My Boss is a Serial Killer (36 page)

“
What are you grinning about?” he
demanded.

I answered innocently, “Don’t mind me. It’s
the drugs.”

At long last, I got my car and keys back from
Bill. He drove my car over to me Friday night. That was an amusing
meeting: Bill, my mother, and I sitting in my less-than-tidy living
room, me loopy from medication, my mother overprotective, and Bill
utterly horrified at a number of things. He was beside himself
emotionally over my appearance, my trauma, and what he saw as my
rescue of his life, but mostly that he didn’t think they’d gotten
my stitches in very well, because they weren’t what he’d call
“evenly spaced.” While he was there, he straightened my
bookshelves, and he managed to charm my mother, who was like me in
her ability to be open-minded to insanity so long as the crazy
person was polite. Plus, he let her know in no uncertain terms that
he was eternally in my debt, an opinion that she shared.

I told them both to stop being so dramatic. I
figured, and I told them so, that eventually Gus would have
discovered, if not that Charlene Templeton was guilty, then at
least that Bill Nestor was not guilty. Bill wasn’t convinced. He
didn’t have my faith in Gus. Besides, he said, in the time it took
them to accept his innocence, his entire life could have been
ruined by his assumed guilt. I granted him that. Yet I don’t like
to get too much credit for simple loyalty and a bit of lucky
guessing.

I still felt that most of my motives, from
the start of this little adventure, had been rather selfish.
Occupying time at work. Trying to impress Gus. Trying to impress
Bill. Wanting to keep my good boss, even at the risk of working for
a serial killer.

Gus came to see me on Sunday morning. My
mother sat in the same room with us as we spoke, like some
chaperone from the Victorian Age. Actually this was preposterous
because, yes, my hormones jumped into high gear whenever Gus was
around, but Sunday morning saw the full fruition of my bruises,
contusions, and swellings. Even if I had felt physically capable of
passion, I had my doubts about whether Gus would have been willing.
I thought he probably liked his women to look human. As I had
hobbled into the bathroom that morning I’d thought I looked sort of
cool, a black-and-blue girl who’d had a wild night at the roller
derby. That was before my hot cop boyfriend showed up. That’ll make
a black-and-blue girl wish for some concealer. But he was my big,
sweet grizzly bear, regardless of my hideous appearance. He brought
me a large bouquet of wildflowers, which was so nice of him, and
the complete first season of
Lost
, which was absolutely
brilliant of him.

The official reason for his visit was to
apprise me of the situation with Charlene Templeton and what had
been learned from her lately. First of all, she admitted that she
was the one who’d been at my house the previous Saturday, and had
straightened up my supplies to make it look as if Bill Nestor had
been there. This was, I suppose, all part of her plot to throw
suspicion on Bill.

More interesting was the history that Gus had
learned from her.

Before she came to MBS&K as a secretary
in 1991, Charlene Templeton had worked as a secretary in a hospital
legal department for several years as her first job out of school.
During those years, there had been at least three
less-than-satisfactorily explained hospital deaths. This happened
back before absolutely every hall in every public building had
video surveillance. I barely remember the time.

“
They were badly injured, middle-aged
women,” Gus explained. “All three were hospitalized for injuries
sustained in accidents where one or more of their family members
had died. Two car accidents, and one house fire. Investigations
were conducted, but eventually closed; because of their ages and
injuries, there was only a vague suspicion of malpractice from the
hospital. However, when we mentioned this to Charlene, she started
talking again. About her mission from God, or whatever the hell she
thinks she’s doing.”

He also told me also that my piecing together
of Charlene’s modus operandi had been close to correct.
Unfortunately my boss Bill took notes that were far too detailed
and included information about the widows’ home security systems,
watchdogs, and even where they kept their spare keys. Once she’d
found a victim that both fit her profile and had an accessible
home, Charlene could easily enter the widow’s house with her face
covered, confront the widow under the guise of being a thief, and
tell her victim that she’d shoot her if she didn’t ingest the
pills. The widows complied without overwhelming protest because
Charlene promised to call for help after she left the house. And
because she was obviously a woman, the widows didn’t fear being
raped or molested while they were unconscious.

