Mortal Faults

16

“You killed your children,” Abby said slowly.

Andrea faced her. “I did.”

“Why?”

“If I could answer that…” She broke eye contact, turning away. “I’ve spent twenty years trying to understand why. The psychiatrists worked on me. I think they enjoyed it. I was a challenge. But they never figured me out. The media people all had their theories, too. There was a book-I didn’t read it. A book about me that was supposed to explain it all. But how could a book explain it when even I didn’t know?”

Abby watched her, trying to imagine Andrea Lowry as a younger woman, a mother of small children. “You said you were famous.”

Andrea released an incongruous little laugh. “I suppose infamous would be the right word. They called me Medea. That was the nickname they came up with, the newspaper people. You know, the woman in Greek mythology. Her husband betrayed her with another woman, so Medea killed their children. Killed them just for spite. Then she escaped in a chariot drawn by flying dragons.” She gazed moodily toward the curtained window. “Medea was luckier than I’ve been. I’ve never escaped.”

“What happened to you after-after you…?”

“I shot myself.” She said it simply, without emotion. “Put a bullet in my head. Or tried to, anyway. I actually grazed my skull just behind the ear-this ear.” She pulled back a tuft of hair to expose a scar. “I would have bled to death, except the neighbors heard the gunshots and called nine-one-one. The police got me into surgery. The surgeon saved my life.” She replaced the spill of hair with an unsteady hand. “I wish he hadn’t. I should have died then.”

The story was moving too fast. Abby wanted to slow it down. “Where did you get the gun you used?”

“I bought it when I first moved to California. Even back then, everyone talked about crime. I was brought up in a small town in Oregon where people kept their doors unlocked. So I was scared. I never thought-never thought I would turn out to be the criminal, myself.”

“Okay,” Abby said softly. “So, once you recovered from surgery

…?”

“The psychiatrists started in on me. Trying to get me to remember. I didn’t, you see. Didn’t remember any of it. That evening was a total blank. Amnesia, the product of posttraumatic stress-that’s how they diagnosed it. Would have been simpler to say there are some things a person just can’t stand to face. Are you thirsty?”

The unexpected question caught Abby up short. “I’m okay.”

“Well, I’m thirsty. I haven’t talked so much a long time.”

She went into the kitchen, and Abby followed, waiting while Andrea poured herself a tall glass of lemonade. The kitchen was dark and windowless. There was no sunlight in this house, and Abby now knew why.

“Anyway,” Andrea said after a long swallow, “they said I’d had a psychotic break. I’d been in a fugue state. I hadn’t known what I was doing. Temporary insanity. Which was true, of course. It had to be true. No rational person would have done what I did. No one who was not insane…”

She took another gulp of lemonade. Ice clinked in the glass. Her hand was shaking.

“But I wonder, does that absolve me of guilt? If I wasn’t myself when I did it, does that mean I’m not responsible? And if I’m not, who is? Someone must be-or something. A sin of that magnitude must have a cause. And the cause must be me or something inside me, something hidden that came into the light just that one time…”

“A demon,” Abby said, understanding.

Andrea nodded, her eyes dark and sad. “We fool ourselves by thinking we’re in control of our actions. Then something like this happens, and we realize we’ve never had control. There are only urges and impulses that move us, like-like currents under the sea, like a riptide, an undertow, and they drag us where we never meant to go.”

Abby was beginning to wish she’d asked for some lemonade. Her mouth was dry. “Were you put on trial?”

Andrea answered with a shake of her head. “I was ruled incompetent. Remanded to the custody of a mental institution. I stayed there for twelve years.” She let those words settle in the air like a sentence of doom. “And they worked with me. They got me to remember. They brought back the memory of what I did that night. Thanks to them, I can relive it whenever I like. That’s what twelve years of treatment brought me. A memory I never wanted.”

“Unless you remember,” Abby said, “you can never move past it.”

Andrea’s tongue clucked. “You sound just like them. You could be a psychiatrist yourself.”

“I earned a degree in that field. Never got licensed, though.”

“Apparently you don’t believe in licenses.”

“I’m a free spirit.”

