Dark Lie (9781101607084) (12 page)

I blinked, barely able to see. I breathed out. With my coat wrapped around her like a mantle, Juliet stood in the room, dungeon, wherever we were, beside me.

Then I gasped and struggled to breathe again, catching sight of—Him.

He stood glaring at us both in the plain light of a 75-watt overhead bulb, and there was no way I could deny away the pain any longer.

He—I still couldn't bring myself to think of Him by name—the love of my life hadn't changed much. He still affected the same black army boots, tight black jeans, tight black T-shirt showing off His narrow body, the gothic sort of clothing most people leave behind after adolescence. His face—life had added a few scars, as if He'd been in a fight or two. Somebody's fist had flattened His nose and knocked it a bit crooked. Time had grayed His skin. But He was still average, ordinary looking, nothing to attract anyone's attention—except when He spoke. Then, no one could ignore the authority of His voice and the vehemence of His stare.

Or Pandora. No one, I think, could have ignored that wickedly curvaceous hunting knife in His hand. As for me, the sight of it nearly paralyzed me.

Looking at the knife, then looking into His predatory, stony eyes, I knew. He was insane. He'd been crazy even back then, when we were kids, but I'd been too lonely and naive to realize. I had mistaken His predation for attraction, His irrationality for ardor, and now—years had passed, and He'd aged a little, yet He seemed not to have grown. Or grown up. At all.

Except that He'd grown even more psycho.

I stood gasping, sobbing, and I felt Juliet's hand on my arm, her touch asking me to look at her, but I couldn't—I didn't—it was as if all my life I had been gazing at visions of angels, angels, angels, but now I was living an Escher, suddenly seeing that the angels were only empty white spaces between devils, devils, dark dark devils. Very real devils, while the angels had been white holes like the gaps in my daydreams. An illusion. A fantasy way to escape from the dismal reality of living with my parents. And after that, a dream of romance during my boring marriage to Sam—

Poor ever-so-careful Sam. I wondered what he was doing right now. Worried about me. Frantic, probably. Unable to sleep. Pacing the floor with no idea what to do, as innocent as a newborn angel when it came to this kind of danger.

While I stood there facing my very real, very personal devil incarnate.

“You call the cops?” He demanded with cattle-prod voltage in His voice.

I jumped as if I'd been hit. Crying too hard to speak, I shook my head.

“Don't lie to me, bitch!”
Flick
, a blur like a rattlesnake striking, and I found myself blinking cross-eyed at the wicked tip of His knife poised maybe two inches from my face. “That's your car by the phone on the—”

“It doesn't work!” Wincing away from the knife, I babbled between sobs, “The phone is—dead, so—I couldn't call.”

“Phone's
dead
, huh?”

The way He said it tightened a noose around my throat. I couldn't respond.

“So you tried to steal my van instead.” An inch from my nose, Pandora quivered with rage. Light shimmered off the honed edge of her blade.

I closed my eyes.

“If either of you moves an inch, I'll carve you both.” I heard booted footsteps heading someplace rapidly.

I opened my eyes in time to see Him standing with His face to the room's paneled outside wall. His back to us.

But only for a second. As I watched, unmoving, uncomprehending, He turned and strode back to us.

His mood seemed to have eased marginally. Thumbing the edge of His wicked knife, glaring at me, He barked out a flinty laugh. “Fat crying ugly woman,” He said. “I hate fat women.”

When I was young, He had compared my eyes to the great limpid eyes of deer, to pools of deep water, to morning dew—but now He did not notice the same eyes dwarfed amid my blotched, puffy face.

He barked, “I hate crying women. And most of all I hate ugly women. I'm going to enjoy killing you, bitch, as soon as I decide how.”

I had loved Him. Loved Him. Dreamed of Him for years. And He didn't even know me. He saw only a fat ugly crying woman, make that bitch. Didn't recognize who I was. Or care. He had—

Made love to me?