Charlene apparently told them the pills were
just mild sedatives meant to ensure that they didn’t call the
police until she’d ‘made a getaway,’ but nothing she gave those
women was a mild sedative. She was feeding them heavy-dosage
sleeping medications and highly toxic amounts of over-the-counter
painkillers. Charlene never left behind any indication that she’d
been there and obviously was able to do this eight times without
detection. On her ninth murder, she was spotted leaving Adrienne
Maxwell’s house by a witness who could not have identified her for
all the tea in China. But Charlene, I suppose, had not known that.
There were two aborted attempts, if we could believe what Charlene
said, but no one ever saw her face so these were just reported as
attempted burglaries. Bill Nestor therefore had a couple of clients
who were lucky to still be alive.

Also, in Bill’s miscellaneous red-rope file,
which was kept with all the other miscellaneous files in Lloyd’s
great file cavern, the crime scene investigators found six little
locks of hair from various victims on the list. Where the other
three victims’ hair was, I didn’t know and didn’t much want to
know. Charlene planted the hair in one of Bill’s seldom-used
miscellaneous files on the day she sent me searching for the Bryony
Gilbert file.

“
Has she said anything about her
childhood?” I asked him.

“
That’s something the psychiatrist is
going to deal with,” replied Gus. “I’m more concerned about things
I can send her to prison for.”

“
Like attempted murder,” interjected my
mother, who had kept quiet through the horrific details.

“
Charlene said something when we were
in the file room,” I mused. “Something about her mother and her
grandmother, and I felt, kind of…”

I didn’t want to complete that sentence.
Everyone seemed plenty annoyed with me over nearly getting myself
killed and plenty annoyed that I wasn’t angrier about it. Gus
finished for me, though, without sounding especially irritated.
“You felt sorry for her.”

He looked at me with surprising tenderness. I
liked to think that he was bowled over by my generosity of spirit,
though he may just have been sympathizing with a drug-addled, badly
bruised dingbat. There was sure something in his gaze, though,
because my mother suddenly stood up, declared that she forgot to do
something important in the kitchen, and rushed away to leave us
alone and unchaperoned.

Gus moved to sit beside me on the couch. He
didn’t touch me—that was a no-no. He said, “You’ve been really
understanding about this boycott my boss has put on our…”

“
Affiliation?”

“
Affair, I was going to
say.”

“
Oh I like that—it sounds
exotic.”

“
It doesn’t bother you much, I guess,”
he ventured, in an uncharacteristic show of doubt, which I was
compelled by adoration to fix immediately.

“
It bothers me some,” I admitted, “but
you’re seeing that as a lack of commitment to our ‘affair’ when in
actuality, it’s the opposite. I’m completely secure. I’ll wait for
the case to close— for a month or six months or six
years.”

He looked pleased but didn’t seem to want to
look too pleased. “You would wait six years? No you wouldn’t.”

“
Excuse me, but have you failed to
notice that you’re a detective who has promised me a motorcycle
ride? I’d wait sixteen years.”

“
Carol, I’m serious. I’m so sorry about
this.”

“
I’m serious too. People always think
I’m joking when I’m serious.”

“
You’re not worried at all?”

Was I not? Was I really so confident about us
that I had not a shadow of doubt? You might be thinking that I was
ignoring one obvious problem—I was willing to wait for up to
sixteen years for a detective on a motorcycle—but was that same
detective willing to wait even that first postulated increment of
one month for a bruised-up secretary? I may have been on a heavy
dose of medication that day, but the fact that Gus brought it up
first and seemed truly anxious made me think he was probably almost
as patient as me. All we had to do was keep our clothes on.

Chuckling hurt some, in my ribs and certainly
in my face, but I did it anyway. “Everything’s going to be fine.
I’m in complete denial of any other outcome.”

