Chaos

CHAPTER 27

CRIMINALLY INSANE, DEEMED MENTALLY unfit to stand trial, Carrie was warehoused on Wards Island in the middle of the East River, and it was a catastrophic mistake.

I don’t know why it surprised anyone when she escaped. Benton had predicted as much, and he said that the miscreant who airlifted her to freedom, Newton Joyce, wasn’t the first or last Clyde to her Bonnie. As a child, Joyce was horrifically disfigured in a fire. After his death, police searched his house and found a freezer full of his victims’ faces. Carrie had encouraged him to keep the souvenirs. They probably were her idea.

I’m sure there were other partners after him, who knows how many before she exploited and had her fill of Troy Rosado. Carrie has a pattern of partnering with people she’s convinced she can control, usually fatally flawed males like Troy, like Joyce, and before them Temple Gault, who Carrie worshipped and couldn’t dominate.

A rare breed of glorious monster, Gault was a self-indulgent flamboyant Caligula, only he also was disciplined and supremely competent. Slight and limber, he was lithe and as lethal as a razor-tipped whip. He could strike as fast as a cobra, slicing open a throat or kickboxing the person to death, and he had a fetish for biting. As I walk through the heavy hot air I see his light blond hair, his blue eyes wide and staring like Andy Warhol’s.

I’ve hardly thought about Temple Gault in years, and it’s as if he’s suddenly all around me. For an uncanny instant I feel his evil presence in the stagnant night, and I’m grateful he and Newton Joyce are gone for good. Dead. Unfortunately Carrie isn’t, and I envision her dyed black hair and baseball cap, her unnaturally pale skin that she obsessively protects from ultraviolet light and toxins. This was what she looked like about a year ago, at any rate, and we have no idea about her appearance now. It could be anything.

But I would know those eyes, eerily blue like cobalt radiation, as if the decay of her very core emits a sapphire glow that darkens with her worsening moods, deepening to an angry purple like a damselfish when it turns aggressive. Carrie once was physically exquisite, born with exceptionally beautiful attributes and a stellar intellect. Her splendor was part of her curse.

The rest of it was her deranged religious freak of a mother who was pathologically jealous with a plethora of personality disorders and delusional ideations. Carrie had no siblings that would survive. After her birth, her mother miscarried twice. The brother born on the third try died soon after the father went to prison, and I remember looking up the autopsy records and lab reports when I was the chief in Virginia.

I remember thinking that a lot of mysterious deaths like eleven-month-old Tailor Grethen’s were signed out as sudden infant death syndrome or SIDS when maybe they shouldn’t be. I remember wondering how he really died as I imagined little angelic-looking Carrie doing something undetectable to her precious baby brother. Wedging his head between the mattress and the side of the crib. Positioning him in a way that ensured he couldn’t breathe. Smothering him. To quote Benton quoting Gilbert O’Sullivan:

Alone again, naturally.

Carrie would remain an only child in a blighted universe all by herself. Homeschooled, she had no classmates, friends or ordinary activities. She didn’t go to the movies, take music lessons, play sports or read for pleasure. The only television programs she was allowed to watch were fundamentalist religious ones about Jesus and judgment, about who’s saved and who isn’t. The Jim and Tammy Show. The 700 Club. Jerry Falwell. She listened to TV preachers threaten eternal damnation and other hellfire scares, and by the time she was six, Carrie knew all about sin.

Her mother made sure of it. Benton believes she not only didn’t stop her daughter from being sexually abused, it was the mother’s idea. She egged it on, enticing a host of men with her pretty child as a party favor. Carrie was lagniappe, a little something extra that her mother freely offered and would severely punish her for afterward. Carrie was forced to beg for forgiveness, to forsake her evil ways and perform degrading acts of penance after every battery and rape.

Her superior mental discipline and ability to dissociate have made her a supremely successful psychopath, possibly the most successful one he’s ever encountered, says Benton, who has studied and pursued her much of his career. She can transport herself mentally, detaching herself so completely that she doesn’t feel stress or pain, and she knows how to wait. Carrie will delay gratification for decades if the reward is worth it, and lying and truth are different sides of the same reality to her. She could say the world is flat, the moon made of cheese, and she’d pass a polygraph.

Emotions such as fear, remorse and sorrow are colors missing from her palette, and it was Lucy’s bad luck that this perfect storm of a malicious human being would be her supervisor at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility. My innocent and immature niece literally was assigned to Carrie during the college internship I personally arranged, using my influence and connections. Lucy wasn’t much more than a child at the time.