No. Made use of me.

Helped Himself to my virginity.

In this very room.

I knew. I just knew, even before I turned my head to look around. Yes, it was that same place. That high-ceilinged square room in the basement of the library, taller than it was wide or long. The same wormwork of pipes overhead, painted gray like the plaster. The same dark, cheaply paneled walls, the same ugly green and white checkerboard linoleum, the same dank subterranean smell, and—no, that couldn't be the very same Kmart art on the wall over the sofa. But He had placed a similar mass-produced still life with pink peonies there.

Just as He had arranged a similar sofa in the same position by the inner wall.

Presumably for the same purpose.

Remembering what had happened on a sofa in this room, I dried up instantly. Things were getting too bad for weeping; it was a waste of precious energy. All that mattered now was to save Juliet from Him.

I blinked away my tears and turned to her. “You okay?” I asked her just to let her know I was still with her.

“Shut up,” He snarled before she could answer. Then to Juliet He said tenderly, “Take your coat off, sweet sugar Candy, and sit down.” Even when His tone flipped like that, like a light switch, His flat eyes didn't change at all. Neither did the wooden expression on His face. “Make yourself at home,” He told Juliet. “Candy. The sweetest Candy I've tasted yet. Welcome once again to my humble hideaway.”

Shivering, she stood where she was and, if anything, she clutched my coat more tightly around her.

He lifted His knife expressively. “Pandora says sit.”

She backed a step away from Him.

“Don't be stupid. Whatever Pandora says, you do.”

She didn't move.

“Sit
down
. Do it, or I'll kill . . . you.” I think He had almost said “myself.”

I interposed to distract Him. Once my tear glands had shut down, my mind had started to work again, thank God. In firm teacherly tones I inquired, “Who was Pandora?”

He turned on me so sharply, knife trembling in air, that I thought He would slice me to pieces right there and then, neatly severing my joints like my mother cutting up a chicken. I felt my back tighten and my spine freeze in terror. But the question had done what it was supposed to. It had distracted His focus from Juliet and riveted it on me.

He barked, “I already told you. Pandora's my knife. Pandora's my twenty-four-hours-a-day sweetheart, only girlfriend I can count on, only real woman I ever met, my wife knife, and you shut up.”

I could barely keep my mouth moving, but I had to. Had to keep His attention. Lips fumbling for the words, I asked, “All right, then, who was Candy?”

He went white. White. Hoarsely He demanded, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw writing on the building, something about Candy, um, somebody named Candy.” I had to be careful not to know too much. “Now you keep calling this girl Candy, when I happen to know that her name is Juliet. Who was Candy?”

“Shut up! You don't get to say her name.” The blade of His uplifted knife shook and shimmered like a chill silver flame. “I can say Candy, Candy, Candy whenever I want, but you shut up. Shut up about her! I hate her! I hate her!” His wooden face cracked like a mask, showing some raw, red feeling both hurtful and ugly. Gripping His knife hard, He lunged and stabbed some ghost in the room. “I hate the dumb fuck!” His voice panted, ragged. “She didn't give me a souvenir. Nothing! Not even a curly hair left behind. And I didn't get to do everything I wanted. No goddamn Candy gets to leave me before I'm done with her.”

“Oh.” Like Juliet, I took a step back, shaking. But forget terror; my job was to keep His attention away from her. I managed to say, “She, um, Candy, she left?”

“She fucking disappeared.”

She was disappeared by her parents, I thought, and for years afterward her—my—favorite folk ballad had been a sad song: “I wish I were a tiny sparrow, and I had wings and I could fly; I'd fly away to my own true lover—”

This monster?

“—and all he'd ask, I would deny.”

I had never understood that vicious little thrust of anger at the end of the sweet lyric, but I had kept singing it; I had liked it.

Now I understood why. Without knowing, I had known what He was.

