KillerHair
Chapter 19
Lacey peered out her hotel window Wednesday morning. As Marie had predicted, it appeared to be raining Katzenjammers. A sodden sky hung like misery over the beach town, a wet gray cloak Lacey couldn’t shrug off. She had agreed to meet Vic at eight, check out of the hotel, then grab breakfast somewhere. After that, they would meet with the cop in charge of the Tammi White investigation. Donovan had promised, and Lacey wasn’t about to let him off the hook.
She finished packing, dressed warmly, and headed for a soggy morning walk on the beach. At seven o’clock the beachfront along the hotels was deserted except for a few hardy joggers.
Lacey was grateful now for Marie’s call. Nothing like a little psychic fashion advice. The turtleneck sweater and hooded jacket felt good. Lacey often took long walks when she didn’t know what else to do. Here she took off north, up the boardwalk toward the fishing pier, which would be closed for a few more weeks. The beach looked like every other beach Lacey had seen on the East Coast. Endless boardwalks, endless sun-glass vendors. Tall cement and stucco hotels with endless balconies like human ant farms. Swinging past the salon told her nothing. She looked for the infamous Virginia Beach video surveillance cameras, the city’s attempt to stop crime on the boardwalk. She wondered if they had one pointed at Stylettos. She didn’t see any cameras. Radford’s sign was still in the window and the empty shop was dark, waiting for a cleaning crew to strip away the death of Tammi White.
Lacey was drenched to the bone by the time she returned to the hotel, but her head finally felt clear. Vic was waiting at the front desk.
“You look like a drowned rat,” he said.
“Love those compliments, Donovan. Keep ’em coming.” She turned and walked toward the elevators. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She toweled off in the room and applied a bit of makeup. Her hair went up in a French knot with three pins. The marine blue of the dry sweater was perfect with her eyes. Forget you, Vic Donovan. I’d be wasted on you.
At the diner off Pacific Avenue, she ordered a breakfast fit for a warrioress.
“You know what I think?” Vic asked out of the blue.
“What now?”
“You could have low blood sugar.”
She raised an eyebrow, but he ignored it. She popped a bit of muffin into her mouth and chewed it like red meat.
“You’re always cranky before you eat,” he said. She lobbed part of her muffin at him. “See. You haven’t eaten enough yet. Have some bacon.”
“You’re impossible, Vic. Just why on earth did you want to be here with me if all I do is irritate you? It’s been one lousy trip all the way around, and I’d rather not be insulted on a regular basis, okay? I am a reporter, after all. I’m reviled all the time. I swallow more than my share of it. Every once in a while, I deserve a break.”
He smiled at her. “Just trying to be helpful. Have some grapefruit.”
Detective Jason Harding had bags under his eyes that you could pack, Lacey thought. A hound dog who looked tired of the hunt. Harding’s pale blue eyes were bloodshot and his jowls sagged, but he looked friendly. All in all, he seemed as approachable as an old beagle.
Harding had agreed to meet with them as a favor to a friend of a friend of Vic’s. They huddled over coffee in a nearly empty java shop, steam rising from chocolate brown cups. Harding listened politely as Lacey explained about the phone call from Tammi and the strange man named George Something, who wanted to buy hair after a dramatic cut.
“You say he wanted the hair?”
“And a videotape, and he was willing to pay five hundred dollars for everything. Tammi said that never happens. I planned to meet him with her, but I was too late. The other stylists said they’d never heard anything about him.”
Vic looked at her questioningly. It was the first he had heard of George Something.
“You didn’t want to discuss it, remember?” she said.
Harding coughed and brought her back to the subject. Lacey drew parallels to Angela Woods’ death in D.C. The peculiar alleged suicide notes written in blood on the mirrors, the bad haircuts, the straight razors. She asked Harding if Tammi White’s hair was found in the salon, but he wouldn’t divulge the answer. He barely confirmed that the hair had been cut off. She asked if Tammi had been sexually assaulted. He told her there was no sign of that. To his credit, he actually jotted down some notes on a small pad. She asked if the razor they recovered was a Colonel Conk. He wouldn’t say. She asked whether the surveillance cameras had revealed anything and whether he would investigate the salon’s phone records to trace calls from the mysterious George. He was noncommittal.