She never really had a chance to fall in love with the right person, and maybe she would have if I’d not had the bright idea of sending her to the FBI Academy. If only she’d never stepped foot in Quantico, Virginia. Maybe her first significant relationship wouldn’t have been with someone who seduced her, stole her heart and in some ways her very identity and soul. Maybe Lucy would have felt differently about Janet long ago and also now. I wouldn’t want to be Janet.

I wouldn’t want to be the one who comforted Lucy after Carrie came close to destroying all of us. It’s not a level playing field. It never has been, and Janet’s smart enough to realize there are but a few degrees of separation between murderous hate and erotic love. They are different extremes of the same raging passion, and she evokes neither in Lucy.

Janet is somewhere between the best and the worst of everything when it comes to life with my niece, and I constantly feel bad about it even as I say nothing. It’s not my business. But I worry I’m to blame. Maybe Lucy would have been better off had I not tried to do so much for her, had I not insisted on rescuing her from powerlessness, from loss and every other perceived bogeyman that plagued my childhood.

Maybe Dorothy is right when she says that I’m the one who’s done the real damage to a niece I couldn’t love more were she my own daughter. The irony is that Dorothy doesn’t know about the worst mistake I made. She doesn’t know about Carrie Grethen. My sister could be sitting next to her on the plane and not know who she is or why it matters.

Heading toward the big boxy tent silhouetted against the night, I realized how unsettled I am by Lucy showing up and giving shape and form to her worst fears. I resent walking around in the dark with Carrie on my mind, and I feel myself begin to resist her as I’ve done countless times.

“How are we holding up?” I say to one of the uniformed cops as my sweat-soaked Tyvek-covered feet quietly crunch past on the unpaved path that stretches ahead of me.

“Hanging in.”

“Stay cool,” I say to another officer.

“You too, Chief.”

“If anybody needs any water, let us know,” I offer the next one I encounter.

“Hey, Doc? We got any idea yet what happened to her?”

“That’s where I’m headed,” I reply, and I have a similar exchange with all of them.

There are at least twice as many uniformed officers stationed about, and I have no doubt that Marino’s made sure the park is surrounded and buttoned up. No one uninvited can come in and out, and I find myself constantly listening for news helicopters, grateful I’m not hearing them yet. I don’t need them hovering low and churning up the scene with their rotor wash.

I reach the tent and for the second time tonight am startled by a figure stepping out of the shadows.

“Marino’s inside waiting for you,” Investigator Barclay says officiously as if I’ve just shown up late for an appointment.

VELCRO RIPS AS I push my way through the side flap of the canopied enclosure. For an instant I’m dazzled by auxiliary lights, the scene as bright as an operating room. I stop just inside, setting down my shoulder bag, placing my phone on top of it.

I survey some forty-by-thirty feet of the John F. Kennedy Park that includes the iron lamp with its shattered bulbs, the bicycle and the body, all of it lit up like high noon. Marino and I are alone, no one else allowed inside until we say so. He moves about in white protective clothing that starkly contrasts with the black-paneled walls and twelve-foot-high black roof supported by a scaffolding of gunpowder-gray aluminum poles.

As I watch him make notes and take photographs I feel as if we’re immersed in a black-and-white postmodern photograph. The only noticeable colors are the margins of green grass, the tawny fitness path, red biohazard warnings, and the dead woman’s light blue shorts. From where I’m standing I can’t see the blood but it will be coagulated, tacky and a dark reddish brown on the way to dry black.

That’s based on what I noticed earlier when I got close, and also on the weather conditions, which remain extreme. Already I can feel the trapped humidity from the river. The hot air is sticky and low pressure like a tennis bubble. There’s a plastic smell, and it won’t be long until the stuffy environment bristles with a foul stench as bacteria teem and dead flesh and fluids putrefy.

“I went through the knapsacks,” Marino calls out to me, and I assume he’s talking about Enya and Anya.

“Are the girls safe and cool in a daisy room, I hope?” I find an equipment case to sit on so I can suit up.

“Eating snacks, drinking sodas. Flanders is babysitting, and I’ve got a couple uniforms making a wellness check on the mom.” Marino’s booming voice is amplified by the enclosure.

“She’s still not answering the phone?”

“Or the door. Poor kids. I feel bad for them.”

“And they’re still saying she’s supposed to be home?”

