Better Off Dead (38 page)

"You'll live in a prison," I predicted. "It
may be the outside world, but it will still be a very big
prison."

"Really?" Brookhouse sounded like he was
making chitchat at a party. "Then why am I walking around free
right now?" he asked. "After all, the police are watching my house,
aren't they?"

Asshole. How was he walking around right
now? The bastard was going to make me say it.

"How did you ditch the cops?" I asked,
reluctantly.

He shrugged. "I didn't have to. I was never
there."

"Never there?" I was confused.

He laughed, pleased at his own intelligence.
"When the police come out of the shadows and knock on my front
door, it will be answered by a very perplexed and very innocent
grad student who has been housesitting on my behalf for the past
week, frantically trying to finish his dissertation. Meanwhile, I
have been staying with Lyman and admiring his uniquely decorated
abode." He enjoyed my discomfort. "Don't look so surprised. I told
you before: I know people and how they think. It's my job. I knew
enough not to go home after I was suspended from the university.
The police have simply been watching the wrong man. That's what
they get for making assumptions. We academics may all look alike to
outsiders, but the first thing we learn is never to assume too
much."

"Which of you brilliant academics took the
fall on the rocks and cracked their noggin?" I demanded.

His smile faded. "That would be me, of
course. Unlike Lyman, I have the hair to hide the wound."

"That's too bad," I said, trying to be as
cheerful as he had been, though I don't think I fooled him. "I hope
it hurts. A lot."

His eyes flickered. "It didn't hurt as much
as that gunshot wound your little friend suffered, though, did
it?"

"His name is Luke," I told him. "And he'll
be able to help put you away."

"With an unreliable memory like that?"
Brookhouse asked, sounding shocked. “Tsk. Tsk. Think of what a good
lawyer would do to him on the stand."

"You're gonna stink so bad by tomorrow
morning, there won't be a lawyer on this planet who will even get
near you, not for any amount of money."

"And that shows how very little you
understand about the human mind," Brookhouse answered calmly. He
sat on the edge of a desk and gazed at me almost fondly. "I offer a
lawyer something better than money: notoriety. Fame.
Headlines."

I hated to admit it, but the fucker was
right.

"This was a trap, wasn't it?" I asked. "You
brought Helen here just to get me here."

"Right," Brookhouse said happily. "And it
worked."

I stared at him, willing my hatred to become
a palpable force. He held my gaze.

"I've seen through you since the very
beginning," I said. "You never fooled me. Not for five
seconds."

"What a coincidence," he returned. "I've
seen through you from the start as well."

Carroll, who had been nervously circling me,
as if surveying me for a good spot to bite, chose that moment to
reintroduce his ego into the equation. "No you didn't, David," he
protested. "I'm the one who figured out who and what she was after
Candace told me a female P.I. was asking questions about you."

"But don't you see, Lyman?" Brookhouse
suggested pleasantly. "I'm the one who told you to get close to
Candace in the first place." He smiled at me again. "A neat trick,
wasn't it? I get Lyman to keep an eye on Candace for me, to make
sure she doesn't start spreading vicious rumors that might hurt me.
Scorned women are very prone to such habits, I've found. And, in
return, Lyman gets laid. Something he doesn't seem to be able to do
without my help."

God, what a jerk. He couldn't even be nice
to his killing partner. "Where is Candace Goodnight?" I asked.
"What did you do to her?"

"Me?" Brookhouse looked offended. "I didn't
kill her, thank you. That would be Lyman's department."

"You're worse than him," I told Brookhouse,
nodding toward Carroll. "You see yourself as better than him, but
you're even worse. You're a poser. You're a nobody who came from
nothing and all the expensive clothes and good haircuts in the
world can't hide the fact that you're trash. How did your parents
pay for your private high school anyway? Or was it a scholarship? I
bet you studied all night, every night, praying you could escape
where you came from." That got him. He hit me. Hard. He slapped me
across the face with such force that my head snapped back. And you
know what? It felt good. I had cracked his facade and wormed my way
into that crack. And he hadn't liked it one bit.

