeated stab wounds.
Police say Mason was having an affair with Dr. Lustig, the ex-wife of prominent neurosurgeon Dr. Gary Nagle. Lustig broke off the affair and an enraged Mason sought revenge, police allege.
Officials at Memorial said they were relieved that “this horrible chapter has been closed,” according to a spokesman.
Relieved. Will lingered on the word. Closed. He read the story to the end, letting the coffee scald the roof of his mouth, but he really wasn’t comprehending the other words. It was the boilerplate of a hundred news stories about murders, usually telling little, often telling outright lies. Something went out of him and he just sat there staring at the table. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe it had been this simple, all along. He suddenly felt so tired, so sad beyond the words even to express it, much less to examine its headwaters. And Will wasn’t that kind of man.
Homicide is not that hard. That’s what the old detective who had broken him in—the man’s name had been Charlie Brill, but everyone called him Bull—had told him when he had joined the detail. Most homicides are simple. Family fights, drug deals gone wrong, disputes over money. Young men with guns and no control over their impulses. Jealousy. Lovers killed each other. Most murder victims knew their killers. Most killers eventually screwed up. Gather evidence. Make an arrest. Take it to the DA. Testify. Simple.
Sometimes one good case solved many others. As a young detective, Bull had worked the Cincinnati Strangler case. Seven women had been raped and strangled in 1965 and 1966. The swirling, lethal dangers of the sixties had come down on never-changing Cincinnati. Will had been in grade school, but he remembered it. The cops had eventually arrested a cab driver after a woman had been found beaten and stabbed in his abandoned cab. The MO hadn’t been the same as the others, who had been strangled. But each murder had been slightly different. One woman had been strangled with a necktie in a park. Others had died thanks to plastic clothesline. Two had been exact copies: women beaten badly and strangled with electrical cord. Bull had said they had a theory, played a hunch: that the cabbie was the strangler. He was convicted on only one murder, but after his arrest, the strangler killings had stopped. One veteran newspaper columnist later compared the case to the Slasher attacks: only one conviction, but no more killings.
Except that the Mount Adams killings hadn’t been simple. Theresa Chambers’ body had been found on an April afternoon when a coworker had become concerned and stopped by to check on her. She had looked through the kitchen window and seen a naked leg and a lot of blood. Inside the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old restored house, the scene had been surreally calm, neat—no broken dishes or overturned tables or chairs. A set of women’s clothes had been neatly folded on a chair, with black panties on top. The body had almost been arranged: completely nude, legs open, arms and hands holding a framed photo of her daughter, who was away at college. Yet all was not calm: the body had been nearly flayed in some places by a very sharp knife, then her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled darkly on the floor. She had been sexually assaulted and semen had been recovered by the medical examiner. And her ring finger had been cut off and taken.
Will and Dodds had immediately looked at her estranged husband, Bud. The spouse almost always was the killer. Simple, remember? Their marriage had been marked by physical abuse and she had a restraining order against him. He was also a Cincinnati cop who had faced more than his share of brutality complaints. Theresa’s time of death had been estimated at around three a.m. the day her body had been discovered. Bud had an alibi—he had been on duty on the overnight shift. But that broke down within a day when it turned out that he had gone off his beat early, his shift commander agreeing to cover for him, thinking he needed to run an errand. Day after day, Will and Dodds had interrogated Chambers in one of t
he dismal little rooms at headquarters. A cop with a bad temper and a history of threats against his wife had finally killed her. Where had he been that day? Chambers had said he hadn’t been feeling well, so he went home to his apartment and took a nap. No alibi. Lots of motive.
But it hadn’t been a simple case. No witnesses could place Chambers at the scene anytime near the murder. He had claimed he hadn’t seen Theresa for two weeks before the murder. The kitchen had lacked Chambers’ fingerprints. He had said it was because he hadn’t lived there for a month, but Will thought Chambers had wiped it down. Other evidence—bloody shoeprints, fibers, skin under the fingernails—was missing. A search warrant executed at Chambers’ apartment turned up nothing. The knife was missing from the scene, and wouldn’t turn up for days, when Dodds went back to Theresa’s house, did his homicide stroll, and finally found it in the back of the freezer. It had no trace evidence.
On the fifth day of interrogation, Chambers had seemed to crack. He changed his story, said he had left patrol to visit his girlfriend. She would back him up. Her name was Darlene Corley, a white-trash woman living down in the flood zone of the Columbia neighborhood. They had found her in an ancient, paint-peeled duplex that seemed like the moon compared to the Victorians being restored a block or two away. They had stood on the porch talking to her, and she had said that she had been with Chambers early that morning. He had pulled his patrol car right up to the curb there, and come inside and they had made love. The two detectives were about to invite themselves inside when the call came: another homicide in Mount Adams, same MO.
Jill Kelly was a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, an assistant professor at Xavier University. Her fiancé had found her inside her apartment at seven p.m., exactly two weeks after the murder of Theresa Chambers. The apartment was two blocks away from the location of the first killing. Like Theresa, Jill had a petite build and shoulder-length auburn hair. The scene had almost been a carbon copy, right down to the folded clothes and missing ring finger—with her engagement ring on it. This time, however, the medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault but no semen. The assailant had worn a condom. Will had found the knife on the first sweep, buried in the cat box. Like the weapon that had been used on Theresa, it was a folding combat knife.
Mount Adams is a sky island of a neighborhood perched over downtown and the Ohio River, on the leafy edge of Eden Park. Sit in one of the bars and restaurants with a view, and you’re eye level with the top of the imposing cluster of skyscrapers. On clear summer nights it’s as if you can reach across and touch their necklaces of light. Mount Adams had long since been reclaimed by gentrification and its narrow streets were home to galleries, restaurants, townhouses, and expensive homes, mostly in closely-spaced, restored nineteenth-century buildings. Although it sat in the midst of the city, its height and affluence seemed to offer an illusion of safety. Trouble was down the hill—not there. When the media learned of the Jill Kelly homicide coming just fourteen days after the killing of Theresa Chambers, they thought: serial killer in paradise. They called him “the Mount Adams Slasher.” That was fine with Dodds and Will, who also adopted the term. The most horrific, distinctive fact of the two crimes had been concealed from the media: the amputation of the ring fingers. Between themselves, the cops called the killer something altogether different.
They called him the Ring Bearer.
And two weeks later, he struck again, four blocks away, when Lisa Schultz had come home late from work to a house that was supposed to be empty. Her husband had been on a business trip to London. Instead, the Slasher had been waiting for her. His method was identical to the Kelly murder. And then the city had gone into near panic. Police patrols had been increased yet again. Two nights later, a unit responding to a prowler call had chased a black male from beside a house on St. Gregory Street. He had run through Longworth’s, out the kitchen and gotten away, but one of the patrolmen knew the suspect. He was a small-time burglar and sometime Peeping Tom named Craig Factor.
Will had always known they had the wrong man, despite the fact that the semen matched. Departments made mistakes with DNA every day. Chambers had seemed right for many reasons. But one was especially powerful: what woman would automatically open her door at night for a stranger, particularly after an unsolved murder had happened nearby? A woman who was reacting to a police officer, standing there under the “burned out” porch light, showing his badge. But they had never run across the tracks of a male nurse named Judd Mason, not once. Maybe he had been so wrong because he had never seen the case objectively. But right at that moment, burning his mouth with expensive coffee, it was a thought through whose threshold he didn’t dare pass. He pulled out his cell phone to call Dodds. Then he put it away. What was the point?