The Pain Nurse - страница 32

Chambers’ head dropped slightly as if a supporting cord in his neck had snapped. He looked at Will strangely. His tongue flicked out like a lizard’s.

“Where’d you hear that?” Will said nothing. Chambers stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “She had a lot of ideas.” He stared past Will. “She was paranoid, fucking nuts. I put up with that for years. I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“You did hurt her. You beat her. The cops responded to a domestic at your house. They let you off. Then she got a restraining order against you.”

“That was just being married, give me a break. Now all these bitches are counselors and lawyers and they tell gals to ‘get a restraining order,’ and the husband’s always guilty. How many domestics did we respond to as uniforms that turned out to be nothing.”

“How many where the husband came back and killed the woman.”

Chambers leaned against the wall, pulled out a cigarette, and stuck it in his lips. He wanted to light up, but seeing a smoke detector overhead thought better of it. He stuck it back in the pack.

“We used to be friends, I thought,” he said. “You were a righteous cop on the streets, Borders, back in the day, when we worked District One together. We’d all get together. We were all family. I was nothing but happy for you when you aced the sergeant’s exam and then went to homicide. What’d I ever do to you?”

Will ignored him and wheeled six feet away and to the side, making Chambers turn to see him. Then he turned the chair toward him again and advanced. “I always wondered why you did it.”

“I didn’t.”

“Not why you killed Theresa, because we knew about your temper.” Chambers’ left eyelid flickered when Will said the woman’s name. “And motive. You had a girlfriend you wanted to be with. And Theresa had $500,000 in life insurance, still payable to you. I didn’t even wonder about the knife. The more I learned about you, Chambers, the more it made sense. No quick gunshot for Bud Chambers. That would take away the fun, the fear. I just wondered why you killed those other women.”

“I didn’t!” His voice was a mechanical hiss.

“I guess you got scared when we looked at the logical suspect, the estranged husband. Pretty dumb for a cop, if you ask me, because we always look at the husband first.”

“I was on duty…”

“That was your first lie to us.”

“Well, shit, so I was with Darlene. It wouldn’t be the first time a married cop saw his girlfriend on his dinner break. She told you I was there.”

“Yeah. I’m sure your little white-trash girlfriend was as afraid of you as your wife was. Or was she an accomplice? But we caught you in a lie about where you were the day your wife was murdered. I hate cops that lie. If they lie about one thing they’ll lie about the important things, too.”

“I was a good cop.” Chambers swallowed the words.

Will said, “I just never understood the others.”

“What?”

“The other women. Jill Kelly. Lisa Schultz.”

He moved up to Chambers, making him dance his toes away from the wheels, vaguely aware of his foolhardiness. “I mean, if you were going to tamper with the DNA and implicate Factor, why kill those other women? Why turn the beef with your wife into a serial killing that had the whole city terrified?”

“Factor raped her and killed her. He killed all those girls. It was his semen. A jury said so.”

“It was his semen with Theresa. That’s the only one he was convicted for. Craig Factor had a rap sheet as a Peeping Tom. He’d never even been arrested for a violent offense.”

“Who the hell knows what makes a psycho snap.”

“Yeah, you should know, Marion. Two other women all killed the same way. Their clothes neatly folded. Very violent knife attack. The knife wiped clean of prints and hidden in the same room. They had been raped, the same as Theresa. Only, the funny thing, there was no semen. You made them take showers before you killed them? And the mutilation. You especially liked that, right? Got your dick all hard, that sense of power.”

“You say. Nobody believed that.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Who else could have done it? By the time the second murder happened, we were all over Mount Adams with stakeouts. Everybody was locked in their houses after dark. But the killings went on. Who else could do that but a cop, somebody who knew how we worked and could monitor our radio frequencies. Somebody who could get a woman to open her door.”