Dark Lie (9781101607084) (18 page)

“Please.”

* * *

Moseying around the old building, Bert Roman carried almost seventy years of Appletree history with him. Heck, he'd worked his first job here at this place, back when it was still a cigar factory making all of Appletree smell like apple cider, which was a heck of a lot nicer than what a paper mill would do. He'd started in the cigar factory as a floor sweeper, advanced to being a wrapper, then a machine operator. He remembered the people he'd worked with. He'd gone to school—elementary, junior high, high school, it was all in the same building back then—within a block of here. He remembered people from school too. He remembered people he'd had dealings with over the years. Arrested. Rescued. Watched die. He remembered births, weddings, funerals, scandals—there wasn't much that went on in Appletree that he didn't know about. He knew more about this jurisdiction, and more about life in general, and way more about being a cop, than Walker ever would.

And the son of a bitch treated him like a messenger boy.

Fine. Retirement was coming up in just a few months now.

Taking his time, Bert scanned the old Appletree cigar building from roofline to foundation, took a few steps, scanned some more. He loved these old factories. They didn't build them generous and solid like this anymore, rows and rows of stately double-sashed windows giving natural light to rooms twelve feet high, basement twelve feet deep, access through an outdoor concrete stairwell with a double metal door—firmly padlocked, Bert noted—over top of it to keep the rain and dead leaves and such from puddling at the bottom. Sloping door, nearly horizontal; they didn't make basement entryways like that anymore. Or basements that rose into a three-foot foundation with real windows, not just window wells, for illumination—

There was a broken basement window.

Bert frowned, wondering why this window hadn't been boarded up like the others. Looked like it had been covered from the
inside
for some reason. Now it looked like somebody had put a rock through it.

Probably had nothing to do with anything, but Bert made a mental note to point it out to Walker when he got here.

Movement on the parking lot caught his eye: Sam White waving at him like he wanted to talk with him. Sam was a nice guy, Bert had decided, but excitable. Required a lot of smoothing down. Bert didn't mind; smoothing people down was one of the things he did best, and anyway, he'd finished his look around. Smiling, he ambled over to the White fellow, who was speaking into a cell phone clutched in one hand and was saying, “You think it's him? Blake Roman?”

Bert lost his smile.

“I know it's not certain, but—” Sam listened for a moment; then in heightened tones he said, “Apparently somebody here overlooked your fax. Look, would you please send it again? I'll make sure Appletree PD pays attention to it. And the FBI. They're supposed to roll in any minute now.”

More silence as Sam listened and Bert thought about the fax he had read that morning and then destroyed, for reasons that applied to him and, as far as he knew, nobody else. Good thing those newfangled shredders minced the thing into diamonds so fine that nobody could ever prove what he'd done. If asked, of course he would deny it.

Sam said into the cell phone, “I wish you were here to see for yourself, but to me—well, first of all, it says Candy, and nobody that I know of ever called her that except . . . Yeah. Yeah, and that wild scrawl—this looks the same to me, just kind of rings a bell, but I don't know why. . . . The
y
in ‘Candy'? Yes, the tail comes to a point and then hooks back in a big curve that kind of underlines the word.”

He paused, listening to—Bert felt himself getting pretty anxious to know who was on the other end of that conversation, but he tried not to let it show. He put on his poker face.

“All it says is ‘Candy got laid here.'” Sam White's voice thinned, stretched translucent by stress, saying that. “Yes, the
g
in ‘got' has a hook tail like the
y
in ‘Candy.'” He listened, then responded, “The
d
on ‘laid'? Yes, it looks weird. Kind of toppling off the end of the word. It—what? I—I really can't tell.” Stretched even worse, his voice nearly broke.

He took a few deep breaths as if to steady himself, and then perked up, relief showing in his face. “You
will
? You already
did
, while we were talking? Thank you. Thank you so much, Officer. I really appreciate your help.”

Clicking off, he told Bert, “She sent the fax again.”

This news hit Bert in the gut, but he didn't let his poker face slip. Years as a cop on the beat had given him a lot of practice at hiding his feelings. He said only, “She?”

“Officer from Fulcrum. Chappell. Handwriting expert. Thinks this—” With a grimace, Sam White gestured at the bold black letters painted on the wall. “Thinks it may have been put there by an individual named Blake Roman. Do you know anything about him?”

Bert felt Sam's desperate gaze upon him.

“Blake Roman,” he repeated thoughtfully.

“He's a convicted rapist, he's wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a young woman, and apparently he was raised in Appletree. I have reason to think my wife might have known him when they were both kids in school.”

