“When you called,” Bett McCall confessed, “I was a little uneasy.”
“Of course,” the man said, walking into the room. Dr. Bill Peters seemed confident, comfortable with himself. He had a handsome face. His eyes latched onto Bett’s and radiated sympathy. “What a terrible, terrible time for you.”
“It’s a nightmare.”
“I’m so sorry.” He was a tall man but walked slightly stooped. His arms hung at his side. A benign smile on his face. Bett McCall, short and slight, was continually aware of the power of body stature and posture. Though she was a foot shorter and much lighter, she felt-from his withdrawing stance alone-that he was one of the least threatening men she’d ever met.
He looked approvingly at the house. “Megan said you were a talented interior designer. I didn’t know quite how talented, though.”
Bett felt a double burst of pleasure. That he liked her painstaking efforts to make her house nice. But, much more significant to her, that Megan had actually complimented her to a stranger.
Then the memory of the letter came back and her mood darkened. She asked, “Have you heard about Dr. Hanson? That terrible thing with his mother?”
Dr. Peter's face clouded. “It’s got to be a mix-up. I’ve known him for years.” He glanced at a crystal ball on her bookshelf. “He’s been an advocate for assisted suicide and I think he did talk about it with his mother.”
“You do?”
“But I think she misinterpreted what he said. You know that a nurse said his mother lifted the hypodermic off a medicine cart.”
Bett considered this. Maybe Tate had been wrong about somebody framing Dr. Hanson to get him into jail and unavailable to speak to them.
“Doctor..
“Oh, call me Bill. Please.”
“Is he a good therapist? Dr. Hanson?”
The therapist examined a framed tapestry from France, mounted above the couch.
Why was he hesitating to answer?
“He’s very good, yes,” Dr. Peters said after a moment. “In certain areas. What was your impression of him?”
‘Well,” she said, “we’ve never met.”
“You haven’t?” He seemed surprised. “He hasn’t talked to you about Megan?”
“No. Should he have?”
‘Well, maybe with his mother’s accident… he’s had a lot on his mind.”
“But that just happened this week,” Bell pointed out. “Megan’s been seeing him for nearly two months.”
In his face she could see that he couldn’t really defend his friend.
“Well, frankly, I think he should have talked to you. I would have. But he and I have very different styles. Mrs. McCall-”
“Bett, please.”
“Betty?”
“Betty Sue.” She smiled, and then blushed. Hoped he couldn’t see it, thankful for the dimmed lighting. “All right… Deep, dark secret? The name’s Beatrice Susan McCall. My sister-”
“Your twin. Megan told me.”
“That’s right. She’s Susan Beatrice. We were named dyslexically. I can’t tell you how many years we plotted revenge against Mom and Dad for that little trick.”
He laughed. “Say, could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
“Of course.”
She noticed that he examined her briefly-the light black jeans and black blouse. Wild earrings dangled; crescent moons and shooting stars. She started toward the kitchen. “Come on in here. Would you rather have a soda? Or wine?”
“No, thanks… Oh, look.” He picked up a bottle of Mietz merlot, which Brad had bought for them last week and they hadn’t gotten around to drinking yet. He glanced at the eighteen-dollar price tag. “Funny, I just bought a case of this. It’s a wonderful wine. Eighteen’s a great price. I paid twenty-one a bottle-and that was supposed to be a discount.”
“You know the vineyard? Brad said it’s real hard to find.”
“It is.”
She said, “Let’s open it,”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep.” Bett was happy to impress him. She opened and poured the wine. They touched glasses.
“Do you live in the area?” she asked.
“In Fairfax. Near the courthouse. It’s a nice place. Only… there’re a lot of law offices around there and I get these lawyers coming and going at all hours. Drives me crazy sometimes.”
She gave a brief laugh. He lifted an eyebrow. She’d been thinking of all the nights Tate had spent in that very’ neighborhood, interviewing prisoners and police and getting home at ten or eleven. “Tate-”
“Your ex.”
“Right. I’m afraid he’s one of them. Working late, I mean.”
“Oh, that’s right. Megan told me he was an attorney. But he doesn’t live in Fairfax, does he? Didn’t she tell me he’s got a farm somewhere?”
“Prince William. But his office is here.”
Dr. Peters smiled and examined the collection of refrigerator magnets that she and Megan had collected. It pinched her heart to see them. And she had to look away before the tears started.
He asked her some questions about the interior design business in Virginia. It turned out his mother had been a decorator.
“Where?” she asked.
“ Boston.”
“No kidding! That’s where the McCalls are from.” She pointed to some pictures of her family in front of Old Ironsides and in their front yard, the Prudential building towering over the skyline in the background.
“Sure,” he said. “I thought I detected a bit of accent. I’m driving the car to the party…
She laughed.
“You miss it?” he asked.
“No. We moved here when I was ten. The South definitely appeals to me more than New England.”
“To the extent this is the South,” he offered.
“That’s true.”
He took her glass and refilled it. He handed it back and leaned against the island, glanced at the expensive stainless-steel utensils. “I love to cook,” he said. “It’s a hobby of mine.”
“Me too. It’s relaxing to open some wine, come out to the kitchen and start slicing and dicing.”
He lifted the heavy Sabatier butcher knife and tested the edge carefully with his thumb. Nodded. “Sharp knives are-”
“-safer than dull ones,” she said. “My mother taught me that.”
“Mine too,” he said, weighing the knife in his hand for a moment, studying the blade carefully. Then he set it on the table. “Should we go back in the other room?”
“Sure.”
He nodded toward the door. She preceded him into the living room. Bett sat on the couch and he walked over to the bookshelves, looked at her collection of crystals and several boxes of tarot cards.
He chided, “Didn’t you know you’re supposed to keep your tarot cards wrapped in silk?”
“You know about that?” She laughed.
“Sure do.”
“I was really into the occult a long time ago.” She smiled and realized that she was relaxing for the first time all day. “I was kind of crazy when I was young.”
“You look embarrassed. You shouldn’t be. I think our spiritual side’s as important as our physical and our psychic sides. I use a holistic approach in my treatment. A lot of times I’ll prescribe herbs-they have both organic and psychosomatic effects.”
“I try to use them whenever I can,” Bett said.
“If my patients need something I’d rather it was Saint-John’s-wort instead of Prozac.”
He was a doctor who felt this way? How often had she explained these things to doctors, or to friends, or to Tate, only to be met with a politely wary gaze-at best.
Dr. Peters continued. “It makes a lot of sense to me. Take tarot cards… do they predict the future? Well, in a way they do. They make us look at who we are, where we fit in with the godhead or the Oversoul-”
“Oh, you know Emerson?” she asked, pointing to a book of his writings.
Dr. Peters walked to it and pulled the volume off the shelf He flipped through it, held up the book and showed her the title of an essay “The Oversoul.” “I’ve been reading him since college… I think fortune-telling makes us look at where we fit in with the life force, what our relationships are like, makes us question where we’re going. That has to affect our future.”
“That’s true,” she said, feeling warm and comfortable. She sipped more wine. “That’s what I’ve always felt. Most people don’t get it. They just make fun of the Madame Zostra’s fortune-telling stuff It’s not fair. My ex…”
But she decided to let the thought die. And Dr. Peters didn’t push her to finish.
The doctor was looking at her bookshelf, head cocked sideways. Pointing out volumes. “Ah, Joseph Campbell. That’s very good. Sure, sure…You know Jung?”
“Sort of, not really.”
“About the archetypes? There are certain persistent myths we see surfacing in people’s lives. The Arthurian legend-you know it?”
Know it? she thought, laughing to herself I lived it.
“T. H. White, Camelot, the whole thing.” She pointed out an old copy of The Once and Future King.
“What a book that is,” he said. “Oh, and The Mists of Avalon,” nodding at the book.
“The best,” she said enthusiastically. Remembering how Tate didn’t have time for any of this. She found the old angers and resentments churning up again and recalled how much comfort she’d found in the New Age world. Here was a man who truly understood her. It was so refreshing…
Dr. Peters tapped his glass to hers and they sipped. Her glass was nearly empty. Yet she didn’t feel drunk, she felt elated. He sat down close to her. “Um, Bert… I don’t know how much Megan told you about me.”
“Nothing, really. But she didn’t want to talk about her therapy sessions. That’s what we were going to do today, Tate and I. Meet her for lunch and find out how it was going.”
He nodded. He was really quite a handsome man, well built. Interior designer Bett McCall thought: Proportions are everything.
“Dr. Hanson saw her more frequently than I did. But I wanted to come over tonight and just talk to you about her a little. Try to reassure you.”
Oh, I’ll take that. Anything you want to give me in the reassurance department, I’ll take.
“Have you heard anything from her?” he asked.
“Not a word. But there are some funny things going on.”
“What sort of things?”
‘We think maybe somebody was following her. My husband… my ex-husband thinks it might have to do with a case he’s working on. He thinks the man he’s suing is trying to distract him or something. I don’t know.”
“Any… what would they say on NYPD Blue? Any concrete leads?”
“Not really. But Tate’s been in touch with a friend of his at the police.”
“Oh, is that the detective who called me? He asked me a few questions about Megan. Um, what’s his name again?”
“Konstantinatis.”
“Right. Well,” he continued, pouring more wine, “I think you should know what I told him.”
“What’s that?”
“That I don’t think she’s in any danger.”
“Oh, did she say something to you about running away?” Bett asked quickly. “You’d tell me if she did.”
“Ordinarily that’d be confidential. But… yes, I would tell you. And she didn’t say anything specific about it though she was always talking about going to a big city like San Francisco or New York.”
“They found an Amtrak timetable in her car. She’d marked trains to New York.”
He nodded, as if a mystery had been explained. “I’d guess that’s what happened. No, I’d say I’m positive that’s what happened. I really doubt there are stalkers or bogeymen out to get her.”
“Why’re you so sure?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead he said, “I think we need more wine. I’ll get it. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Dr. Peters vanished into the kitchen. He returned a moment later, sat down and poured. After a moment he asked, “How does your husband feel about his daughter?”
“Tate’s…“ She groped for words.
He supplied one. “Indifferent?”
“Yes. He’s never been very involved with Megan.”
“I understand that. But why?”
She now looked at the crystal ball. In it was captured the orange glow from a wall lamp. She stared at the distorted trapezoid of light and said, “Tate wanted to be his grandfather. He was a famous lawyer and judge in the area. He had a big family, a traditional lifestyle. Well, Tate wanted that-and a good, dependable farmwife.” She lifted her hands and slapped her thighs. “He got me instead. Big disappointment.”
“No, that’s not you.” The doctor smiled wryly. “I can see that. That was very unfair to you for him to expect that.”
“To me?” she asked. “Unfair?”
“Of course,” he offered as if it were obvious. “Your husband had a distorted level of expectations-based on a child’s view of the past- and he tried to project that onto you. I’ll bet he worked a lot, spent time away from home.”
“He did, yes. But I was busy too. My sister was sick-”
“Her heart condition.”
Oh, she could talk to this man for hours! She’d met him only thirty minutes ago and yet he knew her. Knew her better than Tate did-even after all those years of marriage.
“That’s right.”
“But why are you taking the blame? You’re attractive, intelligent, have a mind of your own. If you wanted an independent life, why should you feel bad about that? It seems to me that he's the one to blame for all this. He went into the marriage knowing who you were and tried to change you. And probably in some less-than-honest ways.”
“Less than honest?”
“He appeared supportive, I’ll bet. He probably said, ‘Honey, do whatever you want to do. I’ll be behind it.’”
She was stunned. It was as if Dr. Peters were looking directly into her memories. “Yes, that’s exactly what he’d say.”
“But in fact, what he was doing was the opposite. Little comments, even body language, that’d whittle away at your spirit. He wanted you barefoot and pregnant and wanted you to give up your life, have dinner on the table for him, give him a brood of kids, ignore your ill sister. And he was going to make a name for himself as a prosecutor and to hell with everybody else.” His eyes flickered with pain-her pain. “It was horrible what he did to you. Inexcusable. But I suppose it’s understandable. His character, you know.”
“Character.”
“You know the old expression? ‘A man’s character is his fate.’ That’s your ex-husband. He’s reaping now what he sowed. With Megan running away.”
I wish I could believe that, Bett thought. Please… Tears now. From the wine, from the astonishing comfort she felt, years and years of pain and confusion and loneliness being stripped away. “I She caught her breath. “He’d sit down and talk to me and say that he loved me and what could he do for me-”
“Tricks,” Dr. Peters said quickly. “All tricks.”
“I couldn’t argue with him. He had an answer for everything.”
“He’s smooth, isn’t he? A slick talker. Megan told me that.”
“Oh, you better believe it. I couldn’t win against him. Not at words. Never. I always came away feeling, I don’t know, violated, I guess.”
“Bett, most women would’ve put up with that. They would’ve stayed and stayed and destroyed themselves. And their children. But you had the courage to do something about it. To strike out on your own.”
“But Megan… she’s suffered.
“Suffered?” He laughed. “Because of him, yes. Not because of you. You’ve done a miraculous job with her. Here’s to you.” He tapped her glass and they drank. The room was swimming. She realized he’d moved very close to her and she enjoyed the proximity.
“A miraculous job?” Bett shook her head, felt her eyes swimming with tears. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
Dr. Peters said firmly, “Why, if every mother cared for her children the way you care for Megan I’d be out of business.”
“Do you really think that?” she asked in a choked voice. The tears were coming fast now But she wasn’t the least embarrassed. Not in front of this man. She could tell him anything, she could do anything. He’d understand, he’d forgive, he’d comfort. She said wistfully, “Too bad Megan doesn’t think so.”
“Oh, but she does.” He frowned in confusion.
“No, no… there’s a letter…“ She glanced toward her purse, where the girl’s horrible note sat like a puddle of cold blood.
“The detective told me about it. That’s the main reason why I wanted to see you. Alone, without your husband here.” He took the wineglass from her and set it on the table. Then he sat forward, took her hands in his. Looked at her until she was gazing into his dark eyes, nearly hypnotized. “Listen to me. Listen carefully. She didn’t mean what she wrote you.”
“She-”
“She. Didn’t. Mean. It. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Bett was shaking with sobs. “But what she wrote, it was so terrible…
“No,” he said in a firm whisper. “No.” He was completely focused on her. She thought of the other men in her life with whom she’d had serious talks. Tate was often elsewhere-thinking of cases or trying to dissect what she was saying. Brad would smother her with an adoring gaze. But Dr. Peters was looking at her as a person.
“Here’s what you have to understand. Your letter doesn’t mean anything.”
Oh, please, she thought, please explain how this happened. Please explain to me why I’m not a witch, please explain how my daughter still loves me. She thought of an expression she’d heard once and believed was true: You’d kill for your mate; but you’d die for your child. Well, I would, she thought. If only Megan knew that she felt that way.
He squeezed her hands. “Your daughter hates your husband. I don’t know what the genesis of that is but it’s a very deeply ingrained feeling.”
Bett felt the impossibility of compressing seventeen years into a few minutes. Her eye went to a board game, Monopoly sitting dusty on the shelf. "There were so many things she wanted from Tate… Megan wanted us to play games together. Tate, her and me. But he never would. And then-”
“It doesn’t matter,” the doctor interrupted. “The fact is that she was the child and he was the parent and he failed her. Megan knows it and she hates him. The anger inside her is astonishing. But it’s only directed at him-I guarantee you that. She loves you so much.”
Shaking with tears. “But the letter…
“You know the Oedipus and Electra principles? The attractions of sons and mothers and daughters and fathers?”
“A little, I guess.”
“In Megan’s subconscious her anger at your ex-husband makes her feel terribly guilty. And directing it only at him is intolerable. With the natural attraction between fathers and daughters she either had to write no letter at all or write you both. She was psychically unable to point her anger only at its true source.”
“Oh, if I could believe that…"
“During our sessions she was always telling me how proud she was of you. How she wants to be like you. How hard a life you’ve had. I promise you, without a doubt, she regrets writing that letter to you. She doesn’t mean it. She’d give anything to take it back.”
Bett lowered her head and put her face in her hands. Why was the room swimming so badly? His arm went around her shoulders.
“You okay?”
She nodded.
“Will she be coming back?” Bett asked.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. It might be awhile-your husband’s caused some serious damage. But nothing that’s irreparable. Megan knows that she couldn’t ask for a better mother in the world. You’ve done everything right. She loves you and misses you.”
Bett sagged against his chest, felt the muscles in his arms tighten as he held her. Oh, when was the last time she’d felt this good, this easy, this comforted? Years. She felt his hot breath on the top of her head. She smelled a faint aftershave.
“I feel so light-headed.”
Did she say that? Or think it?
She wept and she laughed.
The doctor’s hand went to her forehead. “You’re so hot..
