Bury the Lead - By David Rosenfelt Page 0,85
on, Willie, it’s none of my business, but that locket alone is worth ten thousand. It didn’t fall off a truck, did it?”
His look is one of pure amazement. “Ten thousand? Are you kiddin’ me? For that thing around her neck?”
“What did you pay?”
“I didn’t. It was her friend’s . . . Rosalie. It was in her stuff. Sondra wears it all the time . . . it’s kind of a good-luck charm.”
“Let me get this straight,” I say. “Rosalie, the . . . girl that was working with Sondra, she had an alexandrite locket?”
Willie calls out to Sondra, sitting across the room, and asks her to come over, which she does. She’s wearing the locket, and Willie points to it. “That was Rosalie’s, right?”
Sondra reacts defensively, her hand covering the locket. “Yes . . . it was hers . . . I didn’t know anyone to give it to.” Some defiance creeps into her voice. “I think she would have wanted me to have it.”
“Can I see it?” I ask.
She takes it off and hands it to me. I’m not an expert, but I have no doubt that it’s real. “Rosalie had this in her apartment?” The apartment was ransacked after the murder; it would take a stupid criminal to leave this behind.
“No, we shared a safe-deposit box. All the girls had them. The guys that would come around . . . let’s just say we didn’t trust them that much.”
I nod, and hold up the locket. “Did she have anything else like this?” I ask.
“No, not really. Just some old clothes . . .” She points to the locket. “Is it worth anything?”
“Ten grand,” says Willie, and Sondra makes a sound somewhere between a gasp and a shriek.
“Oh, my God . . . ten thousand dollars,” she says, then points to the locket. “It opens. There’s a picture inside.”
She shows me how to open it, and there is in fact a picture of a quite attractive woman, maybe fifty years old. The woman is well dressed and seems to be wearing the same locket, or one just like it. In the background is a stately Victorian house; it does not take a genius to figure out that this is a wealthy woman. “Do you know who this is?” I ask.
Sondra shrugs. “She sort of looks like Rosalie, so I just figured it was her mother or grandmother.”
“Can I borrow this for a few days?” I ask.
“Sure. No problem.”
On the way home I relate the story to Laurie, who doesn’t see it as so remarkable. “Most of these kids don’t start out on the street, Andy. Some of them come from upscale families, and if they run away, they could take a piece of those families with them.”
“But Randy Clemens said it was all about ‘the rich one’ and that the others were ‘window dressing.’ We all just assumed it was Linda Padilla. What if it was Rosalie? What if she was the real target, and Linda Padilla and the others were killed to cover up that fact?”
“So we need to find out who Rosalie was,” she says. “Without prints, that’s going to be tough. Dental records don’t help unless you know who it might be, so you can get them and compare. They—”
I interrupt her, slapping the steering wheel in my excitement. “Maybe that’s why he cut off her hands! Laurie, this guy was out there committing these psycho murders, but he didn’t fit the profile of a psycho. There was no passion, no sexual molestation. He was cold and calculating, but cutting off the hands didn’t fit in with that. Now it does! Maybe he was cutting off the hands so we wouldn’t be able to identify Rosalie.”
Laurie asks me if I have any idea at all who Rosalie might be, and though I do, I’m still so unsure that I don’t want to voice it yet. Instead, I pick up the phone and call Kevin, Vince, and Sam Willis and give them each an assignment. I ask them to come to my house at four P.M. tomorrow with whatever they find out.
In the morning, I’m going to call Cindy Spodek and ask her a key question. Other than that, I’m going to just wait until four P.M. and try to relax. Because if I’m right, that’s when the shit is going to start hitting the fan.
• • • • •
I BELIEVE THAT ROSALIE was Eliot Kendall’s missing sister. Eliot had said his sister had never been