“Does my being a reporter have anything to do with your reticence?” she asked.
It was the first time Harding the Hound Dog smiled. “Yes, ma’am. But I do appreciate your coming to me with this information. Truly.” He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. And he had bad news for her. Stylettos was one block out of camera range of the notorious beachfront cameras. And Tammi White apparently had a history of suicide attempts.
“I don’t know what happened up in D.C., but there are copycat murders and copycat suicides. Young women are particularly susceptible to it. You may have to accept the idea that she wanted to go out with the same kind of attention that your beautician up in Washington got.”
Before Harding finished his coffee and shambled off, Lacey mentioned her little visit from the FBI. And the fact that the agents seemed very interested in the Marcia Robinson angle.
Harding’s big hound-dog eyes looked up at her. She could feel Vic’s hand squeeze her arm meaningfully. Another little detail she hadn’t mentioned to him.
“Criminy, Ms. Smithsonian.” Harding moaned. “Does this mean I am to expect a visit from the FBI? Lord Almighty.”
She shrugged. “I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Got to admit, interest from the FBI makes it sound more suspicious.” Harding closed his eyes. “Anything else?”
“The agent’s name is Thorn.”
“In the side, no doubt.” Harding said he would withhold judgment until the medical report was in. That was his only concession to Lacey’s linked homicide theory.
Talked out, worn out, and irritable, they didn’t attempt a conversation on the drive back to Alexandria, just a random statement from time to time. The storm refused to abate and the landscape rolled by like an Impressionist painting as the Jeep slogged back up I-95. Vic finally cut off to Route 1 when the traffic became too snarled, near Fredericksburg.
“She didn’t kill herself, Vic,” Lacey said. He grunted. “Tammi’s hair, the hair she supposedly cut off, was missing, no matter what Harding confirms or denies.”
“You could have mentioned this George character or the FBI to me. I thought we were friends.”
“You make like the Sphinx and I’m supposed to spill my guts? You gotta play fair, Vic. Tell me something I don’t know. What’s your take on Radford?”
“Do I think he’s a killer? Who knows? He’s very freaked out about the deaths. Wants a total information blackout.”
“So maybe he did it, or knows who did,” Lacey suggested. Vic frowned at her. “What do you think of Beauregard Radford?”
“Mama’s boy. Josephine’s still combing his hair for him.”
“And Josephine?”
His expression softened at her name. “She’s a formidable woman. Very formidable.”
His answer made her heart sink. Vic was attracted to Josephine and Lacey didn’t care to explore that connection.
But a plan of action was forming in the back of Lacey’s head. She shut her eyes and leaned back. It might not be the brightest thought in a dark day, but it was a plan and it grew more compelling with each swipe of the windshield wipers.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this.” Vic sounded surly, but he had yet to sprout horns and breathe flames, so how mad could he be? Lacey figured. It was hard to tell in the dark.
“Must be my powers of persuasion,” she said. They had spent many hours together; none that Lacey could say were romantic, but neither had they gone for the jugular. And she had worked on him relentlessly for the rest of the drive.
“Nah. I’ve probably just lost my mind,” he said.
It was nearly midnight on Wednesday night and the moon was hiding behind a cloud-locked sky. “If Radford finds out that I let you in the warehouse after all, he’ll split a gasket.”
“Yeah, but what if he turns out to be a killer, Vic?”
“Then he’ll split our gaskets.”
She shouldered her Nikon and tripod. They would have less than a minute to get any photos once the luminol raised the bloodstains. If there were bloodstains.
Lacey had badgered him for the remainder of the day, until he gave in to her plan to view the crime scene—or what was left of it—that night, and spray it with luminol. His first reaction was that she read too many mysteries. Vic thought she was nuts, but crazy or not, the idea began to attain a certain logic. He did have access to luminol, after all. And to the warehouse.
By the time Vic picked her up again at eleven-thirty that night, she had dispatched the dead Z back to Asian Engines, checked out her camera equipment, and pulled together what she thought was a passable burglar outfit. Basic black on black, accessorized in black. She had even mobilized a secret weapon. “I love it when a plan comes together,” she mocked herself.
