They follow the music, moving through the rooms as the bars grow louder and quieter, the same song finishing, then restarting.
“Over here,” Elsie calls eventually, standing at the opening of a long, dark corridor. There is a door at the end, and the hallway is lined with old family photos. Beverley pauses to look.
Enid was beautiful—isbeautiful—not the dowdy, nagging wife Beverley had allowed herself to imagine. It had seemed easier, more acceptable, to be the “other woman” if she convinced herself that Enid existed in a vacuum—without friends, without family, without her own interests, fears or aspirations—but the photographs are snapshots of the life of a woman with everything to live for: Enid laughing on a garden swing seat, head tossed back, pale neck exposed, free; Enid and Roger in swimsuits, pedal boats bobbing on the glittering sea behind them; Roger in his police uniform, badge gleaming, a proud Enid beside him, her hair salon-done.
Something warm drips down Beverley’s leg and she moves her hand to it. Pulling her fingers away, she realizes they are coated in blood.
“Jesus Christ, Bev.” Margot stares at her, eyes wide.
“It’s nothing,” she lies again. “I just got winded,” she says, pushing harder at the place just above her hip bone. Her whole stomach is beginning to ache, and there is a faint, high-pitched sound in her head. She takes a breath and turns the handle of the door, expecting it to jam, locked. Instead, the door opens easily. The music blares out, hitting them like a wall, and they step in.
Forty-Five
“I wanna go withyou…to that other world.”
“Someone shut that off,” Elsie calls, and Margot moves to the eight-track player.
The silence rings out. The women’s eyes widen as they take in the room.
It looks like some sort of fanatic’s lair. Along one wall there’s a long desk, above which ripped-out newspaper articles have been taped to the paint. On the opposite wall are sketches; Elsie moves to inspect them. “He was planning how to do it.”
Beverley rushes over. Diagrams are sketched in ballpoint pen on the lined pages of an exercise book. They depict the way in which each of the five women was killed.
She raises a hand to touch them. One diagram shows a body swinging on a hook. Parts of the diagram are numbered, small notes scribbled beside them.Should be a cargo hook but can only get a winch hook,one of them reads. She pulls away, her fingers leaving a smear of blood on the paper.
To others, the room might be passed off as a place of investigation, something put together by someone looking into every detail of the crimes. But Beverley, Elsie and Margot can see it for what it is, a place where abhorrence is designed, a place of planning.
It makes Beverley sick, the fact that he was so deliberate, so painstakingly precise, this man she has let into her home. There’s horror in the meticulousness of it all, the ease he must have had with killing.
She realizes then that the pig must have been Roger’s doing, too—not a warning or a taunt, but a means of confusing her, of throwing her off any scent of suspicion that might have lingered around him.
She swoons and grabs her stomach. How could she not have seen it? How could she have let this happen again?
“Seems like he was pretty obsessed with these girls.” Margot picks up a yearbook that has been left open on the desk and holds it out. Sarah Gunn’s picture is immediately recognizable.
“No, he wanted to make it look as if the killer was obsessed with them,” Beverley replies.
“What do you mean?” Elsie asks. Her eyes flick down to Beverley’s palm, which is clasped to the bloody pool on her dress.
“Bev, you look—”
“He wanted to make it appear as if the killer was someone who would naturally target girls fresh out of college, pretty girls, popular girls.”
“Like someone with an axe to grind?” Elsie asks, frowning at Beverley again with concern.
“Like some sad loner, someone odd, someone who’d just been dumped.”
Beverley’s skin is becoming very cold. She touches her cheek with the back of her hand; it has the clamminess of old, abandoned meat.
“He did his research and chose his victims based on who he thought someone like Peter Farrer would target.” She says it througha fog. “He chose methods that would draw the attention of the press eventually—once he’d decided there were enough victims—making the killings high-profile while also using them as a way to move suspicion toward Peter.”
“What about the bracelet, then?” Elsie casts her eyes around at the diagrams. “Cheryl Herrera’s. How did that get into Hank’s car?”
Beverley allows her back to lean against the wall. There are flashes of light in front of her eyes.
“Roger used Hank’s garage to get the cars from the precinct fixed up,” she says—that’s what Sharon told them. “He must have seen Peter there. Maybe they chatted. Maybe Peter had his camera with him. Maybe they got to talking about movies…”
“It would make sense for him to presume that Peter and Hank drive the same vehicles,” Margot says. “All he’d need to do was toss the bracelet in.”
