Blind Alley - Iris Johansen [55]
“Yes, I did. Your mailbox is three miles away on the main road. I wanted to make sure that there weren't any surprises. Since Aldo was camped out in the woods he probably checked out your mailbox occasionally. It's what I would have done. You never can tell what will come in handy when you're on the hunt.” He sat down beside her on the swing. “But there didn't seem to be anything to worry about. Most of it's for Eve.”
“It's usually that way. Eve's very famous and she has a lot of requests for her services. And she wouldn't like you going through her mail.”
“Like I said, I didn't want any surprises.”
“What did you expect? A cobra in the mailbox?”
“No, that wouldn't fit Aldo's pattern. But Julia Brandon was killed by poison gas. There are ways of making an envelope deadly.”
Her mind jumped immediately to the aftermath of 9/11. “Anthrax?”
“Or something else. I didn't think it likely he'd want to rob himself of the pleasure of a close-up kill, but he's not always predictable.”
“You seem to be doing a pretty good job so far. Poison gas . . . That's the only one who died like that, isn't it? Drownings, incineration, smothering. For a serial killer he doesn't seem to be consistent in his methods. They usually have a weapon of preference, don't they?”
“He's consistent. Each one of those deaths occurred to the citizens of Herculaneum during the eruption. He's killing Cira over and over in every conceivable way she could have died that night.”
“My God.”
No air. Hot. Hot. Hot.
“Are you okay?” Trevor's gaze was narrowed on her face.
“Of course I am.” She looked out at the lake. “How did Cira die?”
“I don't know. Every scroll in the library concerned Cira's life, not her death.”
“Then maybe she didn't die at Herculaneum. There were survivors, weren't there?”
“Yes.”
“Then she could have been one of them.”
“I'd think a woman like Cira would have been heard from in the years after the disaster if she'd lived. She was no shrinking violet.”
“Maybe she had a reason to disappear.”
He was silent a moment. “That had a note of desperation. You really want her to have survived, don't you? Why?”
“Don't be silly. I'm not desperate about anything. She just didn't deserve to die in that tunnel.”
“Tunnel?” He was gazing at her oddly. “Why should she have died in a tunnel? She had a fine home in Herculaneum.”
“Did she? I must have been thinking about the gold in the tunnel.” She changed the subject. “I just remembered that Joe wanted to know if you'd figured out how Aldo found all those women with Cira's face. You said one woman's photo was in the newspaper and I guess he could have stumbled on one or two of them, but not all. And he was moving so fast in the past few weeks that he couldn't have just gotten lucky.”
He shook his head. “I've been concentrating more on getting Aldo, not the whys and wherefores. But tell Quinn I'll work on it.”
“Good. You won't be alone. Joe may figure it out before you do. He doesn't like to ask for help.”
“He didn't. You did it for him. Did Bartlett come by and introduce himself?”
“Yes, he's very unusual. How did you get together with him?”
“I was backtracking after I saw that photo of Peggy Knowles and questioned all the families of the victims I ran across. Bartlett was on Ellen Carter's list. I was pretending to be from Scotland Yard at the time. I'm pretty good and no one else was suspicious. But Bartlett is a hell of a lot smarter than he looks. He followed me back to my hotel and pulled a gun on me.”
“Bartlett?”
He smiled. “He surprised me, too. He was scared to death but he was determined. His hand was shaking so badly that I thought I'd better talk fast or he'd shoot one of us by accident.”
“Why didn't he call the police on you?”
“Because he wasn't happy with the way the investigation had been going. He loved Ellen Carter.”
“He said he had three ex-wives.”
“She was number two. Bartlett stays close to his wives even after they divorce him.”
“Why