Deceived

12

That night, when Loretta called in tears, claiming there was a man watching her from the yard, I was at the computer in my Uncle Jake’s office, a two-room CBS that adjoins a strip mall off Pondella Road. Lots of traffic and neon glare; cars with subwoofers that rattle the windows. For the last three years, I’d been living here alone and had done my best to convert the place into a homey apartment, even though I knew it would never feel like home.

Loretta called around ten. I had finished my charter at seven and arrived at the office thirty minutes later. My routine when entering the place seldom varied. I locked the door behind me and put the teakettle on while I showered. Changed into jeans and a clean blouse, then settled myself at the desk to work. Tonight, my routine changed slightly because the first thing I did was check e-mails-but still no word from Ford. More disappointing was that the two cheerful notes I’d sent him hadn’t been opened, possibly not even received in the remote Venezuelan village where he’d said he would be working.

“Shit!” Birdy Tupplemeyer’s affection for profanity was rubbing off on me because that was my reaction. I got up, rechecked the door lock, then fussed with the heavy curtains that shielded me from outside noise and the eyes of loiterers in the parking lot next door.

Stop fretting, I told myself, and returned to the computer, carrying a mug of mango tea. Joel Ransler had postponed our charter to investigate what he said was a murder scene. It didn’t take me long to find the few facts available. An eighty-two-year-old man, Clayton Edwards, had died of “multiple wounds” in a Sematee County mobile home park and his trailer had been ransacked. Murder-robbery was suspected.

The name Edwards is mentioned often in Florida history, so I spent another fifteen minutes searching for more information, then gave up. I had a lot to do: Fisherfolk Inc., the nonprofit organization based in Carnicero, had to have a founder, possibly even a board. What were their names? There were newspaper articles I needed to read about the Dwight Helms murder, and I also wanted to confirm what Birdy had told me about the Candors.

What kind of psychiatric research had Dr. Alice Candor conducted? Birdy hadn’t had time at the sheriff’s department to find out, or it was possible that medical journals were kept locked to all but subscribers. I also wanted to run a background check on Joel Ransler, who had confirmed by text he was meeting me at the dock in the morning. Everything about the man seemed genuine and likable, so why did I distrust him? No… that wasn’t fair. Truth was, I didn’t want to trust him because… why? Was it because I found Ransler attractive, was flattered by his interest, even though I was already in love with a good man?

Nothing wrong with that, my conscience insisted. Finish with the computer, then go to bed. You won’t have to sleep in an office much longer.

It was never easy for me to be alone in this building at night. Living next to a strip mall was like waiting for a traffic light to change or for a bus to arrive-some sudden transitional signal that would thrust me forward into my future. Finally, it was happening. The beautiful little Marlow cruising boat would soon be my home, which is why most of my things were already packed in boxes. The office was becoming an office again, but that didn’t change the emptiness I felt as I sat alone, trying to ignore the headlights and rumble of passing cars, the voices of faceless strangers who parked outside to use the fitness center or to buy beer at the Shop N Go.

Soon, the search engines, which debit our agency monthly, began to produce information I could not have found on my laptop, and the noise outside was silenced. One by one, I created folders labeled Fisherfolk, Candors, and Helms Murder, then dragged files into them as they appeared. I wanted to arrange the files chronologically before I began my reading. Because I dreaded what I might discover about the murder of Dwight Helms, I also wanted to save it for last.

I opened the Candor file first, even before the search engines had completed their work. Everything Birdy told me about the couple was true, but her words hadn’t had the impact of seeing the mug shots of Dr. Alice Candor and her husband glowering at me from clippings in the Toledo Blade and Cleveland Plain Dealer. The charges made against their company, Firelands Physicians Regional Health Care, had made headlines. Something Birdy hadn’t mentioned was their company had also managed rehab clinics for the state penal system. It was a lucrative contract that had been canceled when six inmate patients followed through on a suicide pact that, supposedly, didn’t include a note explaining why they’d killed themselves. During the scandal that followed, letters to the editor about the Candors were so venomous, it was no wonder they had fled to Florida-a state where the best of people, and the worst, come to reinvent their lives.

