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Again, it didn’t make sense.
As for Ned Zavala, the “Bayou Butcher,” he was more likely. Anyone who could cut people into pieces . . . and he was mean. Major chip on his shoulder. She didn’t buy his mother recanting her testimony and placing the blame on her recently deceased husband, no matter how unhinged and brutal Corrin Hebert had been. She picked up her notes on theBayou Butcherand found her notes that Zavala had indeed threatened not only her, but her father as well. “You’ll regret this,” he’d yelled to Bentz, and he’d been led in chains out of the courtroom once the verdict had come down. “I’ll see to it! You’ll regret the day you were born.”
And when Kristi’s book had come out, she’d received letters from him while he’d been incarcerated. All on lined paper, all in pencil. She found those letters in a file now and looked through them. Five in all, the first being furious and threatening and then less so. She’d received the last one two years before he’d been released and nothing since. And his letters had been written in a stiff printing. As if he were still in grade school. There were some references to God and Jesus, but no specific Bible verses were included.
If Zavala were the killer, again the question was, what would have set him off? Why would he sneak around in the pouring rain to attack her and murder Jay? Again she thought of the prerelease of the TV movie. Was that enough to ignite him? She leaned back in her desk chair.
Did it make sense?
Did anything?
Her head was beginning to pound with the thoughts swirling through it. She felt like she was treading water, moving ever faster and getting nowhere. She scraped her hair away from her face and searched in a drawer until she found a rubber band. As she formed a loose bun with her fingers and snapped the band into place, she saw a copy ofThe God Complex and Murderlying under an open spiral notebook.
“Hamilton Cooke,” she said aloud, and picked up the book. He was a cold one. She remembered meeting his eyes this morning when he’d walked into the green room at the station.
If looks could kill . . .
Yeah, she’d be dead already.
He hated her, and Reggie, she, too, despised Kristi and let her know it, but would either of them put everything they had at risk out of what—vengeance? Some kind of warped view of the world? Hamilton was a killer, Kristi felt it in her bones every time she saw him, but Reggie?
It took a deep, simmering rage to wait in a downpour and attack a target, then turn the attack on a second person—but that might have been just self-preservation. She stretched her arms over her head. The notes to her—meant to terrorize.
Not really Reggie’s style.
But Hamilton Cooke? What about him?
Something bothered her when she thought about him. What was it she was missing? She went through her notes again, searching for . . . what? She wasn’t sure.
Was it something to do with his wife? His first wife? The one who he swore had injured herself in the shower, hitting her head and bleeding out? The autopsy showed that she’d had a blood thinner in her system, but she’d been prescribed it by her doctor who was not her husband. Kristi had always wondered if he’d given her extra medication, then wounded her, made it look like an accident and then watch her bleed out, only to go back to his “yard work” when he knew his daughter was going to find her mother.
What kind of cold bastard did that?
Would he come after Kristi now, years later? Risk his new life with his new wife? Could his rage have smoldered so long or was it Reggie, her white-hot temper, finally exploding? But why? And why now?
Was it because Hamilton Cooke wanted his medical license back and he believed that her book had thwarted him? Had his seething, simmering rage with her finally caught fire? Had he snapped?
She picked up the book, studied the cover where Hamilton Cooke’s visage in cruel black and white seemed to stare back at her.
What about the religious overtones of the messages she’d received? She knew that the whole family attended church and gave time and money to St. Ada’s, but so what? But wasn’t there something in Hamilton’s background? She thumbed through the pages to the section on his childhood.
On the surface he’d had it all: good looks, brains, and an athletic body. He’d been a star basketball guard, gotten a scholarship to a private Catholic college, gone on to medical school after a fleeting thought of going to the seminary.
“How about that,” she said, biting her lip and thinking hard, trying to imagine Hamilton Cooke as a priest. “Dear God,” she whispered. It had been there, at the college, where he’d first met Aldo Lucerno, whose family donated heavily to the college.
Old rivals?
Who ended up marrying the same woman?
Dave padded up the stairs and stared at her.
She patted his head.
He whined and made a move toward the door.
She checked her watch. “I did promise we’d go for a walk, right?” At that the dog did a couple of quick twirls, then shot down the stairs, and ten minutes later Kristi was outside, jogging with the dog at her side, breathing in the cool evening air and feeling her head clear. She had her flashlight with its jagged rim in one pocket, a small aerosol can of mace in the other.
Just in case.
