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Ali spends three days messaging me almost nonstop. She’s out of town and I figure what’s the harm in a little harmless conversation? After all, she’s hundreds of miles away.
Ali had previously told me she was headed to Boston for work. I relayed the info to Nadia who reached out to a friend that lives near Cambridge. She asked her to follow Ali from the airport.
One morning Nadia comes in late, holding two cups of coffee set in a takeout tray in one hand and a large envelope in the other. “Sorry, I’m late,” she says. “I had to stop by the print shop.”
She slams the envelope down on my desk and then takes her coffee from the tray and places mine on my desk. I reach in and pull out several photographs. “You’re never gonna believe it.”
I lay the photos out on my desk, arranging them like puzzle pieces. I lean forward to study them closely. My stomach tightens and my mouth goes dry as I go through them one by one. The sight of Ali makes me slightly dizzy.
There’s a shot of her entering Mass General Hospital in Boston. There are shots of her standing outside the hospital near the emergency entrance presumably getting air and messaging me. There are pictures of her staring at her phone, photos of her sitting in a car in the parking garage. I think of her there messaging me, writing amusing texts, flirty texts, dirty texts.
In another photo, she wheels a man from the hospital entrance and helps transfer him from a wheelchair to an SUV that’s waiting at the curb.
In the next set of photos, the SUV has pulled up in front of a high-rise building. Then Nadia pulls up a video on her phone and plays it for me. I watch as Ali unloads the chair from the back of the SUV and readies it for its occupant. She’s pushing it to the passenger side door, and she’s helping him into it. She works the chair like a pro, setting it up just right, applying the brake, holding it so it doesn’t move, loading several bags of belongings on the man’s lap, flinging an overnight bag over her shoulder. I can tell this isn’t her first rodeo.
The last set of photos shows Ali greeting the doorman with a tight smile, chatting with him. The final photo shows her disappearing into the building, wheeling the man through the doors.
According to the timestamps, she was messaging me about having full days, working with clients. In the past twenty-four hours, she’s only written sporadically, rarely initiating conversation, but she always replies.
“Is it family?” I ask Nadia, lifting my coffee from the Styrofoam tray. “It has to be family.” I point to the photograph of her positioning the wheelchair at the passenger side of the SUV. “Becausethatdoes not look like a cold-blooded killer.”
“Have you ever heard of Ted Bundy? Or Perry Smith?”
“Sure.”
“How about Colonel Russell Williams?”
“Let me guess, also fond of murder?”
“Yeah,andhe was a pilot. Supposedly, he flew the British royal family around the world. I read he had a penchant for dressing up in women’s lingerie. Talk about a double life.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about serial killers.”
Nadia smiles. “It’s a fetish.”
“I don’t want to know.”
She grins from ear to ear. She stabs her pointy finger at one photograph, pinning it to the desk. “That guy there is her husband.”
I’m not shocked. At least I don’t mean to be. For as long as I’ve been in this line of work, I’ve seen a lot. I don’t know how I could have missed this. Except that I never checked. “Did you find out anything about her parents? Mother? Father?”
“This isn’t enough?”
“I don’t think she’s our killer.”
“Why? Because she helped a dude into a wheelchair? A man that she happens to bemarriedto.”
“No, because I haven’t found a motive.”
“What motive did Gacy or Williams or Bundy have other than they were fucking crazy?”
Nadia has a point.
“She screws anything with legs. What else do you need, boss?”
“That’s not funny.”
“You said you weren’t going to see her anymore.”
