Chapter Thirteen #2
The women look at one another. No words pass between them, but they feel the weight of their shared history, the downward pull of their husbands’ actions.
“If they are linked, and Berryview is in the middle of this killer’s operating zone”—Elsie gestures to Beverley’s map, with its three red rings—“maybe it’s someone close to here. Maybe we could find him, or at least work out what sort of person he might be.”
“Now, that is something we’d be excellent at,” Margot agrees.
Bev raises an eyebrow in question.
Margot looks between them. “Have these cops shared a bed with a killer? Have they baked him a pie? Have they slipped his jacket off his shoulders at the end of a long day?”
“No,” Elsie obliges.
“We know what it’s like to live with a dangerous man,” Margot continues.
“We know—with the benefit of hindsight, of course—what the signs are that he’s dangerous.
We may not know why our husbands did what they did, but I’d say we have a pretty good chance of figuring out what kind of guy this killer is. ”
“The police will be looking at circumstantial suspects.” Elsie works hard to keep the enthusiasm from her own voice. “People who worked with the victims, laborers carrying out jobs near where they were killed. Let them do that. It’s grunt work. We can get ahead of the game.”
“Get into this man’s head.” Margot’s eyes grow large.
“And on that note: I’ve been thinking,” Elsie posits.
She’s already won over Margot; she just needs to ensure that Bev’s fully on board.
But with the scrapbook, the map, the connection Bev feels to Cheryl Herrera, Elsie knows there’s no way she’ll say no.
“All three of our husbands were going through high pressure in their lives at the time that they were killing, right?” She’d had the thought in the car on her way home from work the other day.
She’d been trying to link Albert’s situation with those of Henry and Stephen.
They were a teacher, an air-conditioning engineer and a politician, men who on the surface seemed so very different, but all committed abhorrent acts, expertly covering their tracks.
“ ‘High pressure’?” Bev asks.
“Take Stephen,” Elsie replies. “Didn’t you say he was running for election before his crimes started, Margot?”
Margot confirms it.
“He didn’t win, did he? His ego must have taken a bit of a knock…”
“He certainly had an ego.”
“He might have found the loss humiliating?”
Margot nods, tongue pressed against her cheek in thought. “So, what about Albert?”
“He’d lost his job at the school,” Elsie answers. “He hated that. He was so angry. He was forced to look for jobs that he felt were beneath him, and even those places wouldn’t give him a shot. What about Henry?”
Beverley sighs.
“Any work issues?”
She shakes her head. “Not really, but…” Bev frowns, pauses. “There was something.”
Elsie nods. “Go on.”
“His brother got in touch, said their father was dying.”
“So, what? Grief?” Margot asks.
“Not even grief, something different. Something more complicated.”
Elsie knows Bev’s husband had a difficult relationship with his father, that he was abusive, controlling.
“So you’re saying that anyone experiencing a challenging life situation is more likely to kill?” Bev asks.
“No, but if someone already has the propensity or the characteristics to be able to kill, something difficult in their lives might create an environment that pushes them to do so—like a padlock.” She twists her hands. “Something has to happen to make all the numbers align. Then…”
“Boom.” Margot opens her hand. “Like a pressure-cooker situation.”
“Exactly,” says Elsie.
“So if we do this—if—” Bev says, “we could be looking for someone going through financial difficulty? Or facing something else challenging?”
“Bankruptcy, a struggling business, family drama…”
“How do we even go about looking for that?” Margot asks, dubious.
Before Elsie can answer, Beverley suddenly interjects, “You do know how it will look, though, right?”
They turn to her.
“Taking an interest in Cheryl’s case, in Emily’s, is one thing, but doing a whole investigation ourselves? You know how it looks that we aren’t locking ourselves in our houses all day?” Her voice is tight. “If we go nosing around at crime scenes, what will people think?”
“Who cares how it looks?” Elsie argues. “Don’t we owe the girls this? The girls our husbands took, other girls—don’t we owe it to them to try to protect future victims?”
“Anyway,” Margot butts in, placing her tumbler on the floor, “do I really have to say it again? God. I am not what my husband did. You are not what Henry did. Elsie is not what Albert did. People might want to see us as by-products of their actions, but I am not that. I refuse to be a footnote in his story for the rest of my life. I’m in. I say we do it.”
“You keep everything in that scrapbook, Bev,” Elsie encourages.
She knows they have to work together to do this.
“Don’t you have those letters? From all the women who wrote to you whose husbands did bad things.
Maybe the letters can tell us something about what kind of guy this killer could be—how they found out what their husbands were doing. ”
“We can build a picture of him.” Margot takes the baton.
“Try to track him down that way. Find out why he might be doing this, what motivates him.” She watches Bev, hopeful.
“We’ll tell the police if we find anything significant, if that makes you feel better.
Elsie, there must be more you can do with that logo, some digging you can do at the Signal? ”
She nods. She still needs to convince Hunter to run a story about the bracelet. If the public knows about it, they can keep an eye out for it. Finding that bracelet, wherever it might be, could give them a clue to the killer’s identity, his whereabouts.
“And can you look into this missing model?” she asks Margot in return. “Try to remember if there was anything else you heard—someone she was in touch with, a boyfriend, someone she was dating, anything.”
“And you?” Margot asks Beverley. “Are you in?”
Beverley is quiet for a while, then swallows thickly. “All right.” She nods eventually. “I’m in.”