Chaos

CHAPTER 46

TWO DAYS LATER, SATURDAY MORNING

FOR AN INSTANT I was Elisa Vandersteel sailing through empty space and landing on my back, remembering nothing. Except I came to in the emergency room. I’m not dead, not even close, and I sit up in bed to the sound of heavy rain.

It dully beats the slate roof and spatters the windows when the wind blasts, and Sock and Tesla are wedged warmly on either side of me. I hear their breathing, and then it’s drowned out by howling gusts that just now whistled and moaned, and water thrashes and drums in different intensities and tempos. The early morning sounds moody and wounded. Or maybe it’s me who feels like that.

The event at the Kennedy School night before last wasn’t canceled but postponed, and that not only was wise but unavoidable. One speaker was dead, the other in the hospital. Whatever the drone’s conductors came in contact with in addition to Carrie Grethen and her stiletto caused me to be thrown and knocked unconscious. I spent the next day and a half being tested, prodded, probed and scanned, finally coming home last night.

So I didn’t give my presentation to influential people, and here I am resting peacefully in bed with two dogs. I can’t think of anything much better than that. Janet and Desi have been kind and thoughtful about looking after me, and Dorothy is around somewhere. Benton and Lucy should be home any minute, having left the helicopter behind in D.C. because of the weather. We’ll have a wonderful brunch in a little while. I should get going, and I feel strangely lightweight as if someone turned down gravity.

It’s as if the reign of terror has been lifted with the dry spell, the heat wave, as if the balance of life has been restored, and I feel happy in a way I’ve not been in a long while. Carrie Grethen was badly sliced up and burned, her skull fractured by the mechanical monster of her own design. When she’s sufficiently recovered she’ll be held in isolation at the local state psychiatric hospital, in a maximum security forensic unit for the criminally insane. She can’t hurt anyone now, and her partner Theo Portison is in jail, neither going anywhere except to trial.

Meanwhile the police and FBI will continue their search for any other foot soldiers she may have recruited here or abroad. Lucy suspects Carrie can operate her drones remotely the same way military operators do. She could have had one docked in the Bethesda area and piloted it from South Florida to fly to Briggs’s house and kill him. After that Carrie boarded the plane in Fort Lauderdale and enjoyed her friendly flight with my sister. I can’t wait to hear what Dorothy has to say about that. Since I got shocked unconscious, I’ve not talked to her much.

I check my e-mail. My office is working overtime, and another note from Ernie confirms what we suspected, that the same panguite fingerprint we found in the Molly Hinders case was also present in the whitish linear burns on Elisa Vandersteel’s body. Both women were electrocuted by carbon nanotube conductors that were retracted by spools into a monster drone powered by capacitors and coated in a thermal protective paint that includes panguite. The weights at the ends of the conductors, what resemble sinkers, also contain panguite.

Benton says making a weapon out of something stolen from his powerful brother was Theo’s way of appropriating what he perceives as rightfully his. “Sort of like Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright,” my husband said, and he also believes that the murders in Cambridge were target practice, in a sense, except the selection of the women was emotionally driven by Theo’s tendency toward erotomania and sexual violence.

Based on further information Benton has gotten from the brother William, it would seem that Elisa was friendly with Theo and likely had no idea that he was obsessed with her. Apparently after he returned to Cambridge a year ago he suggested that she should come here and try to get her foot in the door as an actress. She could stay with him while she interned, and she did for several weeks, living in a back room and helping with cooking and other chores.

Then she met Chris Peabody and soon after moved in with him, in part to get away from Theo, who by all accounts she was fond of but found increasingly annoying and overbearing. She thought him peculiar but likely never imagined that he was spying on her, stalking her, becoming increasingly enraged when he saw her with the young man she’d met and was falling for.

It’s occurred to me that Theo may have been watching when Elisa rode her bicycle to the Faculty Club. I remember her kissing Chris Peabody on the sidewalk while Benton and I were there. It may very well be that Theo had been engaging in dry runs, practicing his drone maneuvers with her being none the wiser, and as she was riding through the park he may have decided to scare her. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. But he did.

He wouldn’t have shown up at the scene and taken the neckerchief or anything else from her body if he hadn’t intended to kill her. The blue paisley-printed bit of cloth was a souvenir. Maybe Theo would have taken other items had Anya and Enya not appeared, and I wonder how long he might have hidden in the bushes watching them. It wasn’t a deer that startled the twins. That’s not what they heard running away in the dark.

