hoping for.”
She escorted him back to the front door, saying, “Please, call me Merry, and the appreciation is all mine. You’ve helped me put a face on this man, or at least some sort of personality. He’s less anonymous to me now. More familiar. I can’t say that I know him—it’s not that—but I recognize the type.”
She opened the door and shook his hand. “So I thank you. I hate the idea that someone came in here while I was asleep, and I’m still going a little crazy over the whole security thing, but maybe this’ll help with the nightmares. I really appreciate your coming by.”
Joe said his final farewells and took his leave, walking across the lawn to his car. He was happy that she’d seen this as an opportunity to feel better, but his life experiences had taught him to view things less optimistically.
He got into the car and put the key into the ignition. But he didn’t start up the engine quite yet, choosing to gaze thoughtfully at the large house for a moment longer.
His mind returned to what Ron Klesczewski had told him about the break-in at the Jordans’, with its hints of possible mob involvement and of Lloyd Jordan’s being a whole lot cagier than the woman Joe had just left.
He seriously doubted that the Tag Man had restrained himself to merely peaking at Jordan’s investment portfolio. But, if not just that, what else?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dan sat very still in the womb of his secret room, as cut off from the rest of the world as possible, staring at the .45 pistol that lay menacingly in the center of his tidy desk. Thoughts of the snake in Eden crossed his mind.
Two things might have attracted the owner of this gun: Dan had removed some of Lloyd Jordan’s confidential papers, and at Gloria Wrinn’s he had uncovered the gruesome trove of a man whose activities had been giving him nightmares ever since.
The papers he understood, at least as far as he’d bothered to pursue the matter. The love letter spoke for itself and hadn’t been all that revealing; the financial records, of which he’d grabbed but a sampling, had clearly shown transactions going to and fro, but had also been coded, to preserve the names or entities involved. They possibly reflected something illegal, being kept either for blackmail or life insurance, but since he’d left the bulk of them in place, and had stolen what he had as an irritant only, it seemed unlikely that his life would be a reasonable price to pay for their removal. Also, the man with the gun hadn’t mentioned them.
He had said that the conversation desired by his clients involved Sally.
Which brought Dan to thinking about Paul Hauser.
He hadn’t looked at all of Hauser’s albums. Just most of one and single pages of two others. Enough to reveal that they involved the homicidal deaths of women either Sally’s age or not much older.
There had been unsolved deaths in upper New England over the years. Now and then, a woman might be found dead in her home, or buried in the woods, or dumped in an urban alleyway, with her killer never caught.
But they were rare, and none that Dan could recall had been as overtly violent as what he’d witnessed in those photographs. Not that he would have known, necessarily. He was not a tabloid fancier, and the local media tended not to go in for gory details. Generally, there was a propriety to rural newspapers and TV news shows that he’d come to appreciate. Politicians cheating on spouses were usually left alone, civic leaders caught in embarrassing legal situations got by with a police-blotter reference. The double-spread coverage of killings so common to big cities was treated up here with a virtual primness, with photographs of the house involved, perhaps, or a high school graduation snap of the victim.
There had been the infamous Connecticut Valley Killer, of years ago. Dan had heard the police theorize that in fact, those murders—six in all—had possibly been the work of two unrelated
She escorted him back to the front door, saying, “Please, call me Merry, and the appreciation is all mine. You’ve helped me put a face on this man, or at least some sort of personality. He’s less anonymous to me now. More familiar. I can’t say that I know him—it’s not that—but I recognize the type.”
She opened the door and shook his hand. “So I thank you. I hate the idea that someone came in here while I was asleep, and I’m still going a little crazy over the whole security thing, but maybe this’ll help with the nightmares. I really appreciate your coming by.”
Joe said his final farewells and took his leave, walking across the lawn to his car. He was happy that she’d seen this as an opportunity to feel better, but his life experiences had taught him to view things less optimistically.
He got into the car and put the key into the ignition. But he didn’t start up the engine quite yet, choosing to gaze thoughtfully at the large house for a moment longer.
His mind returned to what Ron Klesczewski had told him about the break-in at the Jordans’, with its hints of possible mob involvement and of Lloyd Jordan’s being a whole lot cagier than the woman Joe had just left.
He seriously doubted that the Tag Man had restrained himself to merely peaking at Jordan’s investment portfolio. But, if not just that, what else?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dan sat very still in the womb of his secret room, as cut off from the rest of the world as possible, staring at the .45 pistol that lay menacingly in the center of his tidy desk. Thoughts of the snake in Eden crossed his mind.
Two things might have attracted the owner of this gun: Dan had removed some of Lloyd Jordan’s confidential papers, and at Gloria Wrinn’s he had uncovered the gruesome trove of a man whose activities had been giving him nightmares ever since.
The papers he understood, at least as far as he’d bothered to pursue the matter. The love letter spoke for itself and hadn’t been all that revealing; the financial records, of which he’d grabbed but a sampling, had clearly shown transactions going to and fro, but had also been coded, to preserve the names or entities involved. They possibly reflected something illegal, being kept either for blackmail or life insurance, but since he’d left the bulk of them in place, and had stolen what he had as an irritant only, it seemed unlikely that his life would be a reasonable price to pay for their removal. Also, the man with the gun hadn’t mentioned them.
He had said that the conversation desired by his clients involved Sally.
Which brought Dan to thinking about Paul Hauser.
He hadn’t looked at all of Hauser’s albums. Just most of one and single pages of two others. Enough to reveal that they involved the homicidal deaths of women either Sally’s age or not much older.
There had been unsolved deaths in upper New England over the years. Now and then, a woman might be found dead in her home, or buried in the woods, or dumped in an urban alleyway, with her killer never caught.
But they were rare, and none that Dan could recall had been as overtly violent as what he’d witnessed in those photographs. Not that he would have known, necessarily. He was not a tabloid fancier, and the local media tended not to go in for gory details. Generally, there was a propriety to rural newspapers and TV news shows that he’d come to appreciate. Politicians cheating on spouses were usually left alone, civic leaders caught in embarrassing legal situations got by with a police-blotter reference. The double-spread coverage of killings so common to big cities was treated up here with a virtual primness, with photographs of the house involved, perhaps, or a high school graduation snap of the victim.
There had been the infamous Connecticut Valley Killer, of years ago. Dan had heard the police theorize that in fact, those murders—six in all—had possibly been the work of two unrelated
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