Chapter 19

The Peralta killings, as Ethan had come to think of them, had been some of the best experiences of Ethan's life. The conventions were easy places to remain anonymous. Peralta was so fixated on his own sexual pursuits that Ethan was never concerned about being spotted. He'd watch Peralta from afar (and sometimes fairly close up) and over time realized that the man had a pattern. First and foremost, he would flirt with conventioneers, hanging out at the hotel bar, looking for someone who would sleep with him. If that didn't work out—it rarely did—he would leave the vicinity of the convention, go to dive bars late at night to look for easy prey, or check out strip clubs and massage parlors. From there he would keep lowering his sights.

In Chicago, three months after he'd killed Kelli Baldwin in Atlanta, Ethan watched Peralta spend a late night at a bar buying drinks and making out with a local. Ethan, disguised in a hockey jersey and a baseball cap, sat at a table near the back by the pool tables. He followed them out of the bar, watched them stagger back to Peralta's hotel, arms around each other, hips bumping. Ethan found a place to camp out across the street from the hotel, and kept an eye on the revolving doors, hoping that the woman didn't decide to stay the night, assuming, somehow, that she wouldn't. Ethan turned out to be right—at three a.m. the woman emerged from the hotel, stepping into the light cast on the vacant valet stand. Ethan, worried that she'd ordered a car to pick her up, moved fast, then lucked out when the woman started walking. He dragged her down the alleyway by the hotel, put her in a choke hold that knocked her out, finishing her with a brick. Her name was Bianca Muranos, and there were a fair number of stories about her in the press. Ethan kept wondering if Peralta would be identified. Plenty of other patrons at the bar had seen them together. They'd entered the hotel together. She'd have been lousy with Peralta's DNA. But nothing came of it.

Ethan found himself torn between enjoying his new game and wondering when someone would identify Peralta as a suspect. He'd always thought that most police officers, despite what television shows and detective novels would like you to think, were neither smart enough nor particularly driven to solve crimes. In Fort Myers, Ethan went so far as to kill Nora Johnson while Peralta was right next to her in the car. He'd watched the whole scam unfold in the bar, Peralta smitten with the gorgeous bartender, her flirting back. After last call he'd followed Peralta to the parking garage where he'd met the bartender. She led him to a parked car, the two of them getting in the front seat. Ethan had been surprised they hadn't gotten into the back and he'd waited for a moment before approaching the car, but after a few minutes it was clear they weren't going anywhere. Knowing how dangerous it was, but thrilled with the idea, he'd removed his own tie, then simply slid into the backseat and managed to get it around the woman's neck while her hands were down Peralta's pants. Peralta never looked his way, just scrambled out of the car when Ethan told him to run. And, not surprisingly, Peralta had never reported the incident.

It was a genuine shock when Ethan heard that a parking lot attendant had been arrested for the crime. Less of a shock that he was eventually released. As far as he knew, the case had stalled.

Getting a little bored, Ethan had decided to see if could point the finger in Peralta's direction a little more forcefully. In San Diego Peralta had visited a woman's house on his second-to-last night there, a woman who turned out to be a massage therapist who worked out of her home. Judging by Peralta's body language as he left her house, he'd been expecting more than he'd received. From that point on, Ethan decided to shadow the massage therapist, who he later learned to be Mikaela Sager—she had a small business sign next to her front door. Ethan trailed her the following night to an oceanside bar, where she ordered a glass of wine and pulled out Bring Up the Bodies in paperback from her hobo bag. He'd grabbed the seat next to her and started a conversation.

"You're not...?" she said, an anxious expression on her face.

"I'm not... who?" Ethan said.

"Oh, sorry. This is embarrassing but I'm meeting someone here, not for another hour, but I thought you might be him."

"You're on an online date?" Ethan said.

"Not yet I'm not," she said, and then he told her he was a school administrator from Northern California and that he was here for the English teachers' conference. A flicker of recognition crossed her eyes at the mention of the conference—Peralta must have told her he was attending—and Ethan watched her think about telling him about her bad experience with a massage client but deciding not to. They had a couple of drinks and split an appetizer, then Ethan told her he'd better get out of the way before her real date showed up, and how he'd really come down here in hopes of walking out along a pier at night to see the stars. She'd taken a guilty look around the bar and asked him if she could come with him. The rest was easy.

Before he tipped her into the water, he'd pinned a Jane Austen brooch that he'd stolen from Peralta's booth onto her blouse. It was time to finally get someone to pay attention.

