Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories Read online

  The opening he had made was just large enough to slide her body through and then crawl in after her. In his basement he picked her up again and carried her to the secret place. She was still knocked out, so there was no resistance as he attached the restraints to her wrists and ankles, and, as a precaution, tied the scarf loosely around her mouth. He could tell from her breathing that she had a cold. He certainly didn’t want her to suffocate.

  For a moment he reveled in the sight of her, limp and lovely, her hair tumbling onto the mattress, her body relaxed and peaceful. He straightened her terry-cloth robe and tucked it around her.

  Now that she was here, he felt so strong, so calm. He had been shocked to find her in the kitchen so early in the morning. Now he had to move quickly: to get her clothes and her purse, to wipe up that spilled coffee. It had to look as if she disappeared after she left the house.

  • • •

  He looked at the answering machine in her kitchen, the blinking light indicating there had been seven calls. That was odd, he thought. He knew she hadn’t gone out at all yesterday. Was it possible she didn’t bother to answer the phone all day?

  He played the messages back. All calls from friends. “How are you?” “Let’s get together.” “Good luck in court.” “Hope you make that contractor pay.” The last message was from the same person as the first: “Guess you’re still out. I’ll try you tomorrow.”

  Mensch took a moment to sit down at the breakfast bar. It was very important that he think all this through. Matthews had not gone out at all yesterday. It seemed as though she also hadn’t answered her phone all day. Suppose instead of just taking her clothes to make it look as though she’d left for work, I tidied up the house so that people would think she hadn’t reached home at all Saturday night. After all, he had seen her come up the block alone at around eleven, the newspaper under her arm. Who was there to say she had arrived safely?

  Mensch got up. He already had his latex gloves on. He started looking about. The garbage container under the kitchen sink was empty. He took a fresh disposable bag from the drawer and put in it the squeezed grapefruit, coffee grinds, and pieces of the cup Bree had dropped.

  Working methodically, he cleaned the kitchen, even taking time to scour the pot she had left on the stove. How careless of her to let it get burned, he thought.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, he made the bed and picked up the Sunday edition of the Washington Post that was on the floor next to it. He put the paper in the garbage bag. She had left a suit on the bed. He hung it up in the closet where she kept that kind of clothing.

  Next he cleaned the bathroom. Her washer and dryer were in the bathroom, concealed by louvered doors. On top of the washer he found the jeans and sweater he had seen her wearing on Saturday. It hadn’t started raining at the time, but she had also had on her yellow raincoat. He collected the sweater and jeans and her undergarments and sneakers and socks. Then from her dresser he selected more undergarments. From her closets he took a few pairs of slacks and sweaters. They were basically nondescript, and he knew they would never be missed.

  He found her raincoat and shoulder bag in the foyer by the front door. Mensch looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty, time to go. He had to replace and re-mortar the cinder blocks. He looked around to be sure he had missed nothing. His eye fell on the lopsided venetian blind in the front window. A knife-like pain went through his skull; his gorge rose. He felt almost physically ill. He couldn’t stand to look at it.

  Mensch put the clothing and purse and garbage bag on the floor. In quick, determined steps he reached the window and put his gloved hand on the blind.

  The cord was broken, but there was enough slack to tie it and still level the blind. He breathed a long sigh of relief when he finished the task. It now stopped at exactly the same level as the other two and as his, just grazing the sill.

  He felt much better now. With neat, compact movements he gathered up Bree’s coat, shoulder bag, clothing, and the garbage bag.

  Two minutes later he was in his own basement, replacing the cinder blocks.

  • • •

  At first Bree thought she was having a nightmare—a Disney World nightmare. When she woke up she opened her eyes to see cinder-block walls painted with evenly spaced brown slats. The space was small, not much more than six by nine feet, and she was lying on a bright yellow plastic mattress of some sort. It was soft, as though it had quilts inside it. About three feet from the ceiling a band of yellow paint connected the slats at the top to resemble a railing. Above the band, decals lined the walls: Mickey Mouse. Cinderella. Kermit the Frog. Miss Piggy. Sleeping Beauty. Pocahontas.