"They'll find you out," I predicted. "Soon
everyone will know what you really are, no matter what you do to
me."

"The police and the good people of this town
don't care about you," he said quietly. "They only care that all
this nastiness goes away quickly, so that everyone can pretend this
is a sleepy, pleasant Southern town again. And as soon as the
attacks stop or they find a scapegoat—that would not be me, by the
way—they'll get on with their lives, grateful that their perfect
world has been restored."

I knew then what he was up to. "He's going
to pin it on you," I told Carroll. "He's going to make sure you die
in the fire, and he'll say you did it all."

Carroll looked alarmed; the thought had
never occurred to him. But Brookhouse moved quickly to repair the
damage.

"Don't worry, Lyman," he said soothingly.
"We're in this together. They'll never get anyone for the attacks,
everyone will be too relieved when they stop to care, and this
young lady here will take the blame for Helen's death. And her own
death, of course."

"How do you plan to explain the fire?" I
asked. "The bogeyman did it?"

"No, PSNC. As in the gas company. All that
accelerant scattered along the halls will go up in smoke. It will
be indistinguishable chemically from the explosion caused when the
gas furnace blows. Details count."

"And my being tied up and handcuffed will go
unnoticed, too?" I asked. If only Helen was awake, maybe we could
work something out. She was too far away from me to be able to
rouse her. Whatever they had drugged her with was strong. Or she
was already...

"We're going to set you free before the
blast," Brookhouse promised. "We just have to strangle you first."
With that, he slipped a black hood over my face and tied it around
my neck. Panic set in. I began to struggle, jerking my body,
lifting the chair, rocking it as hard as I could, doing anything to
escape.

Brookhouse started to laugh, that creepy
chuckle of his that made my skin crawl.

It was the last sound I ever heard him
make.

The room erupted in thunder and glass. The
one-way observation wall blew out from the force of an explosion
triggered on the other side. Glass and metal flew past, Brookhouse
fell on top of me, then slid off to the floor behind me. Carroll
screamed and whirled around, I know because he trampled my bound
feet in the process. That was when I recognized the smell filling
the room. Gunpowder. I pitched myself forward instantly, toward the
floor, sending Carroll tumbling away from me. The chair fell over
just as a series of quick, loud pops rocked the room. A
handgun.

I heard a thud as Carroll hit the ground. I
could see nothing, could hardly breathe inside the hood. Someone
burst in the door.

"Help us," I croaked, as I heard my chair
being set back upright.

Hands grabbed me and hoisted me back on the
chair. But then the person brushed past me, moving toward where I
thought Carroll lay on the ground. I heard clicks and rustlings.
The process was repeated behind me, where Brookhouse had been
shot.

"Who are you?" I called out. "Bobby? Is that
you?"

Silence.

I heard my unseen rescuer walk past me,
heading toward the table where Helen lay slumped over the papers.
Why? I wondered. Chairs scraped. I heard heavy breathing, then a
grunt. Footsteps re-approached, then paused behind me.

"Let me go," I pleaded.

"No."

That one word was loud, deep, abrupt—and
disguised. I froze.

"Wait." The same deep voice, all inflection
removed. Who was it?

I waited.

The footsteps continued toward the door,
something heavy swung past, thumping me in the back. Helen's feet?
Was she slung over his back? I heard the door open and  shut
again. Who was taking Helen? And why?

I waited some more, listening as the
footsteps lumbered down the hall. The back door to the basement was
unbolted with a clang, metal hit metal. The sound echoed down the
hall. Then I heard another clang as the steel exit bar was
depressed. Someone had pushed their way outside. The basement door
stayed open. I could hear car doors opening and slamming. A
powerful engine roared to life—a truck, or maybe a van? The engine
idled for only a moment, then another door slammed and the vehicle
pulled away. Within seconds, I could hear it no more.

What in god's name had just happened?

I began to struggle against the handcuffs
binding me, though I knew it was no use. I then tried to wriggle my
feet free somehow, but the cord only cut into my ankles more. I
stopped, discouraged. That was when I heard the sirens. It sounded
like hundreds of them, all converging on the building. Within a
minute, cars were screeching to a halt, orders were shouted, doors
slammed.