Raymond-I now knew the husband’s name. I had seen him from a distance and hadn’t noticed his graying mustache or his pale, nervous eyes. A dog that fears his master’s voice and hand-the expression on the husband’s face was similar. Alice Candor’s credentials-degrees from Oberlin, Ohio State, and Johns Hopkins-suggested that she, the overachiever, was the dominant of the two. She had done research at a psychiatric hospital prior to going into private practice, then chairing Firelands Health Care, but had published in only two journals. As feared, access to both was restricted, then further restricted when I attempted to subscribe: licensed physicians, medical students, and authorized clinicians only.

Even so, I found an abstract of Dr. Candor’s first research paper, which produced a familiar chill because it suggested the doctor had done research using prison inmates as subjects:

Effects of Benzedrine on Violent Habitual Offenders Unresponsive to Standard Protocols

A two-year study that suggests clinicians can assert surrogate influence on habitually violent and criminal behavior after administering Benzedrine in dosages that avoid addiction (but exceed the accepted maximum) via media that manipulate the subject’s frontal lobes.

In high school, I got A’s in physiology and chemistry but now couldn’t remember what Benzedrine was for or remember the role our frontal lobe plays in the human brain. I knew what assert surrogate influence and manipulate meant, though, and it scared me. In this case, the assertive surrogate was Alice Candor. How she had manipulated the brains of her inmate patients, the abstract didn’t say, but she’d readied them by administering a drug in large dosages. Could assertive influence also be translated as control? Was that why six prison inmates had committed suicide?

I looked up Human brain, frontal lobes and found too much to digest in one night. Basically, the frontal lobe is two sections of brain that presses against our foreheads. Combined, they are responsible for our behavior, our ability to learn, and all of our voluntary movements.

Voluntary movements-I wondered if the distinction was significant. To a man or woman in prison, I had no doubt that it was.

As I puzzled over the wording, my phone buzzed, which caused me to jump. I stood, checked the time-9:20 p.m.-then opened a text from Birdy Tupplemeyer, which read Just leaving. Place closest me no luck. Can’t call now. How long U up?

Using two fast thumbs, I replied, Late as you want, get out of there, be careful! because her note could only mean one thing: she had gone alone to a dump site near her condo in South Fort Myers, one of the places we’d discussed earlier. It was a county landfill that was gated and guarded after hours but a common destination for trucks loaded with raw earth to unload.

“Crazy woman,” I muttered but had to smile. I often meet people who talk bravely about their intentions, but Birdy, by god, was a doer, not just a talker. My respect for her had just climbed several notches.

As an afterthought, I sent a second text: Don’t go alone again! Mean it! And I did. I had agreed to help the redhead, why hadn’t she waited for another night? I walked around the office, expecting a response that didn’t come. After five minutes had passed, I was worried enough to consider sending a third text, but decided Tupplemeyer-a cop-didn’t need a babysitter, so I went to the bathroom, used the toilet, and washed my face to collect myself.

Assert surrogate influence. I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. Levi Thurloe, a huge man with a child’s brain, was working for the Candors. Had Alice, the research psychiatrist, been giving Levi drugs and then… what? Issuing hypnotic commands? Whispering into his ear during lunch breaks, then sending him out to intimidate people she considered to be enemies? Or even ordering them killed with an axe? It sounded like ridiculous science fiction. But the couple now owned several small Florida clinics, according to Birdy. Dr. Alice was still licensed to practice, she had worked with violent criminals in the past, and the woman still had access to lord knows what types of drugs. Maybe the scenario wasn’t so silly after all.

Enough with the Candors! Finish up and get to bed!

I returned to the computer but couldn’t make myself sit in the chair. The three new folders were the same size, but the label Helms Murder seemed to leap off the screen at me, so I took another thoughtful lap around the room, pausing at the door to the storage closet. My Uncle Jake hadn’t been a tidy man, so, after his death, it had taken me two weeks to sort through his personal files and belongings, which I had stored inside on shelves. Only yesterday I had unlocked this door, then traced my memory of Hoppe’s Gun Oil to Jake’s holster-an oddity that didn’t mesh with my knowledge of the bookish Dr. Marion Ford.

I stood there for a moment, telling myself my fears were imaginary, but unlocked the door and flicked on the light anyway. Two single overhead bulbs showed stacks of boxes and plastic containers, all labeled. There was also a gun safe bolted to the back wall, the inexpensive type made of sheet metal, painted brown. My fears might be imaginary, but the man who had chased me with an axe had been as real as real can be. It seemed reasonable to protect myself if it ever happened again.

