Page 60 of Water's Edge

“Dina Knowles only had panties on,” Clay says. “We didn’t find her clothing, either.”

Larry finally finds what he is searching for. He puts a couple of pictures on the desk and points with a fingernail that needs some serious clipping. “This was taken beside the body and out across the strait. You can see D’Arcy Island right over there.”

I wonder what is so important about that tiny island that he’s going to so much trouble to find the picture and point it out. So I ask: “What about D’Arcy?”

Larry leans back again and spreads his hands out like a bishop giving a blessing. “Well, you see what I’m saying.”

I don’t. Not at all. Clay does and covers a grin with his hand. Ronnie is clueless by her expression.

“It’s simple,” Larry says. “If she’d been across the strait, she’d have been the Mounties’ problem.”

“Poor you.” Clay pats Larry on the hand. “Always overworked and underpaid. You have the worst luck of anyone I’ve ever known.”

Larry waves him off. “Yeah, yeah.”

“No,” he says. “I mean it. I think the killer only dumped the body there to piss you off.”

“Okay. I get it. No one sees what I mean.”

I still didn’t see it.

Larry taps the picture again with that fingernail. “Whoever killed this girl had his pick of islands and beaches and inlets. He had to get there by boat, so if he’d dumped my girl anywhere in the Haro Strait, it would have been the same to him. We don’t know where the murder took place. It could be any one of a couple dozen islands, but he dumps her on San Juan Island. The killer could be Canadian for all we know.”

I wasn’t familiar with every island, especially along the Canadian border.

“Larry,” Clay says, “all three of these women could have been killed anywhere and dumped in our jurisdictions. The facts are—and correct me if I’m wrong—they all lived alone, all looked alike, all are around the same age, all had babies or were pregnant, and all worked at bars near some type of waterway.”

That sums it up nicely, I think.

“Mine was staged to look like she’d drowned there,” Larry adds.

I raise my eyebrows. None of that is in the reports I’ve been given.

“Staged?” I ask.

He taps the pictures again. “No one in their right mind would want to be swimming in the icy water in their birthday suit.” With his eyes still on mine, he extracts another picture from the folder. This is one of the victims at the scene. She is on her back, arms splayed out to her sides, legs shoulder-width apart. It is a very unnatural position for a body to have washed up on the beach. For that matter, it is not the way a body would come to rest if it was dumped out of a boat or dragged onto the beach.

It was just like the way Leann Truitt was staged.

“Did you think she drowned?” I ask.

“It’s what one of the Marine Patrol guys said. Anyway, Benton was two years ago. Somehow it got leaked to the news that my girl was strangled with a belt. Had been tortured. You two might have a copycat killer. Someone that got wind of Margie Benton’s case.”

“Was it in the news?” I ask.

“’Course,” he sneers. “Those bloodsuckers posted pictures and everything. I don’t know where they got them.”

Ben Franklin once said three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. So true. Nothing is secret when it involves law enforcement if more than one person knows about it. Larry himself might have leaked to a reporter.

Clay laughs a little. “Larry, I don’t believe it’s a copycat and neither do you. This guy is proud of his killings. He marks them.”

I turn and face him. “What do you mean?”

Before he can explain, my phone buzzes with a call from Marley Yang. I excuse myself and take it outside. I know that Marley is going ballistic if he’s gotten the DNA sample from Lonigan. Lonigan doesn’t even know whose samples they were, so he couldn’t have told Marley. I thought he would run them as unknown subjects. I told Cass to mark the bags with aBand aT. I didn’t want Lonigan to know what I was up to.

Thirty

I find a space next to the copier. Above it, a sign with four figures bent over laughing: “You want itwhen?” Nan has the same sign on her desk. She makes a habit of pointing to it whenever the task—or the individual who asks for it to be done—annoys her.

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