“Yes, I think you are. I sensed that about you when we met. It made me envy you. I may have been a free spirit once. I can’t recall. It was so long ago.” She looked away. “It’s a lie, anyhow-what you said.”

“What’s a lie?”

“That by remembering, I can move past it. I can never move past it. Remembering only etches the pain deeper. It doesn’t resolve anything. It doesn’t bring closure.” Her tone was hollow. “There can never be closure.”

“How about forgiveness?”

“Never that, either.”

Abby touched Andrea’s arm, a light touch, the outreach of one human being to another. “People do things in a state of psychosis that have nothing to do with their moral values or their character.”

Andrea didn’t withdraw from the touch, but neither did she seem comforted by it. “So I shouldn’t blame myself? But I took out the gun. I loaded it. I pulled the trigger. So who gets the blame? The demon who possessed me-that’s what I’d like to think. But that demon was part of me, was in me.” Now she pulled free of Abby’s hand. “And somewhere it still is.”

“The doctors must have felt otherwise, or they wouldn’t have released you.”

Her shoulders lifted listlessly. “They said I was no longer a danger to myself or others. They let me go. I spent six months in a halfway house. Then I was on my own. I didn’t want to be anywhere near California. So I moved to Florida. It was about as far away as I could get. I rented a cheap place, and did some entry-level jobs. It was all right. I was almost happy at times. I would walk on the beach in the evening and feel… almost whole.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t stay there.”

Andrea looked at her. “So am I, really. I don’t understand it, myself. But last year I started to feel… started to feel I had to come back. Had to be in California again. I don’t know why. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing but memories… bad memories…”

“So here you are.”

“Yes. Here I am. My parents died years ago. They left enough money for me to buy this house and pay my bills without working anymore, as long as I didn’t indulge in any extravagances. Of course, I had no desire to indulge myself. I only wanted to be left alone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“And have you been? Left alone, I mean.”

“Not at first. When I was in the halfway house, they would still come after me-the newspaper people, the magazine people, the TV people. They wouldn’t let me be. Most of the public had forgotten by then, but those people would never forget. To them I was an open sore, and all they could do was scratch and make me bleed.”

“That’s why you changed your name.”

Andrea smiled a little, in acknowledgment of this small victory, this successful deception. “Yes. I found a way. It was illegal, but

… well, I suppose you know all about that kind of thing. The name you gave me was an alias. You probably have documents to back it up, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So do I. By the time I moved to Florida, I was Andrea Lowry. No one tracked me down. No one recognized me. It was… wonderful.”

“One more reason to stay in the Sunshine State.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But something drew me back. Still, I've kept a low profile. No one has intruded on me or questioned my past. I did worry that the absence of any credit history would prevent me from buying this house, but I was paying cash out of the inheritance, so the seller didn't care.”

“They wouldn't have cared, anyway,” Abby said. “A blank credit history simply means you have no record of defaults. There are no red flags. That's all they ever look for.”

“I knew you'd be an expert on it. How many identities do you have?”

Abby had actually lost count. “I’ve used a few,” she answered vaguely.

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Changing your identity. Becoming someone else.”

“I guess I do.” Oddly, she’d never thought about it before.

Andrea seemed unsurprised. “I thought I would enjoy it. I thought-this is how naive I was-I thought it would make me free. Of course it didn't.”

“But the reporters couldn't find you.”

“True, I was free of them. But that wasn’t freedom. I was still the same person, only with a different name. I had the same memories, the same bad dreams-and the same good dreams, which were worse than nightmares, because they would never last, and I would wake up, and the children wouldn’t be there after all, and it wasn’t their hair I was smelling, only my pillow…”

Abby almost reached out again, but stopped herself, knowing the gesture would be rejected. “You may not believe me,” she said, “but I think you’ve suffered enough. There’s a statute of limitations on any kind of pain, any kind of guilt.”

Andrea’s eyes were empty. “Not this kind.”

Scaling the old lady’s fence was no problem. There was no dog in the backyard and no indication of a security system protecting the property.

