CHAPTER 32

It took one phone call the next day to determine that Michael Shaw’s partner was a real person, now living in California-and not particularly happy to have a stranger call him out of the blue and remind him that his lover was dead.

“Of course I live where I told the police I live,” he said when Tess explained, in a smooth-as-silk lie, that she was going over open case files for the Anne Arundel County police and needed to make sure he had provided a correct telephone number and address. “But what about the case? Have you made any headway?”

“We’re pursuing it with due vigilance.” She thought that was something a cop might say.

“Have you learned anything, anything at all? It’s been six months, and when I call your detectives they act as if I’m a gigantic pain. Are they ever going to make an arrest in Michael’s case? I understand that accidents happen, but a hit-and-run-a person should have the decency-you can’t know whether someone’s dead or not unless you stop-”

Shaw’s former lover began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said, and this was not a lie. “But we may have a break in the case soon.” She hoped that wasn’t a lie.

“I could have told you that the doctor’s boyfriend isn’t one of our guy’s personas,” Carl said when she hung up the phone. Esskay had allotted him a small portion of the office sofa.

“How so?”

“Our guy’s not queer.”

She gave him a look.

“Sorry. Gay, he’s not gay. He’d be appalled you even thought to check.”

“And how do you know that?”

He tapped his forehead. “I just do.”

“Uh-uh. You’re the one who said you didn’t want to get into that mind-hunter shit.”

“I’m just saying I know he’s not a-not gay.”

“It’s still a supposition. Let’s keep to facts. Here’s one: Michael Shaw’s partner, unlike the other boyfriends in our various cases, didn’t disappear off the face of the planet. Too bad. Shaw’s death would be a more obvious part of the overall pattern if he had. So what else do we know about Shaw?”

“He was a shrink.”

“Right. Is it possible our guy ever went to him?”

“Not of his own volition. He wouldn’t want to be in analysis.”

“What if it were court-ordered?” Tess couldn’t help thinking of her own situation. She reread the obituary in her file. Shaw had been a doctor in Hopkins’ famed sex clinic. Serial killing had a strong sexual component. If EAC-the shorthand she and Carl had started using for Eric-Alan-Charlie-had committed a lesser crime in yet another persona, he might have been ordered into therapy. But wouldn’t an arrest have outed his identity scheme?

Carl was on the same train of thought, even farther down the track. “We’ll never get the doctor’s client list,” he said. “It would be hard enough if we were real cops. As amateurs with no legal standing, there’s no way. Besides, why kill your shrink? He can’t tell your secrets to anyone.”

“That’s not exactly true. If you blurt out your intention to harm someone, the doctor does have an ethical obligation to alert the authorities. A psychiatrist has to make a clear distinction between delusion and true intent, but he couldn’t sit there and listen to a patient describe his plan to commit a criminal act and just shrug it off.”

“Okay, but Michael Shaw is, chronologically, the last on the list. He was killed in December. So what did our guy tell him that was so bad he had to kill him?”

Tess chewed on her pencil, looking at the list she had long ago memorized. The first victim was Tiffani, killed six years ago. Lucy had died eighteen months later. EAC-then in Alan guise-had met and courted Julie Carter between Tiffani and Lucy, dropping her, possibly because of her addiction. He staged his own death the summer after he killed Lucy. Hazel Ligetti’s house had burned down a few months earlier. And then-nothing for two years, not until Michael Shaw the past December.

“I bet anything he was the doctor’s patient,” Tess said. “But I don’t know where to go with that. Where does Hazel fit in?”

“Got me. What did she do?”

“She worked for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Hagerstown, in some low-level paper-pushing job. You know, all the other women-the ones he killed and the ones he didn’t-they all had some joy in their life, even if it proved to be false. They got to have the illusion of being happy. But Hazel Ligetti had nothing. According to her landlord, she lived alone and seldom went out.”

“A paper pusher?”

“Yep.”

“What kind of paper do you think they push at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene?”

“I don’t know. Insurance claims?”

“Yeah, among other things. Also”-he paused, to give his words more weight-“disability programs.”

“So? He’s disabled, he sees a psychiatrist, he kills the doctor and the woman who sent him there. We’re back to where we started.”

“You don’t know much about disability programs, do you?”

Tess shook her head.

“Well, I do, sad to say. When I had… my problems at work, they tried to get me to apply for SSI-Supplemental Security Income. That’s the federal program. But to get that, you almost always have to go through the state and qualify for some sort of temporary support first. Nobody gets SSI the first time out. What do we know about our guy’s second two identities?”

“They’re men in hospitals who have suffered catastrophic injury.”

“Right. Which means their case files could have passed through the hands of a DHMH worker in Washington County. There’s a rehab hospital out there, but it’s short-term. What do you want to bet that the real Alan Palmer and Charlie Chisholm were hospitalized there before they found long-term care?”

It took Tess a few seconds to work it through for herself. Of EAC’s myriad identities, only the first alias belonged to someone who was dead, Eric Shivers. He had died as a teenager, old enough to have a driver’s license on record-and young enough not to have anything else on record. Frederick cops would have run Eric’s name and the date of birth and the Social Security number through the computers, but they wouldn’t have found anything suspicious. It never would have occurred to them to check Vital Records to see if Tiffani’s boyfriend was dead. After all, he was living and breathing, right in front of them.

She booted up her computer and plugged the next two names, Alan Palmer and Charles Chisholm, into a phone directory that searched every listed number in the nation. Dozens of hits came up, unusual names were harder to come by in this day and age. So if there ever was any confusion-if anyone ever said, “Hey, I knew an Alan Palmer back home”-EAC could laugh and say, “Yes, I’ve met a few Alan Palmers in my time too.”

Did he laugh? Did he smile? How normal-seeming was he? Very, according to his last girlfriend, Mary Ann. The perfect boyfriend. Until he killed you.

“He needs relatively common names,” Tess said, thinking out loud. “Names of people who have no connection to him. The men also have to be a certain age-they all had the same birth year-and have a physical description he can more or less fit. Caucasian, around six feet, light eyes. Hazel helped him get those. Why?”

“Beats me. If she knew what she was doing, it made her an accomplice to some pretty awful stuff. And from the way you said she lived, it doesn’t sound as if she was blackmailing him or anything.”

Tess chewed the inside of her mouth. “We can’t just sit here, speculating. We need to drive out to the office where Hazel worked, find out what records she had access to.”

“Same problem we have with the shrink. Why would anyone talk to us?”

Tess rummaged through her desk, finding letterheads from an insurance company, one that happened to exist only in her imagination: S amp;K Fire and Life, named for the greyhound. She loaded a sheet in the printer and began typing.