She was almost out the door when the phone rang. It was Stella. “Lacey, I was crazy with worry. I called and called to see how it went in Virginia Beach and there was no answer. I finally got ahold of Heidi and she told me what happened to Tammi. You gotta be careful. Oh my God. He’s after stylists with long hair!”
“Calm down, Stella. I gotta go.”
“Are you okay? Maybe you should ease off for a little while.”
“I’m fine. I’ll call you.”
“Maybe I can give you a short haircut for a little extra protection.”
“I’m not cutting my hair, Stella!”
Vic was waiting when she got downstairs, and they took off without a word for the Stylettos warehouse on Four Mile Run Drive in Arlington. It sat between a used-tire outlet and a tuxedo-rental shop. The squat brick building and small paved parking lot were surrounded by a chain-link fence that had little effect on salon products waltzing out. Vic opened the door and disabled the alarm system so they could enter. She gazed at the muscles in his forearms as he worked the heavy door. She wondered what the rest of his muscles looked like and hated herself for it.
Vic’s new, improved video surveillance system was not installed yet, so there would be no visual record of their visit. Vic relieved the guard until the next one came on duty at two. Heading up corporate security had its advantages. No one would question why he was visiting the warehouse in the middle of the night: a security check. Since he had redesigned salon security, theft was way down and Radford was pleased, according to Stella. But there still were holes at the warehouse. Vic wouldn’t discuss it.
Vic turned at the sound of footsteps. Lacey followed his gaze to the bustling earth mother figure advancing on them.
“And why on earth are we bringing her?” he asked. Marie Largesse had taken a few minutes to meditate in the passenger seat of her small midnight-blue Toyota, but now she joined the team. Lacey was asking herself the same question. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—a crime scene, a psychic. Just like on TV.
“She’s my secret weapon. Don’t laugh. Her shoulders twitch when she gets these psychic vibrations,” Lacey said. Vic rolled his eyes at her. “At least that’s what she tells me.”
“If anyone finds out about this—”
“Who’s going to tell?”
“I’m talking to a reporter,” Vic pointed out. “Remind me to recharge the cells in my brain case, okay Lacey?”
It was partly the reporter factor, she knew, that pushed him away from her. But Lacey resented knowing that Vic would be more willing to share his thoughts with Radio Free Stella, the voice of Dupont Circle, who would tell the whole world, than with her.
Marie bustled up to the door in layers of black and royal purple, like a voluptuous queen of the night. She was wearing gauzy skirts, a flamboyant cape, and a multicolored scarf wound through her curls. And she’d gone very heavy on the eyeliner.
“That’s better, darlin’. I’m centered now,” she said. “I have to tune my harmonic frequency before I can receive vibrations from the astral plane.”
Vic turned quickly so Marie couldn’t see his lips quivering in repressed laughter.
Marie’s task was receiving vibrations. She told Lacey that her specialty was sensing auras and spiritual vibes. Marie’s predictions about the trip to Virginia Beach had been dead-on, so to speak. But weather was one thing, and murder was another. Lacey did not necessarily believe that Marie could finger the killer. She hoped that Marie could intuit a clue or two. Vic had told her solving Angie’s death was impossible, Lacey thought. So why not try the impossible?
The motley trio entered quietly. The warehouse was dimly lit with skylights and orange Exit signs. Vic was reluctant to light the place up. They passed the empty security booth and headed toward the back, flashlights stabbing the gloom. Lacey bumped into “Medusa,” the ancient permanent-wave machine, its shadow looming huge against the wall, its rods dangling menacingly, grabbing at her. She swallowed a yelp.
Angie’s modular station, of chrome and mirrors with lacquered shelves and drawers, was stored in a back corner with a jumble of grungy Stylettos artifacts, including furniture remnants from the Red Poppy Period, the Turquoise Period, and worst of all, the Dye-Stained Beige Period. But Angie’s last stand sparkled in the flashlight beams, its chrome gleaming. So Long was long gone from the mirror. It looked spotless, courtesy of Miss Ruby and Not-a-Trace Cleaners, revealing no remnant of the bloody scene of Angie’s death.
But traces of that night might still be there, and if the luminol did its job, they would rise again, like bloodstains in stories told around campfires.
She whispered to Marie as if in fear of waking the dead. “You don’t have to touch anything, do you?”
