Better Off Dead (13 page)

Brookhouse was in his office, pecking in
something on his computer keyboard. He turned the monitor away from
my view when I knocked on his open door, but I got a glimpse of a
screen heavy with text before he did. The “publish or perish”
principle at work, I figured.

"Come on in," he said, sounding infinitely
benign. He ran his hand through his hair, leaving little spikes in
its wake. "You're in my intro class. We talked last week,
right?"

"That's me," I admitted.

He nodded. "Have a seat. What can I do for
you?"

My chair was way too deep for comfort. I
sank in like I was being sucked into a feather bed, my legs flying
into the air. Brookhouse stared at the leather and silver ankle
bracelet as I rearranged my skirt and covered the essential parts.
Would the bastard really stoop so low as to deliberately install a
crotch-shot chair? Well, of course he would, I reminded myself.
Those illicit peeks were probably a lot more fun than the plethora
of blatant offerings he received from naive coeds.

"I'm here about the lab assistant job," I
explained. "I need to pick up some extra money."

His sigh was preoccupied, weary. "That job
is turning into a real pain in the ass." He glanced at me in
apology for the minor profanity. I tried to look faintly shocked at
this egregious affront to my delicate ears. "The turnover in the
position has been horrendous and it's starting to affect my study
results. I really need someone stable this time around."

I was going to suggest that not screwing his
assistants might help with the turnover, but I had a feeling he had
reached that conclusion on his own.

"You have a boyfriend?" he asked, picking up
a letter opener and sighting down it like he was checking the
barrel of a gun for accuracy.

"What's that got to do with it?"

He shrugged. "Girls with steady boyfriends
are more apt to stay put. They don't cancel out at the last minute
for a date with some new guy."

"I have a two-hundred-eighty-pound boyfriend
who's a wrestler at Carolina," I lied. "He'd kill me if I even
looked at anyone else." I smiled brightly at him. Hey, the guy
liked a challenge. I was giving him one. "And he has a lot of away
matches, so I really need a job in part to give me something to
do."

Brookhouse was staring at me with an
intentness that made me uncomfortable. It was not sexual interest.
It was suspicion. What had I said?

"How old are you?" he suddenly asked.

"Late twenties," I lied. "But my boyfriend
doesn't know that. I dropped out for a while, then re-enrolled
after I got my shit together."

"Perfect." He smiled and sat back in his
chair. "Maybe an older student will be more reliable. Like an old
car you can depend on."

Like an old car, I thought. That's me.
Plenty of miles on my tread and in dire need of a lube job. "What's
the story?" I asked.

Turns out the job was mainly interviewing
students who were paid volunteers in a study sponsored by a
Research Triangle pharmaceutical company. He couldn't tell me the
name, but there were three likely possibilities, all well-funded,
thanks to healthy corporate holding companies. Brookhouse was
likely pulling down a nice fat grant for this study. No wonder he
was starting to put his professional life ahead of his pecker. He'd
lose a lot if the study got yanked from him.

"We're in phase two of the trials for a new
drug similar to Prozac, but without the side effects or withdrawal
problems," he explained. "Before we test it on subjects who are
actually suffering from anxiety disorders or depression, we're
testing it on healthy student volunteers. We're trying to determine
that the drug causes no harm before we give it to individuals with
impaired emotional states. Your job is to interview the volunteers
each week about specific topics. The questions are designed to
measure their emotional well-being. It's really very simple. You
follow a multiple-choice questionnaire."

"All I have to do is interview these people
every week?" I asked.

"That's right." He nodded. "But it's a blind
study. Do you know what that means?"

"Everyone will be wearing sunglasses?" I
suggested.

He ignored the joke. "It means you won't
know the real names of the student volunteers. In addition,
approximately one-third of the volunteers are taking a placebo,
meaning it's just a sugar pill. I'm the only one who knows whether
a subject is taking the real thing or a placebo."

"Because?" I prompted, wondering if the
people with real emotional problems would have to make do with a
placebo as well.

"It's a necessary step to measure what
effect expectations and mental outlook have on the drug's
benefits."

"Okay. And it pays fifteen dollars an
hour?"