  She suddenly realized that there was a gag over her face, and she tried to push it away, but could only move her arm a few inches. Her arms and legs were held in some kind of restraints.

  The grogginess was lifting now. Where was she? What had happened? Panic overwhelmed her as she remembered turning to see Mensch, her neighbor, standing over her in the kitchen. Where had he taken her? Where was he now?

  She looked around slowly, then her eyes widened. This room, wherever it was, resembled an oversized playpen. Stacked nearby were a series of children’s books, all with thin spines except for the thick volume at the bottom. She could read the lettering: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  How had she gotten here? She remembered she had been about to get dressed to go to court. She had tossed the suit she had planned to wear across the bed. It was new. She wanted to look good, and in truth, more for Kevin than for the judge. Now she admitted that much to herself.

  Kevin. Of course he would come looking for her when she didn’t show up in court. He’d know something had happened to her.

  Ica, her housekeeper, would look for her too. She came in on Mondays. She’d know something was wrong. Bree remembered dropping the coffee cup she was holding. It shattered on the kitchen floor as Mensch grabbed her and stuck the needle in her arm. Ica would know that she wouldn’t leave spilled coffee and a broken cup for her to clean up.

  As her head cleared, Bree remembered that just before she had turned and seen Mensch, she had heard a footstep on the basement stairs. Her mouth went dry at the thought that somehow he had come in through the basement. But how? Her basement door was bolted and armed, the window barred.

  Then sheer panic swept through her. Clearly this hadn’t just “happened”; this had been carefully planned. She tried to scream, but could only make a muffled gasping cry. She tried to pray, a single sentence that in her soul she repeated over and over: “Please, God, let Kevin find me.”

  • • •

  Late Tuesday afternoon Kevin received a worried phone call from the agency where Bree worked. Had he heard from her? She never showed up for work on Monday, and she hadn’t phoned. They thought she might have been stuck in court all day yesterday, but now they were concerned.

  Fifteen minutes later, August Mensch watched through a slit in his front window drapery as Kevin Carter held his finger on the doorbell to Bree Matthews’s town house.

  He watched as Carter stood on the front lawn and looked in the living room window. He half expected that Carter would ring his doorbell, but that didn’t happen. Instead he stood for a few minutes looking irresolute, then looked in the window of the garage. Mensch knew her car was there. In a way he wished he could have gotten rid of it, but that had been impossible.

  He watched until Carter, his shoulders slumped, walked slowly back to his car and drove away. With a satisfied smile, Mensch walked down the foyer to the basement steps. Savoring the sight that would greet him, he descended slowly, then walked across the basement, as always admiring his tools and paints and polishes, all placed in perfect order on shelves, or hanging in precise rows from neatly squared pegboard.

  Snow shovels hung over the cinder blocks that he had removed to gain entry into Matthews’s basement. Beneath them the mortar had dried, and he had carefully smeared it with the dry flakes he had kept when he separated the blocks. Now nothing showed
, either here or on Bridget Matthews’s side. He was sure of that.

  Then he crossed through the boiler room, and beyond it, to the secret place.

  Matthews was lying on the mat, the restraints still on her arms and legs. She looked up at him and he could see that underneath the anger, fear was beginning to take hold. That was smart of her.

  She was wearing a sweater and slacks, things he had taken from her closet.

  He knelt before her and removed the gag from her mouth. It was a silk scarf, tied so that it was neither too tight nor caused a mark. “Your boyfriend was just looking for you,” he told her. “He’s gone now.”

  He loosened the restraints on her left arm and leg. “What book would you like to read to me today, Mommy?” he asked, his voice suddenly childlike and begging.

  • • •

  On Thursday morning Kevin sat in the office of FBI agent Lou Ferroni. The nation’s capital was awash with cherry blossoms, but as he stared out the window he was unaware of them. Everything seemed a blur, especially the last two days: his frantic call to the police, the questions, the calls to Bree’s family, the calls to friends, the sudden involvement of the FBI. What was Ferroni saying? Kevin forced himself to listen.

