The Phantom Prince by Elizabeth Kendall

Author:Elizabeth Kendall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kathy McChesney called me at work and asked me to come down to the police station and pick up my jack handle and some other things of mine that she had. The scrapings from the jack handle had been tested in the lab and they were not blood. I had taken so much time off from work lately, I asked if she could bring them to me, but she was insistent that I come down to the police station. When I got there, she explained that her boss, Captain Mackie, had something he wanted to show me. We went into his office along with two other detectives. Mackie showed me what they had figured out from Ted’s oil company credit card slips.

On a large pad of paper on an easel, Mackie had diagramed the locations from which young women had disappeared in Colorado. On the next sheet he had made a list of credit card slips from Colorado with Ted’s signature. On a third sheet he had put the two together and showed that Ted had been in each location when the women had disappeared. I was stunned. Mackie told me that the license numbers on the slips varied. I remembered the visit Ted had made when the license plate of his VW was loosely propped up inside the car and told Mackie about it. Mackie told me all this was highly confidential information, and the only reason they were telling me was that they trusted me and wanted to impress on me the gravity of the investigation.

Next, they wanted to probe my sex life. I had discussed it with Hergesheimer, with Kathy, and with the two detectives from Utah, and now I was expected to go over it detail by detail again with these three men I hardly knew. My face was on fire. I stared at the floor, completely humiliated, as I answered their questions. How often? Where? When? What positions? Where are his hands? Where are your hands? Oral sex? Anal sex? Bondage? When it was time to go, I could barely move. I asked Kathy for my jack handle. “Sorry,” she said, “we still need it.”

That night Kathy called me at home to tell me that the Seattle Times was going to publish a story the next day regarding Ted’s travels to Colorado and the murders there. She said a reporter had walked in right after I left and asked if his story was correct. What else could Mackie do but say yes? I found that hard to believe. I felt that I had been set up, and I was sick of being manipulated.

I was sick of thinking about anal rapes, strangulation with nylon stockings, beautiful healthy daughters torn away from their families. The world was a sick, sick place and I was profoundly sorry that I had brought my beautiful, innocent child into it.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw in my own reflection a similarity to the women who had died: the long brown hair, the pierced ears.

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