1st to Die - James Patterson [70]
He fixed his eyes on me. “That’s right. Morbid curiosity’s my business.”
I opened my manila folder and took out the top photo. He was playing us, just as he had been playing us by leaving dead-ending clues along the way.
I slid the photo across the table. “This might sharpen your memory,” I said. “That’s Kathy Kogut, the bride who was murdered the other night. The man next to her, I believe, is you.”
Chapter 76
SLOWLY, RED BEARD PICKED UP THE photo and stared at it. “It is me,” he declared. “But the lady, though quite beautiful, I don’t recognize. If I can ask, where’s this picture from?”
“The San Francisco opening of Crossed Wire.”
“Ah,” he sighed, as if that classified something for him.
I watched the gears in his brain start to shift for the right response. He was definitely smart, and a pretty good actor.
“I meet a lot of people at these events. It’s why I try to avoid them. You say this was that girl who was killed in Cleveland?”
“We were hoping this was someone you might’ve remembered,” I replied.
Jenks shook his head. “Too many fans, not much appetite to meet them, even the really pretty ones, Inspector.”
“The price of fame, I imagine…” I took the photo back, thumbed it for a moment, then slid it back in front of him.
“Nevertheless, I have to come back to this particular fan. I’m curious why she doesn’t stick out for you. From all those other fans.” I withdrew a copy of a Northwest Bell phone bill from my folder and handed it to him. On it were several highlighted calls. “This is your private number?”
Jenks held the copy of the bill. His eyes dimmed. “It is.”
“She called you, Mr. Jenks. Three times in just the past few weeks. Once… here, I circled it for you, for twelve minutes only last week. Three days before she was married, then killed.”
Jenks blinked. Then he picked up the photo again. This time he was different: somber, apologetic. “Truth is, Inspector,” he took a breath and said, “I was so, so sorry to hear what had taken place. She seemed, in the last month, so full of anticipation, hope. I was wrong to mislead you. It was foolish. I did know Kathy. I met her the night of the photo there. Sometimes, my fans are rather impressionable. And attractive. At times I, to my detriment, can be an impressionable man.”
I wanted to lunge across the table and rip Nicholas Jenks’s impressionable face off. I was certain he was responsible for six vicious murders. Now he was mocking us, and the victims. Goddamn him.
“So you’re admitting,” Raleigh interjected, “that you did have a relationship with this woman.”
“Not in the way you’re insinuating,” Jenks replied. “Kathy was a woman who hoped to satisfy her own vague artistic aspirations through an association with someone engaged in the act of creating. She wanted to write herself. It’s not exactly brain surgery, but I guess if it was so damn easy we’d all have a book on the bestseller list, right?”
Neither of us responded.
“We spoke, maybe met, a few times over a few years. It never went beyond that. That’s the truth.”
“Sort of mentoring?” Raleigh suggested.
“Yes, that’s right. Good choice of words.”
“By any chance”—I leaned forward, no longer able to control my tone—“were you mentoring Kathy in Cleveland last Saturday, the night she was killed?”
Jenks’s face turned granitelike. “That’s ridiculous. What an inappropriate thing to say.”
I reached into the folder one more time, this time taking out a copy of the security photo of the killer arriving at the Hall of Fame. “This is a security photo from the night she was killed. Is that you, Mr. Jenks?”
Jenks didn’t even blink. “It might be, Inspector, if I had been there. Which I categorically was not.”
“Where were you last Saturday night?”
“Just so I understand,” he said, stonily, “are you suggesting I’m a suspect in these crimes?”
“Kathy Kogut talked, Mr. Jenks.” I glared at him. “To her sister. To her friends. We know how you treated her. We know she left the Bay Area to try to get away from your domination. We know things