14. J.T. Ellison

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СКАЧАТЬ went to the boxes on his desk, flipped the lid off the center box, slipped on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses. He thumbed through the center of the files and pulled out a manila folder marked Photos. He paged through until he reached one he liked. He held it out for Taylor to look at.

      “That picture is of the back of Vivienne White’s head. See that little bald patch? We always figured he was yanking their heads back so hard that he pulled the hair out at the roots. It was the same for all ten girls. A bald patch, right at the nape of their necks. I don’t know about any cream being found on the bodies, but the missing hair was a big deal for us.”

      Taylor’s lips were pursed. “That wasn’t in the files.” She looked at Kimball then, a mean thought niggling her mind. She hated to think the worst, but it had happened before.

      “Kimball, is there something we’re missing? Are our files incomplete?”

      He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t answer that for you. That’s why I pulled these from the garage, just in case. You know how it is. Files get lost over time. The case is twenty years old. You’re welcome to these, if you want. Compare and contrast.”

      “I appreciate that.”

      Kimball circled the desk, sat in his leather chair. He pulled out a pipe and loaded it up. The scent reminded Taylor of her grandfather, a man she hadn’t known very well. When she looked in a mirror there was a likeness, and when she felt her temper rise, she knew it was his anger.

      “Anything else top your list?”

      Taylor smiled. The man was still as sharp as ever.

      “Tell me. Why did they name him Snow White?”

      Kimball smiled, then turned and went to the bookcase. He ran his fingers along the spines on the third shelf from the bottom, the wood just high enough that he didn’t need to bend over to read the titles. He made his selection, a tattered, beaten book that looked quite old.

      He turned back to them. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. My daughter, Stacy, Sabrina’s mother, was a little girl when the first murder happened. I was reading to her before I tucked her in, a ritual I tried to maintain even when I was working the B-shift on Homicide. I’d read, get her to sleep, then go to work.”

      He fingered the cover of the book. Taylor could see that the edges of the pages were gold.

      “Well, this was the story I’d read to her that night. It was snowing hard, and I got to work thinking we’d have a slow night. Instead, we got called to the lot behind the old Chute Complex, those gay bars out in Melrose. You know where I’m talking about, off Franklin Road? It’s all built up now.”

      Taylor nodded.

      “That was Tiffani Crowden’s final resting place. I got on the scene and saw her, lying there in the snow. The story popped right into my head.”

      He cracked open the book. No bookmark was necessary; it opened to the page he wanted. The words he read made a chill spread through Taylor’s body.

       “‘Once upon a time, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony. And whilst she was sewing and looking out of the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to herself, would that I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame. Soon after that she had a little daughter, who was as white as snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony, and she was therefore called little Snow White. And when the child was born, the queen died.’”

      Kimball closed the book, cleared his throat. “Fitting, really.”

      They were silent for a few beats. Taylor was the first to venture in. “Wow. I had no idea.”

      Kimball offered her the book. She took it and glanced at the cover. Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

      “That was my copy from when I was a boy.”

      Taylor met Kimball’s eye, gave the book back. “Thank you. This helps. Did you ever think that he’d read the story and was trying to re-create the scenes?”

      “Sure. Made perfect sense. Too perfect. I always thought there was more. Hate. Lust. Power. All excellent motives. But why does any killer develop his MO? Maybe Snow White’s mother read to him before she went to work. Maybe he had someone who he read to, and lost her? Attaining the unattainable, always a rich source for motivation. We won’t know unless we catch him, ask him.”

      “Can I ask you about the note he sent you? I’m curious about that.”

      “Smart girl. I bet you are.” Taylor took the praise and realized she would have enjoyed working with this man, had she ever gotten the chance.

      He puffed, sucking the fire into the tobacco, ruminating. “That damn note. I swear, we went over it and over it. Didn’t have all the fancy tests y’all have nowadays, but we could do a fair amount of work back then. The computers were young, and the printers weren’t as plentiful. Just the fact that it came off a computer told us something. He was well-off. It came from an IBM 8580, PS/2 Model 80 386, one of those early desktops, and the printer was a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet Inkjet.”

      Fitz shook his head. “You remember that offhand?”

      “Yeah.”

      Taylor was beginning to understand the reputation Kimball had acquired as the detail man. He continued his recitation.

      “Top-of-the-line printer, too. Those things were a thousand bucks a pop when they first came out. At the time, not too many people here in town had one. We traced the ownership, came back to a fellow in Green Hills, man by the name of Mars. Wasn’t him doing the killing, but it was his computer that the note got written on, his printer that spit it out.”

      Burt Mars. Taylor knew that name. He was a friend of her parents. An accountant, if she remembered correctly.

      “But it wasn’t Mars who wrote the note, right?”

      “We never could prove it was him. Never thought so, either. He just didn’t seem capable of pulling off something so elaborate as ten murders. Now, he could bilk Uncle Sam out of a pretty penny, I’ll give him that. No, we always thought it was one of his clients. Someone who had access to his office.”

      “Why a client? Why not an employee?”

      Kimball gave her a look, then smiled at Fitz, who had rejoined Taylor on the couch. “Because whoever this guy was, he had money. Now, Mars was a generous guy, but not that generous. His employees didn’t have the cash flow that Snow White did. No, it was one of Mars’s clients, all right. Someone who paid other people to do his work for him. I’ve always been confident about that.”

      “Why? What was so special about him that you think he came from money?”

      “The signet.”

      Taylor shook her head. “What?”

      “The signet ring. Jesus, that wasn’t in the files, either?”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