But He must never understand. The tiny sparrow swooped through my mind in the time it took for my mouth to fumble out, “She, um, Candy, maybe something happened to her.”

He sneered at me. “You don't know a thing about it, asshole. Dogface bitch.” He lowered His head, bearlike, and lurched toward me, in my face, close enough so I could feel His hot breath as He ranted, “Christ, I've never seen such an ugly slut. What is that crap all over your face, pimples with pus on them? What kind of crud you got, bitch, AIDS?”

The rash was ulcerating and oozing, evidently. How nice. I wanted to tell Him that my crud was worse than AIDS and He was likely to die just because He'd breathed on me, but I didn't. I couldn't, because I knew what I might have to do any moment now.

Backing away another step, I said, “It's nothing. A skin condition. Just something that happened. The way something might have happened to Candy,” I added, directing Him back on task, as my Ed Psych teachers would have said, but carefully keeping my tone gentle. “Something she couldn't help.” I eased one hand over to Juliet, touching her rigid shoulder. She stood with both arms clenched around herself, wrapped in my coat as if in Kevlar. I gave her only a quick glance; had to keep my eyes on our captor. “Um, maybe somebody made Candy go away,” I ventured, thinking of my parents, who had—I realized for the first time in my life—rescued me from Him. Bless their narrow-minded heads, they had saved my life, however blindly and harshly, by removing me from Appletree. Remembering that hegira, I said, “Maybe somebody took her away from you.”

He, of course, attributed to the suggestion a very different meaning from the one I had intended. “Shut up! She wasn't that kind. Not Candy. There wasn't nobody else for her.” He glowered at me, so vehement that I flinched, thinking He would hit me or, much worse, stab me—

But then His knife hand sagged. “See, all the other girls I had up till then were just slut du jour
. . . .”
Pandora tilted uncertainly. “They were ordinary, they'd done it before, they dished it out or not, they said, ‘Okay, but you got to wear a condom,' or they'd say, ‘No, I don't want to get warts,' or crabs, whatever, or first they'd say, ‘Sure, whatever you want,' and then they'd change their dumb-ass minds and say go jack off. But Candy . . .” He glared at me. “Candy was different. She thought different. She even looked different. She was smart and yet she was sweet and pure. She'd never been there before. She didn't know a thing.
I
took her. I took her every step of the way. One thing at a time. And she loved it. Nobody can say she didn't love it. And it was her first time. It was like holy rape. Like rapturing the Virgin Mary.”

Dear God. How much horror had my parents saved me from?

I babbled, “But I thought you hadn't gotten to, um . . .” Playing my part. I knew all too well what He had done. I knew. . . . I knew . . . something I'd whitewashed over in my bowdlerization of my personal fairy tale, couldn't remember. . . . But it didn't matter, because I was playing a role. Had to remember that. Stupid fat ugly interfering bitch, especially the stupid part. I prattled, “I thought you hadn't consummated the relationship?”

“Con-sum-mated the re-la-tion-ship?” Mimicking my voice, He started to laugh again, the yapping laughter of a vicious dog. Then
flick
went the mood switch. Two steps and He stood inches from me, glowering, knife poised. “You dumb fuck,” He whispered fiercely, “of course I screwed her. I screwed her plenty. What I didn't get to do was join with her in blood. What I didn't get to do was slit her wrists.”

EIGHT

K
nowing that Chief Angstrom wouldn't give her an inch of slack when other cops were watching, Officer Sistine “Sissy” Chappell waited for an opportunity to speak with her boss alone. Normally she would have tapped on his office door at the Fulcrum PD, but he (like her, and all the others) was still at the Phillips home waiting for a possible ransom call. Maybe an hour went by before he noticed her and called, “Sissy, ain't your shift up? Go home. Get some rest.”

Crap. She had to do it. Walking over to stand by Angstrom's chair, she asked, “Chief, could I have a word with you?”

“Sure. Shoot.”

