Blind Pursuit

45

“You realize, of course,” she began casually, “you’re supposed to be dead.”

“I made it look as though I was.”

He sat stiffly in the chair, one hand on the gun, the other balled in a fist, his body language expressive of rigid self-restraint. It was as if his clenched muscles and locked joints formed a barrier against the wild surge of emotion swirling in him, a dam straining against floodwaters. She waited tensely for the first fatal cracks to appear.

“But your father,” she said softly. “He’s really dead, isn’t he?”

A brief incline of his head. “Yes.”

“You killed him.” Not a question.

“He deserved it.”

“Why?”

He didn’t reply at once. His hand stroked the pistol in his lap. Erin tried not to look at it, not to think of the explosive violence it contained.

“Lincoln Connor was a great guy,” he said finally, his voice low and bitter. “Everyone said so. Always smiling and joking, and so good with horses. Believed in discipline, though. People knew that. They heard stories about how he beat his son. Well, every kid needs to learn a lesson now and then, right? Only, the discipline my father imposed didn’t always stop with a beating. Sometimes he found other ways of hurting me.”

“What ways?”

“Two fingers up the rectum. Then three fingers.” The chair creaked as he shifted his weight, and she knew the sphincter muscles near the base of his spine were tightening involuntarily. “When I was old enough, big enough… his fist. And then… not his fist.”

She felt a pang of pity, not for the killer before her but for the small boy he had been. But of course it was no longer possible to separate the two. The hurt little boy still lived within this man, buried alive somewhere deep inside, and screaming, unheard.

But the women in the woods-they had screamed, too.

“What age were you when it started?” she asked.

“Little. Maybe four.”

“Did Lydia know?”

He shook his head slowly. “She never had a clue.”

“How could Lincoln keep it secret?”

“He did it only when she wasn’t around. Lydia was in charge of the ranch’s inventory; she was always going into town for supplies. Lincoln had no shortage of opportunities. And I never told. I was scared, ashamed. And…”

“And what?”

“And so I… kept the secret,” he finished lamely.

“That’s not what you started to say.” No reply. “You wanted to tell me something more.”

Tense silence ticked in the room. She knew it was crazy, suicidal, to push further on this point. So she wouldn’t, of course. She wouldn’t.

She did. “In our first session, there was a point when you thought I’d implied you were gay.”

“Hadn’t you?”

“No.”

“Then why raise the issue again?”

“I think you know why.”

He said nothing.

“You enjoyed it. What your father did.” Each word was a step forward into an unknown darkness strewn with lethal trip wires. “At least sometimes. At least a little bit. Didn’t you, Oliver?”

His right hand closed over the barrel of the gun, clutching it tight.

“You do think I’m queer,” he breathed.

“I haven’t said that.”

“Don’t bullshit me. Don’t bullshit me, you little whore.”

“Oliver-”

“You filth. Stinking filth.”

His hand was sliding down the gun barrel toward the handle, and she knew that when he reached it, he would lift the gun and shoot, shoot without thinking, shoot to kill.

“Oliver,” she said more sharply. “Stop it.”

His hand froze an inch from the checkered grip.

“I’m sorry if you heard me say something I didn’t mean to say.” She spoke softly, keeping her tone neutral and nondefensive. “It wasn’t my intention to suggest that you were homosexual. I hope you understand that.”

He seemed slightly mollified, but his hand remained on the gun. “Then what were you suggesting?”

“Only that you may still be afraid of something you felt with your father, years ago. An emotion or a physical sensation. A fleeting response, meaningless… but it haunts you. I think that’s why you see sexual needs as threatening, dangerous-”

“But I don’t,” he cut in. “I’m not threatened. You’re on the wrong track. Sex doesn’t have anything to do with… with anything.”

“You believe that, I’m sure. But it may not be true.”

“Are you saying I’m a liar?”

“I’m saying your true feelings are buried deep. So deep that you can’t find them, can’t acknowledge their reality.”

“That’s just stupid,” he whispered, but she heard doubt in his voice for the first time.

“Don’t fight me on this, Oliver,” she said. “Open up to me. Please.”

He didn’t speak for a long moment. Then slowly he lifted the gun, as if to remind her of its presence. A shade too ostentatiously, he slipped it back into the side pocket of his jacket.

“I thought we were talking about my father,” he said mildly.

She yielded, afraid to press any harder and see the pistol return. “How long did Lincoln continue to mistreat you?”

“Until I left home.”

“At eighteen?”

“Yes.”

“He was still abusing you at that age?”

“Not as often. But… yes.”

“Did you leave because of Lincoln?”

“No. It was Lydia. She disowned me. Ordered me out of the house.”