“Blake Roman.” Bert was not quite able to meet Sam White's worried eyes. “No, can't say as I ever really knew a Blake Roman.”

In a sense this was not a lie.

* * *

Once before, years ago, Blake had told me about his parents.

I had repressed that aspect of my daydream romance completely.

I had done this to myself. But why? How could I have turned this sick, insane, knife-obsessed person into an angel in my mind?

Now, standing against a rough wall with blood running down my arm, I remembered how terrified of him I had been as a girl. And now I had experienced that which I had feared: Pandora's razor edge, Pandora's dagger tip. I had just been stabbed. I knew what a knife wound felt like. And I had survived so far. I was still alive, on my unlovely feet, standing there. The blank of whitewash in my mind ran red, and I remembered.

* * *

I am sixteen, lying mostly naked on the sofa in the librarians' lounge, shivering as Blake shows me his most prized possession. It is a knife. Larger and much more frightening than the jackknife he brought out before. This knife is too big for him to hide in his pocket, and if he tried to keep it in his room, his foster mother would find it and confiscate it and probably phone his caseworker. So he keeps it in a rotting leather sheath and stows it under the heavy pediment of the same concrete park bench where he had first kissed me.

Today he retrieved it as we walked to the library. He has made me conceal it in my purse for him. And it would seem he has brought it here for a purpose. He has mostly undressed me, but instead of caressing me as usual, he reaches for the knife. My stare freezes onto its silver curving razor-edged viciously pointed blade.

“It was my father's hunting knife he took with him to the Gulf War,” Blake tells me. “He gave it to me. It's the one I used—I mean, he used it to kill towelheads. Lots of them.”

He drops his pants and holds the knife alongside his erection. I cannot wince my glance away from the sight of his penis as I usually do. The knife transfixes my stare there, the flat of its blade pressing against Blake's tender genital skin as if displaying it on a steel plaque.

“Which one's bigger?” Blake challenges me.

I can't answer. I don't dare. Trembling, I stare.

“Here.” Blake offers me the knife. “Heft it. Hold it.”

I shake my head. I want him to touch me in all the ways he has taught me, yet I want to put my clothes back on and get out of there, yet I am afraid to. I am afraid of—why am I afraid? I shouldn't be afraid of Blake. He is my prince, my hero, my angel, my white—

In a voice as hard as the steel blade, he commands me, “Take it, Candy. Hold it.” He thrusts the handle toward me.

I would rather hold a live rattlesnake, yet I take the knife in my shaky hand. The way Blake tells me, like a prophet, I have to. Awkwardly I hold it by the haft, which is made of some disintegrating brownish substance.

“Deer antler,” Blake says as if reading my mind. “Falling apart. I'm going to replace it. Customize it.” He smiles, yearning, eager. “Go on, move her around.” He gestures toward the knife. “Get used to her.”

Her?

“Move her around, Candy!” That compelling tone of command again. “Balance her in your hand.”

Gingerly I lift the long, heavy thing.

Blake extends his arm toward me, underside up. Something about the gesture reminds me of a puppy rolled over on its back, baring its neck and belly. The underside of Blake's arm looks as petal-soft and creamy pale as the skin of his penis.

“Cut me, Candy,” he urges.

I freeze, uncomprehending.

“Just a little cut, like my mother used to give me.” He points at a faint scar on his upper arm. “Come on, Candy. Then I'll cut you.”

* * *

I didn't remember any more. I couldn't. I didn't want to. I didn't need to.

I couldn't remember whether I had obeyed him and cut him. But I knew I hadn't let him cut me.

I knew this partly because of the vengeful writing on the outside of the library basement wall. Evidently I had not performed all that Blake had required of me, so he had painted that message there. In back, where anyone who parked a car would see it, but where I, walking in the front door from school, would not notice at first.

It might have been a day or two later that my parents had taken me away.

I wanted never to remember what had happened during the intervening day or days. But one thing I knew: There were no scars on my arms.

Whereas Blake was standing before me now with dozens of scars sprawling, a white scribble of pain, all the way up his forearms.

* * *

Grabbing his cell phone to follow up on Sissy's fax, Sam decided that, under the circumstances, his habitual good manners might be worse than a bad habit; they might be just what Dorrie didn't need right now. He jabbed the Appletree PD number with unnecessary force of finger. When a female voice answered, he demanded without preliminaries, “Walker.”

There was nothing Sam could do about the irritating wait before the cop picked up, nothing except hate the unfortunate hold-the-phone music, yee-hah country music, as he had never hated music before.