It wasn't just sheer laziness that kept him from moving his ass from that chair, Sissy intuited. He was testing her. She had no choice except to unzip Dorrie White's laptop computer case and pull from it a rather messy wad of notebook paper, which she placed on the Phillipses' dining room table in front of her boss. “Those were hidden along with the pink notebook under Dorrie White's mattress. They're notes from her high school boyfriend, and his handwriting strongly suggests that he might be a psychopath. I think—”

By speaking rapid-fire, she managed to get this far, but no further, before Chief Angstrom stopped her with a snort of disgust. What she wanted to say she thought was that instead of calling this the Phillips case, with Dorrie White as the perpetrator, somebody ought to consider that it might be the Dorrie White case with some unknown subject, maybe this high school boyfriend, as the perp. But right now Chief Angstrom was interested only in bawling her out. “Sissy, I told you before, don't go talking nonsense to me about handwriting. There isn't a speck of proof—”

With unusual daring she interrupted. “Handwriting analysis is not a science
yet
because there haven't been enough studies made. But there
have
been extensive studies of the handwriting of the prison population, which enables me to say with certainty that this”—she pointed to Blake's love notes—“is the handwriting of a dangerous felon.”

“You say,” Angstrom shot back. “So what? You're nothing but a green rookie, and even if you were a so-called expert on handwriting, that kind of testimony is not admissible in court.”

“Polygraph test results aren't admissible in court either, but we still use them as an investigative tool—”

With lessening patience he overspoke her. “Have you read these?” He jabbed at the pancake stack of yellowing notebook paper with one expressively offended finger.

“Yes, of course.”

“And is there anything in them that says the boy is criminally inclined?”

“His handwriting—”

“Screw his handwriting! You want to check him out on the basis of nothing but his handwriting?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, forget about it. You're off duty. I'd suggest you go home and get some rest.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

Sissy considered that a suggestion wasn't an order.

She drove to Fulcrum PD headquarters and, rubbing her eyes, settled her weary body at one of the computers there. What she did on her own time was her own business. Using a departmental computer on her off time might not be considered her own business, but if Chief Angstrom said she was a green rookie, okay, she would be a green rookie who didn't know any better.

Waking up the computer—which was doing what she should have been doing, sleeping—Sissy keyboarded her shield ID number plus a departmental password to log on.

While she waited for the computer to do its thing, she couldn't help remembering how definitively Chief Angstrom had shut her up. Maybe a half hour had gone by since, but it still stung. She sighed. Not so much angry as philosophical, she wondered when, if ever, she could expect respect as a police officer. So far she got none from anyone, not her fellow officers and especially not her own family. Her mother opposed her choice of career because it was too dangerous, while her father seemed to think it wasn't dangerous enough; he wanted her to go into the military and maybe follow in his footsteps as a fighter pilot. Her sisters thought she was trying to be a hotshot, her brother in the marines sided with her father, and her other brother, the family underachiever, warned her she'd better find a job far from him and his street gang. Not wanting to shoot him any more than he wanted to shoot her, she had complied, graduating from her local police academy back in New Jersey, but then finding her first job in another city across state lines.

Which took her away from her family, but unfortunately also took her away from all her old friends. And Fulcrum was proving to be not an easy place to find new ones outside of a church.

Her gangsta brother, now, he got respect in the old neighborhood, and Sissy rolled her eyes at the thought; her brother's criminal friends had his back, but who had hers? Neighbors? She hardly knew them except as apartment numbers in her building. Fellow officers? Maybe, but nobody really wanted to connect with her, the greenest of rookies, until after they had seen her in action for a while.

The computer gave a kind of satiated burp that meant it was ready, and Sissy began, as protocol demanded, with a background check on Candor Birch White even though she felt certain Dorrie was cleaner than a detergent commercial. Partly Sistine believed this because she'd seen Dorrie White's home, Dorrie's choice of harmonious and soothing colors, and her many big pillows and soft surfaces, comfortable sofas and easy chairs and recliners made even more welcoming by pastel lap robes Dorrie had probably crocheted herself.

