Broken Dolls by James Carol Page B

visit the first victim, Sarah Flight.’
    We turned right out of the Cosmopolitan’s driveway and I flashed my cigarette pack at Templeton.
    ‘Fine with me, so long as you’re sharing,’ she said.
    I lit two cigarettes and passed one to Templeton. The traffic was slow and sticky. Almost as bad as New York traffic, but nowhere near as bad as LA traffic. We drove in silence, Templeton concentrating on driving while I concentrated on the case. It was a comfortable silence, companionable, there was nothing forced about it.
    I finished my cigarette and pitched the butt out of the window, hit a button on my door and the window buzzed shut. Thirty seconds later, Templeton followed suit. The buildings got smaller and greyer and bleaker the further north we drove. The winter sunshine made the architecture look better than it had yesterday, but not by much. The radio played a steady stream of classics. Hendrix, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin. Great tunes from a long-ago time.
    ‘So what was he like?’
    I’d heard that question plenty of times so I didn’t need to ask who Templeton was referring to. Usually people waited until they knew me better, but I wasn’t surprised she’d asked. She didn’t strike me as someone who would tiptoe around a subject.
    ‘He was completely plausible,’ I said. ‘A pillar of the community. He taught math at college and by all accounts he was popular with his colleagues. The kids liked him, too. He was outgoing and inspiring, your typical eccentric teacher. He had one of those brains that never switches off. While he was at San Quentin numerous attempts were made to measure his IQ but he just used them as an excuse to mess with the shrinks. All any of them could say for certain was that he’d easily qualify for Mensa.’
    ‘You didn’t suspect anything?’
    ‘If you mean, did I suspect that my father was a serial killer, then, no, I didn’t.’
    ‘But there was something not quite right about him, wasn’t there?’
    I remembered a barbecue back when I was eight or nine, a couple of years before the FBI swooped in and arrested my father and my world turned upside down. The men were all gathered around the barbecue, and my father was in the middle of them. He was wearing a cook’s apron, a beer in one hand, a set of tongs in the other. The beer had flowed freely all afternoon and everyone was laughing and joking and having a wonderful time. My father was laughing and joking right along with them. Except there was something a little too forced about his laughter. What I remembered most was that my father’s laugh didn’t quite reach his eyes.
    ‘In hindsight, the signs were there,’ I said. ‘I like to think if I met him now I would see straight through him. But I was just a kid. I was eleven when the FBI arrested him. He murdered his first victim before I was born. At home he swung between being distant and being controlling, but he was no worse than my friends’ fathers. In fact, he was better than most of them. Of course, all my buddies thought he was great, because that was the face he showed them.’
    ‘Why do I feel like I’m only being given the edited highlights?’
    ‘Because you are.’
    ‘Look,’ said Templeton, ‘if you don’t want to talk about this, that’s fine. I understand.’
    ‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that I don’t really know what to say. If he was an unsub I could give you a complete profile, chapter and verse. But he was my father. I’m just too close to offer any sort of objectivity.’
    ‘You blame yourself, don’t you? You think you could have done something to save those girls.’
    ‘And you sound like the shrink back at Quantico.’
    ‘You’re dodging my question.’
    ‘Of course I am. We’ve only just met. Let’s save the heavy stuff for when we know each other better.’
    I tapped another cigarette from my pack and offered one to Templeton. She declined with a shake of the head. A shaft of sunlight shone