"That's right. And if you want to pick up a
little more change, one of my colleagues is working on a different
study still in the preliminary stages. He needs someone to check on
the cages each day."

"Cages?" I asked, visions of a dungeon
crossing my mind.

"Mice. Genetically bred lab mice. Cute white
furry creatures."

"I can do cute and furry. I'll take both
jobs if they're still open." That would give me a chance to drop in
every day and keep an eye on Brookhouse.

"Great." He smiled. "See the receptionist in
the department's main offices for the paperwork. She'll also have
your paycheck every other Tuesday. Can you start this week?"

"Sure. I'm ready when you are." Oops, not
what I really meant.

He didn't pick up on the cue. He really was
minding his P's and Q's. "We usually interview the subjects on
Monday afternoons. And you have to witness them taking their
medication as part of the interview. That's one of the benefits of
this drug. It's a weekly dose. No daily pills to remember."

"I can do that," I promised.

"Excellent." He stood and I was surprised at
how tall he suddenly seemed. He towered over me. "What was your
name again?"

"Casey," I said, sounding chipper and female
and distracted. No need to highlight the last name. He did not ask
for it.

"Good to have you aboard, Casey," he said,
gripping my hand and shaking it. His hand was cold and limp. I
tried to pull away but he held me firmly in a too-close hand clasp.
Then he stared into my eyes as he unconsciously ran his tongue over
his bottom lip.

The breath went out of me in an instant.

His gaze was like diving headfirst toward
the bottom of an empty well. I felt myself surrounded by darkness,
caught in a void that seemed to pull all light and goodness from
me, just sucked it clear out of my toes, emptied my heart, draining
me of all feeling.

I pulled my hand away quickly, and looked
toward the light of the open door.

Brookhouse did not seem to notice.

I hurried from his office, my heart
pounding. I had felt that way only once before in my life, when I
had stopped at an I-95 rest area late one night in the middle of
nowhere in southern Virginia. A lone man had been standing on the
concrete sidewalk outside the bathrooms, head down as he smoked a
cigarette. There was not another soul in sight. The man was
slender, no physical threat to me, but I automatically registered
his appearance. He wore blue jeans and a matching denim jacket,
with a baseball hat pulled low on his face. I gave him little
consideration as I hurried by.

But once I was in my bathroom stall, a vague
feeling of doom insinuated itself into my consciousness. The
whisper grew, becoming a wave. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a
complete feeling of darkness, a void, a black hole of being that I
knew, with absolute certainty, had everything to do with the
ordinary-looking man lurking outside the building, smoking a
cigarette.

Without even considering an alternative, I
locked the bathroom door from the inside, jimmied open a side
window and wiggled my way out, leaving the building in the shadows
of a heavily wooded area. I hurried to my car in silence, praying
that someone else would pull into the rest area soon. The only
vehicle in sight was a small camper. Oh, god, the man was driving a
camper.

I was panting by the time I reached my car.
As I slipped into the driver's seat, I slammed the door shut in my
near-panic. The smoking man's head jerked up as I turned on my
headlights. He glanced at the bathroom door, then back at me. Even
in the blinding glare of my headlights, his eyes seemed to burn
with darkness across the expanse of the sidewalk, boring into me.
His surprise and anger were palpable. He held his cigarette in an
outstretched hand and a wisp of smoke curled up from it in the
dusty brightness of the headlights' glare, as if his smoldering
anger had reached the burning point at his fingertips.

I burned rubber pulling out of the deserted
parking lot, hit the fast lane of the highway and never looked
back.

Six months later, I heard from a friend in
the Durham Police Department that a serial killer was stalking
victims at rest stops off I-95 in North Carolina and Virginia.

I was unable to give a description of what
the man had looked like. But I could remember to this day what he
had felt like. And David Brookhouse felt exactly the same way.

"What is it, babe?" Burly asked. We were
sitting down by the pond later that night, in search of quiet.
Helen's house had filled back up and she was once again playing
cards with Fanny and Bobby D., with Killer curled at her feet. Her
mother was back to grumbling in front of the television. Weasel had
reconciled with his latest girlfriend and was racking up the
overtime on his job, hoping to take her to Jamaica for a vacation.
The pond was an oasis from all the human expectations and
disappointments that filled Helen's house.

