The Lesson of Her Death

wanted to call up the psychiatrist and tell her to get her fashion-plate ass over here this minute. In a tired voice: “You’re doing fine. A lot better than when we started tonight.”
    “No, I’m not!” she said. She stood up.
    “Sit down, young lady. You’ve done the word before. Try it again. ‘Mother.’”
    “M-O- …”
    Corde heard her hyperventilating and thought momentarily of Diane’s long labor when the girl was born.
Breathe, breathe, breathe
.…
    “It’s E-R. No, wait. M-O-T … I got lost. Wait, wait …”
    Corde set the piece of paper on the table with the other failed tests and picked up a blank sheet. He began to write, “M-O-T-H …”
    “No!” she screamed.
    Corde blinked at the volume of the wail and the terror it contained. “Sarah!”
    “I don’t know it! I don’t know it!” She was howling. Corde—standing up, sending a chair flying—believed she was having a seizure.
    “Sarah!” he shouted again. His neck bristled in panic.
    Corde took her by the shoulders. “Sarah, stop it!”
    She screamed again and tipped into hysteria.
    He shook her hard, her hair flying around her head like golden smoke. The glass tumbled over, a flood of brown soda poured onto the carpeting. She broke away from him and raced up the stairs to her room. Sheetrock throughout the house shook as her door slammed.
    Corde, hands shaking, was mopping up the spilled soda with wads of napkins when the doorbell rang.
    “Oh, Lord, now what?”
    Steve Ribbon leaned on the doorpost, looking out over the lawn. “Talk to you for a minute, Bill?”
    Corde looked toward Sarah’s bedroom then back to Ribbon. “Come on in.”
    Ribbon didn’t move. “Your family home?”
    “Just Sarah. Jamie and Diane are at a meet. Should be home anytime.”
    The sheriff didn’t speak for a minute. “Why don’t you step outside here?”
    Corde shook his head. “I don’t want to go too far.Sarah’s not feeling well.” He stepped onto the porch. Ribbon closed the door behind him. Corde flicked spilled soda off his fingers. The sheriff’s squad car was parked in the driveway. Jim Slocum was driving. In the back was a blond man, heavy, craggy-faced, eyes fixed on the headrest in front of him.
    Ribbon’s eyes scanned the moonlit ground, studying the perfectly trimmed grass. He said, “Bill, I’ve got to talk to you. They found Jennie’s roommate. Emily Rossiter.”
    Corde crossed his arms.
    They
found … Not
we
found. Corde understood the difference.
    It was his turn to stare at the neatly edged front lawn. From where he stood it was in some geometric shape whose name he couldn’t recall—a rectangle pushed to one side.
    “Somebody hit her over the head then threw her in Blackfoot Pond right by the dam. She drowned. And there’s some pretty unpleasant stuff he did to her.” Ribbon paused. “There’s a tentative match between shoeprints nearby her and those found by the dam the night Jennie Gebben was killed. I know your opinion, Bill, but it looks like there probably was a cult killer all along.”

PART TWO

Physical Evidence

T he medical examiner was in a prickly mood. For the second time in two weeks, he stood in mud, at night, beside this dark pond. His usual demeanor—that of a cheerful TV doctor—was absent.
    Streaks on her face, hair muddy and plastered around her head the way a bald man hides scalp, still-beautiful Emily Rossiter lay on a blanket, faceup. A black hideous wound marred her temple. A large fishhook was embedded deep in her groin in the center of a slick patch of dark pubic hair. The hook was attached to a long piece of twenty-pound test line, which had pulled her skirt up between her legs.
    A crowd of locals and reporters stood on the fringe of the crime scene—a sloping grassy backyard that bordered Blackfoot Pond.
    The ME, a thin man of fifty, said to T.T. Ebbans, “Blow to the right temple with a rough, irregular object. Death by drowning.”
    “Rape?”
    “Not this time.”
    “What about the hook?” Ebbans asked. “After she was dead?”
    “Dollars to doughnuts.”
    Jim Slocum said to Ebbans, “There, you’ve got your postmortem piercing. That’s common in sacrificial murders.”
    Ebbans pushed past the reporters, telling them that Sheriff Ribbon would be holding a press conference in ten minutes. He joined Bill Corde up by the road.
    “Detective Corde!” Addie Kraskow waved frantically, her laminated
Register
press pass bouncing on her chest. “You didn’t think a