Sometime short of forever, the music clicked off and someone picked up. “Walker here.”

“Sam White here. Did you receive the fax about Blake Roman?”

“Just came in.”

“It came in earlier too, if anybody would have paid any attention. Have you read it?”

“Yes, but I don't see—”

Sam steamrollered over him. “Did you give it to the FBI?”

“No, because—”

“Are they there?” Sam became louder and more terse with each utterance. He had used not a word of profanity, yet he felt a sense of taking command. He had never been in the military, but knew to some small degree what General Patton must have felt like.

“Yes, they're here, but we—”

“Walker, you're not—”

“
Captain
Walker.”

“Captain Walker, you're not hearing me. I'd like to speak to the FBI.” Sam wished he had paid more attention to the FBI agents when he had seen them at the Phillips house, so he would know which ones were the most likely jackasses, and what he was up against, and whom to ask for by name. “Their top agent, please.”

“Mr. White—”

“
Now
, Captain Walker.”

Without another word the prick put him on hold. Sam endured yet more down-home music. If anybody had ever put General Patton on hold, Sam thought, clenching his jaw, Patton would have ordered a nuclear strike.

Somebody picked up. “Hello, Mr. White?” A pleasant enough male voice, neutrally midwestern.

“Sam White, yes.”

“I'm Special Agent Frank Gerardo. I've just scanned the Blake Roman report, and I understand your concern that it was overlooked earlier in the day. I know—”

Sam interrupted. “Agent Gerardo, it's what you don't know that worries me. I need you and your men out here an hour ago.”

“Out where?”

“Where the abductor's van is. Did Bert by any chance report that my wife's purse is in it?”

“No, I hadn't heard that.” Gerardo started to sound genuinely concerned. “You think—”

“I think my wife and the missing girl are inside this abandoned building. I have good reason to believe that the graffiti on it was written by Blake Roman.”

“What? Wait a minute, Mr. White. How can you know—”

“Sissy Chappell!” Sam exploded. “The Fulcrum officer who sent the report. Ask her! She's the one who spotted this Blake guy as a felon in the first place from some old love notes we found. She's a handwriting expert.”

TWELVE

B
ert recalled well enough that there had been a Roman family in Appletree. He particularly remembered Randall Roman, a brilliant young man up till he enlisted, got sent to the Gulf War, and had a losing confrontation with a land mine. He'd gone away a graduate of the high school's “gifted” program, planning to use his GI money for a college education and a career as a theoretical engineer. He'd come back in a wheelchair and messed up in the head as well—flashbacks, drinking problem, couldn't go to school or hold a job. Ended up living on disability in a trailer behind the old foundry.

All of which could have been overcome, Bert considered, if it weren't for Randall's biggest liability: his wife, Pandora, Penny for short, piece of work he'd met at Fort Bragg and brought home like trash stuck to his shoe. And their kid, conceived before Randall had gone off to get his legs and nether parts blown to smithereens. Afterward, there'd been no more kids, just the one son, a boy, totally spoiled and messed up. Presumably there'd been no more kid-procreating action from Randall Roman. It had been common knowledge that Penny supplemented the family income by entertaining gentleman visitors. While Bert had a low opinion of whores, he knew every little town had at least one; it was nothing to get excited about—except this Penny Roman had a kink that brought her company all the way from Akron.

She did it while her husband watched.

She made him watch.

Sometimes she let her son watch too.

* * *

The phone rang persistently beside Sissy Chappell's bed. Facedown in her pillow, groping for the source of the noise, she peered at the glaring red numbers on the digital alarm clock with one bleary eye. It was 8:08 a.m. She'd had just about half an hour of sleep.

Approximating the phone to her ear, she mumbled, “'Lo?”

“Officer Chappell?”

“Yes.” Sissy sat up, instantly awake. She knew that voice, even though the guy was talking on a staticky cell phone. “Agent Gerardo?” The FBI top gun heading the Phillips case team.

“Right,” he said. “Officer Chappell, I'm sorry to call you at home, but it's important. We need you here in Appletree to help sort out Blake Roman's possible involvement with Dorrie White. I'm sending a helicopter for you; it's already on the way. I understand Fulcrum PD has a landing pad on the roof. Can you be there ASAP?”

Sissy replied without hesitation. “I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“Good. See you soon. I already spoke with Chief Angstrom, and you're to bring the handwriting evidence with you.”

“Bubba!” Sissy whispered after she had hung up the phone. The FBI had spoken to her boss wanting to borrow her to do
handwriting analysis
? Angstrom had to be having eyebrow meltdown.

