Split Second

Delion said, “One of the intended victims, a young woman in Philadelphia, scored her fingernails down Kirsten’s face. We typed her DNA from the tissue and matched her to Ted Bundy.”

“Imagine that. Is there no privacy of any kind anymore? I would very much appreciate it if you did not tell George that his stepdaughter’s father was one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.”

Lucy said, “You never told him? If he doesn’t know, I imagine he will know very soon now, Mrs. Lansford. Unfortunately, we cannot control leaks, as much as we would want to. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I suggest you warn your husband. And when Kirsten comes to trial, every single thing everyone knows about her will come out.”

“Well, then, I must trust you either don’t ever catch Kirsten or you kill her.”

Hmmm. Coop said, “You saw the police sketch in the paper and on TV, didn’t you, Mrs. Lansford? You recognized your daughter, didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “No, the police sketches weren’t at all like her, and so I dismissed it.”

“But then other police sketches came out. You recognized those as Kirsten, didn’t you, ma’am?”

“Perhaps I did notice a resemblance, perhaps it was niggling at the back of my mind, but I have a great talent for shutting out unpleasantness, and, believe me, there couldn’t be anything more unpleasant than this creature murdering five women, let alone thinking that perhaps he was really a she, and that she was really Kirsten. I suppose I was afraid that sooner or later someone might come to see me. But I must admit, you’re here much sooner than I expected. May I ask how you found me?”

Lucy said, “We had an excellent description and sketch of Kirsten. We narrowed down our search to the San Francisco area where the murders began and found her quickly enough from her senior yearbook photo at Mount Elysium High School.”

Mrs. Lansford walked over to the giraffe that was nearly as tall as she was, with an eye patch over one eye. Oddly, she lifted the eye patch, looked at the empty eye pit closely, then carefully laid the patch over it again and gave the giraffe an absent pat. “His name is Louie. Ah, so easy, it seems. I’m very glad one of the killer’s victims managed to live through the attack.

“I don’t know what I can tell you, since I haven’t seen Kirsten in over a year. The last time was on her birthday, when I called to invite her to our house in Atherton to give her a special present.”

“What was the present?” Lucy asked, seeing for the first time a fat pink hippo sitting beside a bright blue-and-orange chair. It should have been tacky but was, in fact, charming.

“A Porsche Nine-eleven, black, naturally, since she’d left her white period.”

“Did her white period include blond hair?”

Mrs. Lansford nodded.

Coop said, “Did she favor a different color before then?”

“Red. That didn’t last long. No, it was white for years. It was very unnerving to see her. And tedious. And weird. I told her so, but she ignored me, as usual.”

“How does Kirsten earn a living, Mrs. Lansford?”

“She went to law school—I know, I know, so did Ted Bundy for a while. She stopped going to classes, flunked out, just like her father. Despite all the white, all the bizarre outfits, she is very pretty, and very thin; she modeled for catalogs for a while, but she tired of that quickly enough. She really didn’t need to work, since her stepfather”—she paused for a moment, frowned at a small piece of paper sitting on the hoof of the blue horse, bent over and picked it off, rolled it into a ball, and gently placed it in the bright yellow sunflower wastebasket beside the desk—“since he gave her an allowance of five thousand dollars a month for many years. I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he is a foolishly generous man.”

Lucy said, “Mrs. Lansford, when did you tell your daughter her father was Ted Bundy?”

Elizabeth Mary Lansford laughed. “What mother would ever want to tell her daughter something like that? I never told her. But she found out, I have no idea how, and she wouldn’t tell me how she knew. It was when she was twenty-five. She walked unexpectedly into the gallery, looked at the painting I had finished that morning, and she sneered—she always sneered at my work—and she said, calm as you please, ‘I know you hate me, Mother, like you hated my father. I could have visited my father in prison in Florida, met him before he died, but you never even told me who he was. You kept him from me; you stole my father from me. You’re a bitch, a gold-plated bitch, and I wish he’d killed you.’