Dylan tracked down the junction box on the rear wall of the house. The phone cable, dropping down from a utility pole in the alley, was heavy and tough to cut, which was why normally he would pry open the box to work on the wiring inside. In this case he didn’t have to. A pair of red and green telco wires extended out of the bottom of the box and snaked through the siding on the wall. Sloppy, leaving them exposed like that. Some phone company drone had been in a hurry when he did the installation.

Dylan unsheathed his knife and sliced the wires. Now the house had no phone service, unless the woman had a cell phone.

He pointed at Bran, wordlessly instructing him to take up a position in the yard where he could cover their avenue of escape. One thing Dylan had learned was to always keep your exit lane open.

Bran crouched beside a leafy eucalyptus and signaled that he was ready. Dylan led Tupelo to the back door. It was locked. Not a spring latch, either. Goddamned pain-in-the-ass dead bolt. But there was a glass pane in the door, which would make things easier.

“Wish I’d brought a glass cutter and some tape,” Dylan whispered through his mask.

“Fuck that,” Tupelo said, and with the butt of his H amp; K he cracked the pane into a starburst pattern.

The impact made no more noise than the snap of a twig. Still, Dylan was pissed.

“I tell you to do that?” he breathed. “You wait for my goddamned order.”

Tupelo looked away, his eyes twitching in the ski mask’s slits. “Just wanna get it done,” he mumbled.

Dylan inspected the damage. The glass was holding together, but one stiff breeze would blow it apart. Again he wished he had some sticky tape. Could have taped over the fragments and pulled them away without a sound. As it was, he would have to push in the panel and hope the old lady wasn’t listening.

“You haven’t told me,” Abby said, “how Reynolds fits into all this.”

“No, I haven’t, have I?” Andrea hesitated, then made a flick of the wrist, as if dismissing some unheard counsel of caution. “I suppose I can tell you. I-”

“Wait.” Abby held up a hand.

From the rear of the house there was a tinkle of breaking glass.

The shards fell away with a touch of Dylan’s gloved hand. They hit the floor with a soft metallic clatter like the jingling of bells. He stuck his arm through the hole and groped for the dead-bolt release. In a second the door was unlocked. He pushed it open and was dismayed to hear the low, prolonged squeal of unoiled hinges.

The old lady might have heard that, even if she’d missed the noise of the falling glass. They would have to move fast before she hightailed it out the front door.

He entered the rear hall, leading Tupelo, their sneakers treading soundlessly on the bare wooden floor.

Abby glanced at Andrea and saw the woman’s eyes widen in fear.

“What’s back there?” Abby whispered.

“Door to the backyard. There’s a glass pane in the door.”

Down the rear hallway came a long screeee of hinges. The door, opening.

A bad time to be unarmed. Abby’s purse, with the gun in it, was in the living room.

But there was another gun-Andrea’s. Abby pulled open the kitchen drawer and grabbed the revolver inside.

“This thing still loaded?” she whispered.

Andrea nodded.

The gun in her hand made Abby feel a little better, but not much. Getting into a shootout at close quarters wasn’t her idea of a good time. Too many things could go wrong. And as long as she and Andrea were stuck in the kitchen, the intruder had the advantage. He could corner them and finish them off from the doorway.

Andrea had frozen. But there was no time for fear. In a tactical situation, the first thirty seconds were the most critical.

Abby grabbed Andrea by the shoulder and hustled her into the living room. The front door beckoned, but it was too far away, and besides, there might be someone else waiting outside, hoping to pick them off if they tried to flee.

And her purse-it, too, was out of reach.

She pivoted toward a side hallway and took it at a run, Andrea following. There were two doors in the hall. One was shut. Before Abby could try it, Andrea gasped, “Closet.”

The other door was ajar. Abby pushed it open and led Andrea into what was obviously the master bedroom, lit by a lamp on the night table, with a closet, a bathroom, and two curtained windows that must face the backyard.

She pulled Andrea behind the bed, kneeling with her, then yanked the lamp’s power cord out of the wall socket. Now the only illumination was the trickle of daylight through the curtains and the glow of a nightlight in the bathroom.