Sissy's intense interest in handwriting analysis was just part of her study of the larger field of graphology: personality as revealed in unconscious doodling or conscious creativity, choice of colors, choices in the different ways of filling space. Sistine could not imagine that anybody who collected Flutterkitties could ever plan and execute a violent crime. She had seen a peaceable but yearning soul in Dorrie's collections of figurines and art as well as in the daisy and butterfly and rainbow magnets on her fridge. She had noticed that Dorrie White kept liquid hand soap in flowered dispensers beside all the sinks, preferred rounded corners to sharp ones in just about every context, used ruffled pillow shams on the beds. To Sissy's eyes, a hundred details in the White house revealed Dorrie to be a homebody who put others above herself and probably contributed to charities alleviating the suffering of hungry children or stray animals.

Even more important, Sistine had seen Dorrie White's handwriting in that pink Juliet Phillips scrapbook. Smallish handwriting, very round, slanted a bit toward the right, with short ascenders and a small midzone but ample descenders, garlands, and end strokes. In other words, Dorrie White was timid, very kindhearted, and warm but lacking in self-esteem. She was unhappy in her daily life but had no ambition to do anything about it; she was probably a romantic dreamer.

And she was generous. Very generous.

While thinking all of this, Sissy checked wants and warrants in her region, then statewide, even nationwide, before she finished off by Googling “Candor White” to see whether she had ever made headlines of any kind. All the results were negative, meaning good. Dorrie White could not have been more clean.

In Officer Chappell's opinion, presumption of innocence in regard to Dorrie White deserved a lot more attention than it was getting in the Fulcrum Police Department right now.

Not for the first time, Sissy mentally questioned the competency of Chief Angstrom. Not because he was maybe racist and almost surely sexist; those all-too-common attitudes she could deal with. But she simply could not understand how Chief Angstrom could be so stupid as to discredit handwriting analysis. How could he, a law enforcement official, not understand that the entire legal system he upheld was based on signed documents simply because each person's handwritten signature is as individual as a fingerprint? And nobody disputed that experts could match handwriting, that each person wrote differently despite the public school system's best efforts to teach all children to write alike. So how could anybody say that the differences were not due to variations in personality?

“Get over it,” Sissy muttered to herself. The chief was her CO. He hadn't even bothered to look at the love notes signed “Blake.” She was through trying to educate him.

Rookie cop Chappell used another departmental password to access NCIC, moved the mouse to the search box, and typed into it a single name: “Blake.”

She pushed “GO,” then rubbed her eyes again and leaned back in her comfortless plastic chair to wait. This was a long shot and it was going to take a long time.

As the computer hummed and chirped to itself, compiling a list of every “Blake” in the NCIC, Sissy Chappell took another look at the handwriting samples she had found in Dorrie White's bedroom.

Oh, yeah. Throughout his scrawls, “Blake” exhibited the “felon's claw,” an unmistakable kink of the descenders. Sissy had never seen it so pronounced in any other real-life handwriting sample she had studied; this guy's handwriting provided a textbook example for the studies that had been conducted of the handwriting of criminals, very different from that of the overall populace. A hint of the felon's claw in someone's handwriting usually indicated a liar, especially an adulterer. But when it appeared as blatantly as it did in the samples she held, it was thought to be characteristic of rapists.

Not that any one trait meant a whole lot in handwriting. Like a medical diagnostician, Sistine depended on experience, intuition, and an overall impression for her conclusions. But that was just it: Taken all together, the grandiosity and swagger of this man's handwriting, its instability, its toppling impetuosity, and especially those final
d
's, bloated, protuberant, shaped like a clenched fist giving the finger to the world—

The computer ceased its mutterings and gave an electronic “Ta da!”

