“What happened to him?” I asked. Grimaldi probably had this information already—Laura Lee’s husband would have been a viable suspect, I assumed, before the authorities realized she’d been the victim of a serial killer—but if she knew, Grimaldi hadn’t mentioned it.
“After Laura Lee died, you mean?” Millie Ruth turned to me. “The kids moved in with her mama. When Frankie got out of prison, he came back into the house for a bit, but it didn’t stick, and within a year, he was back in trouble.”
“Would you happen to know where I could find him now?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Millie Ruth told her. “He sold the house eventually, took the money and left. Her folks live over in Sunnyside, if that helps.”
Grimaldi allowed as to how that helped a lot, and took down the names of Laura Lee’s parents. “Savannah tells me you were a teacher at Columbia High.”
“I told you that,” Millie Ruth said tartly. “Almost forty years I taught. I retired the year before she started.” She glanced at me. “Had her sister and brother and her husband in class, though.”
“I don’t suppose you taught Latin?”
“You suppose right,” Millie Ruth said.
“Who did?”
Millie Ruth thought back. “When I first started, Mr. Wilkins was the Latin teacher. Older than God, he retired five or six years after I came on. Dead now, rest his soul.” She thought for a moment. “Then we got Mr. Hanson, or maybe Mr. Olson, for a year. But something happened there, something to do with a student, as I recall, and he left under something of a cloud. And now there’s Miss Stevens.”
“I remember Miss Stevens,” I said. “She was there when I attended Columbia High.” Not that I’d studied Latin. But I’d known who the Latin teacher was. “Did Laura Lee take Latin? Or Frankie?”
Millie Ruth giggled. “I doubt that very much. Not really scholars, the two of them.”
I had assumed as much. Scholars, from what I know about them, don’t usually end up in prison or working at truck stops.
We bid Millie Ruth a polite goodbye, and went back to the SUV.
“About Frankie’s prison record…” I said, when the car was rolling down the street.
Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll pull the records. But I know for a fact that he was locked up when his wife was killed. He was cleared as a suspect because of it.”
“He might have killed the others, though. You said the origin kill may have tipped the serial killer over the edge, right? Maybe the murder of his wife, by someone else, tipped Frankie over the edge. He wasn’t there to protect her, and she got murdered. That would be enough to tip anyone over the edge.”
Not into serial murder, of course, but into depression and self-flagellation and guilt.
“Possible,” Grimaldi admitted. “If he’s been in and out of prison for the past sixteen years, there might have been enough time between sentences to commit the murders.”
Her eyes were distant, looking beyond the road and into her own head. Behind us, Damascus faded into the background. Grimaldi added, “It would explain the long cooling-off period between murders. There are usually only two things that’ll keep a serial killer from killing, and those are…”
“Death and incarceration,” I said, since I’ve watched my share of Dateline and 48 Hours.
Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll get the records, and we’ll see whether there’s any overlap between Frankie’s periods of freedom and the murders. That would make it simple.”
It would. “Are you certain the Roman numeral I on Laura Lee’s arm was actually a Roman numeral I and not just a scratch? Because if it is Frankie, and he thought it was a numeral I, he could have started marking his own victims from that.”
“If he didn’t study Latin,” Grimaldi said, “he’d be more likely to go with the usual tally method, most likely. They’re not Serif letters. They’re Sans Serif.”
I blinked at her, and she added, “The I doesn’t have the little line at the top and the bottom. It’s just a single stroke with the knife. Like a tally.”
“Oh.” It had been a while since I’d worked on my magnum opus, Bedded by the Bedouin, but I knew what she was talking about. “Arial instead of Times New Roman.”
“Yes,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll check the crime scene photos from back then, and see if the line on Laura Lee’s arm looked like it might have been an accidental slash. Maybe he uses a knife to threaten them. Maybe she resisted and it’s