Erin blinked, taken by surprise. “Lydia? But… why?”

He fixed his stare on her. “That, you can’t know.”

Instinctively she understood that this was one territory she dared not explore, the one secret he would not share.

“All right,” she said evenly. “So you left Tucson. Went to the Prescott area, as I recall.”

“In a stolen car. I ditched it when it was almost out of gas. Had no money to fill the tank. Started walking, and met up with a bunch of kids my age. Hippies. My hair was long, and I looked scruffy enough to fit in. We got to talking, and I improvised a story about burning my draft card and going underground.”

“You stayed with them.”

“For a few weeks. We moved from town to town, keeping close to the edge of the woods. Living off the land, they called it, though really we were scrounging through garbage.”

“Then your father came looking for you-”

“No. It didn’t happen like that. Not like that at all…”

His words trailed off, and his eyes lost focus. Ordinarily she was not averse to leaving a patient wrapped in thought, even for long minutes if necessary. But not now. If he became passive, disengaged, his internal controls would relax… and his impulses might take over.

From experience and study, she knew that epileptic episodes were most likely to occur in that half-aware state between wakefulness and sleep. As the mind wandered, the seizure threshold was lowered, sometimes to the danger point.

She had to keep him talking and alert, without getting him agitated. Emotional stress could trigger a seizure also.

A fine line to tread. A tightrope over a chasm.

“Tell me, Oliver,” she said softly. “Tell me how it did happen.”

“It was evening. A summer evening. Warm day, cooling as the sun hung lower.” His voice was remote and thoughtful, his words drifting up from a deep well of memory. “I went for a walk in the woods with another guy from the camp. Just the two of us. He wasn’t a friend, exactly, but he’d been pleasant to me. Funny to think he was just a kid. We both were. Just kids. Eighteen years old. Funny.

“We found a creek, ambled far enough along the bank to leave the camp sounds behind. In the quiet, we sat by the water, smoking. Peaceful there, with the current forking around the rocks, and the sun setting, and that sweet-smelling smoke.

“After a while it was dark, and we were both pretty high. Then… he got rough. You know what I mean.”

“He wanted to do what Lincoln had done.”

A shaky nod. “I told him no. He tried to force me. I remember him tugging at my jeans, me on my belly, struggling, and him hard against my rear, like Lincoln giving me some discipline, Lincoln making me bleed, and then he was Lincoln. Maybe it was the dope or… or some kind of long-buried revenge fantasy surfacing, I don’t know, but he was Lincoln, and I wasn’t going to take it from him anymore.

“Guess I went wild then. I don’t remember now. But I must have fought back, really fought, for the first time in my life.

“When I came back to myself, there was a rock in my hand. It was bleeding. At least it seemed to be. Blood from a stone, I remember thinking. I touched my face-wetness there, too. He’d broken this”-he fingered his pulped, shapeless nose-“and I hadn’t even noticed. Then I looked down, very slowly, and there he was, on the ground, with his pants around his knees and his dick hanging out and his skull open wide.”

“How did you…” Erin hesitated, choosing the right words. “How did that make you feel?”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

She believed him. The rare breakout of emotion must have consumed itself, leaving him empty and blank. He would have had no reaction to the body sprawled before him, the body of a boy of eighteen, killed in the woods.

Eighteen. Oliver’s age. Of course.

Erin shut her eyes, making the obvious connection. “This boy’s name-”

“Harold Gund.”

She nodded. “You took his identity. And erased your own.”

“I hadn’t planned on it. But as I sat there, watching the moon rise over the trees, I worked everything out. I saw a way to cover up the murder and take revenge on Lincoln. I felt strong enough then. I’d been liberated. I was… free.”

“How did you do it?”

“Gund was my height, my approximate build. I changed clothes with him, taking his wallet, leaving mine with the body. Used some of Gund’s money to hop a bus to Tucson the next morning, then rode a city bus from the terminal to the edge of town that afternoon. At night I walked to the ranch. This ranch.

“Easy enough to sneak onto the grounds; the gate wasn’t padlocked in those days. I eavesdropped through an open window while Lincoln talked on the phone. His end of the conversation made it clear he was alone; Lydia was in the hospital-nervous breakdown. Everyone assumed she was worried sick about me. Nobody guessed the truth.”

Erin did not ask what the truth was.

“Once the lights were out, I broke in through the back way. The lock never was any good, which is why I installed a padlock on that door once I bought the place.

“Lincoln was snoring in bed. I clubbed him unconscious with his own shotgun. Lugged him to the carport, dumped him in the trunk of his car. Drove north to Prescott Forest. Lincoln came to around three in the morning and started thumping on the lid.