"I'm in here!" I screamed. The goddamn hood
would not come untied. I needed a knife. I couldn't breathe. "In
here!" I screamed again. "Help me! Help me!"

Voices, footsteps, shouting, chaos. It all
flooded into the room at one time. Someone whistled. Someone barked
to stay back. Someone swore as they stepped on a mouse. Hands
reached out to help me.

"Unlock them," a voice ordered. I knew that
voice. Ferrar. Oh god, I had never been happier to hear that
voice.

"Don't move," a woman ordered me. I froze
again. Gentle hands fumbled with the handcuffs and suddenly I was
free. "Let me," the same voice ordered, and I waited while she cut
the rope around my neck. The cord binding the hood fell to the
ground. I tore off the hood. I was staring straight into Ferrar's
face.

"What the fuck just happened?" he asked me.
It was the first curse word I had heard him utter.

He was staring down at the floor. I followed
his gaze. Lyman Carroll sprawled, dead, in front of me, two bullet
holes neatly drilled in the center of his forehead. He lay on his
side, obscuring all but the barrel of a shotgun cradled in his
arms. I looked back up at Ferrar, shaking my head. I had no idea
who had killed him. He pointed over my shoulder.

The female officer had freed my feet from
the rope. I twisted around in the chair, looking behind me.

David Brookhouse lay on the floor, his arms
flung to each side. The center of his chest was missing. It had
been blown completely away. His right hand gripped a small gray
gun. It was not the gun he had been holding before. And it was not
Burly's gun, either. Whose?

I turned back to Carroll. What the hell was
he doing with a shotgun?

"What happened?" Ferrar asked again.

"I have no idea," I said. I think my utterly
confounded expression convinced him. "I have no fucking idea at
all."

The official story dominated the headlines
well beyond the holiday weekend: Brookhouse and Carroll had killed
each other in a dispute about the tainted drug study. The world
seemed to believe it. But I know that no one at Helen's house did.
We spent the weekend reading the newspapers, arguing over the menu
for our canceled and now rescheduled Thanksgiving dinner—and
debating how and when the cops might come to haul me away.

Several days after the shootings, evidence
was uncovered that linked Brookhouse to the rapes. Despite his vast
expertise about the criminal mind, as he liked to put it,
Brookhouse had been unable to resist the lure of keeping trophies
from each rape. There were Polaroid’s of him in action discovered
in a safe in his house, including photos that were undeniably of
Helen. She had been right. David Brookhouse had raped her—and
written her threatening letters as well as made the harassing phone
calls. The letters had been lovingly stored on the hard drive of
his home computer, while long-distance records showed a pattern of
Brookhouse phoning Helen's house. She was his obsession, it seemed,
once she became the first woman in his life ever to break off with
him first. His outrage over this insult had made him
uncharacteristically careless about covering his tracks. And there
were more Polaroid’s of her than of anyone else.

"Excuse me," I said when Marcus gave me this
news. "But hasn't anyone thought to ask who exactly took the
Polaroid’s of Brookhouse raping women?"

Marcus sighed. "You aren't going to like
what's about to happen," he predicted. And I didn't.

Within days, the official story of the
showdown in the psychopathology basement had conveniently morphed
into a tale in which Lyman Carroll played the part of hero. This
myth was strengthened when the true records of the drug study were
discovered in one of Brookhouse's home files. The actual data
confirmed what more and more people had come to suspect: there was
no way that particular drug was going any further forward in
testing. It caused harm to healthy subjects. The company pulled the
plug. And the press discovered that both Brookhouse and Carroll had
owned a partial interest in the drug venture from the start, even
though they were supposedly studying the drug's effects
objectively.

This bit of news raised eyebrows. Within a
few more days, Duke had announced a new policy: no staff member was
allowed to hold a financial interest in any venture undergoing
testing or scrutiny by any department of the university.
Objectivity must be preserved, it seemed. Or, at least, the
illusion of it.