"You don't think he killed Pauline?"
"No, Sam, not anymore. For years I did, but not anymore. Not since last week." His voice was peaceful. Some part of his soul had come to the end of the line and was calm. A car drove by on the street outside. One of his dogs scratched at the screen door to be let in. Durant closed his eyes and didn't move. I got up and opened it. The pug waddled over to its master and, tensing down a couple of times, finally jumped onto his lap.
"Who did kill her?"
"I don't know, but he's contacted me." He gently lifted the dog off his lap and put it down next to him on the couch. It looked indignant but didn't move. Durant went to a desk in the corner of the room and picked up a manila envelope. He came back to the couch and handed it to me.
"As you can see by the postmark, it was sent from Crane's View. Whoever it is likes his irony. Open it. All of the answers are inside."
It was nothing special – one of those brown manila envelopes you buy by the dozen at any stationery store. Durant's address was typed out in a nondescript font, no return address at the top-left corner or on the back.
"I had a friend dust it for fingerprints but of course there were none. This person knows what he's doing."
I put the envelope down and looked at him. "From the look on your face I feel nervous opening it."
"Better nervous than the way I felt when I took it out of the mailbox. I thought it was an advertisement so I opened it on the way back to the house. When I saw what was inside it felt like I had been punched in the heart. Go ahead, take a look."
Inside were four photocopies of original newspaper articles, and a typed note. The articles described separate murders spanning the last thirty-four years. The first was a teenage girl in Eureka, Missouri. The second Pauline Ostrova. The third a waitress in Big Sur, California, and the fourth David Cadmus. The words on the note were typed in the middle of the page: "Hi Edward! I hear you're dying. Don't go before I tell you my stories. These are only some of them."
"A serial murderer? That's what McCabe said in California!" I described the videotape of the Cadmus murder, the "Hi, Sam!" Post-it notes, other things, including the act of the female spider preserving sperm inside her body for eighteen months. Durant listened without interrupting. While I spoke, he pulled the dog. back onto his lap and scratched its head.
When I was finished, he reached into a pocket and took out a pack of Gauloises cigarettes and an old Zippo lighter. The smell of summer in the room was quickly replaced by acrid cigarette smoke. He offered me one but I refused, remembering that smoking a Gauloise was like inhaling a volcano.
"This is the only good thing about dying. I always loved smoking, but gave it up years ago with the provision that if I ever became very ill, I'd do it to my heart's content.
"I wouldn't have believed it was possible if there hadn't been one other thing in that envelope, Sam. It convinced me." On the coffee table, among the magazines, ashtray and many books was a small silver pocketknife. Durant pointed to it and I picked it up. Nothing special – a silver knife with two blades and no gewgaws like a bottle opener or scissors. There was a long deep scratch down the length of it. In the middle was engraved the name Sparky. I remembered my father using a similar knife to scrape tobacco out of his pipe.
"It belonged to my father. Sparky was his nickname. He gave it to me when I went to Korea. I gave it to Edward when he went away to college. It was a good-luck charm for the Durant men. I wanted him to have it. Edward remembered using it the day of the murder to carve Pauline's and his initials into a tree. Whoever does that anymore? Then he explained its history and gave it to her.
"We talked about it when he was on trial. Despite all the terrible things happening, he became fixated on finding that knife. I looked everywhere and checked with the police, but it had disappeared. Killers often take souvenirs from the scenes of their crimes. When I was practicing, we were often able to convict people on the basis of the mementos we found in their homes.
"It's quite remarkable. Practicing law all those years, I saw every kind of human aberration but never once, not once did I think Pauline's murder was only one of many. It never crossed my mind."
All the crimes described in the photocopied articles were unsolved. Durant had used his considerable pull to find out as much as possible about each one. With the exception of David Cadmus, there were a great many similarities.
I asked the same question I'd asked Frannie. "But why did he wait all this time? If he wanted to be known for these murders why didn't he advertise after he'd done them? The first girl was killed thirty-four years ago. Today she would be fifty!"
Durant chuckled and clicked his lighter open and closed a few times. "You're asking a dying man that question, Sam. Believe me, your perspective changes when the Grim Reaper is on the horizon. Who knows why he's doing it? Maybe he's sick like me, or just sick and it's finally beginning to ooze out. Maybe he wants to be on television like every other celebrity murderer these days.
"We spend so much time looking for patterns and reasons, understandable motives and grudges, but it's fruitless. Some things just are. and that irrationality terrifies us. We keep searching and saying, 'But there's got to be a reason!' Sorry, not always. Less and less frequently, if you look at the way the world is moving.
"Take your natural disasters. Whenever a tornado or hurricane strikes, some church is destroyed with a hundred good people inside. There's no explanation for that, so what do we do? Assess the damage and say a hundred million dollars. Count two hundred and nine dead. Hooray for numbers! Something we can understand. They may not explain, but they do create an ordering that we need to bear it.
"My son and daughter-in-law died because they had a fight one night and the wrong person was watching. Now he wants us to know he was there."
The next week felt like I was on one never-ending plane ride. I spent three days in Big Sur, California, flew down to Los Angeles, then over to St. Louis, where I rented a car and drove to Eureka, Missouri.
Durant had loaded me down with information. When I told McCabe his story, Frannie was ecstatic and went to work finding out more. I spent most of the time in the air reading their combined research.
How many other people had this man killed? What had he been doing all the years in between? I kept picturing an old thin electrician in a nowhere town. Drinking beer at night in a dumpy bar and then going home in a haze to look at his souvenirs and clippings. I'd watched documentaries on television about mass murderers. They're often abused as children or the father abandons them when they're very young. Was this guy one of those? All of his victims had been hit on the head and then thrown into water where they drowned. No sexual abuse. Nothing of importance taken, other than a pocket knife here and who knows what else there. Did the killer keep these things in a box, a drawer, a special bag hidden in a closet? How did he know I was writing the book about Pauline?
That last question was answered when I arrived in Los Angeles. In between sniffing around the death of David Cadmus, I stopped at Book Soup with an hour to kill. Browsing the magazine racks outside, I picked up a recent People and riffled through it. I hadn't looked at one in a long time, basically because Cassandra's mother read it religiously. Every time I saw the magazine I was reminded of the pit viper who'd once been my wife.
"I saw an article about you in there a couple of weeks ago."
I turned around and Ann English, the store's beautiful manager, was smiling at me. We kissed cheeks and I asked what she was talking about.