He hugged her harder and his hand slid downward, fingers encircling her neck. An electric chill went through her and then her arms were snaking around him, pulling him to her. Her head was up and she pressed her cheek against his.
No, no, she thought. I can’t be doing this…
But she was thinking these words from a very different place, very remote. And it was impossible for her to release her grip on the man who’d repaired her bleeding soul. He thinks I’m a good mother, he thinks I’m a good mother, he thinks…
He leaned down and kissed her tears.
The light touch of his lips felt so good…
She was so giddy, so happy…
Stretching out, getting comfortable… The room was hot, the room was wonderful…
And what was this? she thought like an excited high school girl.
He was kissing her on the mouth. Or am I kissing him? Bert didn’t know. All she knew was that she wanted to be close to him. To the man who’d found her single worst fear and killed it dead.
“No,” he protested. But his voice was a whisper.
But she was not letting him go. She knew she should stop but she couldn’t. She pulled him down next to her on the couch, refusing to let go, arms fixed forever around his neck. The room filling with heat, spinning, orange lights, yellow Eights
Kissing harder now.
Hands on her belly, then her chest. She glanced down and wasn’t surprised to see her blouse was undone. Her bra up, his fingers cupping her breast. This seemed completely natural. A pop, the snap of her jeans opened. Had he done that, or had she? It didn’t matter. Getting close to him was all that mattered, hearing him whisper whatever he would whisper in her ear as he lay on top of her. That was what she wanted, hearing him speak to her. The sex wasn't important but she’d gladly give him that if only he’d keep reassuring her, keep speaking to her…
She opened her mouth and kissed him hard.
And then the world ended.
The front door was swinging open. And a familiar voice was crying, “Bett…why, Bett!”
Gasping, she sat up.
Dr. Peters backing away a shocked look on his face.
Brad Markham stood in the doorway, his face a horrified mask. His key to her house dropped to the floor with a loud ring. “What…“ He was breathless. “What…“
“Brad, I thought…”
“I was in Baltimore?” he spat out. He shook his head. “I was. A policeman called and told me about Megan. I drove down to be with you…Your daughter’s missing and you’re fucking somebody. You’re cheating on me?”
“No,” she said, feeling faint and nauseous from the wine and shock. Tears coming again. Tears of horror. “You don’t understand. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“I’m sorry.” Dr. Peters looked horrified. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend. You never said anything.”
“Boyfriend?” Brad spat out. “We’re engaged.”
“You’re what?” The doctor stared at Brad. “I’m so sorry. She never said anything.”
“How could you?” Brad spat out, raging at her. “After everything I’ve done for you? And Megan? How could you?”
“I don’t know what happened..
Brad stalked outside leaving the door open.
“No!” Bett cried, sobbing, pulling her bra down and buttoning her blouse as she stumbled toward the door. “Wait.”
Through her tears she saw Brad’s car squeal off down the street.
Leaning against the doorjamb, sobbing, sinking to the floor. Close to fainting, wishing to die…
“No, no, no…
Then the doctor was standing next to her, crouching down. His mouth close to her ear. When he spoke the voice was so different from the soothing drone of ten minutes ago. It was flint, it was ice water.
“What I told you Megan said about you? That wasn’t true. I only said it to make you feel better… All she told me was that you were a selfish whore. I didn’t believe her. But I guess she was right.” He took a final sip of wine. “What a pitiful excuse for a mother you are.”
The doctor rose, set the glass on the table and stepped over her, out the door. It seemed he was smiling, though Bett was blinded by the tears and couldn’t say for certain.
Tate Collier hung up the phone. Sighed.
No, man, Josh still isn’t home. I don’t know where he is. You called, like, three times already. Maybe we’ll give it a rest now? Okay?
Well, where the hell was Megan’s boyfriend?
Konnie too was still out of the office. And it irked Tate that the detective hadn’t returned his page.
He fed the Dalmatian and paced up and down his front porch, looking at the clear early evening skies and the dusting of April growth over his fields.
No more Dead Rebs that he could see.
Again his eye settled on the dilapidated picnic bench in the backyard. Remembering Bett unhooking the Japanese lanterns, feeling the odd heat of that fall so many years ago, feeling the residual exhaustion from the funeral. Sweating in November, the hot wind pushing crisp, curled leaves over the shaggy grass.
He remembered:
Bett looking down at him. Asking, “What is it?”
Alarmed, as she gazed at the expression on his face.
What is it, what is it, what is it?… A simple question. Yet simple words can’t convey the answer-that two people who were once in love no longer are.
He’d closed his eyes. “I don’t want to be married to you anymore,” he’d said.
Good-bye…
Tate now looked away from the bench and glanced impatiently at the cordless phone, sitting on the porch swing. Why wasn’t- It rang. He blinked and snagged it from the cradle.
“Hello?”
Silence for a moment. Then: “Tate?”
“I’m here, Bett. What’s wrong?” His heart went cold at the sound in her voice.
“I’m on my way to Baltimore.”
“You are? Why?”
More silence. “Brad left me.”
“What? At a time like this?”
“It’s not his fault. I did something stupid. I don’t know… I don’t want to go into it. It’s… Oh, Jesus, it’s a mess.”
“Bett, you sound terrible. Are you crying?” “I can’t talk about it. Not now” “When’ll you be back? What about Megan?” “I don’t care.”
He heard utter defeat in her voice. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, Tate. We’ve blown it. There’s nothing we can do. We’ve ruined her life, she’s ruined ours. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe she won’t. Let’s just let her go and hope for the best. I don’t care anymore.”
“This doesn’t sound like you.”
“Well, it is me, all right? It was stupid looking for her, it was stupid getting together like this, you and me. We should have kept our lives on different sides of the universe, Tate. What’ve we got to show for it? Just pain.”
“We’re going to find her.”
“She doesn’t want to be found. Don’t you get that? Let her go and don’t worry about it. She’s part of the past, Tate. Let her go. The phone’s breaking up. I’m coming to a tunnel. Good-bye, Tate… Good-bye…
Bait.
That’s me, yes sir. That’s me.
He’s on to you, Crazy Megan says. Move, move, move.
She went to the right and Peter Matthews went to the right.
Left and left, straight and straight.
Getting closer all the time.
Whispering, “Megan, Megan, Megan.”
Other words too. She wasn't sure but she thought he was muttering, “I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you.” Or maybe “cut you.”
Megan was part of his fantasy now. She was a victim from those disgusting comic books. The tentacles, the monsters, the purple dicks, the claws and pincers…
And was nothing more than a game to the boy-if you can call a six-foot, two-hundred-pound thing a boy.
As she moved up and down the corridors, gripping the handle of her glass knife in her right hand, which stung fiercely from the blisters, she had all sorts of terrible thoughts: why the father had brought her here, for instance. As a bride for his son. Jesus… Maybe Aaron Matthews had wanted grandchildren. Maybe Peter’d been at Jefferson High- they had a special ed department-and he’d gotten obsessed with her. That might be it. And his father had kidnapped her to be a present for his son.
Down the corridor toward the kitchen.
Scuffling, muttering, but no sight of him.
Down the corridor that led past the door to the basement. The lock looked flimsy but not that flimsy. Breaking it open would make a hell of a noise. And what was down there anyway?
No, Crazy Megan tells her, Stick to your plan. He’s gotta go down.
Well, one of us does, thought the less confident half of the duo,
Keep going, keep looking for him. Up and down the dim halls.
It didn’t seem that late but the hospital was in a valley and the sun was behind a mountain to the west. The whole place was bathed in cold blue light and she was having trouble seeing.
She stopped. The boy’s footsteps were getting closer.
This is it, Crazy Megan says. Just stab the flicker in the back and get it over with.
But Megan reminded her that she couldn’t do that. As much as she hated him, she couldn’t kill.
He wants to fuck you. He wants to pretend he’s one of those insect monsters and fuck you till you bleed. You have to- Be quiet! I’m doing the best I can.
Closer. The steps got closer. The sound coming from around the corner. She didn’t have time to get into the main corridor-he was too close.
She stepped into a little nook. Trapped.
He moved closer, paused. Maybe hearing her.
Maybe smelling her. He’d stopped whispering her name. Which scared her more because he knew he was close to his prey and didn’t want to be heard. He was sneaking rip on her. He was playing the invisible monster; she’d seen that story in one of the comic books. Some creature you couldn’t see snuck into girls’ locker rooms and raped stragglers after gym class. The comic had been limp, as if Peter’d read that one a thousand times.
He moved forward another few cautious steps.
Her hand started to shake.
Should she jump out into the corridor and just run like hell?
But he couldn’t be more than ten feet away And he’d looked so big in the photographs! He could lunge like a snake and grab her by the throat in two steps.
Suddenly a flash of pain went through her hand-from one of the blisters-and she dropped the knife. Gasped involuntarily.
Megan froze, watching the knife tumble to the floor. It can’t break! No…
Just before the icy glass hit the floor she shoved her foot under it, waiting for the pain as the tip of the blade sliced into the top of her foot.
Thunk. The knife hit her right foot flat and rolled, unbroken, to the floor.
Thank you, thank you…
She bent down and picked it up.
Another two footsteps, closer, closer.
No choice. She had to run. He was only three or four feet away.
Megan took a deep breath, another. Jump out, slash with the knife and run like hell toward the trap.
Now!
She leapt out, turned to the right.
Froze. Gasping. Her ears had played tricks on her. No one was there. Then she looked down. The rat-a large one, big as a cat-standing on his haunches, sniffing the air, blinked at her, cowering. Then indignantly it turned away as if angry at being startled.
Megan sagged against the wall, tears welling as the fear dissipated.
But she didn’t have much time for recovery.
At the far end of the dim corridor a shadow materialized into the loping form of Peter Matthews, hunched over and moving slowly. He didn’t see her and disappeared from view.
Megan paused for only a few seconds before she started after him.
The Shenandoahs and Blue Ridge keep the air in northwest Virginia clean as glass in the spring, and when the sun sets, it’s a fierce disk, bright as an orange spotlight. Newscasters report on “sun delays” from the glare at various places on the highway.
This radiant light, behind Tate, lit every detail in the trees and buildings and oncoming cars as he sped down I-66 at eighty miles an hour.
He skidded north on the parkway, then east on Route 50, pulled into the county police station house and climbed out of the car. He practically ran into Dimitri Konstantinatis as he too happened to arrive, carrying two large Kentucky Fried Chicken bags.
“Oh-oh,” the detective muttered.
“What oh-oh?”
“That look on your face.”
“I don’t have a look,” Tate protested.
“You had it comin’ into my office when you were prosecutor and you needed that little bit of extra evidence-which’d mean I’d lose a weekend. And you’ve got it now. That oh-oh.”
They walked inside the building and into Konnie’s small office.
“You didn’t call me back,” Tate said.
“Did so. Ten minutes ago. You musta left. What’s that?”
Tate set the letter Megan had written him and the knucklebone he’d found in his house that morning, both in Baggies, on the cop’s desk.
“Prints,” Tate said.
“A prince among men-yes, I am. So, what’s going on?”
“I want you to run the letter through Identification. Something’s up. Bett’s acting funny”
“You complained about that when you were married,” Konnie pointed out. “ Crystals, mumbo jumbo, long distance calls to people’d been dead a hundred years.”
“That was cute funny This’s weird funny. Witnesses’ve been disappearing and not calling back and it’s just too much of a coincidence. And I think I know who’s behind it.”
He also told Konnie about his run-in with Jack Sharpe.
“Ooo, that was bright, Counselor, and you were packing your gun to boot?”
Tate shrugged. “Was your idea for me to get one.”
“But it wasn’t my idea to threaten an upstanding member of the Prince William mafia with it. Grant me that at least.”
“I’ve been on his bad side since I routed his lawyers at the injunction hearing last week.”
“What’s wrong with a nice theme park ‘round here, Tate? You’d rather have what we got now in Manassas? A track fulla big wheels slugging it out in a mud pit. I’d vote for Disneyland, with them fun rides and cotton candy and knock-the-clown-in-the-water shit.”
“I’m just telling you that Jack Sharpe would love for me to be out of commission come that argument at the Supreme Court in Richmond next week. And I think he’s had somebody in a van following me. Sorry, no tag, no model.”
Konnie nodded slowly. Then added, “But he’s got boys he’d hire for that. And they could hire other boys. No way could you trace it back to him. And you think anybody’d snitch on Jack Sharpe?”
“I’m not a prosecutor anymore, Konnie. I don’t want to make a case. I want to find Megan. Period. End of story.”
“And kneecap the prick who did it.”
Tate pushed the bags containing the letter and the bone toward Konnie again. “Please.”
Another mournful glance at his cooling dinner. “Be right back.”
“Wait.” Tate handed him another Baggie. “Exemplars of Megan’s prints on the keys and mine on that glass. And remember you handled the note too.”
Konnie nodded. “The prosecutor in you ain’t dead, I see.” Carrying the bags, he walked down the hail toward the forensic lab. He returned a moment later.
“Won’t be long. I was looking forward to supper.”
Tate ignored the red-and-white KEG bag and continued. “Now, there was a gray Mercedes following her. Can you check that out?”
“Check what out?”
“Registered owners of gray Mercedeses.”
“I was asking before: year, model, tag?”
“Still none.”
Konnie laughed. He typed heavily on his computer keyboard. “This’ll be worth it just to see your expression.”
As he waited for the results Konnie peeked into the tallest Kentucky Fried bag, kneaded his ample stomach absently. “You know what the worst is? The worst is when the mashed potatoes get cold. You can eat the chicken when it’s cold because everybody does that. On a picnic, say. Same with the beans. But when mashed potatoes get cold you have to throw them out. Which is bad enough but then you think about them all night-how good they would’ve been. That’s what I mean by the worst.”
The screen fluttered. Konnie leaned forward.
“Here’s what we got. I did Fairfax, Arlington, Alexandria, Prince William and Loudoun. Mercedes, all types, all years, gray.”
Tate leaned forward and read: Your request has resulted in 2,603 responses.
“Two thousand,” Tate muttered. “Man.”
in
"Two thousand six hundred.”
Tate knew from his prosecuting days that too much evidence was as useless as too little.
“If you’re Just not buying the runaway stuff”-Konnie sighed- “were gonna have to do more thinking. All right, you think Sharpe’s a possibility and I don’t think he’s above snatching a girl. But there anybody else? Think hard now, Tate. Anybody hassling her?”
“Recently?”
“Like last year’s weirdoes don’t count?” Konnie snorted. “Whenever!”
“Not that I know of. I have to say there was a rumor… it was just a rumor… she might’ve been seeing… well, having sex with some older men. And maybe there was some money involved. I mean, they were paying her.”
If Konnie felt anything about this he didn’t show it. “You have any idea who? Where?”
“Some kids at this place called the Coffee-”
“-Shop. They been trying to close that piss hole down for a year. Well, I can poke around there. Ask some questions. Now, was she in any cults or anything?”
“No, don’t think so.”
“You or Bell in anything like that?”
“Me?”
“All right, your wife.”
“Ex,” Tate corrected.
“Whatever. She did that sort of stuff”
“It was strictly softball with her. No Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown or anything like that. Bett wouldn’t even put up these Indian posters because they had reverse swastikas on them. Nothing to do with Nazis; she just thought it was bad karma.”
“Karma,” Konnie scoffed. “Any relationships of yours go south in a big way recently?”
“I-"
“‘Fore you answer, think back to every one of them twenty-oneyear-olds you promised diamonds to and then ran for the hills.”
“I never proposed to a single one,” Tate said.
“Never proposed to marry ‘em, maybe.”
“You don’t get Fatal Attraction after three dates. That’s about the longest term I went.”
“Sad, Tate, sad. How ‘bout Bett?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
“Any relatives acting squirrelly? Might’ve wanted to take the girl and run?”
“Only relative nearby’s Bett’s sister, Susan. Outside of Baltimore. She’d never do anything to hurt her. Hell, she was always joking about adopting Megan.”
This got Konnie’s attention. “Adopting her? You sure she’s not involved in this? Maybe she went over the edge, decided to get herself a daughter.”
“Imagine Bett but fifteen pounds lighter. She couldn’t kidnap a bird.”
“But she could’ve hired somebody to. She could have a wacko boyfriend.”
“I just can’t see it, Konnie.”
“Gimme her name anyway.”
Tate wrote it down.
“Okay, how ‘bout any business associates of either of y’all? Clients? Or the bad guys? Other than Sharpe.”
“Bett’s got this interior design business. I don’t think her clients’re the sort for this kind of thing. Me, all I’ve been doing are wills, trusts and house closings-except for the Liberty Park case.”
Konnie grunted. The detective got a call. Grabbed the phone. Nodded. Slammed it down. “Interesting… That was the lab. Only her prints and yours on the bone. And mine, yours and hers on the letter.
But… there were some smudges on the bone that might’ve been from latex gloves. Can’t say for certain, But that starts rue wondering. Think it’s about time to do a Title Three."