  “She’s been gone long enough for us to consider her a missing person,” the agent said. Fifty-three years old and nearing retirement, Ferroni realized that he’d seen the look on Carter’s face far too often in the past twenty-eight years, always on the faces of those left behind. Shock. Fear. Heartsick that the person they love may not be alive.

  Carter was the boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend. He’d freely admitted that he and Matthews had quarreled. Ferroni wasn’t eliminating him as a suspect, but he seemed unlikely and his alibi checked out. Bridget, or Bree, as her friends had called her, had been in her house on Saturday, that much they knew. They had not been able to locate anyone who saw or spoke to her on Sunday, though, and she hadn’t shown up for her court appointment on Monday.

  “Let’s go over it again,” Ferroni suggested. “You say that Miss Matthews’s housekeeper was surprised to find the bed made and dishes done when she came in Monday morning?” He had already spoken with the housekeeper, but wanted to see if there were any discrepancies in Carter’s story.

  Kevin nodded. “I called Ica as soon as I realized Bree was missing. She has a key to Bree’s place. I picked her up and she let me in. Of course Bree wasn’t there. Ica told me that when she went in on Monday morning she couldn’t understand why the bed was made and the dishes run through the dishwasher. It just wasn’t normal. Bree never made the bed on Monday because that’s when Ica changed it. So that meant the bed had not been slept in Sunday night, and that Bree could have vanished any time between Saturday and Sunday night.”

  Ferroni’s gut instinct told him that the misery he was seeing in Kevin Carter’s face was genuine. So if he didn’t do it, who did that leave? Richie Ombert, the contractor Matthews was suing, had had several complaints filed against him for using abusive language and threatening gestures toward disgruntled customers.

  Certainly the renovation business caused tempers to flare. Ferroni knew that firsthand. His wife had been ready to practically murder the guy who built the addition on their house. Ombert, though, seemed worse than most. He had a nasty edge, and for the moment he was a prime suspect in Bridget Matthews’s disappearance.

  There was one aspect of this case Ferroni was not prepared to share with Carter. The computer of VICAP, the FBI’s violent criminal apprehension program, had been tracking a particular pattern of disappearing young women. The trail started some ten years ago in California, when a young art student disappeared. Her body showed up three weeks later; she had been strangled. The weird part was that when she was found she was dressed in the same clothes as when she had disappeared, and they were freshly washed and pressed. There was no sign of molestation, no hint of violence beyond the obvious cause of death. But where had she been those three weeks?

  Shortly afterward the VICAP computer spat out a case in Arizona with striking similarities. One followed in New Mexico, then Colorado . . . North Dakota . . . Wisconsin . . . Kansas . . . Missouri . . . Indiana . . . Ohio . . . Pennsylvania . . . Finally, six months ago, there in D.C., an art student, Tiffany Wright, had disappeared. Her body was fished out of a Washington canal three weeks later, but it had been there only a short time. Except for the effect the water had had on her clothes, they were neat. The only odd note were some faint spots of red paint, the kind artists use, still visible on her blouse.

  That little clue had started them working on the art student angle, looking among her classmates. It was the first time there had been any kind of stain or mark or rip or tear on any of the women’s clothes. So far, however, it had led nowhere. Odds were that the disappearance of Bridget Matthews was not tied to the death of Tiffany Wright. It would be a marked departure in the serial killer’s method of operation for him to strike twice in one city, but then maybe he was changing his habits.

  “By any chance is Miss Matthews interested in art?” Ferroni asked Carter. “Does she take art lessons as a hobby?”

  Kevin kneaded his forehead, trying to relieve the ache that reminded him of the one time in his life he had had too much to drink.

  Bree, where are you?

  “She never took art lessons that I know of. Bree was more into music and theater,” he said. “We went to Kennedy Center pretty frequently. She particularly liked concerts.”

  Liked? he thought. Why am I using the past tense? No, God, no!