“It was still dark when I pulled into the woods and popped the trunk. At first he was crazy with rage, till I let him see the gun-his own sawed-off Remington, steady in my hands. He turned conciliatory then. Tried to make nice. Hoped I didn’t hold it against him, what he’d done; it was just a father’s way of showing love; sure, that’s all he was, a loving father…

“I let him talk as I marched him to the creek in the predawn dark. After a while the words dried up, and he started to cry. Weeping like a woman, like the bullying coward he was. But I don’t think he believed I would do it, really do it, until he stumbled over the corpse at the water’s edge.

“Fear put some fight into him. He spun around, grabbed for the shotgun, and I gave him a taste of it, right in the face.”

Erin shuddered. He saw her reaction, and his eyes narrowed coolly.

“Don’t look so stricken, Doc. It’s not the worst way to die. He never even heard the blast.”

Just like I won’t hear it when you shoot me, she thought numbly.

“Before I left, I turned the gun on Harold. Put the muzzle in his mouth and blew his head off. Nobody was going to identify that corpse from dental records.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“I’d never been arrested; my prints weren’t on file. I don’t know if Gund had a rap sheet. But this was 1968, remember. No computerized fingerprint searches, no nationwide data bank. If Gund had been local, his prints could have been on file somewhere in Arizona. But he’d wandered in from Oregon only a couple weeks earlier.

“Low probability the authorities would bother with prints, anyway. The case was open-and-shut, a no-brainer. Lincoln had beaten me; folks back home knew that much. He’d made a lot of noise to the press about how angry he was at his disobedient son. And just a few days earlier I’d been seen by someone who knew the family; my father could have known where to find me. Besides, it was 1968, an angry year.

“When the police found Lincoln, he had the gun in his hand; I’d wedged it into his fingers with the muzzle under his chin, or where his chin used to be. Next to him, there was the body of a boy my age, wearing my clothes, with my wallet. His hair was brown, not blond like mine, but the shotgun blast had scattered most of it, and I’d gathered up the rest and fed it to the creek.

“Lydia’s hospitalization ensured that she was in no condition to view the body. The only people who looked at it were cops, coroners, and morticians, none of whom had known me.”

“So you got away with it.”

“Well, there was one thing that had me worried for a while. One of the papers reported that the police were trying to find a boy named Harold, last seen with me.”

“You must have anticipated that.”

“Not entirely. People entered and left the camp all the time. Nobody kept track of anyone. There was no organization, no one in charge. As it turned out, that’s what saved me. The kids interviewed by the police knew nothing about the missing boy except his first name. They couldn’t agree on his description, and they didn’t even know he was from Oregon; I was the only one he’d talked to at any length. The cops had nothing to go on; there were a million long-haired teenagers named Harold. I was safe.”

“Safe,” Erin echoed softly.

“And free. Free of Lincoln. Free of the past.”

But she knew he had never emancipated himself from his father or his childhood. And at some level, she was certain, he knew it, too.

“Gund had an Oregon driver’s license,” he went on quietly. “No photo on it, fortunately; that particular innovation postdates the sixties. There was only a typed inventory of physical characteristics. The one serious discrepancy between his appearance and mine was hair color, as I mentioned. When I got a new license eventually, I passed that off as a clerical error.”

“Where did you go?”

“New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada… all over. I hitchhiked, did odd jobs, got hassled by local cops. The transient’s life. Not as glamorous as it looks in the movies. Eventually I got sick of all that. I settled in Wisconsin, found myself a janitor’s job at a university. Worked there for twenty years. You’ve read the clippings. You know what I did on the side.”

“What made you relocate to Arizona?”

“You and Annie. I was looking for you.”

Stalking us, she corrected silently. “After all that time? But… you never even knew us.”

“Maybe I wanted to.”

“Why?”

No answer.

Let it go, she told herself. She knew his reason. She had no need to hear him say it.

Except she wasn’t sure. The pieces didn’t quite fit.

And she had to know.

“What is it you feel for us, Oliver?” she asked, leaning forward.

“Feel? Nothing.”

“That’s not true.”

“You ask me questions, and you won’t accept my answers.”

“Because the answers are incomplete. You went to a lot of trouble to bring me here.”

“For help. For therapy.”

“There are other therapists. Why me? Why a member of the family?” No response. “You took a risk working for Annie. There was at least a slight chance she would identify you. People don’t do things-difficult things, dangerous things-without a motive. What’s yours? What do we mean to you?”

“Nothing,” he said again. “You mean nothing.”

She could see the denial in his face, in the twisted pose of his body.

“You want to believe that,” she breathed, “but I don’t think you do.”

“I don’t give a damn what you believe.”