Hugo had started to cut back the banana
palms for the winter, but was only a quarter of his way through the
job. He'd given up for the night when we appeared, leaving us to
our romantic sunset. I was sitting on Burly's lap near a grill that
Hugo had built from an oil drum and some old oven racks. You could
fit a whole pig inside that grill, which was probably what Hugo had
in mind.

"There's something wrong with Brookhouse," I
told Burly. "I can feel it."

Burly tightened his arms around my waist.
"Forget about him. Look at the sun."

The setting sun was perfectly framed between
two palms on the opposite side of the pond. It hovered, an immense
scarlet ball that seemed to dance back and forth between the ponds,
a private juggling act for our pleasure.

"This is so weird," I said. "The sand and
the palm trees, it's like we're not even in North Carolina. We'll
have to cookout down here one night. Look at that grill Hugo's
built."

"And look how he intends to start it." Burly
pointed at a metal can the size of a milking canister with a large
hose attached to its lip. It was tucked beneath the grill.

"What the hell is that?"

"Bush burner," Burly explained. "Maintenance
guys use them to burn down brush along the edge of the
highway."

"You mean that sucker is a
mini-flamethrower?" I asked.

Burly nodded. "That Hugo scares me
sometimes," he said.

"Look, a dove." I pointed over the pond
where a female mourning dove was winging her way across the
flame-tinged water. The sunset gave her a pinkish glow. She seemed
to radiate her own inner light as she coasted on the air currents,
her movements graceful and unhurried.

"Uh-oh—trouble," Burly said. "There, to the
west."

A hawk had soared into view, clearing the
tree line in a heartbeat. The dove, unknowing, continued on her
way— beautiful and clueless. Behind her, the hawk beat its massive
wings in that deceptive, almost slow-motion way predators have as
they time their approach and display their confidence. The hawk's
sharp eyes fixed on the dove and never wavered as it moved into
position above and behind her. I knew what was coming and wanted to
cover my eyes.

"Relax," Burly said. "Hawks only eat land
mammals, they're not fast enough to catch other birds."

"Someone forgot to tell the hawk that," I
said. "I don't think I can look." I started to cover my eyes. But I
then peeked anyway. Few of us can resist the lure of violence,
especially the random destruction of innocence by pure power.

The hawk never saw us, and never cared it
was supposed to be too slow. Its complete concentration was on the
dove. For an instant, the hawk seemed to freeze in mid-air,
silhouetted against the setting sun. Then it struck, dropping from
the sky with a terrifying beauty, wings folded upward, talons
outstretched, sharp beak ready to slash. Like a dark angel bent on
revenge, it descended in a free-fall of fury, hitting the dove
within seconds, the impact exploding in a burst of feathers that
floated down toward the pond's placid surface. Both birds tumbled,
then the hawk tightened its grip and recovered, extending its wings
for balance and gaining altitude with a few languid flaps. It
regained speed and soared toward the far forest, the injured dove
struggling only briefly before it grew still.

The whole thing had taken less than a
minute.

"Jesus," Burly said. "She never even saw it
coming."

I thought of Helen trapped in the house a
few hundred yards away. "No, she never did."

Naturally, the lab assistant job required me
to tramp daily into the very basement where my anonymous caller had
been raped. Attempts to find out more about the incident went
nowhere. Not even the administrative dragons in the department's
office were willing to talk about it. They looked at me like I was
crazy. Either the woman had not reported the attack or there was
some serious cover-up in place. Neither alternative made me feel
all that safe as I wandered through the winding and somewhat
mazelike system of hallways and rooms that had resulted from a
renovation of the basement area. The floors and walls were as
pristine as a hospital's, with everything a bright white. But there
were no windows. Anywhere. And the effect was claustrophobic enough
to make me want to blow a hole through a wall or two. Ever since I
had been privy to Helen's own brand of prison—seen her standing at
the window, looking out on a world she could not join—my own
freedom had been increasingly important to me. Enclosed places made
me nervous. White walls or not.