“A wiretap?”
“Yours and your wife’s phones both.”
“Ex.”
“You keep saying that. Broken record. That’s in case you get a ransom call.”
“I thought this wasn’t a case.”
“It’s becoming one. Tell me again what happened this morning at your place. I mean exact.”
Tate remembered this about Konnie: he was a working dog when it came to dredging for evidence and hammering on suspects and witnesses. Only exhaustion would slow him down-and even then it never stopped him.
Tate gave another recap of the events.
“So you never actually saw her at your house?”
“No,” Tate said. “I got back home about ten A.M. from the office then got suited up and went to check on a busted pipe.”
“The sharecroppers there?”
“No. Not on Saturday. I never saw anybody at all. Just the lights go out around ten-twenty.”
“All of ‘em?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you think that was funny?”
“No. Megan doesn’t like bright lights. She likes candlelight and dimmers.”
This gave Tate a burst of pleasure-proving to Konnie that he knew something about the girl after all.
“It was dark as pitch this morning,” the detective mused. ‘With all that rain. Most people’d want some light, you’d think. ‘Less they didn’t want to be seen from the outside.”
“True.”
“And shit, Tate, wait a minute. Why’d she go to your place at all?”
“To leave the letters and get the backpack.”
“Well, doesn’t she have any suitcases or book bags at your wife’s? Sorry your ex’s. Your dee-vorced spouse’s.”
“Sure she does. You’re right. Most of them are there, as a matter of fact. And she had her book bag with her at Amy’s. And a lot more clothes and makeup at Bett’s place than mine.”
The cop continued, “You and Megan hardly ever saw each other.” “True again.”
“So you wouldn’t go into her room much, would you?” “Once a month maybe.”
“So why’d she leave the letters there? Why not at her mother’s?” That would’ve made more sense, true. The detective added, “And hell, why go to the house and leave some letters this morning around the time you were going to meet her? I tell you, if I was going to leave a note to diss my folks and run I’d leave it someplace they weren’t going to be. Don’tcha think?”
“So he made her write ‘em and planted them himself. Whoever he is.”
“That’s what I think, Counselor… Here’s what I’m gonna do. Order some serious forensic work and then have a chat with the captain. Guess what? This’s just become a case. And in a big way.” Konnie pulled a drumstick from the bag and charged down the hall.
Tate returned home.
No messages and no one had called; the caller ID box was blank.
Twelve hours ago he had wanted Megan and Bett out of his life again. He’d gotten his wish and he didn’t like it one bit.
So Brad had left Bett. He didn’t know what to make of that. Why? And why now? He had a feeling that whoever was behind Megan’s disappearance was behind this too.
Then his thoughts segued to Belize, the trip he and Bett had planned to take. A second honeymoon. Well, a first honeymoon technically-since they’d never taken one after their wedding.
He looked out over the dark sky; at the spattering of a million stars. Tate laughed to himself. What a kick if they’d run into each other. He wondered how Bell would have reacted to Karen. No. Cathy.
Probably not well.
Not a jealousy thing so much as a matter of approval. She’d never liked his taste in women.
Well, Tate didn’t either, now that he looked back at his lovers over the past ten years.
Belize…
Was there actually a possibility that he and Bett might take that trip together still-after they found Megan?
Whatever happened with Brad, the presence of a fiancé didn’t seem as insurmountable as simply the concept of Tate and Bett taking a trip together. At one time their joined names had been a common phrase among their friends. But that was a long, long time ago.
Yet-this was feelings again, not Cartesian logic-yet somehow he believed that they’d get along just fine. The fight today had been as bad as any they’d had fifteen years ago. And yet there’d been a reconciliation. This astonished him. That never would have happened in the past.
He sighed, sipped his wine, looked out at the Dalmatian nosing about in the tall grass. Thinking now of Megan.
But even if husband and wife were to get together again, what would the girl come home to? And more important… who was the person coming home?
Was the girl’s drinking and the water tower incident more than just a onetime fluke? Was that the real Megan McCall, a bitter young woman who slept with men for money? Or was there another person within her? One Tate didn’t know well-or maybe one he hadn’t even yet met?
Tate Collier felt a sudden desperation to know the girl. To know who she was. What excited her, what she hated, what she feared, What foods she liked. What clothes she’d pick and which she’d shun. What bad TV shows she’d want to watch.
What made her laugh. And what weep.
And he was suddenly stung by a terrible thought: that if Megan had died this morning, the victim of a deranged killer or an accident, he’d have been distraught, yes, terribly sad. But now, if that happened or- the most horrifying-if she simply vanished forever, never to be found at all, he’d be destroyed. It would be one of those tragedies that breaks you forever. He remembered something he’d told Bett when they’d been married, a case he was working on-prosecuting an arson murder. The victim had run into a burning building to save her child, who’d survived, though the mother had perished. He’d read the facts, looked up to Bett and said, “You’ll kill for your spouse but you’ll die for your child..
In rhetoric, lawyers use the trick of personification-picking words to make their own clients seem human and sympathetic and their opponents less so. “Mary Jones” instead of “the witness” or “the victim.” Juries find it far easier to be harsh to abstractions. “The defendant.” “The man sitting at that table there.”
It’s a very effective trick and a very dangerous one.
And it’s just how I’ve treated Megan over the years, Tate now thought. He rose, walked into the den and spent a long time looking
for another picture of her. He was terribly disappointed he couldn’t find one. He’d given his only snapshot to Konnie and Beauridge that afternoon.
He sat down in his chair, closed his eyes and tried to create some images now. Images of the girl. Smiling, looking perplexed, exasperated… A few came to mind. He tried harder.
And harder still.
Which was why he hadn’t heard the man come up behind him.
The cold finger of a pistol touched his temple. “Don’t move, Mr. Collier. No, no. I really mean that. For your sake. Don’t move.”
Jimmy, Tate recalled.
His name was Jimmy. And he was the man who’d been far more willing than Tate to engage in some gunplay in Jack Sharpe’s immaculate foyer.
Tate glanced at the phone.
Jimmy shook his head. “No.”
“What do you want?”
“Mr. Sharpe sent me.”
Figured that.
The gun was really very large. The man’s finger wasn’t on the trigger; it was outside of the guard. This didn’t reassure Tate at all.
“I have something for you to look at.”
“Look at?”
“I’m going to give it to you to look at. Then I’m going to take it back. And neither me or Mr. Sharpe’ll ever admit we know what you’re talking about if you ever mention it. You understand?”
Tate didn’t understand a thing. But he said, “Sure. Say, is that loaded?”
Jimmy didn’t respond. From the pocket of his leather jacket he took a videocassette. Set it on the table. Backed up. Nodded toward it. Tate walked over, picked it up. “I should play it?”
Jimmy’s face scrunched up impatiently.
Tate put the cassette in the player and fiddled with the controls until the tape started to play. The scene on the TV showed a building, some bushes. The date and time stamp revealed that it had been made that morning, at nine forty-two. He didn’t recognize where. The tape jumped ahead four minutes; now whoever was making the tape was driving, following another car down a suburban street. Tate recognized the car being followed. It was Megan’s Tempo. Because of the rain he couldn’t make out who was driving.
“Where did you get this?” Tate demanded.
“Watch, don’t talk,” Jimmy muttered. The gun was pointed directly at Tate’s back.
Another jump on the tape. To nine-fifty that morning. Tate recognized the Vienna Metro station. The man taping-of course, one of the private eyes hired by Sharpe, despite his protests to the contrary- must have been afraid of getting too close to his subject. He was about fifty yards away and shooting through the mist and rain. Megan’s car stopped at a row filled with other cars. There was a pause and then motion. After a moment he caught a glimpse of someone. A white man, it seemed, wearing a dark jacket, though he couldn’t be sure. Tate could see no distinguishing features. Then there was more motion. Finally a gray Mercedes pulled out of a space and a moment later Megan’s car eased into where the Merce had been. At 10:01 the Mercedes sped out of the lot.
The tape went fuzzy. Then black.
Tate stared, his heart pounding. Thinking of the vague motion he’d seen-pixels of light on the screen, distorted to start with, more distorted in the rain and fog. But he believed it might have been the man lifting a heavy object from the trunk of Megan’s car and putting it into the Mercedes. An object about the size of a human body.
“That’s all,” Jimmy said. “Could you eject it?” Tate did. “Did he see anything else?” he asked. “Who?” Jimmy asked.
“You know who. The private eye. Can I talk to him? Please?”
Jimmy nodded at the table. “If you could just set the tape there and backup.”
Tate did. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer. This was as far as Sharpe was willing to go. But he asked one more question. “Why did he show this to me? He didn’t have to.”
Jimmy pocketed the cassette, gun still held steadily at Tate. He backed to the door. “Mr. Sharpe asked me just to mention the old adage that one good deed deserves another. He hopes you’ll remember that next Thursday at the argument down in Richmond.”
“Look-”
“He said he didn’t think you’d agree. He just asked me to mention it.”
Jimmy walked to the sliding door, through which he’d apparently entered. He paused. “The answer to your question? I myself would guess it’s because he’s got two daughters of his own. Good night.”
After he’d gone Tate drained his wineglass with a shaking hand and picked up the phone and dialed a number.
When Konnie answered Tate said, “Got a lead.”
“Asking or telling?”
“Telling.”
“Go on.”
“Long story. That case with Sharpe?”
“Right.”
Tate said, “It wasn’t just me he had a PI tailing. It was Megan too.”
“Why? Dig up dirt?”
“That’s my guess. Lawyer’s daughter scores drugs. Sleeps around. Something like that. Any-way, a friend of his just showed me a tape.” Tate described it.
“Hot damn. Get it over here-”
“Forget it. It’s been atomized. But I think it was Megan the perp was moving from one trunk to another. She was probably drugged.” Tate prayed the girl had merely been unconscious.
“Tags?”
“Nope. Sony.”
“Damn, Tate. Why’d you think they put those cute little signs on cars?” After a pause Konnie continued. “Okay. So-you don’t think it’s Sharpe?”
“He didn’t have to show me diddly. He didn’t even bargain-well, not too hard. You know, throw the case and I’ll tell you what the PI saw. He could’ve done that.”
“Would you’ve agreed?”
Tate didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Yes, I would have.”
“Okay, so it’s not Sharpe. Then let’s think. She’s got a stalker after her. He’s checking out her routine. Following her. When she goes to school, when she goes to pom-pom practice.”
Tate tried to picture Megan as a cheerleader. “As if?”
“He knows where she’s going to be this morning. He gets her, drugs her, drives her to Vienna, where he’s left his own car. He’s got to switch wheels. The Mercedes.”
“Right.”
“Leaves her car with the timetable. So it looks like she’s headed off on Amtrak. .. He took off to wherever he was going to stash her. Which means what, Counselor?” Tate couldn’t think.
When he said nothing Konnie gave a harsh laugh. “Damn, I’d forgot how I had to hold your hand when we were putting all those bad guys away What’s sitting right under her car at the moment?”
“Tread marks! The Mercedes’s tread marks.”
“There’s hope for you after all, boy-if you apply yourself and work real hard. Okay, Counselor, this’s gonna take some time. Listen, you sit tight and have some nice hot mashed potatoes. And think of me when you eat ‘em.”
Konnie Konstantinatis’s first lesson in police work was to watch his father fool the tax men like ‘coons tricking hounds.
The old Greek immigrant was petty, weak, dangerous, a cross between a squirrel and a ferret. He was a born liar and had an instinct for knowing human nature cold. He put stills next to smokehouses, stills next to factories, stills in boats, disguised them like henhouses. Hid his income in a hundred small businesses. Once he smooth-talked a revenuer into arresting Konnie’s father’s own innocent brother-in-law instead of him and swore an oath at the trial that cost the bewildered man two years of his life.
So from the age of five or six Konnie had observed his father and had learned the art of evasion and deception. And therefore he’d learned the art of seeing through deceit.
This was a skill to be practiced slowly and tediously. And this was how he was going to find the man who’d kidnapped Tate Collier’s daughter.
Konnie arranged for a small crane to lift Megan’s car out of its spot, rather than drive it out and risk obliterating the Merce’s tread marks.
He then spent the next two hours taking electrostatic prints of the twelve tire treads that he could isolate and differentiate-ones he determined weren’t from Megan’s car. He then identified the matching left and right tires and measured wheelbases and lengths of the cars they’d come from. He jotted all this, in lyrical handwriting, into a battered leather notebook.
He then went over the entire parking space with a Dust buster and- hunched in the front seat of his car-looked over all the trace evidence picked up in the paper filter. Most of it was nothing more than dust and meaningless without laboratory analysis. But Konnie found one obvious clue: a single fiber that came from cheap rope. He recognized it because in one of the three kidnapping cases he’d worked over the past ten years the victim’s hands had been bound with rope that shed fibers just like this.
Speeding back to the office, the detective sat down at his computer and ran the wheel dimensions through the motor vehicle specification database. One set of numbers perfectly fit the dimensions for a Mercedes sedan.
He examined the electrostatic prints carefully. Flipping through Burne’s Tire Identifier, he concluded that they were a rare model of Michelin and because they showed virtually no wear he guessed the tires were no more than three or four months old. Encouraging, on the one hand, because they were unusual tires and it would be easier to track down the purchaser. But troubling too. Because they were expensive, as was the model of the car the man was driving. It was therefore likely that the perp was intelligent, which suggested he was an organized offender-the hardest to find.
And the sort of criminal that presented the most danger.
Konnie then started canvassing. It was Saturday evening and although most of the tire outlets were still open-General Tire, Sears, Merchants, Mercedes dealerships-the managers had gone home. But nothing as trivial as this stopped Konnie. He blustered and bullied until he had the names and home phone numbers of night staff managers of the stores’ record-keeping and data-processing departments.
He made thirty-eight phone calls and by the time he hung up from speaking with the last parts department manager on his list, faxes of bills of sale were starting to roll into police headquarters.
But the information wasn’t as helpful as he’d hoped. Most of the sales receipts included the manufacturer of the customer’s car and the tag number. Some had the model number but virtually none had the color. The list kept growing. After an hour he had copies of 142 records of the sales of that model of Michelin in the past twelve months to people who owned Mercedeses.
He looked over the discouragingly lengthy list of names.
Standard procedure was to run the names through the outstanding warrants/prior arrests database. But a net like that didn’t seem to be the sort that would catch this perp-he wasn’t a chronic ‘jacker or a shooter with a long history of crime. Still, Konnie was a cop who dotted his i’s and he handed the stack to Genie. “You know what to do, darling.”
“It’s seven forty-two on a Saturday night, boss,” the assistant pointed out.
“You had dinner at least.”
“Lemme tell you something, Konnie,” the huge woman said, nodding at the KFC bags. “Throw those out. They’re starting to stink.”
Dutifully, he did. As he returned to his desk he grabbed his ringing phone.
“Detective Konstantinatis, please?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Special Agent McComb with the FBI. Child Exploitation and Kidnapping Unit.”
“Sure, how you doin’?” Konnie’d worked with the unit occasionally. They were tireless and dedicated and top-notch.
“I’m doing a favor for my boss in Quantico. He asked me to take a look at the Megan McCall case. You’re involved in that, right?”
“Yup.”
“It’s not an active case for us but you know Tate Collier’s the girl’s father, right?”
“Know that.”
“Well, he did some pretty good work for us when he was a commonwealth's attorney so I said I’d look into her disappearance. As a favor.”
“Just what I’m doing, more or less. But I’m gonna present it as an active case to my captain tonight.”
“Are you really?”
“Found some interesting forensics.” Konnie was thinking, Man, if I could turn the tire data over to the Feds… the FBI has a whole staff of people who specialize in tires.
“That’s good to know. We ought to coordinate our approaches. Do some proactive thinking.”
“Sure.” Konnie’s thinking was: They might be the best cops in the world but feebies talk like assholes.
The agent said, “I’m up at Ernie’s, near the parkway. You know it?”
“Sure. It’s a half mile from me.”
“I was about to order dinner and was reading the file when I saw your name. Maybe I could come by in an hour or so. Or maybe-this might appeal to you, Officer-you might want to join me? Let Uncle Sam pick up the dinner tab.”
He paused for a moment. “Why not? Be there in ten minutes.”
“Good. Bring whatever you’ve got.”
“Will do.”
They hung up. Konnie stuck his head in Genie’s office, where she was looking over the warrants and arrests request results. “Everything’s negative, Konnie.”
“Don’t worry. We got the feds on the case now.”
“My.”
He took the stack of faxed receipts from her desk, shoved them into his briefcase and headed out the door.
Konnie was feeling pretty good. Ernie’s served some great mashed potatoes.
Aaron Matthews sat at a booth in a dark corner of the restaurant, looking out the window at a tableau of heavy equipment, bright yellow in the dusk, squatting on a dirt hillside nearby.
