Free Body of Shadows by Jack Shadows Page A

throat.
    “I’m an attorney,” she said. “What I’m about to do is violate the oath I took when I became an attorney. I’m going to violate my client’s confidentiality.”
    “Are you sure you want to do that?”
    “Trust me, I don’t want to,” she said. “You need to promise me that you’ll never tell anyone about this conversation, not today, not tomorrow, not ten years from tomorrow.”
    “I won’t.”
    “If you ever tell anyone about it, I’ll deny it,” she said. “I’ll deny it with a vengeance. Then I’ll sue you for defamation to prove I’m right.”
    “You won’t get anything,” Drift said. “All I have is a ’67 Corvette and the bank owns most of that. Do you like old Corvettes?”
    “No. I’m a Porsche girl.”
    “Do you have one?”
    “Maybe.”
    “I hope it’s ’89 or earlier,” Drift said. “Those were the keepers, with the headlights sticking out like torpedoes. The new ones don’t do anything for me.”
    “Me either,” she said. “Mine’s an ’86.”
    “When did they put in the synchronized clutch?”
    “Eighty-seven.”
    “Ouch. So you have to come to a complete stop to downshift into first?”
    “Right.”
    “That makes for tough driving.”
    “There are worse things,” she said. “The guy you’re looking for refers to himself as Van Gogh. He was a client of mine. He never had an actual case with me, he just retained me and then told me about the killings.”
    “Why?”
    “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe he just needed to talk about it and knew I couldn’t repeat anything because of attorney-client confidentiality. Maybe he just liked to put me on edge. Either way it was pretty sick. He’s been doing them for years.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Van Gogh, that’s all I have,” she said. “He never told me his real name.”
    “Do you have an address, phone number, anything?”
    “No.”
    “You’re not being much help,” he said.
    “He picks them out in bars,” she said. “He follows them for a week or two or three, then he strikes. He ties their wrists to the headboard and then chokes them to death while he’s raping them. That’s how Jackie Lake died, right?”
    “How’d you know that?”
    “I’m an attorney,” she said. “It’s a small town.”
    “Has he called you about Jackie Lake?”
    “Not yet.”
    “When he does I want you to record it.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “What else can you tell me about him?”
    “A little part of his left ear got shot off once. He’s pretty proud of that,” she said. “That was his inspiration for cutting off the left ear of his victims.”
    “Who shot him? The police?”
    “He never said.” She lowered her voice. “Every time he talked to me, he always finished the conversation the same way. He always said that if I ever told anyone anything about what he was telling me, he’d do the same thing to me that he was doing to the other women, only more slowly. That’s why you’re going to get up now and walk away, and you’re not going to turn around, like you promised. Goodbye.”
    “What you just did took a lot of guts. Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    Drift stood up.
    He took a step and stopped.
    He didn’t turn around.
    “Was Jackie Lake a friend of yours? Is that why you’re coming forward?”
    No one answered.
    She was gone.
    Drift walked away.
    He didn’t turn around.
     
    On the walk back to the office he called Sydney and said, “See if you can find the name of a female attorney in town who owns an ’86 Porsche 911.”
    “Who is this?”
    Drift smiled.
    “Thanks.”
    He was almost at the office when the phone rang and Sydney’s voice came though.
    “The attorney in question is someone named September Tadge.”
    “September?”
    “Right.”
    “As in the month?”
    “Right. July, August, September.”
    “Her parents must have been hippies,” Drift said.
    “I wouldn’t know,” Sydney said. “That’s a white infliction. You don’t find any black girls