  Ferroni consulted the notes in his hand. “Kevin, I want to go over this again. It’s important. You were familiar with the house. There may be something you noticed when you went in with the housekeeper.”

  Kevin hesitated.

  “What is it?” Ferroni asked quickly.

  Through haggard eyes, Kevin stared at him. Then he glumly shook his head. “There was something different; I sensed it at the time. But I don’t know what it was.”

  • • •

  How many days have I been here? Bree asked herself. She had lost count. Three? Five? They were all blending together. Mensch had just gone upstairs with her breakfast tray. She knew he’d be back within the hour for her to begin reading to him again.

  He had a routine he followed rigidly. In the morning, he came down carrying fresh clothing for her, a blouse or sweater, jeans or slacks. Obviously he had taken the time to go through her closet and dresser after he had knocked her out. It appeared that he had only brought casual clothes that were washable.

  Next he would unshackle her hands, connect the leg restraints to each other at the ankle, then lead her to the bathroom, drop the clean clothes on a chair and lock her in. A minute later she’d hear the whir of the vacuum.

  She had studied him closely. He was thin but strong. No matter how she tried to think of a way to escape, she was sure she couldn’t manage it. The ankle restraints forced her to shuffle a few feet at a time, so she clearly couldn’t outrun him. There was nothing that she could use to stun him long enough for her to get up the stairs and out the door.

  She knew where she was—the basement of his town house. The wall on the right was the one that they shared. She thought of how upset she had been about the stained wallpaper on that wall. No, not wallpaper—wallhanging, Bree reminded herself, fighting back a hysterical wave of laughter.

  By now the police are looking for me, she thought. Kevin will tell them how I accused Mensch of causing the leak in the roof. They’ll investigate him, then they’ll realize there’s something weird about him. Surely they can’t miss that?

  Will Mom and Dad tell Gran that I’m missing? Please God, don’t let them tell her. It would be too much of a shock for her.

  She had to believe that somehow the police would start to investigate Mensch. It seemed so obvious that he must have kidnapped her. Surely they would figure it out? But, of course, trapped here in this cell she had no idea what anyone outside might be thinking. Someone would ha
ve missed her by now—she was certain of that—but where were they looking? She had absolutely no idea, and unless Mensch radically altered his routine, there would be no opportunity to let them know she was here. No, she would just have to wait and hope. And stay alive. To stay alive she had to keep him appeased until help came. As long as she read the children’s books to him, he seemed to be satisfied.

  Last night she had given him a list of books by Roald Dahl that he should get. He had been pleased. “None of my guests were as nice as you,” he told her.

  What had he done to those women? Don’t think about that, Bree warned herself fiercely—it worries him when you show that you’re afraid. She had realized that the one time she broke down sobbing and begged him to release her. That was when he told her that the police had rung his bell and asked when the last time was that he had seen Miss Matthews.

  “I told them I was on my way back from the supermarket Saturday, around two o’clock, and I saw you go out. They asked what you were wearing. I said it was overcast and you had on a bright yellow raincoat and jeans. They thanked me and said I was very helpful,” he said calmly, in his sing-song voice.

  That was when she became almost hysterical.

  “You’re making too much noise,” he told her. He put one hand on her mouth, while the other encircled her throat. For a moment she thought he was going to strangle her. But then he hesitated and said, “Promise to be quiet, and I’ll let you read to me. Please, Mommy, don’t cry.”

  Since then she had managed to hold her emotion in check.

  Bree steeled herself. She could sense that he’d be back any moment. Then she heard it, the turning of the handle. Oh, God, please, she prayed, let them find me.

  Mensch came in. She could see that he looked troubled. “My landlord phoned,” he told her. “He said that according to the contract he has the right to show this place two weeks before the lease is up. That’s Monday, and it’s Friday already. And I have to take all the decorations down from here and whitewash the walls and also the walls of the bathroom and give them time to dry. That will take the whole weekend. So this has to be our last day together, Bridget. I’m sorry. I’ll go out and buy some more books, but I guess you should try to read to me a little faster. . . .”