Marie said she did not. She looked at the station and closed her eyes for a moment while a scowling Vic crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. Marie opened her eyes wide and looked at Lacey, who was expecting startling revelations. “Yes, Marie?” she asked.
“I see—I feel—Oh my God,” was all the psychic said before crumpling in a queen-sized swoon.
It took a few moments for Lacey and Vic to react to the large woman at their feet. “Is she okay?” Lacey asked as Vic felt for a pulse. Her pulse was strong; she had only fainted. He balked at trying to move her, however. Lacey rolled up Marie’s cape and tucked it under her head. They continued their quest.
Wearing latex gloves, they opened the cabinet drawers and found three pairs of styling scissors, cotton balls, hair sprays, and a curling iron. A few silky strands of hair were woven through a brush, but there were no long hanks of hair. “There’s nothing, Vic,” she said. He nodded.
Once again, she knew she could be destroying evidence, but she had no choice. She also knew that bleach could affect the results and salons were full of bleach. They worked quickly. Lacey set up the camera and tripod. Vic sprayed the whole station lightly with luminol. It struck her as a bizarre party trick, a scientific sleight of hand. They cut the flashlights, and in the dark, the chemical raised the dead. Lacey heard her own sharp intake of breath and Vic’s as the blue light glowed from the bloodstains as if they’d been hit by live electricity. She let her breath out slowly. Blood had been spattered and smeared everywhere. With fast low-light film, she took as many photos as possible from every angle while the stains were illuminated. They began to fade almost immediately.
But what did that prove? With a sudden insight, Lacey lay on the floor and sprayed the luminol underneath the counter. On the underside, more dramatic stains told the rest of the story. In her mind, Lacey could see the scene: Angela gripping the counter as blood gushed from her wrists. A small handprint held on to the edge underneath the counter. But there was a larger bloody handprint under there as well, on the left side, gripping the counter with longer, thicker fingers—proof that Angela Woods was not alone as she bled to death. Ruby and her crew had smeared them, but not erased them. Lacey didn’t need a psychic to feel the sick vibrations. She shot the rest of the film.
Vic efficiently accounted for their gloves and all traces of their visit. He demanded the film from the camera. She balked. It was their deal, in exchange for letting her into the warehouse, but she dug in her heels.
“Chain of evidence, Smithsonian,” he said.
“No. My film, my camera, my property,” she said.
“You’re on private property. Courtesy of me.”
“Are we really going to fight about this, Vic?”
He paused and rubbed his eyes. “We’ve been through this. We use a photo lab that deals with this kind of thing and I can secure chain of custody.”
She sighed. “I’m trusting you on this, Vic.”
“And I know a blood-spatter expert. I don’t want anyone else to die, Lacey.”
“I want to see the photos as soon as they’re ready, I want the negatives, and I want to talk to your expert. Okay?” She handed him the roll and folded her tripod.
He pocketed the film and helped her walk a sluggish but conscious Marie out to her car. Marie had come to as Vic and Lacey finished their task—blank as a new videotape. How convenient, Lacey thought.
“Be careful, scoop. I like your hair the way it is,” Vic said. He ruffled her hair and gave a tug on a lock. Just like a big brother would.
Marie took the passenger seat and Lacey took the wheel. Marie was in no shape to drive yet. But she did seem to be in shape to eat. Lacey agreed; Marie would drop her at home later. Vic would wait at the warehouse for the next security shift.
Lacey found herself at almost two a.m. ordering an early breakfast at Bob & Edith’s diner on Columbia Pike, on a school night with a so-called paranormal seer who was drawing a complete blank. Marie sat alertly at a blue Formica-topped table and appeared much refreshed by her impromptu nap.
“My psychic senses just plain overloaded. It was too intense,” she said. “I don’t do trauma very well.”
“Now you tell me. Do you remember anything?”
Marie said she was sorry and dug into a hot breakfast that smelled delicious. “I probably have it all recorded somewhere inside. I’m like a VCR. We could always try hypnotic regression.”
Lacey let go of her last hope of a psychic breakthrough. I am an idiot. “Let’s sleep on it.”
It was after three in the morning when she got home. Before tumbling into bed, Lacey left a message on Mac’s voice mail that she wasn’t feeling well and she’d be in late. Very late.
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