There’s much we’ll never know unless Theo tells all. Or maybe his many recordings will offer an explanation. Benton believes the former MIT professor had been following Elisa and Molly remotely with his airborne camera. If so, there should be graphic proof of his voyeurism, dry runs, his kills. We’ll get a peephole view into his violent sexual fantasies.

Benton and his colleagues will spend a lot of time going through boxes of carefully labeled audio-video storage devices. Apparently there are years and years of them inside Theo’s landfill of a house, and it’s a good thing he can’t resist his compulsions. That may seem strange to say since people are dead, but many more would be had he been more disciplined.

The plan very well may have been to have these airborne directed-energy weapons stationed all over the place, and eventually Carrie would have an army of her own human drones operating mechanical ones. We may not know what she had in mind, and I suspect Benton won’t find out no matter how much time he spends questioning her eventually.

Carrie isn’t going to talk. If she does, nothing will be truthful. Or even if it is, it won’t be helpful. Not to us.

I’M STARTLED AWAKE WHEN Tesla suddenly sits up and barks, and I realize I must have drifted back to sleep. I fluff pillows behind me to prop myself up, and I pet her head as she barks again and Sock barely stirs.

“Yes, I know you’ve learned a big dog trick but please be quiet.” I pet the small white bulldog with her brown-masked eyes as she barks and barks, her sides heaving in and out like bellows.

Woof-woof-woof-woof…!

“Okay, that’s enough. What is it you think you hear?” I throw back the covers, and she won’t stop.

I get up and pad barefoot to the curtained window across from the bed, and peeking out, I don’t see anything except the rain lashing and flooding the driveway two stories down. The wind howls again, and Tesla barks more frantically as our brindle greyhound Sock continues to snooze.

“All right. Shhhh.” I stroke Tesla gently, talking very soothingly, and it makes me feel better too. “It’s just a storm.” I rub her speckled ears, and the door to the bedroom opens.

“Rise and shine,” Dorothy sings out as she enters, and now I know why Tesla was barking.

It was my sister she was hearing, and Dorothy is wearing a large T-shirt and nothing else as she carries two coffees.

“Mind if I come in?” as she hands me a steaming mug and sits on the bed. “Hush Tesla. I can’t stand a yippy dog.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call her yippy. She sounds rather fierce.”

“Well it’s an irony, right? She’s named for a car that’s supposed to be quiet.”

“Actually it’s Lucy’s joke. For someone with the biggest carbon footprint on the planet? Now she can tell people she has a Tesla.”

“How do you feel? I’ve heard stories about people who get shocked almost to death or struck by lightning and suddenly they can play the piano or their IQ goes up ten points.”

“I’ll let you know. I’ve always wanted to play the piano.”

“Did you have unusual dreams?”

“Not yet.”

“Listen, Kay. I need to explain better what happened,” my sister starts to say, and I stop her.

“How is Desi doing?” I ask because all of us should worry about how traumatized he might be.

“I’m telling you!” Dorothy brags as if she had something to do with it. “What a trouper that boy is! He seems fine.”

“He’s had plenty of practice putting on the brave front, Dorothy. That doesn’t mean he’s fine.”

“You know? One of the things I’ve learned after writing how many children’s books?” She smiles at her rhetorical question. “Plenty, right? The point is, I know kids. And I’m always amazed at how we’re bothered by a lot of things that don’t bother them in the least.”

“Just because he’s not showing something doesn’t mean he’s not bothered. It will be good for Benton to talk to him when he and Lucy get home.”

“Look.” Dorothy sips her coffee. “That evil woman came up to me, and of course I did a double take because at first I thought she was Lucy.”

“Stop.”

“I was waiting at the gate, and she started talking to me, and what a coincidence our seats were next to each other-”

“Stop right there.” I hold up a hand, and shake my head.

“But I need to explain what happened. You need to let me-”

“So far you’ve not explained it at all,” I interrupt, “and we need to leave it that way, Dorothy.”

“But I just said-”

“You’ve explained nothing. Period. We can’t discuss what went on with you and Carrie at the airport, on the plane, or when she showed up here at the house after you invited her here and then let her in. Okay?”

“But I-”

“No.”