This was an area that five years ago had been fields and was now rampantly overgrown with town houses and apartments and strip malls. Starbucks, Chesapeake Bagels, Linens ‘n’ Things. Ernie’s restaurant fit in perfectly, an upscale franchise. Looked nice on the surface but beneath the veneer it was all formula. Matthews stirred as the waddling form of Detective Konstantinatis entered the restaurant and maneuvered through the tables.
Watching the man’s eyes, seeing where they slid-furtively, guiltily.
Always the eyes. Matthews waved and Konstantinatis nodded and steered toward him. Matthews had no idea what official FBI identification looked like and wouldn’t have known how to fake some if he had but he’d dressed in a suit and white shirt-what he always wore when seeing patients-and had brought several dog-eared file folders, on which he’d printed FBI PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL with stencils he’d made from office materials bought at Staples. These sat prominently in front of him.
He hoped for the best.
But after glancing at the files the detective merely scooted into the seat across from Matthews and shook his hand.
They made small talk for a few moments-Matthews using his best government-speak. Stiff, awkward. If the fake files hadn’t fooled the cop the stilted language surely would have.
The waitress came and they ordered. Matthews wasn’t surprised when the detective ordered milk with dinner. Matthews himself ordered a beer.
He said, “I’m afraid we don’t have many leads. But from what you were telling me you think there’s a chance she was kidnapped?”
“First I just thought she ran off. But there’s apparently a tape that shows somebody switching her car with this gray Mercedes around the time she vanished. And maybe hustling the girl into the trunk, unconscious.”
“I see,” said Aaron Matthews, who felt fire burn right through him. His battleship gray 560 sat in the parking lot, fifty feet from them. Resplendent with its stolen license plates.
A tape? Who’d taken it? He was furious for a moment but anger was a luxury he had no time for.
“You’ve got this tape?”
“Vanished into thin air. Long story.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t envy you that job,” the detective said. “Looking for missing kids all day long. Must be hard.” Revealing a sentimental side Matthews wouldn’t have guessed he had.
Matthews said in a soft voice, “It’s where I feel I can make the most difference.” Their drinks came. They clinked glasses. Matthews spilled some beer on the table. Wiped it up sloppily with a cocktail napkin.
“Detective-”
“Call me ‘Konnie.’ Everybody else does.”
“Okay Konnie. I hate to ask but I don’t know this Collier and the question’s come up. Do you think there was anything between him and the girl?”
“Naw. Not Tate. If anything, just the opposite.”
“How’s that?”
“Hell, I didn’t even know he had a daughter until we’d been working together awhile. It’s not that. I do think somebody ‘napped her. No motive yet, though might be a case Tate’s working on. He’s decided this local real estate guy didn’t do it. But I’m not so sure. I also have some thoughts about the girl’s aunt-apparently she’s pretty jealous of her sister having a child.”
Bett’s sister… How did Konnie know about her?
“I ‘statted some tire treads and got a list of a hundred and a half people bought that brand of tire in the past year. Could I give you the receipts”-he patted the briefcase-”have your people check ‘em out?”
“Be happy to. Have you done anything with them yet?”
“Just run ‘em through the outstanding warrants and arrests. Nothing showed up.”
Planning for the kidnapping, Matthews had bought new tires for the car two months ago; he couldn’t afford to be slowed up by a flat. At least when he’d taken the car into General Tire he’d given a fake name and paid cash.
“But then I got to thinking,” Konnie continued, “on the way over here, what I shoulda done-I shoulda looked at the receipts and found out who paid cash. Anybody who did, I figure it’d be a fake name. I mean, those tires cost big money. Nobody pays cash for something like that. So what your folks could do is check the tags and see if the name matches-on all the cash receipts. If they don’t then that’s our prime suspect.”
Jesus in heaven. Matthews hadn’t swapped plates when he’d taken the car in to have the new tires mounted. The tag would reveal his real name and the address of his rental house in Prince William County. Which didn’t match the fake information he’d given the clerk at the tire store.
“That’s a good idea,” Matthews said. “A proactive idea.” He sounded casual but he wanted to scream. A dark mood hovered over him.
The food came and Konnie ate hungrily, hunched over his meal.
Matthews picked at his. He’d have to act soon. He flagged the waitress down and ordered another beer.
“You want to give me those receipts?” Matthews nodded at the briefcase.
“Sure, but let’s go back to headquarters after. It’s right up the street here. You can fax ‘em to your office.”
“Okay.”
The second beer came. Konnie glanced at it for a second, returned to his food.
“This Tate Collier,” Matthews said slowly, savoring his microbrew. “Sounds like a good man.”
“None better. Best fucking lawyer in the commonwealth. I get sick of these shits getting off on technicalities. When Collier was arguing the case they went to jail and stayed there.”
Matthews held up the beer. “To your theory of tires.”
The detective hesitated then they tapped glasses. Matthews drank half the beer, exhaled with satisfaction and set it down. “Hot for April, don’t you think?”
“Is,” the detective grunted.
Matthews asked, “You on duty now?”
“Naw, I been off for three hours.”
“Then hell, chug down that milk and let me buy you a real drink.” He tapped the beer.
“No thanks.”
“Come on, nothing like a nice beer on a hot day”
‘Fact is, I gave up drinking a few years back.”
Matthews looked mortified. “Oh, I’m son’.”
‘Not at all.”
“I wasn’t thinking. A man drinking milk. Shouldn’t have ordered this. I am sorry’.”
The cop held up a calm hand.” ‘S no problem at all, I don’t hold with making other folk change their way of life ‘cause of me.”
Matthews lifted the glass of beer. “You want me to get rid of it or anything?”
As the cop glanced at the beer his eyes flashed-the same as they had when he’d walked through the bar, looking longingly at the row of bottles limed up like prostitutes on a street corner.
“Nope,” the detective said. “You can’t go hiding from it.” He ate some more mashed potatoes then said, “Where you find most of the runaways go?”
Matthews enjoyed each small sip of the beer. The detective eyed him every third or fourth. The aroma from the liquid he’d spilled-on purpose-filled the booth with a sour malty scent. “Always the big city. What a lure New York is. They think about getting jobs, becoming Madonna or whoever the girls want to become nowadays. The boys think they’ll get laid every night.” Matthews sipped the beer again and looked outside. “Damn hot. Imagine that battle.”
“ Bull Run?”
“Yep, well, I call it first Manassas but that’s because I’m from Pennsylvania.” Matthews enjoyed another sip. “You married?”
Or did the wife leave the drunk?
“Was. Divorced now”
“Kids?”
Or did they cut Daddy off cold when they got tired of him passing out during Jeopardy! on weeknights and puking to die every Sunday morning?
“Two. Wife’s got ‘em. See ‘em some holidays.”
Matthews poured down another mouthful, “Must be tough.” “Can be.” The fat cop took refuge in his potatoes.
After a minute Matthews asked, “So, you a graduate?” “How’s that?”
“Twelve steps.”
“AA? Sure.” The cop glanced down at his beefy hands. “Been four years, four months.”
“Eight years for me.”
Another flicker in the eyes. The cop glanced at the beer.
Matthews laughed. “You’re where you are, Konnie. And I’m where I am. I was drinking a fifth of fucking bad whiskey every day. Hell, at least that. Sometimes I’d crack the revenue of a second bottle just after dinner.” Konnie didn’t notice how FBI-speak had turned into buddy talk, with syntax and vocabulary very similar to his.
“‘Crack the revenue.’” Konnie laughed. “My daddy used to say that.”
So had some of Matthews’s patients.
“Bottle and a half? That’s a hell of a lot of drinking.”
“Oh, yes, it was. Yes sir. Knew I was going to die. So I gave it up. How bad was it for you?”
The cop shrugged and shoveled peas and potatoes into his mouth.
“Hurt my marriage bad,” he offered. Reluctantly the cop added, “I guess it killed my marriage.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Matthews said, thrilling at the sorrow in the man’s eyes.
“And it was probably gonna kill me someday.”
“What was your drink?” Matthews asked.
“Scotch and beer.”
“Ha! Mine too. Dewar’s and Bud.”
Konnie’s eyes grew troubled. “So you ‘hat?” The cop nodded at the tall-neck hot tie. “What happened? You fell off, huh?”
Matthews’s face turned reverential. “I’ll tell you the God’s truth, Konnie.” He took a delicious sip of beer. “I believe in meeting your weaknesses head-on. I won’t run from them.”
The cop grunted affirmatively.
“See, it seemed too easy to give up drinking completely. You understand me?”
“Not exactly."
“It was the coward’s way. A lot of people just stop drinking altogether. But that’s as much a failure to me… sorry, don’t take this personal.”
“Not at all, keep going. I’m interested.”
“That’s as much a failure to me as somebody who drinks all the time.”
“Guess that makes some sense,” the cop said slowly Matthews swirled the beer seductively in his glass. “Take a man addicted to sex. You know that can be a problem?” “I’ve heard. They got a twelve-step for that too, you know?” “Right. But he can hardly give up sex altogether, right? That’d be unnatural.”
Konnie nodded.
Oh, he’s with me, Matthews thought. Hell, this is like sex talking your way into a man’s soul. He felt so high. “So,” he continued, “I just got back to the point where I could control it.”
“And that worked?” Konnie asked. The toady little man seemed awestruck.
“You betcha. I stopped cold for two years. Just like I told myself I’d do. This was all planned out. Sometimes it was tough as hell. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. But God helped me. As soon as I had it under control, two years to the day I stopped, I took my first drink. One shot of Dewar’s, Drank it down like medicine.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Felt good. Enjoyed it. Didn’t have another. Didn’t have anything for a week. Then I had another shot and a Bud. I let a month go by.”
“A month?” Konnie whispered.
“Right. Then I poured a glass of scotch. Let it sit in front of me. Looked at it, smelled it, poured it down the drain. Let another month go by.”
The cop shook his head in wonder. “Sounds like you’re one of them masochists or whatever you call ‘em.” But there was a desperation in his laugh.
“Sometimes we have to find the one thing that’s hardest for us and turn around and stare right at it. Go deep. As deep as we can go. That’s what courage is. That’s what makes men out of us.”
“I can respect what you’re saying.”
“I’ve been drinking off and on for the past six years. Never been drunk once.” He leaned forward and rested his hand on the cop’s hammy forearm. “Remember that feeling when you were first drinking?”
“I think-”
“It made you relaxed, peaceful, happy? Brought out your good side? That’s the way it is now.” Matthews leaned back. “I’m proud of myself”
“To you.” The cop swallowed and tipped his milk against the beer glass. His eyes slid over the golden surface of the brew.
Oh, you poor fool, thought Aaron Matthews. You don’t have a soul in the world to talk to, do you? “Sometimes,” he continued pensively, “when I have a real problem, something eating at me, something making me feel so guilty it’s like a fire inside… Well, I’ll have a shot. That numbs it. It helps me get through.”
“No foolin’.” The fork probed the diminished pile of potatoes.
Let’s go deep.
Touch the most painful part…
“If I found myself in a situation where there was somebody I loved and she was drifting away because of the way I’d become-well, I’d want to be able to face whatever had driven her away. I could show her I was in control again and-who knows?-maybe I could just get her back.”
The cop’s face was flushed and it seemed that his throat had swollen closed,
Matthews sipped more beer, looked out the window, at the dusk sky. “Yes sir, I hated living alone. Waking up on those Sunday mornings. Those March Sunday mornings, the sky all gray… The holidays by myself… God, I hated that. My wife gone… The one person in the world I needed. The one person I was willing to do anything for…
The detective was paralyzed.
Now, Matthews thought. Now!
“Let me show you something.” Matthews leaned forward, winking. “Watch this.” He waved to the waitress. “Shot of Dewar’s.”
“One?” she called.
“Just one, yeah.”
Numb, the cop watched the glass arrive.
Matthews made a show of reaching down and picking up the brimming glass. He leaned forward, smelled the glass, then took the tiniest sip. He set the glass down on the table and lifted his hands, palms up.
“That’s it. The only hard liquor I’ll have for two, three weeks.”
“You can do that?” The cop was dumbfounded.
“Easiest thing in the world. Without a single problem.” He returned to his beer and called the waitress over. “I’m sorry, honey. I’ll pay you for it but I changed my mind. I think I better keep a clear head tonight. You can take it.”
“Sure thing, sir.”
The cop’s hand made it to the glass before hers. She blinked in surprise at the vehemence of the big man’s gesture.
“Oh, you want me to leave that after all?”
The cop looked at Matthews but then turned his dog eyes to the waitress. “Yeah. And bring my friend here another beer.”
A fraction of a pause. Their eyes met. Matthews said, “Make it two.”
“Sure thing, gentlemen. Put it on your tab?”
“Oh, no,” Matthews insisted. “This’s on me.”
Matthews, wearing his surgical gloves, drove Konnie’s car out of the parking lot of the strip mall and toward the interstate. The cop was in the passenger seat, clutching a bottle of scotch between his legs like it was the joystick in a biplane. His head rocked against the Taurus’s window. Spit and liquor ran down his chin.
Matthews parked on a side road, not far from Ernie’s, lifted the bottle away from Konnie and splashed some on the dashboard and seat of the car, handed it back. Konnie didn’t notice. “How you doing?” Matthews asked him.
The big man gazed morosely at the open mouth of the bottle and said nothing.
At the strip mall where they’d bought the scotch Matthews had pitched out a trash bag containing the tire receipts and all the rest of the notes on the Megan McCall investigation. The doctor now climbed out of the car, pulled Konnie into the driver’s seat.
Konnie gulped down two large slugs of liquor. He wiped his sweating, pasty face. “Where’m I going?”
“You’re going home, Konnie.”
“Okay.”
“You go on home now.”
“Okay. I’m going home. Is Carol there?”
“Your wife? Yeah, she’s there, Konnie. She’s waiting for you to come home. You better hurry.”
“I really miss her.”
“You know where to go, don’t you?” Matthews asked.
“I think His bleary eyes looked around. “I don’t know”
“That road right there. See it?”
“Sure. There?”
“Right there,” Matthews said. “Just drive down there. That’ll get you home. That’ll get you home to Carol.”
“Okay.”
“Good-bye, Konnie.”
“Good-bye. That road there?”
“That’s right. Hey, Konnie?”
Matthews looked at the rheumy eyes, wet lips.
“You say hi to Carol for me, won’t you?”
The cop nodded.
Matthews flicked the gearshift into drive and stepped back as Konnie accelerated. He was driving more or less down the middle of the road.
Matthews was walking back to Ernie’s to pick up the Mercedes when he heard the sudden squealing of brakes and the blares of a dozen horns, signaling to Konnie that he’d turned his dark blue Taurus onto the exit, not entrance, ramp of I-66 and was driving the wrong way down the interstate. It was no more than thirty seconds later that he heard the pounding crash of what was probably a head-on collision and-though perhaps only in his imagination-a faint scream.
Night now.
The corridors of the asylum were murky, illuminated only by the light from two outdoor security lamps bleeding in through the greasy windows.
Megan McCall, gripping her glass sword, moved silently through the main wing. She couldn’t get the comic books out of her mind, the tentacles gripping screaming women, the monsters raping them.
Moving toward the boy’s room. Closer, closer.
She stepped into the large lobby. In the dim light, shadows filled the space. She believed he was back in his room but he could have been anywhere.
Megan felt a breath on her neck and spun around, practically feeling the metal rod he carried swinging toward her head. Gasping.
Nothing but a faint breeze.
Was he asleep in there? Reading? Jerking off?
Fantasizing about her?
About what he was going to do to her?
The hospital corridors were like a maze. She lost her way and was no longer sure where his rooms were. Made several false turns and found herself back where she’d started. Feeling desperate now. Megan was afraid that he’d find the trap-her only advantage against the boy She walked more quickly, listening carefully. But she heard no obscene breathing, no lewd whispering of her name. In a way the silence was more frightening than his mutterings, not having the least indication where he was.
Then she turned a corner and found his room. She saw light spilling into the corridor from the open door. It flickered and darkened for a moment.
He was inside, Megan, sweating. Megan, scared.
Scared of dying, scared of the monster who lives up the hail, scared of the whispering bears,
Well, you wanted him, Crazy Megan whispers. What’re you waiting for? Go get him.
Megan started to tell CM. to be quiet. But suddenly she stopped- because a thought hit her with the strength of the cinder blocks piled up in her trap. It was this: that Crazy Megan not only isn’t crazy, she’s completely sane. And more than that: CM. is the only one of them who’s real.
Crazy Megan is the genuine Megan-the Megan who danced on the scaffolding of the water tower on a dare, just to get Bett or Tate or somebody to notice her. The Megan who secretly dreamed of going to San Francisco for a year after high school and then to college in Paris. The Megan who made fierce love with a sexy black boyfriend who- fuck you, Dr. Hanson-I do love after all! The Megan who wanted to poke her finger into her father’s face and scream at him, “The inconvenient child’s back and you’ve got her whether you like it or not!”