She got a chance to see for herself about nine minutes later as, hastily dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, and Adidas, she ran up the steps to the PD. Angstrom was coming out the door.

“Sir.” There was no avoiding an encounter and acknowledgment. “Going home to get some sleep?”

“Yes, I am.” He sounded a bit wrought, but his glare seemed much as usual, his eyebrow no more unstuck than before. “What you do with your off time is your own business. But if you're not back here for your regular shift, Chappell, you're fired.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And since when are you a
handwriting expert
? Are you accredited or something?”

“It's not something I need a license for, sir. Excuse me, sir.” Even from where she was standing, Sissy could hear the chopper on the roof.

Running upstairs rather than waiting for the elevator, Sissy knew quite well that she was not likely to be back from Appletree in time to go on patrol that afternoon. She knew that she would probably lose her job because of what she needed to do, and possibly even her law enforcement career—yet her feet ran even faster toward the helicopter, and her heart beat even faster, more eager than ever.

With Dorrie White's case folder in hand, Sissy Chappell had been called on a rescue mission. After months of giving out speeding tickets and parking tickets, maybe today she would do something a little more like the cop she wanted to be.

* * *

“That wasn't broken by somebody throwing a rock in, Bert!” Sam got down on his hands and knees to take a closer look. Gravel cut through his ruined suit pants into his leg as he studied the basement window the old cop was showing him. “Somebody was trying to break
out
.” His chest tightened so that he could barely talk, but he had to get through to this guy. “Look how the wood and glass are shattered out from the inside.”

Bert stood silent, then muttered, “I'm not so sure.”

Instead of answering, Sam held his breath, listening. He thought he had heard a sound from behind that broken window. But now that he was paying attention, all he could hear was traffic swishing past on Main Street as the good people of Appletree headed for church.

Which was probably where Dorrie's parents were right now, Sam realized. In church. Praying. He wondered whether they might possibly remember to include their daughter in their prayers.

But it was nonproductive to think of Dorrie's parents right now. Sam dismissed them from his mind.

“Anyway,” Bert was saying, gesturing at the broken window, “nothing we can do about it till Walker gets here.”

“Shhh.”

“Huh?”

Sam knelt with his big hands cupped behind his ears, listening. And yes, he thought he heard it again, just an intimation of a soprano whimpering sound buried in the ambient noise of a small town, the sandy sound of mundane time sifting through its hourglass.

The sound in the boarded-up basement could have been a puppy or a kitten or a child.

Or Dorrie.

Or his own quaking brain disturbing the wax in his ears.

He mumbled, “I thought I heard something.”

“Heard what?”

“Somebody crying in there.”

Bert hunkered down beside Sam, listened for a moment, then commented gently in his gravelly way, “Now, don't start imagining things on me.”

“I heard somebody crying inside.” Opposition made Sam more sure. “Bert, we have to go in there.” Eyeing the broken window, Sam admitted to himself that there was no way his husky body with its ample belly would fit through it. But he tried to convince himself that Bert's skinny old frame might. “
You
have to go in there,” Sam amended.

“Already told you, we can't do a thing till Walker and the FBI guys say so. And a judge gives the warrant.”

“Bert—”

“I'd have to bust more of that window away,” Bert said. “That's illegal.”

“Bert, what if she's in there? What if she's in trouble?”

“You think she got in there through that three-inch hole in the window? I keep telling you, there's no way anybody
could
get in there. And when Walker gets here, he'll tell you the same thing.”

Sam started getting that unfamiliar fiery molten feeling in his chest again. Anger. Frustration. Having no idea what to do with such emotions, he turned his back on Bert and strode away.

Once in motion, Sam found that he couldn't just stand around waiting for Walker, et cetera, to show their sorry butts. Had to do something. He did what Bert had just done, walked around the building, looking for a way in or any sign that anybody had forced a way in. But except for that broken basement window, which was too small for anything bigger than a rabbit to get through, every orifice of the old factory-cum-library appeared to be boarded up, nailed tight, chained, padlocked, impregnable.

Sam ended where he had begun, in the parking lot, shaking his head.

Bert was right.

Bert couldn't be right.

For no reason except that he could not stand still, Sam started to search the gravel of the parking lot.

Bent over, scanning, he worked his way back the fence, into the weeds at the far end, then out again. At the edge of the gravel he spotted a flashlight he recognized lying on the ground. He stared, swallowed hard, blinked, and didn't touch it or move it. Captain Walker should be proud of him for not messing with the evidence.