Sissy looked: 79,462 hits for “Blake.”

With a sigh, she bent over the computer, beginning the process of sorting and discarding. Eliminate missing children and teenage runaways. Then try “Blake” as first name or aka, not surname. Establish “Blake” as around Dorrie White's age, say, between the ages of twenty-eight to thirty-eight. Make it twenty-five to forty. Cross-reference “Blake” plus “Fulcrum, Ohio.” “Blake” plus “Ohio” . . .

* * *

“Take me instead,” I said.

I couldn't manage to sound flirtatious or provocative. Nothing in my upbringing had taught me how to act sexually alluring, and the present circumstances seemed unlikely to encourage any latent talent. But I was desperately sincere in the offer, and I suppose He could tell. He gawked at me.

“Let this girl go,” I repeated, facing Him steadily, willing myself not to step back, even though He had imposed Himself far too close to me, looming only inches from me. “She has her whole life ahead of her.” I heard a choked sound from Juliet, a whimper, a sob, but I couldn't turn to her. I kept my gaze fixed on our captor. “Take me instead. Do whatever you like to me. It's all the same in the end. You want blood, I've got blood. You—”

He burst into yelps of laughter. I could feel His spit flying into my face. “You crazy fat cow!” He cried, laughing so hard He bent over and had to step back from me to avoid placing His head upon my bosom. “You think I'd touch you with a rabies pole? Dumb ass, you're either a retard or a psycho!”

I breathed out, relieved not because He had refused me but because the energy in the room had lightened, shifted. I had amused Him. Fine. Keep Him laughing. Straight-faced, I inquired, “You don't appreciate what an older woman has to offer?”

“This is not about your
age
, you—What the hell is your name, anyway?”

I shot back the first female name that came to mind. “Maria Montessori.”

Peripherally I saw Juliet turn her head to give me a startled look. Perhaps her parents had sent her to Fulcrum's Montessori preschool.

Our captor, however, didn't blink. “Well, Marie, honey, you are not only physically repulsive but you are also the goofiest broad I've ever met.”

“Thank you. I imagine you've known lots of women?” And insulted them, I thought, and mispronounced their names?

“Oh, yeah.”

“How interesting.” Maintaining steady eye contact and nonjudgmental active-listening posture and all the sincere artifice they'd taught me in educational psychology, I casually sat on the sofa where He'd wanted Juliet to position herself. Not looking at her. I didn't want Him to look at her. I wanted Him to focus on me and keep talking. And I remembered that He liked to talk Himself up.

I burbled, “Mostly younger women?”

“
All
younger women, Ma-rie ba-by,” He bragged. He could call me “Ma-rie” all He liked as long as He wasn't calling Juliet anything. “Hundreds of them. White, black, yellow, brown—I take them all, and the younger, the better.”

I'd sized up His ego rightly. Or more than ego, really: His was an absolute sense of entitlement. His father had been a cripple, He had told me once—that was the word He had used, not handicapped, not disabled, but “a cripple”—and both His mother and father were dead. In an automobile accident? A tragic house fire? He had never divulged. He had worn an air of mystery the way He wore black clothing. He was an orphan, shuffled from foster home to foster home. He had suffered an unhappy childhood and now He deserved—

Oh, my God.

Something in me recognized something in Him. I had been a Cinderella once. He still was a sick male Cinderella, a hungry self centered on bottomless need. Physically, in my breasts and belly, I remembered the starving-baby sensation of His feeding on me.

I whispered, “What did they do to you when you were little?”

Luckily, He didn't hear me. He had turned away, swaggering to the far wall again, arms bowed like a bodybuilder's, knife at the ready, His belligerent back sending a message clearer than words: Don't Even Think about Trying Anything with Me. He peered at that same place on the wall—oh. A peephole. Now, from my seat on the sofa, I could make out a small black metal circle let into the paneling. But it was well below ground level. How could He see anything through that?