“Asleep in bed when they left the house, and I have a feeling I know what that means. Dead drunk, how much you want to bet?” Marino says. “I’m going to have to get DCF involved because it’s obvious there’s a problem.”

The Department of Children and Families is the agency in Massachusetts responsible for neglected and abused kids. I tell Marino that no matter what happens in this case, he should make certain the twins are safe. It would seem they don’t have adequate adult supervision. The way they’re headed they’re going to end up hurt or worse, and I don’t think they understand the different kinds of trouble they can get into.

“Like stealing. Like tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice,” Marino agrees. “Call it what you want? That’s what it is when you pick up something that’s not yours at a scene and decide to keep it. And guess what?” He hunches his shoulder to wipe sweat off his chin. “It turns out they were in possession of the dead lady’s sunglasses. Which is too freakin’ bad because I would have liked to see where they found them. How close to the bike or the helmet, that sort of thing?”

He lowers the camera and heads toward me as I begin pulling off the shoe covers I wore walking here.

“Do I dare ask what else was in their knapsacks?” When children stumble upon a violent scene it’s bad for every reason imaginable.

“Leftovers from dinner,” Marino says as he reaches me. “Bread wrapped in napkins, little packets of stuff like Parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes, salt, salad dressing.” His big face is framed in white Tyvek like a nun in a habit, his cheeks bulging and a sweaty deep red.

“Sounds like they’re not being properly fed.” I look up at him from where I sit. “But you’re not really going to know until you get inside their house. Are you okay, Marino? I’m worried you’re very hot.”

“Well they don’t exactly look like they’re starving. Yeah I’m hot. This sucks.”

“One can be overweight and malnourished,” I remind him. “In fact that’s often the case, especially if the diet is mostly sugar and fast food. And left to their own devices, that’s what kids will eat morning, noon and night.”

“It appears they were telling the truth about having pizza for dinner and why they were out wandering around,” he says. “I get the feeling they do this sort of thing a lot in all kinds of weather, probably because you’re exactly right. Their mother’s not taking care of them.”

“It may be that she’s never taken care of them, including when she was pregnant.” I suggest that the twins may be suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.

“That would explain why between the two of them they couldn’t light up a ten-watt bulb,” Marino says. “They’re street-smart but that’s about it. And it’s shitty. Little kids shouldn’t have to be street-smart.”

“The sunglasses they picked up,” I go back to that. “What do they look like?”

“Maui Jims, sporty ones.”

“Rimless with amber lenses?” I inquire as I get a sinking feeling again.

“Yeah,” he says. “They were near the body, according to Enya. The lenses are dusty and scratched real bad, and I’m thinking the victim may have been wearing them when she was attacked. Assuming they weren’t already damaged.”

“We need to be careful about saying she was attacked.” I don’t like it when he makes me feel like a scold.

“When you saw the lady riding her bike earlier did you notice if her sunglasses were damaged?”

“I didn’t notice, assuming that’s for sure who this is.”

“I think we know.” He pulls off his gloves and tosses them into the nearby biohazard trash bag hanging on a metal stand. “It’s hard to imagine we’re talking about two different women who look similar, are about the same age, and both had on Converse sneakers and a Sara Bareilles concert T-shirt. And maybe the same type of sunglasses. And they appeared in the same part of Cambridge at the same time.”

“Even if they’re the same person that doesn’t mean we know who she is.” I’ll continue reminding him to be conservative even if he doesn’t listen.

“And the other thing the girls had squirreled away?” He picks up a roll of paper towels, tearing off several squares to wipe his face. “A pendant. A gold skull about the size of a quarter, like from a necklace. I’m thinking it came from the broken gold chain.”

“Where was it found?”

“They said on the path near the bike. Based on where they showed me, I’m thinking it was in the general area where the pieces of chain were.” He tosses the wadded paper towels into the bright red trash bag next, and I follow them with my used shoe covers.

“The woman I encountered earlier was wearing an unusual necklace shaped like a skull. It was gold and looked fairly substantial, not flat like a medallion but rounded with contours,” I inform him. “I noticed her flip it around to her back, tucking it into the back of her shirt when she rode across Quincy Street, heading into the Yard.”

“It’s gotta be her, and I’m not liking that you saw her twice right before she got whacked. I keep worrying that she’s got some connection to you, Doc.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be,” I reply. “I don’t believe I’d ever seen her before today.”

Then I tell him about my Internet searches for Elisa Vandersteel. I couldn’t find her in London or anywhere.