Oh, yeah, Crazy Megan’s the sane one. And the other one’s just a loser.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “Okay, prick, come and get me.” The shadow of Peter Matthews froze on the wall.
The light clicked out and the corridor filled with darkness.
“Come on, you fucker!” she shouted.
There was a ring of metal-he must have picked up the rod. She couldn’t see clearly but she could just make out his form lumbering slowly from the doorway. He looked up and down the hail and then turned toward her. “Megan.
God, he’s big.
“Megan!” he rasped.
He started toward her. Moving much faster than she’d expected from the shuffling lope she’d heard earlier.
Her courage dissolved. What a fucking stupid idea this is! Hell, it’s not going to work. Of course it isn’t. He’ll get her.
“No!” she screamed in panic.
Get going! Crazy Megan shouts. Run.
She backed up fast, knowing that she should be watching where she was going but afraid to take her eyes off him for an instant.
Feeling the wall behind her. Nearly tripped on a table. She spun around, pushed it aside.
And when she looked back he was gone.
We’re fucked, Crazy Megan whispers hopelessly
He could be anywhere now! Coming up around her from the left or the right.
And, of course, she remembered, he’d have keys to the place; he could hide in one of the locked rooms arid wait for her to pass by And then… move from room to room and come up behind her.
There was nothing she could do now except return to the dead end corridor where she’d set up the trap. Get there as fast as she could and wait.
But in her panic she was turned around. Was it back that way? Or down this corridor? She gazed down two hallways. Which? He could be down either of them. She could hardly see a thing in the darkness.
There, she thought. It’s got to be that one. I’m sure.
Almost sure.
She sprinted. She slammed into a fiberglass chair, sending it flying. She stayed upright but the noise of the furniture hitting the wall was very loud.
Megan froze, Had he heard? Had- Suddenly a huge form stepped from the corridor about two feet away, lunging toward her. “Megan…
Megan screamed, couldn’t get the knife up in time. She closed her eyes, swinging her left fist toward where his face was. She connected hard and must have broken his nose because he wailed in pain and dropped back, around the corner.
She ran.
Turned one corner and paused at the entrance to the hallway that led to the trap.
He followed, moving toward her.
She made sure he got a good look at her, to see which way she was going, then started toward the trap.
But she stopped. Wait! Was it this corridor? No, the next. Wait. Was it? She glanced into the murky shadows and couldn’t see.
Peter was getting closer. Which fucking corridor? Crazy Megan shouts.
I don’t know, I don’t know, they all look alike…
He was twenty feet away.
Come on, snaps C.M. Get it together
No choice. It better be this one.
Megan ran to the end of the corridor.
Yes! She’d been right. There was the trap. She crouched down and picked up the end of the rope. At the far end of the corridor Peter paused and glanced toward her.
More muttering. Like an animal. She remembered the newspaper picture: his odd mouth, probing tongue, the crazy eves. The grin at his mother’s funeral.
I’m so fucking scared.
You’re gonna nail him, Crazy Megan says.
In the darkness he didn’t even seem to be walking. He just floated closer to her, growing larger and larger, filling the corridor. He stopped right before the trap. She couldn’t see his eves or face in the shadow hut she knew he was leering at her.
More muttering.
He stepped closer.
Now!
She pulled the rope.
The denim snapped neatly in half. The cinder blocks shifted slightly but stayed where they were.
Oh, no. Oh, Christ, no! That’s it, Crazy Megan cries. It’s over with.
He moved forward another two steps.
She swept the knife from her pocket, looked at his shadowy form.
I’m going to die. This is it. I’m dead. He’ll break my arm, take the knife away from me and fuck me till I die… Megan’s by herself now- Crazy Megan has gone away, Crazy Megan is dead already.
He stepped forward one more foot. The dim light from outside fell on his face.
No…
She was hallucinating.
Megan gasped. “Josh!”
“Megan,” he mumbled again. Joshua LeFevre’s face and neck were bloody messes, his hands, arms and legs too. Large patches of skin were missing from his arms and legs. He dropped to his knees.
Just as the cinder blocks started to tumble toward him. He glanced hopelessly at the hundreds of pounds of concrete and didn’t even try to get out of the way.
“No!” Megan cried.
She leapt forward and pushed him aside. The blocks just missed them both and crashed into the floor, firing splinters of stone through the air.
“Megan,” he said, the name stuttering out from his torn throat. Blood sprayed her face as he spoke. Then he passed out.
Tate Collier’s Lexus skidded up to the pay phone on Route 29.
He leapt out, looking around desperately.
He saw no one.
“Hello?” he called in a harsh whisper. “Hello!”
He glanced at the old diner-or what was left of it after an arson fire some years ago-and piles of trash. Deserted.
Then he heard a moan, followed by some violent retching.
Tate ran into the bushes. There Konnie sat, bloody and drenched in sweat, vomit on his chin, eyes unfocused. He’d been crying.
“Jesus. What happened?” Tate bent down, put his arm around the man. When Konnie’d called him twenty minutes ago he’d said only to meet him here as soon as possible. Tate knew he was drunk, only half conscious, but had no other clue as to what was going on.
“I’m going down, Tate. I fucked up bad. Oh, Christ..
Bett… now Konnie… What a day, Tate thought. What a day.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m okay. But I may’ve killed people, Tate. There was an accident. I left the scene.” He gasped and retched for a minute. “They’re looking for me, my own people’re looking for me.” He coughed violently.
“I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No, I’m turning myself in. But-”
He rolled over on his side and retched for a few minutes. Then caught his breath and sat up.
A squad car with flashing lights cruised past slowly. The searchlight came on but it missed the bushes where Tate crouched beside the detective.
“Listen to me,” Konnie said. “You have to get to the office. You need to look at the receipts.”
“Receipts.”
“For the tires. Go to the office, Tate. Genie should’ve made a copy of them. I’m praying she did. Ask her for them. But move fast ‘cause they’re going to impound my desk.”
“Genie? That’s your assistant?”
“You remember her. The list of receipts, okay?”
“All right.”
“Then look for whoever paid cash for the tires.”
“Cash for the tires. All right.”
“She ran warrants but that’s not… that’s not what I shoulda been looking for. Tate, you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. Look for the receipts where the customers paid cash. Then run the tag numbers of their cars. If the registered owner doesn’t match the name on the receipt that’s our boy The one took your daughter. I got a look at He caught his breath. “I got a look at him.”
“You saw him?”
“Oh, yeah. The prick suckered me good. He’s white, forties, dark hair. Six feet. About one seventy. Said he… Claimed he was Bureau. He suckered rue just like my daddy suckered people. Shit. God, I’m sick.”
“Okay, Konnie. I’ll do it. But now I’m getting you to the hospital.”
“No, you’re not. You’re not wasting another fucking minute. You’re going do what the hell I told you. And be there for my arraignment. I can’t believe what I did. I can’t believe it.” His voice disappeared in a cascade of retching.
Tate found his old commonwealth’s attorney ID badge at home and ran back to his car, hanging the beaded chain around his neck.
The date was four years old but was in small type; he doubted anyone would notice.
In twenty minutes he was walking into the police station. No one paid him any attention. He signed the log-in book and walked into Konnie’s office.
A heavyset woman, red eyed and crying, looked up.
“Oh, Mr. Collier. Did you hear?”
“He’s going to be all right, Genie.”
“This’s so terrible,” she said, wiping her face. “So terrible. I can’t imagine he’d take to drinking again. I don’t know why I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I’m going to help him. But I’ve got to do something first. It’s very important.”
“He said I should help you when he called. Oh, he sounded so drunk on the phone. I remember he used to call me up and say he wouldn’t be coming in today because he had the flu. But it wasn’t the flu. He sounded the way he was tonight. Just plain drunk.”
Tate rested his hand on the woman’s broad shoulder. “He’s going to be all right. We’ll all help him. Did you make a copy of the receipts?”
“I did, yes. He always tells me, ‘Make a copy of everything I give you. Always, always, always make a copy.’”
“That’s Konnie.”
“Here they are.”
He took the stack of receipts, owners of Mercedeses who’d bought new Michelins. On four receipts the cash/check box was marked. He didn’t recognize any of the names.
“Could you run these tag numbers through DMV and get me the names and addresses of the registered owners?”
“Sure.” She sniffed and waddled to her chair, sat heavily. Then she typed furiously.
A moment later she motioned him over.
The first three names matched those on the receipts.
The fourth didn’t.
“Oh my God,” Tate muttered.
“What is it, Mr Collier?”
He didn’t answer He stood, numb, staring at the name Aaron Matthews, Sully Fields Drive, Manassas, the letters glowing in jaundice yellow type on the black screen.
The Court: The prosecution may now present its summation, Mr. Collier?
Mr. Collier: My friends… The task of the jury is a difficult and thankless one. You’re called on to sift through a haystack of evidence, looking for that single needle of truth. In many cases, that needle is elusive. Practically impossible to find. But in the case before you, the Commonwealth versus Peter Matthews, the needle is lying out in the open, evident for everyone to see.
There is no question that the defendant killed Joan Keller He was seen walking with the victim, a sixteen-year-old girl, by Bull Run Marina. He was seen leading her into the woods. He was later seen running from the park five minutes before Joan’s body was found, strangled to death. The mud in which her cold corpse lay matched the mud found on the knees of the defendant’s jeans. When he was arrested, as you heard from the testimony, he blurted out to the officers, “She had to die.”
And in the trailer where he lived, the police found hundreds of comic books and horror novels, depicting big, hulking men doing unspeakable things to helpless women victims-victims just like Joan Keller
The defense can see that shiny needle of truth as clearly as you and I can. There’s no doubt in their minds, either, that the defendant killed that poor girl. And so what do they do? They try to distract us. They raise doubts about Joan’s character They suggest that she had loose morals. That she’d had sex with local boys… . sometimes for money. Or for liquor or cigarettes. A sixteen-year-old girl! These are nothing more than vile attempts to distract you from finding the needle.
Oh, they talk about accidental death. “Just playing around,” they say. The killer was a troubled young man, they say, but harmless.
Well, I’d say the facts of the case prove that he wasn’t harmless at all, don’t you think?
Harmless men don’t strangle innocent young women seventy pounds lighter than they are.
Harmless men don’t act out their sick and twisted fantasies on helpless youngsters like Joanie Sue Keller
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let the defense hide that needle of truth from you. Don’t let them cover it up. This case is simple, extremely simple. The defendant, through his premeditation, his calculation, his knowing, purposeful intent, has taken a life. The life of a young girl. Someone’s friend. .. someone’s sister. .. someone’s daughter There is no worse crime than that. And he must be held full y responsible for it.
The great poet Dante said that the most righteous requests are answered in the silence of the deed. I’m not asking for hollow words, ladies and gentlemen. No, I’m asking for your courageous deed-finding this dangerous killer sane, finding him guilty and recommending to the court that he pay for young Joan Keller’s life with his own. Thank you.
Orator Tate Collier had done everything right in the closing statement. It was short, colloquial, filled with concrete imagery. He’d referred to Peter Matthews as “the defendant” and to the girl as “Joan”-depersonalizing the criminal, humanizing the victim. The reference to the “needle”-getting the jury used to the thought of the needle used in lethal injections-was a particularly good touch, he’d thought.
He’d even added the request for the death penalty because that was something they could bargain with in their minds-trading the boy’s life for a finding of sanity and a long prison sentence.
And that was exactly what happened.
He won, the boy was found sane and guilty. And was sentenced to life without parole. Which had been Tate’s goal all along.
And a week later the young man who’d beaten capital punishment was executed by a far more informal means than lethal injection-a dozen prison inmates, identities unknown, had used broomsticks and sharpened spoons to carry out the sentence. And it took them three hours to do so.
Justice?
After he’d heard of Peter’s death, Tate had sat at his desk for a long moment, wondering why he felt so troubled at the news. Then he walked into the commonwealth’s attorney’s file room and read through evidence in the case once again.
They were the same files and documents he’d read before the trial, of course. But he examined them now untainted by the passionate drive to convict the young man. He looked more carefully at the picture they painted of the boy-not “the defendant.” But Peter Thomas Matthews, a seventeen-year-old boy, a resident of Fairfax, Virginia.
Yes, Peter had a collection of eerie comics and Japanimation tapes. But many of them, Tate had learned in preparing for trial, were bestsellers in Japan -where they’d taken on an artsy cult status and were reviewed seriously and collected by young people and adults alike. What was more, the boy also had a collection of serious science fiction and fantasy writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Peter had spent hours copying long, poetic passages from these books and had tried his hand at illustrating scenes from them. He’d also written sci-fi and fantasy short stories of his own, which weren’t bad for someone his age.
Yes, some psychiatric evaluations called the boy dangerous. But others said he merely had a paranoid personality and was given to panic in stressful situations. He had no history of violence.
In getting ready for the case, Tate had also learned about Joan Keller-the victim. The girl had been sexually active since age twelve. She’d experimented with “weird things,” possibly erotic asphyxia. She’d seduced older men on several other occasions and would have been the complaining witness in at least one statutory rape case, except that she’d refused to cooperate. She’d been treated for being a borderline personality and had been suspended twice for assaults-against both girls and boys at her school, including one involving a knife.
Peter had abrasions on his face and neck when he was brought to the lockup. He claimed that Joan had struck him with a rock when she got tired of his awkward groping-after she’d taken his hand and slipped it into her panties.
And the statement the boy had made-about how Joan “had to die”-was disputed by a local fisherman near the scene of the arrest. He claimed the boy might have said, “She never had to die… She shouldn’t have hit me.”
But silver-tongued Tate Collier had managed to keep all of this damning evidence out of the trial or had shattered the credibility of the witnesses presenting it.
Your Honor we will not try the victim in this case Your Honor a well written short story has no probative value in this case whatsoever Your Honor that fact is immaterial and has to be stricken please instruct the witness…
The defense lawyers had come to him with a plea bargain request: criminally negligent homicide, suspended sentence, three years’ probation and two years’ mandatory counseling.
But, no. Peter Matthews had laid his hands upon the neck of a sixteen-year-old girl and had pressed, pressed, pressed until she was lifeless. And so a plea bargain wouldn’t do.
The Court: The defendant will rise. You have heard the verdict of the jury and have been adjudged guilty of murder in the first degree. The jury has not recommended the death penalty and accordingly I hereby sentence you to life in prison.
He went to prison and the last thing anyone remembered about Peter was his telling a guard he was going to play with his new friends. “Won’t that be way cool?” Peter asked. “We’re going to play ball, a bunch of us. They want me to play ball. Awesome.” Then he disappeared into the laundry room and was found, in several pieces, five hours later.
Why, Tate had wondered back then as he sat alone in the musty file room, had he been so vehement about prosecuting the boy? Why?
The question he’d asked himself often in the past few years.
The question he asked himself now. What would have been so bad if the defendant… if Peter had been put on probation and gone into a hospital for treatment?
Wasn’t that reasonable? Of course it was. But it hadn’t been then, not to the Tate Collier of five years ago. Not to Tate Collier the whiz-kid commonwealth’s attorney, the man who spoke in tongues, the Judge’s grandson.
Why?
Because the thought of a killer depriving parents of their child was unbearable to him. That was the answer. That was all he thought. Someone stole away a girl just like Megan. And he had to die. To hell with justice.
Tate had never seen Peter’s father, Aaron Matthews, at the trial or hadn’t paid any attention to him if he’d been there. The man was a therapist, Tate remembered from reading the boy’s history and evaluations. Lived alone. His wife-a therapist as well, and reportedly more successful than her husband-had committed suicide some years before.
Aaron Matthews…
Well, he could give the police a name and address now. They’d find him. He only prayed Megan was still alive.
Now, in Konnie’s office, he dialed Bett’s home phone. Her voice mail gave her cell phone number and he dialed that. She didn’t answer. He left a message about what he’d learned and told her that he was at the county police station.
He started down the hall, striding the way he’d walked when he’d been a commonwealth’s attorney and cut up these offices as if he owned them, playing inquisitor to the young officers as he grilled them about their cases and the evidence they’d collected.
He pushed through the door to the Homicide Division and was surprised to see three startled detectives stop in the tracks of their conversations. He smiled ruefully, remembering only then that he was a trespasser.
One detective looked at another, an astonished gaze on his face.
“I’m sorry to barge in,” Tate began. “I’m Tate Collier. It’s about my daughter. I don’t know if you heard but she’s disappeared and-”
In less than twenty seconds he was facedown on a convenient desk, the handcuffs ratcheting onto his wrists with metallic efficiency, his Miranda rights floating down upon him from a gruff voice several feet above his head.
“What the hell’s going on?” he barked.