“It’s just that you must think I’m really stupid but it’s not like anyone ever told me about her-”

“I’m a witness in the case the same way you are. Now not another word. Thanks for the coffee. It tastes sweet. Did you put sugar in it?”

“Agave nectar, just the way you like it.”

“I don’t take sweetener.”

“Since when?”

“Since ever, Dorothy.” And I have to laugh because the more things supposedly change the more they don’t. “You were always the caretaker,” I tease.

“I’ve never been one of those,” she says sullenly, and she doesn’t seem to be such a good one for herself either.

My sister’s hair is too long and too blond, and whoever she’s paying a fortune to for aesthetic work ought to be locked up. Her unnaturally round cheeks crowd her eyes when she smiles, her lower jaw is too heavy, and she couldn’t frown if she tried, making it slightly more challenging to read her discontent and underlying chronic boredom.

“You have to understand this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” Dorothy’s over-enhanced breasts are on high alert, and it would suit me if her T-shirt were about ten inches longer.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever done?” I inquire. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“I helped catch someone. You’ve always been the crime buster, Kay. And I’m just this overblown pretty woman who’s doing the best she can to keep her shit together while I just get damn older all the time. I mean look at me. No matter what I do.”

I start to tell her to cut out the tanning booths. Her skin looks spray-painted tan, but I don’t go there. She doesn’t need my criticism, and maybe I’m not the only one who’s pathologically insecure but doesn’t show it most of the time.

“I’ll tell you what’s missing.” I set down my coffee on the bedside table. “If you go into the closet and open the first cabinet on the left, you’ll find something special I keep down here for rainy mornings just like this one.”

“A joint would be nice,” she says.

“A very nice Irish whiskey,” I reply. “Go on in there and pour us two shots. Then we’ll talk as long as you don’t ask me anything you shouldn’t.”

I watch my sister walk into the big cedar-lined closet, and I hear her going into the cabinet and pulling the cork out of the bottle.

“We should get Mom on the phone this morning. Both of us,” I say as Dorothy returns.

“Not unless she puts her hearing aids in. I’m tired of yelling.” She sets the shot of whiskey by my coffee. “You’re never around. In fact you never have been ever since you left for college. So I’ve been on my own with her. And now I’m the one she picks on.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“The book business not being what it was? Kids don’t want to read what I write, not this day and age.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I mean let’s face it. I’m not going to be invited to Comic Con.” My sister looks rather crushed.

“Never say never.” I taste the whiskey and it’s warm going down, warmer than the hot coffee but in a different way. “We spend our lives reinventing ourselves, Dorothy. I never knew that until I got a little older and wiser.”

“Well our mother’s decided I’m the failed one. It used to be you because of your divorce and no kids, and then you decided to be a doctor to dead people so you don’t have to worry about losing patients, about them dying on you.”

“I’m sure that’s what mother says.” I reach for my coffee.

“That and getting involved with a married man.”

“Mom has to say we’ve failed because she feels she has,” I reply. “She never had a chance to do any of the things we can, and maybe she questions what her purpose on this earth has been. If so, that’s not a good way to feel when you’re almost eighty years old.”

“Well look.” Dorothy throws back the whiskey as if she needs courage, which she doesn’t. “We’re the only sisters we’ve got, right? So we’re in this together, and mainly I wanted to make sure you’re okay with Pete and me.”

“I don’t really know much about Pete and you,” I reply as I feel indignant inside when I have no right to feel that.

“It’s the real thing, and one favor you could do me is make it sound like I did something helpful at least in catching that monster. What’s her name? Carrie Gretchen.”

“Grethen. And you were helpful,” I reply, and it’s true but not the way my sister would have intended.

She was helpful because she single-handedly brought Carrie to my door. It was Dorothy who began answering Facebook postings from someone who claimed to be a childhood friend from our early days in Miami. My sister bought into Carrie’s traps hook, line and sinker, and began a correspondence that supplied more information to Carrie than she already had.

Dorothy happily volunteered nasty nicknames, and that my father had recorded a radio commercial for his small grocery store. Carrie must have gotten her hands on it or maybe Theo Portison did. There’s nothing good to come of my rubbing it in that Dorothy engaged in a long conversation with a perfect stranger on a flight, and then invited this person to my house and almost got all of us killed and Desi abducted. Dorothy is no match for Carrie’s machinations.

But then none of us really are or it wouldn’t have taken this many years and destroyed lives to catch her.