I didn’t know why he had left it behind, but a chilling possibility was beginning to form in my mind. “Possibility one,” I answered, “he panicked. Maybe the phone rang or someone knocked at the door.”
“On their wedding night?”
“You’re starting to sound like my ex-partner.”
I started toward the Hall, and he caught up. He held the glass doors open for me. As I walked through, he took my arm. “And number two?”
I stood there, looking squarely into his eyes, trying to assess just how far I could go with him. “What’s your real expertise here, anyway?” I asked.
He smiled, his look confident and secure. “I used to be married.”
I didn’t reply. Possibility two: A fear was building inside me. The killer was signing his murders? He was toying with us? Purposely leaving clues? One-time crime-of-passion killers didn’t leave clues like the jacket. Professionals didn’t, either.
Serials left clues.
Chapter 17
THE WINDOW that Phillip Campbell was staring out had a startling view of the bay, but he didn’t really notice the sights. He was lost in his thoughts. It’s finally started. Everything is in play, he was thinking. The City on the Bay will never be the same, will it? I will never be the same. This was complicated — not what it seemed to be but beautiful in its own way.
He had closed his office door, as he always did when he was absorbed in research. Lately, he had stopped catching lunch with his coworkers. They bored him. Their lives were filled with petty concerns. The stock market. The Giants and the 49ers. Where they were headed on vacation. They had such shallow, simple, middle-class dreams. His were soaring. He was like the moguls thinking up their new, new things over in Silicon Valley.
Anyway, that was all in the past. Now he had a secret. The biggest secret in the world.
He pushed his business papers to the corner of his desk. This is the old world, he thought. The old me. The bore. The worker bee.
He unlocked the top left drawer of his desk. Behind the usual personal clutter was a small gray lockbox. It was barely large enough to hold a packet of three-by-five-inch cards.
This is my world now.
He thought back to the Hyatt. The bride’s beautiful porcelain face, the blossoms of blood on her chest. He still couldn’t believe what had taken place. The sharp crack of the knife ripping through cartilage. The gasp of her last breath. And his, of course.
What were their names? Oh, Jesus Christ, he’d forgotten. No, he hadn’t! The Brandts. They were all over the newspapers and the TV news.
With a key from his chain, he opened the small box. What spilled out into the room was the intoxicating spell of his dreams.
A stack of index cards. Neat and orderly. Alphabetically arranged. One by one, he skimmed through them. New names… King…Merced…Passeneau…Peterson.
All the brides and grooms.
Chapter 18
SEVERAL URGENT MESSAGES were on my desk when I got back from the morgue. Good — urgent was appropriate.
Charlie Clapper from CSU. Preliminary report in. Some reporters: from the AP, local television stations. Even the woman from the Chronicle who had left me her card.
I picked at a grilled chicken and pear salad I had brought up as I dialed Clapper back. “Only good news,” I joked, as his voice came on the phone.
“In that case, I can give you a nine hundred number. For two bucks a minute they’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”
I could hear it in the tone of his voice. “You got nothing?”
“Tons of partials, Lindsay,” the CSU chief replied, meaning inconclusive prints his team had lifted from the room. “The bride’s, the groom’s, the assistant manager’s, housekeeping’s.”
“You dusted the bodies?” I pressed. The killer had pulled Melanie Brandt up off the floor. “And the box of champagne?”
“Of course. Nothing. Somebody was careful.”
“What about off the floor? Fibers, shoeprints.”