She would not be deterred by his hostility. She was on the trail of something important, something hidden from her and from Oliver himself; regardless of the consequences, she had to uncover it, had to bring it into the light.

“Annie and I were born in 1966,” she said slowly, “when you were still living at home. Did you ever see us as babies? Did our parents bring us to the ranch?”

“No, never.”

That surprised her. “Maureen never visited Lydia?”

“Not after you were born.”

“How about before then?”

A shrug. “Once.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“No. She wasn’t even married yet.” He shifted in his seat, and his blue eyes flashed. “None of this is relevant to anything.”

It was, though. She knew it was, though she couldn’t see how or why.

“You remember her visit,” she said. “She must have made some sort of impression on you.”

“Not really.”

“Did you talk with her? Spend time with her?”

“Of course not. I was just a kid.”

“She was an attractive woman. Maybe you had a crush on her.”

“There was nothing… nothing like that.”

He seemed less sure of himself. Erin felt confident she was circling closer to the truth.

“Maureen looked like me in some ways,” she said tentatively. “Do I remind you of her?”

“No.”

“Does Annie?”

“No, goddammit.”

He was lying. She was certain of it.

“You did feel something for her,” Erin whispered, “didn’t you, Oliver?”

He shook his head without answering.

“And what you felt for Maureen-you feel it for us, too. For Annie and me.”

“No.”

“You look at us, and you think of her.”

“No.”

“You see Maureen in us. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t you, Oliver?”

“I… no, I… it’s not…” He averted his face from her. Tremors shook his body. “It isn’t… isn’t… oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.”

A change came over him then. His eyes widened in surprise, his gaze focusing inward, and Erin knew he was doing something rare and astonishing; he was looking inside himself, seeing the truth that had been long concealed from his conscious awareness.

And suddenly she was afraid. She had pushed him recklessly, almost forgetting the risk, carried away by the sheer exhilaration of an intellectual challenge.

Now she wondered how his new perspective on himself-whatever it might be-would upset his precarious equilibrium.

“My God,” he said again, numbly. “My God.”

“Oliver?”

“I never knew. I never even knew.”

“Oliver, talk to me.”

“All these years”-he spoke in a robot’s monotone-“and I never knew.”

His gaze shifted its focus. Suddenly he was looking at her. Seeing her with new eyes.

“You’ve been right all along, Doc.” He nodded slowly, mechanically. “And I’ve been deceiving myself. Afraid to face the truth. I’ve been blind. For years… for twenty years… so goddamned blind.”

“Oliver, I want to know how you’re feeling right now. I want to know-”

“Feeling?” A catch in his voice. “How I’m feeling?”

He stood, and once again she was aware of how big he was and how very dangerous. She drew back in her chair, scared now, heart pounding.

“I’ll show you how I feel,” he breathed, the words gathering force as he squeezed them through gritted teeth. “I’ll show you, you goddamned whore. I’ll show you! ”

He seized her by the shoulders, wrenched her upright, the pinch of his fingers painful and startling.

Her involuntary cry was stifled by his mouth on hers. A hot, searing pressure, mashing her lips, stifling breath, smothering her.

She stood rigid in his arms, every muscle locked against the instinctive impulse to twist free.

He broke away. Gasping, she stared at him, at the confusion of emotions shredding the smooth mask of his face-desire and revulsion, hatred and need.

“That’s how I feel,” he croaked. “How I feel. How I feel.”

For some unmeasurable stretch of time they watched each other, their gazes locked.

Then a ripple of muscle spasms danced lightly over his shoulders. His body jerked toward the door.

Slam, and she was alone.

She heard the rattle of the key, the softer jangle of the chain lock, the hasty retreat of his footsteps up the stairs.

Trembling, she waited, afraid of his return, until she heard the muffled growl of the van’s engine. She didn’t relax until the motor noise had faded into silence.

Then slowly she sank back into the chair, wiping her mouth with her hand, trying to erase the lingering residue of his kiss. Head lowered, she fought off vertiginous waves of nausea.

Going to rape her. Christ, she’d been sure he was going to rape her.

Unquestionably he was capable of it. With his psychosis, his violent tendencies, his background of parental abuse…

Parental abuse.

She blinked, then blinked again, and there it was, the puzzle’s final piece.

“Of course,” she murmured.

Oddly, she felt no surprise. She had known already. Known without knowing. Without wanting to know.

Her analysis of his psychology had approached the truth. But at its core it had been wrong. Utterly, devastatingly wrong.

She saw that now. And something else.

The next time he visited her, she would die.

His feelings for her, liberated now after years of ruthless repression, were too intense. They cut fatally close to the heart of his insanity. They would drive him inexorably to kill.

To kill her… and Annie, too.