After returning from San Diego to Philadelphia he waited to hear news, but none came. In the meantime, Ethan had become distracted by an interesting development in his life as Robert Charnock. One of his longtime clients, Jane Hillerman, a very bored middle-aged wife of a financial adviser, had fallen in love with the paintings of an obscure mid-century Canadian artist named Donald Carlyle, who'd painted misty seascapes (and practically nothing else) of the Nova Scotia shoreline. Ethan traveled up to Halifax on Jane's dime to see if he could purchase some paintings for her. While he didn't find any unclaimed artwork, he did find Carlyle's nephew, a watercolorist himself with a knack for painting seascapes very similar to the style of his deceased uncle. He was selling them in two or three touristy galleries under his own name, but Ethan, after bedding the nephew and buying the underfed youth some very good meals, convinced him to produce a few works just for him. Works that would pass as original Donald Carlyles and with Carlyle's distinctive scrawled signature in the lower right-hand corner. And he had returned to Philadelphia to a very giddy client, happy to overpay for the forgeries.

In April Ethan went to Denver the night before the last day of one of Peralta's conventions, and as he joined the throng at the Southwest English Teachers Symposium, trudging their way through the exhibition hall, he was overcome with weariness at the whole prospect of following Peralta on his philanderer's tour around the city. He wanted Peralta caught. He wanted news stories, and he wanted to know that Martha Ratliff had become more convinced than ever that she was truly cursed. That was why Ethan went to Denver on the last night of the convention only. He'd come to realize that, unless Peralta got lucky with a convention-goer (chances of that: close to zero), most of the hunting took place on the last night. And that was the case in Denver, when Ethan followed Peralta to the Five Points neighborhood, where he disappeared into a single-story corner tavern with stucco siding and a red neon sign that simply said bar.

For two hours Ethan waited across the street in the window seat of a coffee shop. Peralta emerged near closing time accompanied by two women, one on either of his arms. They all walked together, Peralta noticeably unsteady on his feet, to a liquor store two blocks away. Ethan watched a conversation ensue in front of the store, and then the three walked another block and wound up at an ATM machine, Peralta no doubt pulling out the maximum withdrawal his bank allowed. The girls took the money, then shoved Peralta to the ground and walked casually away. Ethan had never seen Peralta that impaired and he assumed that the two hustling girls had roofied him.

He followed the girls, who ducked into an empty parking lot. Ethan crouched behind a car and watched them split up the cash. One girl took off, while the other one stayed in the lot for a moment, pulling out a cigarette from her bag and lighting it. Earlier that day Ethan had passed a pile of free junk on a residential street and pocketed a meat tenderizer that had been in a box filled with other kitchen implements. It was in his pocket now, as he came out of the shadows and approached the girl. She jumped a little when she saw him, and he halted, held up his hands, and said, "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. I hate to ask, but can I bum one of your cigarettes? I'll even pay you for it."

She smirked in his direction, swaying a little on her heels, wondering if he was someone else she could con. "They're menthol," she said.

"Menthol, Jesus. One of those isn't worth a whole lot more than a buck." Ethan pulled out his wallet, fishing through it.

She laughed. "You really going to pay me for a cigarette?"

"Sure. Why not? I'm rich."

"Are you?"

"Not really. Maybe just drunk."

She laughed again and held out the hardpack of cigarettes. Ethan took one with his left hand while removing the meat tenderizer from his jacket pocket with his right. He hit her square across the jaw, and she dropped down to the ground in a heap. He crouched next to her. He'd hit her with the serrated side of the tenderizer and a flap of skin hung from her cheek. Without thinking too much about it, Ethan wiped the tenderizer clean of fingerprints, using the girl's cheap skirt, and hurled it down to the other end of the alley. Then he lightly pressed his hand up against the welling blood on her cheek, getting his fingers wet. He stood up and left the parking lot, holding his hand down by his side.

When he got back to the ATM, he didn't immediately see Peralta, but he knew he couldn't have gotten far. Ethan wandered back in the direction of the liquor store and spotted Peralta leaning up against its brick siding. Ethan walked up to him, placed his right hand on the small of his back, and said, "Hey, man, you okay?"

Peralta looked at him through glassy eyes, void of recognition—whatever the girls had slipped him was pretty potent—and said, "I just got robbed, I think."

"Looks like you did," Ethan said. There were sirens in the distance, and he added, "Don't worry, the police are coming." He wiped blood from his hand onto Peralta's shirt.