I got the key to the gun safe and opened it. Jake’s empty shoulder holster was on the shelf above his old Mossberg shotgun and a.22 rifle, the first weapon I’d learned to shoot. I feel no warmth for firearms-who would?-but the memory of the days I’d spent with my sweet uncle, hiking the Everglades as a girl, created a brief nostalgia in me. But that vanished when I reached behind the holster and pulled out what appeared to be a large leather-bound book. It was the size of a family Bible and heavy; the holster made the pleasant sound of creaking leather when I looped it over my shoulder. There was a box of 9mm ammunition on the shelf, and I took that, too. I carried all three items to the desk, returned to lock the gun safe and the closet, then sat at the computer, my attention focused on the book.

NEGOTIATORS. The title was embossed in gold on the cover. A place marker made of red ribbon added to the illusion that this was just an old book. It wasn’t. I flipped open the cover. Inside, nested in black velvet, was a small, stainless semiauto pistol, its transparent handgrip showing it contained no magazine. That didn’t prove the chamber was empty, but I found myself reluctant when I reached to check. Months ago, this pistol had saved my life, yet the sight of it now caused a feeling of revulsion inside me-revulsion not for the pistol but for events associated with it. Joel Ransler had dropped a couple of hints, but Birdy Tupplemeyer hadn’t mentioned reading about the man I’d shot and wounded, although she surely knew-a courtesy I appreciated because even though the man had brutalized other women and would have probably killed me, shooting him wasn’t something I was proud of. I had blocked the details from that awful day, but now here I was, reaching for the same pistol again, a box of 9mm hollow-points nearby, ready to be loaded and do the job they were designed to do, which was kill.

I withdrew my hand and thought about it. Did I really want to carry a gun?

No… I did not. I had enjoyed target shooting as a girl, but putting a bullet through the hip of a human being, then witnessing my attacker’s rage and pain, had replaced my naïve notions with the ugly reality that a bullet scars from both ends. Never again did I want to shoot another human being, so why carry a gun?

I closed the cover of the phony book, pushed it aside, and positioned the computer screen closer. To prove my resolve, I opened the folder I most dreaded and found fifteen documents related to the murder of Dwight Helms. The most repellent had been labeled by the Sematee County Sheriff’s Department Homicide; Helms, D. W., Crime Scene Photos, followed by the date and the status, which was Active. In my current mood, it seemed required that I start there and I did.

It was a multiple PDF file. When I clicked it, sheets of thumbnail images appeared, then opened in such rapid-fire succession that I could only sit there dazed as the photographs stacked themselves on the screen. Old black-and-white shots that had been scanned into the system, each so graphic that my constant wincing soon mimicked the rhythm of a punching bag. The body of Dwight Helms had been found at night. Flashbulbs added a glossiness to the photos, turning pools of blood to silver, casting shadows that magnified each small, grisly detail.

Finally, I regained control of my eyes and managed to turn away. I stood, took a deep breath to stem my queasiness, then started toward the bathroom just in case. That’s when the phone rang. It would have been a relief to hear the voice of Birdy Tupplemeyer, so I grabbed for it but heard Loretta’s panicked voice instead.

“I called nine-one-one, but he’s still out there and I’m scared!” she began, then told me she’d seen a man outside, his shadow in the moonlight, moving from window to window.

I asked just enough questions to convince myself my mother wasn’t stoned or dreaming, and that she really had called police, before saying, “Make sure the doors are locked, I’m on my way.”

In a rush, I shut down the computer and threw a few things in a bag. At the door, though, I hesitated, my hand on the light switch, while I stared at the leather-bound book on the desk.

NEGOTIATORS.

Such a strange title for a box that contained a deadly weapon-a pistol that had already saved my life once and might save me again if a man armed with an axe was on our property. If the crime scene photos hadn’t been so fresh in my mind, I probably wouldn’t have reconsidered, but I did because of the terrible way Dwight Helms had died.

As I drove toward Sulfur Well, the book was on the seat next to me but slightly heavier. Along with the pistol, it now contained a loaded magazine.