“You’re under arrest, Mr. Collier. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”
“For what? What’re you arresting me for?”
“Do you understand your rights?”
“Yes, I understand my fucking rights. What for?”
“For murder, Mr. Collier, The murder of Amy Walker. If you’ll come this way, please.”
She cradled him, sobbing.
Megan had eased Joshua LeFevre into the pale light from the outside lamp. He was even more badly injured than she’d thought at first-terribly battered-riddled with slashes and bite marks, the wounds crusted with dirt and dried blood. One eye was swollen completely closed, Most of his dreads had been torn off his scalp, which was covered with mud and scabs.
He could speak only in a ghostly, snapping wail. No, it hadn’t been Peter Matthews’s leering voice she’d heard; it was Josh’s. His throat was split open and his vocal cords had apparently been cut. When he breathed, air hissed in through both his mouth and the slash. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but she bound the denim rope around his throat anyway. She could think of nothing else to do.
“Thought it was you,” he gasped. “I couldn’t see. My eyes, my eyes. I thought it was you. But you didn’t answer.”
Megan lowered her head to his chest. “I thought you were his son. I thought you were going to kill me. Oh, Josh, what happened? Was it the dogs? Outside?” He nodded, shivered-from the pain, she guessed, as much as the cold.
“That… man?” he struggled to ask. “He kidn-”
She nodded. “Did you call the police?”
“No,” he gasped. “I didn’t know what was going on. I stopped him but he tricked me He coughed for a moment. “Thought you… thought you were going with him.”
“What happened?” she asked tearfully.
The stuttering explanation: he’d followed her and Matthews here then the doctor had attacked him and left him for the dogs. But before they could finish him off a young deer had trotted past and they left Josh to pull her down.
His beautiful voice, Megan thought, crying. It’s gone. She had to look away from his face.
He’d found a metal rod to use as a cane, he continued, and made his way into the hospital to find a phone. But there weren’t any. Then he learned that the doors didn’t open outward, that the place was a prison.
She gently touched a terrible wound on his face. Even if they managed to get him to a doctor soon would he survive? He’d lost so much blood.
“Were you… you weren’t his lover, were you?”
“What?” she blurted.
“He said you were. He said… He said you wanted to get rid of me.”
“Oh, Josh, no. It was… whatever he said, it was a lie.”
“Who is he?” LeFevre rasped.
“We don’t have time now. Can you walk?”
“No.” He breathed heavily and winced. “Can’t do anything. I’ve about had it.”
She pulled him farther into the alcove, hid him from view. “Wait here.”
“Where… you going?”
“Lie still, Josh. Be quiet. I’ll get something to use for bandages,” she said, rising.
“But he might be there.”
She showed him the glass knife. “I hope he is.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But for God’s sake send somebody after my daughter.”
“Once more from the top, please, sir.”
Tate was still stunned from the news that Amy had been found naked and stabbed to death on Tate’s farm.
“There’s a man named Aaron Matthews. He drives a gray Mercedes. He lives on Sully Field, off Route twenty-nine near Manassas. He’s been following my daughter for the past couple weeks. Or months. I don’t know. And-”
“We’ve got our own agenda here, Collier,” the young homicide detective-a dead ringer for the security guard at Megan’s high school- said gruffly, his patience gone. “You don’t mind, we got a lotta ground to cover.”
“Is Ted Beauridge around?”
“No. One more time, sir. From the top.”
He was in an interrogation cubicle and he was perched on an uncomfortable metal chair. At least the cuffs were off.
“Matthews killed Amy. Megan had told her about being followed. He thought she might have some information-maybe he just killed her to get me out of the picture.”
And I gave him her name, Tate thought. He was sure the man who called from the FBI-special agent McComb-was Aaron Matthews, probing to get information to stop their search for the girl. He forced or tricked Megan into writing those notes and when they kept looking for her anyway, he turned on them.
“How’d you find out about the body?” Tate asked. “An anonymous call, right?”
The detectives looked at each other. They were slim and in perfect shape. Shoes polished, guns tucked neatly away. Law enforcement machines.
“It was Matthews who called. Don’t you get it?”
“Her mother said you’d been stalking Amy. That Child Protective Services has been investigating you.”
“What? That’s bullshit. Call them.”
“On Saturday night, sir? We’ll call on Monday.”
“We don’t have until Monday.”
The cop continued lethargically, “Mrs. Walker also said you tried to break into her house today.”
“Amy was going to give us Megan’s book bag. I knocked on the door and tried to open it when no one answered.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There is no Child Protective Services investigation. It’s him! It’s Matthews. He’s trying to stop me from finding Megan. Can’t you see?”
“Not exactly, sir. No.”
“Okay. When did this anonymous call come in? Within the last half hour? Believe me, Matthews killed Amy and dumped the body on my land. I saw somebody watching the house this morning.”
“Did you report it?”
“Well, no, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Tate remembered thinking, as he stood in the rain-swept field that morning, Hey, looks like the Dead Reb. But it wasn’t. It was Aaron Matthews, waiting until I left the house then tossing the dog a bone, planting Megan’s letters, leaving fast.
“I just didn’t. Look, he knows I’m after him-Konnie was running a check on the Mercedes. It turned out to be his. That’s not a coincidence.”
“How do you account for the fact that this girl was murdered with a kitchen knife that had your fingerprints on it?”
“Because it was probably from my kitchen. Talk to Konnie about this morning. He-”
“Detective Konstantinatis is in custody and he’s also in no shape to talk to anybody. As I’m sure you know.”
“Beauridge, then. They were out to my house. Matthews broke in, planted some fake letters that Megan supposedly wrote and he must’ve stolen the knife at the same time. Or stolen it tonight. It’s an easy house to break into.”
“The cause of death was shock due to blood loss after her throat was slashed and her chest and abdomen punctured thirty-two times. There was some mutilation too.”
“Fuck of a way to kill someone,” the other detective added. Tate’s face grew hot. Megan’s terrified eyes were the most prominent image in his thoughts.
“We’ve checked out your house and found you’d packed most of your girl’s stuff away. Her bedroom looked about as personal as a storeroom.”
“She lives with her mother.”
“No pictures of her, no clothes, nothing personal. The impression we got was you’d been planning to say adios to Megan for some time. That’s making us wonder about this whole kidnapping story.”
“There were some witnesses. There’s a teacher… Robert Eckhard. He saw-” But he stopped talking when he saw the expression on their faces.
‘You a friend of Eckhard?”
“I don’t know him,” Tate said cautiously. ‘I just heard that he’d seen the car that was following Megan.”
“Have you ever talked to him?”
“No. I just told you-why?”
‘Robert Eckhard was arrested today on numerous counts of child pornography and endangering the welfare of minors.”
‘What?”
‘Could you describe your relationship with him?’
“With Eekhard? There is no relationship… Jesus Christ. I don’t know him! Please! Just send somebody out to check out this Matthews!”
A rhetorician never pleads. Tate’s talents were deserting him in droves. Think smarter, he raged at himself. He could talk his way out of this. He knew he could. There must be some way. What would his grandfather, the Judge, have done?
All cats see in the dark.
Midnight is a cat…
“Officer,” Tate said calmly, offering a casual smile, “you’ve got nothing to lose. Absolutely nothing. I'm not going anywhere. If you check him out, if you send a couple officers out to his house then I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Anything. No hassle. We have a deal?”
One of the detectives sighed. He shrugged and stepped out the door.
Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.
Tate pictured Megan, bound and gagged, lying somewhere in a basement. Matthews standing over her. Undressing. It was a terrible image and, once thought, wouldn’t go away.
“Have you ever had sexual relations with Amy Walker?”
He tamped down his anger. “I’ve never met her,” he answered.
“Did you send your daughter off somewhere because she knew you were stalking Amy Walker? And did you fabricate a kidnapping charge?”
“No, I didn’t do that.” Struggling now to stay calm, to stay helpful. Really struggling. He looked at the doorway through which the other cop had disappeared. Were they sending a hostage rescue team to Matthews’s house? Or just patrol officers? Matthews could trick them. He could lull them into complacency-oh, yes, he had the gift too. Tate now understood.
You can’t negotiate with someone like Matthews. You need to act- immediately.
The silence of the deed.
“Did you kill Amy Walker?”
“No, I did not.”
“When was the last time you drove your daughter’s car?”
“A month or so ago, I think.”
“Is that how your fingerprints got on the door handle of her car?”
“It would have to be.”
“Could we run through the events just prior to her disappearance once more?”
“Prior?”
“Say, for the week before.”
Tate glanced out the door, squinted. Looked again. The second detective came back into the cubicle. Tate asked, “Did you send a team to his house? I should have told you to send hostage rescue. Not regular officers. And don’t listen to him. Whatever he says, Megan’s there, in the house. Tell whoever’s on their way not to listen to him.”
“He wasn’t home.”
‘What?” Tate asked. He didn’t understand. The officers couldn’t have gotten there so quickly.
“I called him. He wasn’t home.”
“You called him?” Tate’s heart stuttered.
“Relax, sir, I didn’t tell him anything. Just asked him to give us a call about some parking tickets.” The slick young cop seemed proud of his cleverness.
“Jesus Christ, you don’t have to tell him anything. Are you crazy?”
“Sir, we don’t have to pay any attention to your story at all, you know. We’re doing you a favor.”
Tate sat back, glanced into the hail again.
After a moment he looked back at the officers again. Closed his eyes and sighed. “You win. Okay, you win.”
“How’s that, sir?”
“I’ll waive my rights and tell you everything I can think of. No confession but a full statement about my daughter and Amy Walker But I want some coffee and I’ve got to use the john.”
They looked at each other and nodded.
“I’m coming with you,” the first detective muttered.
Tate laughed. “I was a commonwealth’s attorney for ten years. I’m not going to escape.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Tate gave a disgusted sigh and walked into the scuffed halls, which resembled a suburban grade school, He ambled to the men’s room and pushed inside. The detective was directly behind him.
He stood at the urinal for an inordinately long time. When he’d finished and washed his hands he stepped to the door and pushed it open, bumping into the woman who was juggling three large law books and several pads of foolscap, which tumbled to the floor.
“Sorry,” Tate said, bending down to pick up the books.
Bett McCall glanced at him, said, “No problem.” And slipped the pistol out of her purse and into his hand.
Tate didn’t even pause to think-he simply spun around, shoved the Smith & Wesson into the belly of the shocked detective and pushed him back into the men’s room as Bett calmly retrieved the books.
In one minute Tate had gagged and cuffed the furious cop and relieved him of his gun. He tossed it in the wastebasket.
“The cuffs too tight?” he asked. The detective stared angrily. “Are they too tight?”
A nod.
Tate snapped, “Good.”
And stepped out into the corridor as a faint rumble arose in the john, like a low-Richter earthquake. The detective was trying to pull down the stall.
When he’d looked into the hallway from the interrogation room he couldn’t believe that he’d seen her standing there, motioning with her head down the hall. “How did you get in here?” he asked as they walked briskly toward the exit.
“Told them I was a lawyer.”
“You cite a case or two?”
“I could have.” She smiled. “I memorized the names of a couple on your desk. I was going to tell the desk sergeant I had to see my client because these new cases had just been put down.”
“It’s ‘handed down,’ “Tate corrected.
“Oh. Glad he didn’t ask.”
“I don’t know if we can get out that way. I came in under my own steam but the desk officer might know I’ve been arrested.” He looked back down the corridor. “Five minutes, tops, till they come looking.”
She rearranged the books she was carrying so the cover showed. A school hornbook, Williston on Contracts.
He laughed. “That’ll fool ‘em.” Then asked, “You got my message?”
She nodded. “I called Konnie and his assistant told me you’d been arrested. I couldn’t decide whether to get a lawyer or the gun. I figured we didn’t have time to wait for public defenders. My car’s outside.”
The old Bett McCall might have meditated for days, hoping for guidance. The new one went right for the Smith & Wesson.
They paused just before they turned the corner beside the guard station. He took a breath. “Ready?”
“I guess.”
“Let’s go.”
Tate started forward, Bett at his side. The guard glanced at them but out they strolled without a hitch, signing the “time departed” line in the logbook scrupulously-one a phony prosecutor and one a phony defense lawyer and both of them now felons.
Aaron Matthews was driving, seventy, then eighty miles an hour.
Anger had given way to sorrow. To the same piercing hollowness he’d felt in the months after Peter had died in prison. Sorrow at plans gone wrong, terribly wrong.
Matthews had been at his rental house, off Route 29, waiting to see if he’d finally stopped Tate Collier. He believed he had. He’d given up on the subtlety, given up on the words, given up on the delicious art of persuasion. Stiff with anger, he’d dragged the Walker girl, screaming, from the trunk of his car. Said nothing, convinced her of nothing-he’d just slashed and slashed and slashed… All of his anger flowing from him as hot and sudden as the blood from her body. He’d called from a pay phone to report seeing a body then had sped home.
There the phone had rung. He hadn’t answered but listened to the message as the officer left it. Some bullshit about traffic tickets. “Give us a call when you get home. Thank you.”
It meant, of course, that they knew about him. Or suspected, at least.
How had it happened? Why hadn’t they just tossed Collier into the lockup and ignored him? Maybe he had actually convinced them that he was innocent and that Matthews had kidnapped the girl. The fucking silver-tongued devil! An angry, sorrowful mood exploded within Matthews like napalm.
It was only a matter of time now before they found Blue Ridge Facility. They knew his name, they’d find out his connection there, and they’d find Megan.
He stared out the window for a moment. Then closed his eyes.
In a perfect world, moods don’t burn you like torches, juries work pure justice and revenge befalls sinners in exact proportion to their crimes. In a perfect world Matthews would have kept Megan McCall as his child forever, a replacement for Peter. And Tate Collier would have lived in despair all his life, never knowing where she was-knowing only that she’d fled from him, propelled by undiluted hate.
But there was no chance for such symmetry now. All his hopes had unraveled. And there was only one answer left. To kill the girl and leave. Flee to the West Coast, New England, maybe overseas.
He’d lost his son, Tate Collier would lose his daughter.
A kind of cure, a kind of justice, a kind of revenge…
He spent a few minutes preparing some things in his house then hurried to his car. He sped out onto the highway, toward the distant humps of mountains, a sensuous dark line above which no stars became stars and the moon showed as a faint, white crescent of frown.
Cleaning the deep wounds was the hardest part.
She’d found a cheap sewing kit in the bedroom and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet.
He took the stitches bravely (even though she cringed every time the needle pierced his skin). But when Megan poured a capful of alcohol on the wounds he shivered frantically at the pain.
“Oh, I’m sorry”
‘No, no,” came his garbled voice, “Keep at it, Ms. Beautiful…
Her eyes teared when she heard the nickname he’d used the night he picked her up.
“Even if you get out, you’ll never get past ‘em. The dogs. He’s got four or five of the big flickers.”
“You’re sure you can’t walk?”
“I don’t think so,” he gurgled. “No.”
“Okay, you stay here. I saw a door going to the basement. I think I can break it open. I’m going to see if there’s a door or window down there. Maybe it’ll lead outside.”
He nodded, breathed, “I love…“ and passed out.
She stacked the cinder blocks around him so that if Matthews glanced this way he wouldn’t see the young man.
She listened for a moment to his low, uneven breathing. Then, knife in one hand, she started down the corridor.
Megan was almost to the intersection of the corridors when she heard the creak of a door opening. Then it slammed.
Aaron Matthews had returned.
They drove in silence through destitute parts of Prince William County. They passed tilled fields, where the taproots of corn were reaching silently down into the dark, red-tinted earth. Barns long ago abandoned. Decaying tract bungalows, where postwar dreams had withered fast-tiny cubes of vinyl-and aluminum-sided homes. Shacks and cars on blocks.
Through Manassas, where the fearsome Rebel yell was first heard, then through the outlying farms and past the Confederate Cemetery
“It was him, Tate,” Bett said, breaking a long silence.
“Who?”
“A man came to see me. He said he was her therapist but he wasn’t.”
“It was Matthews?”
“He called himself Peters.”
“His son’s name was Peter,” Tate mused. “That must be why he picked it.” Glanced at her. “What happened?”
She shook her head. “He seduced me. Nothing really happened but it was enough…Oh, Tate, he looked right into my soul. He knew what I wanted to hear. He said exactly the right things.”
You can talk your way into somebody’s heart and get them to do whatever you want. Judge or jury, you’re got that skill. Words, Tate. Words. You can’t see them but they’re the most dangerous weapons on earth, Remember that. Be careful, son.
She continued, “He’d called Brad. I think he pretended he was a cop and told him to get to my house. We were together on the couch… I was drunk… Oh, Tate.”