Walking briskly away, he wondered if he'd gone too far, but, honestly, he really was getting tired of this game. He wanted Peralta on the national news. And it wasn't until he was back at his hotel room that he remembered he'd left a witness alive in the parking lot. It was such a stupid thing to do that it actually made him laugh out loud.

The next morning, flying back from Denver to Philadelphia, he was nervous at the airport for the first time in a long time, somehow waiting for his name to trigger an alert to the TSA officer. He really had been careless in not finishing off the girl in the parking lot. He'd also let her look at him. He wasn't as worried about Peralta, who most probably had zero recall of the events that had transpired the night before. But Ethan made it home unmolested by the police, and in his office that night he decided that he needed to end the Peralta killings sooner rather than later. It had gotten too risky. The next convention that Peralta was going to be at, according to his website, was in Saratoga Springs, New York. Well, at least he wouldn't have to fly there. And it was an area he knew well. He decided to go, and he resolved that it would be the last time he committed a Peralta killing. Somehow he'd make it so fucking obvious that even an upstate New York police detective might be able to figure it out. Maybe he'd shove one of Peralta's business cards in the victim's pocket.

But when he got to Saratoga Springs something very interesting happened. Alarming as well, but mostly interesting. On his first night there, he discovered that he wasn't the only one keeping an eye on the roaming salesman. He'd been following Peralta at dinner hour, idly, not giving it too much thought. But Peralta often found someplace to eat dinner before making his way to the part of town where he might find a strip club or a prostitute. So, it was important to keep an eye on him from the get-go. But that night, hanging about a block back, Ethan had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched, that someone was following him. At one point, bending down to tie his shoes, he saw a woman a block back from him, staring into an empty window. After Peralta finally picked a restaurant, Ethan doubled back across the street and got a brief look at the woman who'd been behind him. She was now sitting on a park bench, pretending to look at her phone. Red hair, small frame, a composed stillness about her. He ducked into the next bar and was about to order a drink when a name came to him.

Lily.

She'd been Martha's friend back when he had that teaching gig in Maryland.

He told the bartender he was still thinking and stayed at the bar for a moment. It couldn't be a coincidence, Lily being here. He actually did believe in coincidences—they happened all the time in his life—but not this particular one. His mind raced, creating a possible narrative. Martha must have become suspicious of her husband. Maybe she found the bloodstain on his shirt. Maybe she read about one of the unsolved murders and realized that her husband had been there at the time. Maybe some cop had actually zeroed in on Peralta and asked her to provide an alibi. It didn't matter. Martha suspected her husband. So, she did what she'd done fifteen years earlier when she'd gotten involved with a scary man. She ran to her best friend, who got her out of the situation. Was Lily there to keep an eye on Peralta?

Complicated emotions flooded through Ethan. He felt some satisfaction that his plan was finally coming to fruition. Martha had discovered her husband was a potential serial killer. Her love curse had returned, and now it was only a matter of time before Peralta was actually nabbed for one of his crimes. But there was another feeling that Ethan had, one that was familiar but rare. He was angry. Seeing Lily had brought back the feeling he'd had all those years ago when she'd taken Martha away from him. He remembered it so well. Her smug look from across the table at the bar where Martha had just broken up with him. She'd provided the words and Martha had said them. But it wasn't just that she'd interrupted his fun and games; he remembered being a little scared of her at the time. He'd tried to stare her down and it didn't work, her green eyes looking right back at his with no fear in them. He'd called her a monster, he remembered that, and without hesitating she'd said back to him that she was a monster, and that he needed to remember that.

He went back out to the sidewalk, not surprised to see Lily still on the bench. She turned to look at him and he said, "I thought you looked familiar."

She hadn't admitted anything, of course, pretending that she was randomly in Saratoga Springs for the same conference that Peralta happened to be working. In the middle of their conversation, though, he was suddenly filled with certainty that it was now time to put an end to this whole fucking Peralta caper. He saw a taxi with its light on cruising down the street. He hailed it and jumped in.

During the ride back to his own hotel, and to his Kia, Ethan thought about Martha. At the time he'd walked away from her, he told himself that she'd been too easy to manipulate anyway, but the truth was that he'd been one-upped by Lily, a fucking librarian who looked like she'd get blown over in a sharp breeze.

He'd been mad then, and he was mad now.

He thought about killing Lily. He could double back and follow her to wherever she was staying, probably at the conference hotel. But that would be almost too easy. No, he got another idea, one that would take the legs right out from under her and teach her to not play Nancy Drew with her friends. He needed to show Lily that she'd made a big mistake.

And, suddenly, he wasn't angry anymore. He was happy as a clam.