“In the car?” she manages to ask.
“Or on foot. I’d just walk past the house at the same time every night.”
“Always the same car?”
“Yeah. Just our car, Bev.”
She blinks away disgust. That was the steering wheel she still touched every day, the same gearshift, the same driver’s seat.
“Your guy using different types of cars?”
She nods. That was one reason Roger had given for the crimes not being linked—different vehicles had been spotted at each crime scene.
“That’s easy enough,” Henry says. “Anyone can access multiple cars. You just take ’em. Maybe your guy’s some small-time felon taking things further, pushing boundaries.”
“ ‘Pushing boundaries’?”
“In my experience, these things start small,” Henry explains, clearly relishing having authority on the matter. “Like, a killer mightstart off with little things—breaking and entering, stealing women’s lingerie, watching people in their houses…”
She bristles.
“Then he might wake up one day and find that’s just not cutting it, that he needs something else, something bigger, to satisfy him.”
Beverley can’t meet his eye. He is talking in the third person, but she knows he must be referring to himself, his own behaviors.
“So then he might move to grabbing a girl, touching her, sexual assault or whatever, and it spirals from there. It’s an urge for him.”
Him, notme.
“The itch becomes harder to scratch, the thrill harder to come by.”
Through dizziness, Beverley must concede that he has a point. Their killer could be someone with a few smaller crimes under his belt. He could have a record already.
“But, Beverley.” Her head snaps up. It’s the first time he hasn’t had a hint of a smile about him. She remembers that expression: a blankness that came upon his face whenever he spoke about his father, whenever he talked about trying to make him proud as a kid but never succeeding, whenever he recalled how his father would taunt and belittle him.
“This guy, your killer—he hates women.”
“What?” Despite herself, she is stunned.
“Pretty women, successful, talented. That’s what you said, right? The type of girls that were prom queens.” Henry scratches his neck. “He probably feels…what’s the word? Emaculated.”
“Emasculated.”
“Yeah. He feels emasculated by them—rejected, or whatever.”
Did Henry hate women? Had he hated her during those few years that they’d been married? It had sometimes felt as if he had, his resentment bubbling up through the cracks, convincing her that she haddone something wrong in those moments, that she’d failed as a wife, as a woman, to keep him happy.
“Did he touch ’em?”
She is jarred back to the room. “Sorry?”
“Did he have his way?” He has adopted a mock prim tone.
Her eyes dart. How can he talk about them like that?
“I don’t know.”
Shedoesn’tknow. She didn’t ask if the women had been sexually assaulted. She doesn’t even want to know the answer.