There was a phone on the night table. Abby grabbed it. No dial tone. The phone line had been cut. That meant whoever had entered the house wasn’t just some junkie or random thrill seeker. Not your standard home invader, either. If it had been, the intruder would be shouting orders and stomping through the house, hoping to establish control through intimidation.

This enemy was craftier, stealthier. No teenager, but someone older, more experienced, better organized. A professional assassin with notches in his gun.

Still, the odds had improved. The bed provided concealment, and her angle of view through the doorway provided decent coverage of the hall. She could fire from her improvised sniper’s blind, take out the intruder while he approached.

“Who is it?” Andrea whispered. Abby shushed her.

Through the open door, she saw a shadow pass over the wall of the hallway as the intruder crept into the living room. Then more bad news-a second shadow.

Two enemies. Maybe the odds hadn’t improved so much, after all.

For a few seconds at least, they would be busy in the living room. Abby thought there might be a chance to get Andrea out through the bedroom window. She risked getting to her feet to pull aside the curtains but quickly shut them again. A third man was outside, in the backyard, toting a handgun with an unnaturally extended barrel that could be a silencer.

Not good.

She resumed kneeling behind the bed. There was no way around it-she was going to have to do some shooting. She flipped open the revolver’s cylinder. Fully loaded, six rounds. That wasn’t much against three armed men. She would have to be opportunistic about taking her shots. Her best bet was to take out the first man who came down the hall. If she did, the other two might run.

Sudden darkness in the living room. The intruders had turned off the lights. The most logical reason was that they intended to make a move into the hall and didn’t want to be backlit. Abby had expected as much. It made her job a little harder, but she could see well enough. And she knew where to look. She had the edge.

Footsteps in the hall. They were coming.

Dylan worked his way down the hall, Tupelo behind him. He was pretty sure the bitch had taken cover in the room at the far end. A sweep of the other side of the house had turned up nothing, and she hadn’t had time to get out through either the front door or the door to the carport.

It ought to be easy to bag her. But something was funny. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but she wasn’t behaving the way a frightened woman should. She wasn’t screaming or trying to climb out the window or barricading the door. It was like she was waiting for him, luring him in.

There was a chance she was armed. Maybe she kept a gun in that room. She might be hoping to get the drop on him. If so, she’d worked out a pretty good plan. She was hidden, and he was exposed. The darkness helped him, but not a lot. Even if he hugged the wall, she would probably see his silhouette when he got close to the open door.

He would have to go in quick. When inside, he could take cover, and if she fired, he would identify her position by the muzzle flash. His own shots would be harder to pinpoint; the suppressor module eliminated the muzzle flare.

Once in the room, he would have the edge.

Abby peered into the dimness and saw a hint of movement. The man was creeping up to the bedroom’s open door. Though he had pressed himself tight against the wall, he was partially exposed to her angle of view. He appeared to be in a low combat crouch, his gun held across his chest.

This was the one moment in the encounter when she had an unequivocal advantage. She could see him. He didn’t know where she was. As the mobile party, he was more vulnerable to begin with, and the hall was a free-fire zone-no cover, no concealment.

She pinned him behind the revolver’s front sight. A fancy shooter would try for a head shot, but the smart money was on a hit to the body. She aimed for his torso.

He was at the door frame. In a second he would pivot inside. He would do it fast, because that was the way the pros did it. She would have only a second to fire. If she missed, he would empty his magazine in the direction of her muzzle flare. The bed might absorb some of the shots, but she wouldn’t wager her life on it.

Her heart, beating fast, counted off three seconds, four.

He made his move, spinning into the doorway.

Abby fired.

She took only one shot. Either she hit the target or she didn’t. If she hit him, one shot should be enough. If she didn’t, she would need the other five rounds to repel his attack.

The gunshot set her ears ringing and drowned out any sound of impact. The muzzle flash, close to her face, erased her night vision. For a moment she was deaf and blind. But she knew she’d hit him because he wasn’t shooting back.

“You got him,” Andrea breathed into Abby’s ear.

“Did you see him go down?”

“I didn’t see him at all, but I heard him cry out. You got him. I know you did.”

“There are two others.” Abby drew a breath and smelled gunpowder. “Don’t celebrate yet.”