“No. I’m ... I’m sure I never met her.” The preacher removed his stocking cap with his free hand, his dishwater blond hair spiking up. Without thinking, almost frantically, he smoothed it.
“So she wasn’t a member of your church?” Alvarez asked.
Mullins and his wife shook their heads. “No.”
“We haven’t informed Gilfry’s next of kin yet, so this isn’t for public knowledge,” Pescoli warned. “We’re just looking for information.”
“Okay ...” Lorraine said, then, “You know ... Brenda Sutherland, she’s a member.” Lorraine blinked hard as she lifted her head. Her lips folded in on themselves, and the cords of her neck were visible, as if she was straining hard not to break down completely. “Could this ...” Waggling a hand to indicate everything happening, she cleared her throat. “Could this have happened to her?”
“Oh, honey, that’s really getting the cart before the horse,” her husband cut in, his grip on her hand visibly tightening. “We don’t know what happened to Brenda. She may be fine.”
“No ... no, she’s not!” Lorraine was blinking hard, her neck arching as she lifted her head defiantly. “She would never have left her boys willingly.” Turning her head, she faced her husband. “You know it. I know it.”
The preacher nodded slightly. The hand holding his wife’s relaxed. “That’s true,” he admitted. “Brenda Sutherland is a devoted mother.”
“Very devoted.” Lorraine, pale as a ghost, met Pescoli’s gaze with her own. “You have to find her. You have to!”
“And the madman who did this,” Mullins asserted. “I’m telling you, this is Satan’s doing. Whoever froze that woman and carved the ice around her is working for Lucifer himself!”
It was a good morning.
The sun was up, sparkling on the new-fallen snow, and a bit of a breeze was kicking up the freshly fallen powder. He trudged to the box to retrieve the paper and, walking back to the house, opened up the thin pages. There was nothing about his art inside, of course. The paper would have been to press far before his sculpture was discovered. And he’d been there, too. In the crowd held back by police wire. So he knew his picture had probably been taken by the police and there was a chance he would show up on a news camera’s footage, though he doubted it. But no one would question his reasons for being in the neighborhood if he were to be asked.
He’d avoided any contact with the police as he’d stood in a group, staring at the crèche, where the police had tried to figure out a way to take out the perfect ice statue. He could have told them. A simple winch and a pickup or van,
but, oh, how they’d fussed, uniformed officers, detectives, crime technicians ...
Idiots!
It had been wonderful watching them so befuddled. Now, as he had much earlier at the church, he hummed the refrain that ran through his head. We three kings of Orient are ...
Christmas was definitely his favorite time of year, though it hadn’t always been so. Some of the memories from Christmases past weren’t kind ones and they had the tendency to spread through his brain like corrosive acid, eating away at the gray matter, reminding him that pain and pleasure were lovers, one was not as intense without the other. He’d watched the police from the shadows. They’d flailed and stewed, talking and frowning while the stupid preacher looked on and wrung his oh-so-pious hands. Fortunately, that holy moron had done his best to destroy the crime scene, hypocrite that he was. The uniforms, crime scene investigators and detectives had invaded the crèche. The disturbing thing was that he’d witnessed one of the detectives, the dark-haired one with the intense brown eyes, searching for him in the crowd, trying to identify him. Seriously, she’d eyed the bystanders, hoping that she would catch him.
Bearing gifts, we traverse afar ...
Catch him? She didn’t have a prayer. Of course he would come out the victor in this game. She just didn’t know it yet. But she would. And soon.
He felt a niggle of anticipation at that, a drip of adrenaline at the thought, and he reached into his pocket and played with his hidden treasure. Oh, she’d know all right. This was about to get personal for Detective Selena Alvarez. . .
Of course, not to throw suspicion on himself, he’d left the church early while more curious neighbors and drivers stopped and stared. He’d returned home, though he’d longed to stay and witness the cops’ frustration, the preacher’s distress.
Later, he reminded himself now as he walked around to the back of his house, stepping carefully in the tracks he’d already made through the pristine snow, and on the back porch, he slowly removed his boots, then walked into the mudroom of the old farmhouse in his stocking feet. Through the cold kitchen, past the woodstove, where his great grandmother had made her incredible biscuits, to the front of the house and the den he’d created from the old parlor.
He was certain that the “big” news story in Grizzly Falls was generating interest all over this part of the country, possibly beyond. Fortunately, he’d had the wherewithal to record every local station because he knew he would want to play the recordings over and over again. Then there was his computer; he was already reading the first bits of news as they’d started streaming on the Web. Too wired to sleep, he intended to keep watching the reports as they rolled in.
There was a thud overhead as his wife’s feet hit the floor as she climbed out of bed. Mentally, he counted her footsteps, just six. Always just six. Less than a minute later the toilet flushed. Three footsteps and the plumbing creaked again as she turned on the water over the bathroom basin. Then, within three minutes of waking, she was on the stairs, her slippers quietly gliding on the old wooden steps. He waited, already irritated, ’til she poked her head into his office. “Busy?”
As if there were any question.
“Hmm.” He barely looked up. God, she was beginning to get under his skin. He thought of what he would do to her ... when the time was right. For her, there would be blood. Like the first one.
“I’ll get coffee going. You were already out?”
“Yes.” He had his pat answer. “Research. New article I’m writing.”
“Of course.” She yawned and stretched and he noted she wasn’t interested in anything he did anymore. Not really. Hadn’t even asked about his work. Just didn’t damned care. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been all his life. Half listening, he heard her shuffle toward the back of the house, the bitch who held the purse strings, who wouldn’t so much as sign on a loan he’d wanted a year ago.
She’d probably forgotten all about that.