Tate put his hand on her knee, squeezed lightly “There was nothing you could’ve done, Bett. He’s too good. Somehow, he’s done all of this. Dr. Hanson, Konnie… probably Eckhard too, the teacher. Just to get even with me.” They drove on in silence. Then Tate realized something. “You got here too quickly”
“What?“
“You couldn’t have been in Baltimore when you got my message.”
“No, I got as far as Takoma Park and turned back.”
“Why?”
A long pause.
“Because I decided it had to stop.” Instinctively she flipped the mirror down and examined her face. Poked at a wrinkle or two. “I was running after Brad and I should have been going after Megan.” She continued, “I realized something, Tate. How mad I’ve been at her.”
“At Megan? Because of what we heard at the Coffee Shop?”
“Oh, Lord, no. That’s my fault, not hers.” She took a deep breath, flipped the mirror back up. “No, Tate. I’ve been mad at her for years. And I shouldn’t’ve been. It wasn’t her fault. She was born at the wrong time and the wrong place.”
“Yes, she sure was.”
“I neglected her and didn’t do the things I should have… I dated, I left her alone. I did the basics, sure. But kids know. They know where your heart is. Here I was, running after Joe or Dave or Brad and leaving my daughter. Time for that to stop. I’m just praying it’s not too late.”
“We’ll find her.”
The roads were deserted here and the air aromatic with smoke from wood cooking fires, common in this poor part of the county; The Volvo streaked through a stop sign. Tate skidded into a turn and then headed down a bad road.
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she asked.
“We sure are. They don’t put out all-points bulletins anymore. But if they did we’d be the main attraction in one.”
“They don’t know my car,” Bett pointed out.
He laughed. “Oh, that took all of thirty seconds for ‘em to track down. Look, there. That’s his place.”
Matthews’s small bungalow was visible through a stand of trees some distance away. A rusting heating-oil tank sat in the side yard and the stands of uncut grass were outnumbered by patches of red mud. The house was only two miles away from Tate’s farm. A convenient staging point for a break-in and kidnapping, he noted.
“What are we going to do?” Bett asked.
Tate didn’t answer her. Instead he took the gun out of his pocket. “We’re going to get our daughter,” he said.
Thirty yards, twenty, fifteen. Tate paused and listened. Silence from inside Matthews’s house.
He smelled the scent of wood smoke and pictured the kidnapper sitting beside the fireplace with Megan bound and gagged at his feet.
The shabby house chilled his heart. He’d seen places like it often. Too often, When he was a commonwealth’s attorney he’d always- unlike most big-city prosecutors-visited the crime scenes himself. This was what detectives dubbed a section-sixty cottage, referring to the Virginia Penal Code provision for murder. Shotgun killings, domestics, love gone cruel then violent… There were common elements among such houses: they were small, filthy, silent, brimming with unspoken hate.
The Mercedes wasn’t in the drive so it was possible that Matthews hadn’t heard the message from the police. Maybe Megan was here now, lying in the bedroom or the basement. Maybe this would be the end of it. But he moved as silently as he could, taking no chances.
He glanced through the window.
The living room was empty, lit only by the glow of embers in the fireplace. He listened for a long moment. Nothing.
The windows were locked but he tested the handle on the door and found it was open. He pushed inside, thinking only as he did so: Why a fire on a warm night?
Oh, no! He lunged for the doorknob but it was too late; the door knocked over the large pail of gasoline.
“God!”
Instinctively Tate grabbed for the bucket as the pink wave of gas flowed onto the floor and into the fireplace.
‘What?” Bett cried.
The gas ignited and with a whoosh a huge ball of flame exploded through the living room.
“Megan!” Tate cried, turning away from the flames and falling onto the porch. His sleeve was on fire. He slapped out the flames.
“She’s in there? She’s in there?” Bett shouted in panic and ran to the window. Scrabbling away from the flowing gasoline, Tate grabbed Bett and pulled her back. He covered his face with his hand, felt the searing heat take the hairs off the back of his fingers.
“Megan!” Bett cried. She broke the window in with her elbow. She peered inside for a moment but then leapt back as a plume of flame burst through the window at her. If she hadn’t leapt aside the fire would have consumed her face and hair.
Tate ran around the back of the cottage, broke in the window in one of the bedrooms, which was already filling with dense smoke.
No sign of the girl.
He ran to the other bedroom-the cottage had only two-and saw that she wasn’t there either. The flames were already burning through the bedroom door, which, with a sudden burst, exploded inward. In the light from the fire Tate could see that this wasn’t a bedroom but an office. There were stacks of newspaper clippings, magazines, books and folders. Maps, charts and diagrams.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Bett came up behind him. There was a burn on her arm but she was otherwise okay. “Tate, I can’t find her!” she screamed.
“I don’t think she’s here. She’s not in either of these rooms and there’s no basement.”
“Where is she?”
“The answer’s in there,” he shouted. “He only set the trap so nobody could find any clues to where he’s got her.”
He picked up several bricks and shattered the glass-and-wooden grid in the window. “Oh, brother,” he muttered. And climbed inside, feeling the unnerving pain as a shard of glass sliced through his palm.
The heat inside was astonishing, smoke and embers and flecks of burning paper swirling around him, and he realized that the flames weren’t the worst problem-the heated air and lack of oxygen were going to knock him out in minutes.
He raced to the desk and grabbed all the papers and notebooks he could, ran to the window and flung them outside, crying to Bett, “Get it all away from the house.” He went back for more. He got two more armfuls before the heat grew too much. He dove out the window and rolled to the ground heavily as the ceiling collapsed and a swell of flame puffed out the window.
He lay, exhausted, gasping, on the ground. Dizzy and hurt. Wondering why on earth Bett was doing a funny little dance around his arm. Then he understood. The file folder he held had been burning and she was stamping out the flames.
The sirens were getting closer.
“Great,” he muttered. “Now they’re gonna add arson to our rap sheets.”
Bett helped him up and they gathered all the notebooks and files he’d flung into the backyard. They ran to the car. Tate started it and skidded out of the drive, passing the first of the fluorescent green fire trucks that were speeding toward the house.
They turned north and drove for ten minutes until Tate figured there was no chance of being spotted. He parked near a quarry in Manassas. A grim, eerie place that looked like it should have been a serial killer’s stalking ground though to Tate’s knowledge there’d never been any crime committed here worse than pot smoking and drinking beer and sloe gin from open containers.
Tate and Bett pored over the singed files and papers, looking for some due as to where Matthews might have taken Megan.
The files were mostly articles, psychiatric diagnostic reports, medical evaluations. He also found surveillance photos of Megan. Dozens of them. And of Tate’s house and Bett’s. Matthews had been planning this for months; some of the pictures had been taken during the winter. In one notebook Megan’s daily routine was described in obsessive detail.
More patient notes.
More articles.
More diaries. With shaking hands Tate and Bett read through them all but there was no clue as to any other buildings, apartments or houses where he might have taken the girl.
“There’s nothing,” Bell barked in frustration. “We’ve looked at everything.” Tears on her face.
Tate gazed at the mess of scorched papers and files on their laps. His eye fell on a patient diagnostic report. Then another. He flipped through them quickly. Then read the name and address of the hospital where the patients had been evaluated.
He snatched up his cell phone and, eyes on one of the reports, made a call to directory assistance for Calvert, Virginia. He asked for the number for the Blue Ridge Mental Health Facility.
“Please be out of order,” he whispered.
“Why on earth?” Bell asked.
“Please.
“We’re sorry,” the electronic voice reported, “there is no listing for that name. Do you have another request?”
He clicked the phone off. “That’s where she is. An old mental hospital in the Shenandoahs.” He tapped the reports. “Matthews was a shrink. I’d guess he was on the staff there a few years ago. It’s probably closed and that’s where he’s taken her.”
“You sure?”
“No. But it’s all we’ve got.”
“Go, Tate.”
He pulled onto the highway and steered toward the interstate. Thinking with frustration that they’d have to drive the entire way right on the speed limit. They could hardly afford to be stopped now.
Glass knife in front of her, Megan walked through the hallways.
There was silence, then the shuffling of footsteps. More silence.
I hate the quiet worse than his footsteps.
I’m with you there, Crazy Megan shares.
Then the steps again but from a different place, as if the intruder were a ghost materializing at will.
Five minutes passed. Another noise nearby, behind her. A sharp inhalation of breath. Megan gasped and turned quickly Aaron Matthews was twenty feet away. His eyes widened in surprise. She stumbled backward and fell over a table, went down hard. Grunted in pain as the edge of the table dug into her kidney
Despite the pain, though, she leapt to her feet, lifting the knife threateningly. She assumed he’d charge at her But he didn’t. He merely frowned and said, “Oh, my God, Megan. are you all right?”
Crouching, eyes fiery, breath hard, gripping the cloth handle of her wicked knife. Staring at his dark eyes, his large shoulders and long arms. Why wasn’t he coming at her?
She glanced behind her
“Wait,” he said with a heart-tugging plea in his voice. “Please, don’t run, Please.”
She hesitated.
He sighed. “Oh, I know you’re upset, Megan, honey. I know you’re scared… You hate me and you have every right to. But please. Just listen to me.” He held his hands up. “I don’t have a knife or gun or anything. Please, will you listen?”
His eyes were so sincere, radiating sympathy, and his voice so imploring…
“Please.”
Megan kept her tight grip on the knife. But she straightened up. “Go ahead,” she whispered. “I’m listening.”
“Good,” he said. And offered her a smile.
“I didn’t know you’d gotten out of your room,” Aaron Matthews said.
“Cell,” she corrected bluntly.
“Cell,” he conceded, watching her eyes carefully. “But I should’ve guessed.” He laughed. “You’re the independent sort. Nobody was going to lock you away. It’s one of the things I love about you.”
Matthews noted how she fixed her gaze on his eyes. How her pale lashes stuttered when he’d said the word “love.”
How had she done it? he wondered. He’d been over the cell so carefully-and the lock was still on the door. Had she gotten through the ceiling? The wall? And she was wearing some of his clothes. So she’d found his living area. What else did she know?
However it had happened, Matthews was surprised. It showed more mettle than he’d expected from the spoiled little whiner.
“Are you all right? Just tell me that.” He looked her up and down.
No answer.
He continued, “I’m sorry about your clothes. When you passed out from the medicine I gave you… well, you had an accident. I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would happen. I’m washing your clothes in the laundry room here. They’re drying now. They should be reads’ soon. I didn’t touch you. I swear.”
He glanced at the knife in her hand. A long shard. He thought at first that there was something about the glass itself that was particularly unnerving, the sharp, green edge of the triangle. But then he decided that, no, it was her face that scared him. She was prepared-no, eager-to use the weapon. And so much in control… she’d be a hard one to crack. Harder than in Hanson’s office, where her defenses were down and her self-esteem bubbling near empty.
He eased forward. “Oh, Megan, I’m so sorry.”
The point of the knife tilted toward him and Matthews froze. He said in his best therapist’s tone, “I didn’t want it to happen this way.”
He fell silent. And to fill the intolerable gap of silence she asked, “What way?”
“This…“ He lifted his arms to the hallways. “If there’d been anything else I could have done, I would have. I promise you.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes. “You don’t really know me. But I know you. I’ve known you for a long time.”
She shook her head, frowning, confused. The tip of the knife was pointed lower.
“My name’s Aaron Matthews…
She’d’ve learned his real name, of course-from looking through the desk in his rooms here. But tell someone the truth-no matter how much you’ve lied to them in the past-and you nudge them closer toward you, if ever so slightly. He continued right away-Matthews had a spell to weave and spells work best when cast quickly. “I worked with your father on a case last year. He hired me as an expert witness. To evaluate a suspect. We were talking before the trial. Just making conversation. And I asked about children, if he had any, and he said…” Matthews paused and his face grew somber. He continued, “I’m sorry honey, but he said no, he didn’t.”
Megan’s beautiful light eyes widened. Shocked for a moment. Then they grew deeply sad, as they had in Hanson’s office. A child betrayed, a child alone.
What are the bears whispering to you?
“But I’d heard somebody mention his daughter and I asked him about you. He looked embarrassed and said that, well, yes, he did have a daughter. But she lived with her mother. He said you were technically his child but that was all. I told him about my son, Peter. See, he had some problems at birth. Serious mental problems.”
Another flicker of lash. So she knew about him too. He said, looking down, “But I’ve always felt that, despite all that, I loved my boy and wanted him to be with me. I mentioned that to your father. But he didn’t say anything. I asked him how often he saw you… He said virtually never. I asked him about you and he didn’t seem to know much at all. And then-” Matthews stopped abruptly, like a man finding himself in a minefield.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me,” she said with faint desperation in her voice.
“He said some things about you.”
“Please.” The knife was pointed straight down. Her face was no longer fierce. “I want to know.”
“He said being more involved with you would be… awkward.”
“No, he didn’t,” she whispered. “He didn’t say that at all, did he?”
“I’m not sure Matthews stammered, putting a vulnerable look on his face.
She muttered, “He said being involved with a child would be inconvenient. Right?”
“Yes,” Matthews conceded, sighing. “I’m so sorry, Megan. But that’s what he said. And when I heard it, all I could think of was how I hoped you had a good relationship with your mother. I hoped someone cared. I felt so bad for you.”
A faint laugh then her face went still. “My mother. Yeah, right.”
He cocked his head, offering her another sympathetic glance. And continued, “Well, I went to see her. When you were in school one day.”
“You did?”
Matthews eased a few inches closer He decided that anger wouldn’t work with Megan, unlike with her boyfriend, Josh. The madder she got, the more dangerous she’d be, No, the way to get inside her defenses was to tap into her sorrow and loneliness.
“I lied, Megan. I’ll admit it. I told Bett I was a counselor with your school and I wanted to know how you were doing. I was shocked to find that she didn’t have much time for you either. She told me she was engaged, trying to make that relationship work, was totally absorbed with Brad, didn’t have much time for,.. well, she said, for baby-sitting.”
“She said that?” Megan gasped.
“In fairness she said you were very mature and didn’t need a lot of hand-holding.”
“How would she know?” Megan muttered.
Matthews swayed toward her but the coldness returned to her eyes and she asked, “But why the fuck did you kidnap me?”
“Because I wanted to give you a second chance, Megan.”
“Kidnapping me? What kind of chance is that?”
He looked down and rocked back and forth on his feet, moving a good six inches closer to her. “Oh, Megan, yes, I kidnapped you. But I’d never hurt you. That was the last thing on my mind.” If she’d seen the room, she’d probably also seen the kitchen. He said, “I can prove it. I’ll show you the kitchen. It’s filled with food that you like. I found out what you liked and I bought a lot of it.”
She nodded. Her defenses slipped a bit more. “You were the one following me for the past couple weeks.”
“That’s right. I followed you. And I talked to people about you too. Teachers, students. And the more I learned about you, the more I couldn’t understand your parents. You’re creative, you’re funny, you’re pretty, you have a sense of humor, you were artistic… You were everything a teenage girl ought to be. Why didn’t they want you? Your parents, I mean?”
Her lip began to tremble. She wiped tears.
“It was so unfair,” he whispered. “I wanted to give you the love that they never did. Parental love, I’m speaking oh I hope you know that… I think you’re beautiful but I don’t desire you physically.” He nodded toward her padded cell. “I could have done that when you were unconscious if I’d wanted to.”
Her eyes told him that she understood it. That she’d checked her body for tenderness, for moisture.
But the eyes hardened again. She asked, “But there’s more, isn’t there? There’s another side to it.”
He smiled. “Oh, you’re smart, Megan. You’re very smart. Yes, there’s another side. I wanted another chance too. I told you about my son. The problems I mentioned? They were pretty serious. My wife… she drank and had a Valium habit when she was pregnant. I tried to get her to stop but she wouldn’t, My son had permanent brain damage… Oh, I wanted a normal child. Someone I could spend time with. Have fun with. Someone I could spoil.” He remembered something Bett had told him earlier that evening. “I wanted someone to play games with, to spend Christmas and Easter with, Thanksgiving. To make oatmeal and pancakes for. To hang out with on Sunday in sweats and sneakers and read the paper and rake leaves.”
From somewhere, he summoned a tear.
“You wanted me to be your daughter,” Megan said softly.
“Yes! But there was no way you would’ve agreed on your own. Or even listened to me. You would’ve thought I was some kind of crank and called the police. So I did what I had to. I waited until I had a chance-Dr. Hanson’s mother getting sick-and I arranged with him to see you.”
“That part was true?”
“Oh, yes. Of course it’s true. We’re friends, Hanson and me.” He smiled indulgently. “Though I think I’m a better therapist than he is. I get right to the core of the problem.”
“Yeah, you sure as hell do.” She offered a faint smile in return.
“You didn’t like those letters, I know. But I had to make you see how angry you were with your parents. I had to make you see the truth.”
“That’s why you made me write them?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do with them? Did you send them?”