“
My girlfriend is such a pain in the
ass,” muttered Gus as he grinned at me.

I explained, “I know all about this; it’s
another benefit of watching a lot of television. Many great
television pairings thrive on the sexual tension of being kept
apart. Scully and Mulder kept their hands off each other for years.
In fact, on
Moonlighting
, when they finally had sex, it
ruined the show. And have you ever seen
Wire in the Blood
?
Her name is Carol, too. She and Tony—”

To stop my lecture on televised sexual
tension, Gus leaned over and very, very carefully kissed me. The
combination of painkillers and muscle relaxers made my lips feel
strangely numb. I had to kiss back hard to get my share.

“
Well,” said a husky-voiced Gus when he
drew away, “I’d better go before I do something stupid like kiss
you.”

“
Okay, then,” I said. “See you
Wednesday?”

Wednesday was our next date. I was going to
the police station to give my formal statement. If my bruises had
faded by then, maybe I’d show up in a tank top and fishnet
stockings. But then, I remembered that Gus Haglund liked secretary
clothes.

So, would you believe that Monday morning, I
got up and went to work? I know what you’re thinking. Carol, you’re
thinking, you didn’t even have a job any more. But no, that was not
the case.

Over my long weekend of drugged lethargy, I
got a lot of phone calls. My mother, who was kind enough to stay
with me and field the calls, didn’t let many of the callers speak
to me. I did talk to Donna, who told me: Yes, she was still my
supervisor. No, I had not been fired. Yes, surviving attempted
murder by a coworker is an acceptable excuse for being absent. Yes,
I was technically guilty of job abandonment two days in a row. But,
no, nobody was going to smack me around for it. I was informed that
a note had been made in my permanent record.

“
I’ve been written up?” I asked her,
which everyone knows is code for “you’re on your last leg here,
sister.”

“
Not written up,” Donna had told me.
“There’s just a notation that we had a conference with you about
it.”

A notation. But not written up. I didn’t know
what to make of it. Perhaps they feared a worker’s compensation
claim for injuries I sustained when my coworker tried to kill me.
Anyway Donna told me to take as much time off as needed and come
back when I was ready.

Saying that I was “ready” on Monday morning
was perhaps an overstatement. Physically I was still banged up. I
moved like a woman three times my age, and the blow to my left
temple had turned into a great, blue bruise that no amount of
makeup or clever hairstyling would cover as it puffed up and
discolored my cheekbone.

But I went stir-crazy at home. I worried
about the millings of MBS&K and about what might happen without
me. And television, my great love, is really fun when you use it as
a reward for a hard day’s work or as a weekend tele-stravaganza,
but not when you’re trapped and sore, and there’s nothing better to
do.

So against my mother’s pleas, I went to work
Monday morning. I assured her, and myself, that if I got there and
started feeling too bad, I’d just come back home again. What were
they going to do, refuse to let me? Not when I looked like I’d just
gone nine rounds in a prizefight.

Upon returning to MBS&K, I had expected a
crowd of people to bombard me, asking for a thrilling retelling of
my adventures. However, I was studiously avoided. Everyone’s head
seemed to be down over their work. Even Lucille, the goddess of
gossip, just exclaimed pityingly over my injuries and told me that
it was “so great” to see me back. As if I’d been gone for months,
instead of three days.

I suppose the truth was that I was too big a
part of an ugly incident. This business with Charlene and the dead
clients was going to be far-reaching, most likely involving
lawsuits and investigations, and there was no guarantee that the
firm would survive as a business. Think about it. Would you want to
be a client of the firm where other clients had ended up victims of
a serial killer? Well, maybe you would. Whatever floats your boat.
The point is, the mess with Charlene was by far the worst thing
that had happened here, even worse than “The Time That Gail Went
into Labor in the Bathroom and Didn’t Tell Anyone and Almost Had
her Baby in There.” No one much wanted to speak to me.