“You mean Trudie and Grace and Marnie?” she asked.

“And a couple of others, including the waitress who added a little something extra to your drink. They all were half in love with Dr. Grotto and got off on his fantasy.”

“More Elizabeths in the making,” she said, and he squeezed her fingers.

“More jail time in the making. They’ll be up on charges, too.”

“What about Father Mathias? And Georgia Clovis?”

“The Wagner heirs are apparently innocent, but Mathias is dead, probably killed by Vlad because he knew too much. We’re not certain but it looks like Mathias might have turned troubled girls toward their deaths. Probably inadvertently. The conjecture is that he heard their troubles during confession or maybe counseling. He tried to help, gave them parts in the plays and allowed Dominic Grotto to ‘guide’ them, and I use the term ‘guide’ loosely. Even though Grotto might not have known about what ultimately happened to the girls, he was no saint. He probably had affairs with them.”

She shuddered, thinking of the innocent victims.

“But the real maniac in all of this was Vlad, aka Dr. Preston aka Scott Turnblad. We’re guessing that too many people knew too much. Lucretia took care of Grotto, but that left Father Mathias. Vlad couldn’t let him escape.”

“He was beyond sick. And Elizabeth.”

“Althea. Yeah. She duped us all. Turns out her mother never even lived in New Orleans. She just wanted to spend more time being Elizabeth.”

“Where does that come from?”

“She was a distant relative of the countess, I guess.”

“And crazy.”

“Certifiable. She got all caught up in trying not to age. We found her diaries. Besides being related to the Blood Countess, Althea was convinced she could turn back time, regain any lost youth by bathing in the blood of younger women.”

“Nutso.”

“Yeah, on top of that, she’d been married and the husband left her for a younger woman, just as her father left her mother twice for trophy wives.”

“So what? It happens to a lot of women. They don’t turn into homicidal maniacs.”

“You said it yourself. ‘Nutso.’ Althea aka Elizabeth found her soul mate in Vlad. Their relationship started young. We’ve been digging into Turnblad’s sordid past. His killing may have started young, with his own parents. And he got away with it.”

“So he learned from a young age that he could.”

Jay’s lips twisted at the thought, the way they always did when he encountered a problem he couldn’t understand. “Turns out he and Althea—”

“That would be the nouveau Elizabeth of Bathory?”

“You are paying attention,” he said with a wink. “We found out that they’ve known each other since they were kids.”

“I can’t imagine what kind of games they played.”