He frowned. “The letters? No, I threw them out. Writing them was for you, Megan. I thought maybe, here, we could get to know each other for a while. I’d hoped you’d stay for a few weeks, a month. If it worked out, fine. We could move to San Francisco, you could start college there in the fall.”
He’d moved another few feet closer to her. He was slumped, diminished, looking mournfully at the floor. Matthews had decided how she’d die: He’d strangle her. Her eyes would grow wide and he’d stare at them, drink them in as she died. Pull the glass knife from her hand and get a grip on her neck. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until the tip of her protruding tongue stopped quivering. And squeeze some more after that.
It was the way Peter had killed the slut who’d tried to seduce him. Maybe it was the way Peter himself had died. The body was so mutilated the prison doctor hadn’t been able to be certain of the cause of death.
Tears flooded the eyes of the inconvenient child.
“Oh, Megan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just thought that you deserved so much more than you had.”
She was shivering with the sobs.
“A father who wanted to be rid of you. What a terrible thing… He wanted to get you out of his life and get back to those ridiculous young women he chased after. And your mother… a dear woman but a child herself, really. I thought about all sorts of things-how I could adopt you, get you into a foster home..
“You really thought that?” she asked, wiping her face. Her attention was wavering from the glass blade. Her hand was in the shadows at her side. The hallway was dim and he couldn’t tell whether the knife was pointed downward or at him.
“Yes, I sure did. I talked to a lawyer about adoption. He said I wouldn’t have a chance, not with your natural parents around, however neglectful they were.” His voice was soft, lulling.
Megan wiped her face again. “I just wanted to be loved.”
“And they didn’t love you, did they? They didn’t give you any love at all.”
“Oh, I would’ve done things so differently… and that’s why I took this chance. I’m risking life in prison just to see if something might work out between us. I just wanted you to have a home.” He too was crying now. “I just wanted a family! That’s all I’ve ever wanted boo.”
She was sobbing uncontrollably now, hand over her face. “Yes! That’s it. A home. I never had a home. I wanted a father so badly.”
Matthews stepped closer, reached out a tentative hand and touched her cheek, wiped away a tear. He could almost feel her under his hands, peeing and thrashing as she died. He’d leave her body out for the dogs. So that Collier would have to live with the terrible memory of what the crime scene photos revealed.
“I wish I could have done it differently,” he said. “I mean, this place is so disgusting, Megan. But I didn’t have any choice. For both our sakes.”
“I just-”
He reached out his other hand and put his arm around her shoulder. Rubbed her back.
“I just wanted a home… only a home.” She struggled to breathe.
“I know you did.” His right hand moved down her face to her neck. His left slipped down her arm until he gripped the glass knife she held.
He gently pulled it out of her hand.
Got you! he thought.
But then he glanced down, frowning. It wasn’t a knife at all. In his hand was a plastic Bic pen. But he’d seen the blade… He looked into her face.
Saw the leering smile.
“Nice try,” Megan whispered.
And with her left hand she jammed the glass blade deep into his side. Once, then again. And again.
A flash of terrible pain shot through him and Matthews howled. He twisted hard away from her and the blade snapped on a rib, leaving a long glass splinter inside him.
Now Megan screamed-an insane wail-and as the doctor groped for his wound she slammed her open palm into his face. A huge pop as his nose broke and blood spurted. He went down on his knees. She kicked him near the knife wound and his vision went black from the astonishing pain.
She came forward but he swam back to consciousness quickly and now it was his fist that connected hard-slamming into her jaw, sending her backward into the wall. By the time he was on his feet she was disappearing down the dark corridor.
He touched the wound. The pain was bad. But it was nothing compared with the feeling of shock that raged through him. She’s the one who fooled me! Suckered me in nice and close, got my defenses down. My God, the whole time I thought I was playing her but she led me right into the trap…
Her father’s daughter, Matthews thought in fury and disgust.
He dropped to his knees and began working the fragments of glass out of his wound, actually savoring the pain; he wanted to remember it. He wanted to feel what Megan was about to experience.
The basement…
She plunged into the dim corridors of the hospital, looking for the basement door she’d seen earlier.
Her jaw ached and the back of her head too-from where she’d slammed it into the wall after he hit her. For just a moment she’d thought about leaping on him again-seeing him lying there, blood filling his shirt, blood dripping from his nose. He’d looked half dead. But she wasn’t sure that he was hurt as badly as he seemed. He might have been faking. If he lied with words, he’d lie with actions.
So she ran-to find the basement door.
She heard Matthews’s unearthly scream-it seemed to shake the walls-and then footsteps.
Making slow circles through the corridors, she finally found the door, the one leading to the basement. She grabbed a cinder block and smashed it down on the hasp and lock, which snapped off easily.
Megan flung the door open, looked down into the musty place. For a moment she was paralyzed.
No choice, girl, Crazy Megan the tour guide shouts. Move, move, move.
But Josh, she protested silently, I can’t leave him.
Hey, if you die, he dies. Go!
She clomped down the stairs and found herself in a dimly lit warren of corridors. Trotting slowly from room to room, she took care to avoid the standing water so she wouldn’t leave footprints he could follow.
Please, a door, a window… Oh, please.
She heard the creak of footsteps from the ceiling above her as Matthews made his way to the door she’d just broken open. She found a door leading outside. It was locked. And the windows too were sealed. Another door. Nailed shut.
Goddamn him! C.M. blurts. Why’d he padlock the fucking door upstairs if we can’t get out this way?
Megan didn’t bother to answer. She couldn’t figure it out either. She returned to a room near the base of the stairs and glanced again at one of the windows. The bars on these were wider than the ones on the main floor but she doubted that she could get through.
Fucking hips.
Don’t start! Megan muttered silently and started to turn away. Then she paused, looked back. Thinking: Okay, maybe I can’t get through the bars. But I can make him think I did.
She smashed the glass and pushed an overturned plastic bucket beneath it so that it looked like she’d climbed out.
Then she ran back into the warren of dark storerooms to find someplace to hide.
Most of the cardboard boxes piled in the rooms were too small to conceal her. And she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up into the pipes that ran along the ceiling.
His steps were approaching the door upstairs. Then he started down.
Megan ran into a cluttered storeroom, the farthest one from the stairs. It was filled with cartons, small ones like the others. But over to the side of the room, in the shadows, was a long metal box. It was almost too obvious a choice to hide in but this room was nowhere near the window where she’d faked her escape. And it was pitch dark in here. Matthews might not even see the box if he bothered to look.
Could she get it open? And was it empty?
But Megan stopped asking questions. Matthews was now in the basement. A shuffle of footsteps, a moaning wheeze from the pain of the wounds, words muttered to himself.
Now! Crazy Megan prods her. Go, girl!
Megan unlatched the trunk. It took all her strength to lift the thick lid.
And it took all her willpower not to scream as she looked inside and saw the blue-white flesh, the limp hair, the closed eyes, a dark, shriveled penis, the long yellow fingernails… Cuts and gouges covered the young man’s entire torso, which was further mutilated by the large Y incision from the autopsy. An ear and an arm had been crudely stitched back onto his body.
It was Matthews’s son, Peter. She recognized the eerie face from the newspaper clipping.
Oh, God… My God… Tate, Bett… Somebody!
The footsteps were closer now. They sounded only thirty or forty feet away.
Go on, Crazy Megan urges. Do it.
I can’t do it, Megan thought. No way in hell.
Get inside, C.M. chokes. You have to.
Either you fight him with your fists, she told herself, or you hide in here, Those’re your choices. A moment’s pause. The doctor was now right outside the doorway, it seemed. Then Megan closed her eyes- as if that would lessen the horror-and climbed into the box, lying down on the corpse, on her back, shivering fiercely. She let the lid down. The air reeked of sweet formaldehyde, pickled flesh-she recalled the scent from biology class, hating to be in school at the time but now praying that she could somehow be transported back to that time and place.
And beneath her, terrible cold.
Nothing’s colder than cold flesh.
Then she heard, faintly, a moan very near. Aaron Matthews was in the room.
Crossing a gap in the Shenandoahs, Tate glanced out the window of Bett’s car at the darkened bungalows and ramshackle farmhouses, abandoned barns, the black pits that opened into the network of caverns that laced the earth beneath the Shenandoahs and the Blue Ridge.
They sped past walls of ominous forest-the stark pines, the scrub oak, the sedge, the young kudzu and Virginia creeper. Tate imagined dozens of eyes peering at them and he thought of the Dead Reb once again.
Ten minutes later, well into the Blue Ridge, Tate pulled Bett’s Volvo into an all-night gas station. The elderly attendant glanced at them cautiously when he asked about the mental hospital.
“That old place? Phew” The man cast a dark look westward.
“Where is it?”
“You get back on the interstate and go one more exit..
“We’d rather stick to back roads, if we can.” The state troopers would be looking for him on the highway, a fact Tate didn’t share.
The man cocked his head, shrugged. “Well, that road there. Route one seventeen? Take it west ten, twelve miles till you see a Buy-Rite gas station. Then go left on Palmer and just keep going.”
“We’ll see the hospital?”
“Oh, you’ll see it. Can’t miss it. But I’d wait till sunup. You don’t wanna go there this time of night, no sir. But you asked for directions, not opinions.”
Tate handed him a twenty and they sped off down the road.
They’d driven several miles when a no-nonsense siren burst to life a quarter mile behind them. It was a county trooper. The light bar flashed explosively in Tate’s rearview mirror. He accelerated hard.
“You think he knows it’s us?” Bett asked.
“If he doesn’t he will when he calls in your tags.” Tate’s foot wavered. “What do I do?”
“Drive like hell,” Bett muttered. “Try to lose him.”
He did.
For about two miles it looked as if they’d get away. The Swedes make a good car but it was no match for the souped-up engine of the pursuing Plymouth. “Can’t make it,” he told her.
He eased up on the gas. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he’ll at least send a car to the hospital.”
“No,” Bett said. “Pull over.”
“What?” Tate asked, jockeying the skidding car onto the gravel shoulder and braking.
Bett ripped her purse open and dug inside. She paused, took a deep breath, then sat upright, staring in the rearview mirror at herself, stroking her cheek as Tate had seen her do so often.
What’s she up to? he wondered.
“Bett!” he cried as she lifted the nail file to her face and dragged it hard across her skin.
Blood poured from a gash deep in her cheek.
“Oh,” Bett wheezed. “It hurts.”
Tate stared at the blood, running more black than red down her neck and falling onto her chest in delicate paisleys.
“Get out of the car!” reverberated the metallic voice through the rectangular mouth of the PA speaker atop the car.
The young trooper stood beside the open door of his squad car. His blue-black pistol, dwarfed by the lawman’s huge hand, was aimed at Tate’s head.
“Get out of that vehicle! Keep your hands up.”
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then Bett’s door opened so fast Tate thought that another deputy had snuck up behind them unseen and pulled her out. But, no, she was moving on her own. She screamed shrilly as she rolled onto the grassy shoulder of the road. The leather strap of her purse was wound around her wrists as if she were tied up. Without the use of her hands she fell hard and dust mixed with the blood covering her face.
“Help me!” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”
“Don’t move. Nobody move!” the trooper called, swinging the muzzle toward Bett. Tate sat perfectly still, hands on the wheel.
Bett scrabbled toward the cop.
“He’s got a knife!” she cried. “Help me, please. He cut me. I’m bleeding. Help me!” She put the harrowing wail of a frightened child into her voice as she stumbled forward. “He was going to rape me! Get me away from him! Oh, please… Oh..
The trooper gave in to his instincts. “Over here, miss. You’ll be all right. He’s that fella from Prince William, isn’t he? The one killed that girl? Where’s the knife?”
“In his belt. He picked me up at a rest stop,” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”
“Put your hands up!” the trooper called over the microphone. “And I mean now!”
Tate! did.
“What happened?” the cop asked Bett, who was stumbling closer. “Cut me… I need a doctor…” The words were lost in the sobbing.
“You in the car. Leave your right hand up and with your left reach out the window and open the door. Don’t lower that right hand.”
Tate didn’t move.
“I’m not telling you again! I have a-”
“Put it down!” came Bett’s raw scream from inches behind his head. Tate’s pistol was resting at the cop’s. throat.
“Oh, shit.”
“Do it!”
“I’ve got him covered, lady. You do anything to me and he’s gone. I’ll shoot him. I swear…“ But he said this out of shame, not resolve, and when Bett screamed, “We’re after my daughter and I’ll kill you right now if I have to,” the cop’s disgusted grunt was followed by the sound of his large pistol hitting the dirt.
Bett stepped away from the man, who towered over her. He went limp as he saw the ferocity in her face, maybe wondering just how close to death he’d come. He sagged against the car.
“All right,” Bett muttered. “Lie down on the ground. There. On your stomach.”
Tate was out of the car and jogging toward them.
“There’re other troopers coming, lady. They’ll be here in minutes.”
“All the more reason to move!”
He eased down. Bett handed the cop’s pistol to Tate.
“Cuff him and let’s go,” she said.
But Tate put his hand on her shoulder. “No. You’re staying.”
“No, Tate,” Bett said, holding a wad of Kleenexes up to her bloody chin. “I want to come.”
What could he say to her? That there wasn’t anything she could do and Tate needed to focus on saving Megan-if she could be saved? That it was important for her to stay here and tell the police exactly what had happened, send them out to the hospital? They were both surefire arguments. But Tate answered instead from his heart and told her the truth. Simply: “I don’t want to risk losing you.”
She looked at the dark blood on the Kleenex and up at Tate once more. She nodded.
“Now, listen to me,” he said gravely. “When they get here, just set the gun down and put your hands up. They’ll be nervous and looking to shoot. Do exactly what they say. You hear me?”
She nodded, He touched her cheek, wiping away some blood.
“A sexy woman with a scar-won’t be a man in the county’ll keep his hands off you.”
“You’ll get her, won’t you, Tate?”
“I’ll get her.”
He kissed her forehead and ran to the car.
He floored the accelerator, splattering the squad car with gravel and dirt. As he drove over a crest in the road, the tach nosing into the red crescent of the warning zone, he caught a glimpse of Bett in the rearview mirror, crouching beside the prone trooper, undoubtedly apologizing earnestly. Still, the pistol that was gripped in both her hands was pointed steadily at his face.
She couldn’t take it anymore.
Crazy Megan was gone, dead and sleeping with the fishes.
The depleted air suffocated her. The smells-the rot and the sweet scent from embalmed skin-wrapped themselves around her throat and squeezed.
Which was bad enough. But then the panic started to sizzle through her body like electricity. The claustrophobia.
“No, no, no,” she said, or maybe she just thought it. “No, no… Let me out, let me out, let me out.
Suddenly she wasn’t even worried that Matthews was outside the casket, waiting for her. It didn’t matter; she couldn’t stay inside a moment longer.
Megan pushed against the lid of the coffin.
It didn’t move.
She tried again, with all her strength. Nothing.
“Ah,” she gasped. “Oh please, God, no…
He’d locked her in! She pounded on the lid then heard a wild laugh outside. Words she couldn’t distinguish. More laughter.
More words, louder: “… two having fun together… likes you… Peter likes you.
“Let me out, let me out!”
Her voice rose to a wild keening, her whole body shivered in violent spasms.
“You fucker you fuck let me outoutoutout!” With both her fists Megan pounded on the lid until they bled, banged it with her head, feeling with horror Peter’s cold face against her neck, his cold penis against her thigh.
From outside Aaron Matthews beat on the lid too, responding to her pounding. Then more laughter. And finally more tapping, like a drummer, keeping perfect time with the rhythm of her raw screams.
No subtlety, no nuance…
Tate Collier came to the end of Palmer Road and saw the mental hospital in front of him. He aimed Bett’s car directly toward the gate, got his speed up to about forty and bounded over logs and potholes in the neglected surface. He saw the infamous gray Mercedes parked in the staff-only carport. He saw a faint light in one of the windows.
He had no plan other than the obvious and as he skidded around a fallen pine and straightened for the final assault on the gate he pressed the accelerator down harder, sealing his resolve.
He pressed his hands into the steering wheel, pinning himself into the seat. The car plowed through the chain link. The air bag popped with an astonishingly loud bang. He’d forgotten about it and hadn’t closed his eyes. He was momentarily blinded and lost control of the car. When he could see again he found the vehicle skidding sideways, narrowly missing the Mercedes. The Volvo crashed obliquely into the cinder blocks, stunning him.
Tate leapt out of the car and ran to the first door he could find. Gripping his pistol hard, he flung all his weight against the double panels.
He was expecting them to be locked. But the doors swung open with virtually no resistance and he stumbled headfirst into a large, dim lobby.
He saw shadows, shapes of furniture, angles of walls, unlit lamps, dust motes circling in the air.
He saw faint shafts of predawn blue light bleeding in through the windows.
But he never saw the bat or tire iron or whatever it was that hummed through the air behind him and caught him with a glancing blow just above the ear.