“Sam!” Bert yelled from around the street-side corner of the building. “They're here.”

Walker and the FBI guys had finally arrived, evidently. Sam turned to go tell them about the flashlight.

“White! Sam White!” Walker bellowed. “C'mon over here.”

* * *

“Have you ever flown in a small aircraft before?” The copter pilot had to yell in order to be heard above the engine noise.

“No!” Sissy yelled back.

“Well, here.” Over his shoulder he handed her something made of gray paper folded flat with a sort of oversized twist tie along the top—a barf bag. Sissy laid it aside without comment, but she knew she wouldn't need it. Nervous Nellies with butterfly bellies didn't go into law enforcement.

“Buckle up! Here we go!”

Sissy felt liftoff almost as if she were in an elevator, then a quirky sort of slue, a slight tilt, and the chopper bumbled toward Appletree. Sissy looked down through a window with delight; despite the seriousness of her situation, it was a revelation to see the Ohio countryside, flat as a billiard table, from low altitude.

“I never knew there were so many mounds!” she exclaimed even though no one could possibly hear her.

The slanting early-day light showed them clearly, earthworks left by prehistoric people before even the Mongolian “Native Americans” had come there, excavations encircling conical hills, or sometimes double mounds resembling peanuts, and one long double serpentine complete with snake head. Over and past them, seemingly without noticing them, ran a modern surveyor's pride of patchwork-quilt property lines. Dairy farms and soybean fields, train tracks and roadways, housing developments and industrial parks, formed a thin overlay upon something that had nothing to do with them, that was ancient, very ancient and primitive.

Sissy watched a freight train, visible from end to end, crawl across the enigma below her like a worm.

Ahead lay what looked like toy blocks and matchboxes clustered around a golf tee—houses, businesses, water tower. Gee, someone had painted a big apple tree on the latter. Mentally Sissy shifted gears to be all police business when the copter sat down on what appeared to be the high school parking lot. Now she got to do the crouch-run head-low-beneath-rotor-blades thing she'd seen so often on TV.

As she did it, a man got out of the back of a waiting police cruiser, left the door open for her, walked around, and got back in on the other side.

Waving to the copter pilot, Sissy bounced in with him. Immediately the uniformed officer in the front seat drove off at what Sissy would classify as a level-orange speed.

The man in the backseat with her shook her hand. “I'm Agent John Harris.” He introduced himself with no trace of ego, and he looked more like a slim, fit college professor in a rumpled raincoat, Columbo-style, than an FBI field agent. Maybe he was in forensics.

“Sistine Chappell,” Sissy responded, “no relation to the Vatican.”

Harris chuckled. “Thank you for reminding me of the advantages of having an ordinary name.” Indicating the case file she clutched with both hands, he asked, “Could I have a look at that?”

“Of course.” She handed it over, then gazed around at Appletree as the cruiser zipped them through it.

With boarded-up stores, pawnshops, and tattoo parlors, the place looked like an armpit among small towns, one of many. The streets and sidewalks were empty, and Sissy heard no sirens, but she saw quite a conglomeration of flashing lights up ahead. Their car turned into a side street, then stopped.

Harris, Sissy saw, had one of Blake's love notes in his hand as they both got out of the car. “Follow me. We have to get through this crowd.”

And quite a crowd it was, dressed-up gawkers who had probably been on their way to church being held back by annoyed-looking police who didn't look very spiffy in comparison. Sissy felt underdressed, especially when a broad-shouldered man in a well-fitting suit took hold of her elbow, smiled at her, and started shoving people aside for her special benefit, kind of like Moses parting the Red Sea, except this guy definitely worked out.

Within a few moments Sissy found herself on the other side of the police cordon, standing along with Agent Harris among more men in suits. One step forward and she had a clear view of the focus of everyone's attention. A three-story brick building with ranks of boarded-up windows, probably a factory from back in the days when they depended on daylight. Between her and it, a van of an odd gray-brown color apparently deserted in its gravel parking lot. And along the building's foundation, boldly painted graffiti.

Sissy's eyes widened, taking in the handwriting, more like brushstroke writing. At the same time her ears tuned in to Agent Harris, by her side, saying to someone, “The probabilities are very high that it was written by the same individual who wrote these notes Dorrie White had in her possession.”

Oh, crap. Was that all they had wanted her here for, to bring the notes so that
their
handwriting expert—who did comparison only, never analysis—could look at them in juxtaposition to the graffiti?

Sissy's heart shrank. For this she was sacrificing her job?

“Officer Chappell,” said the man to whom Harris had been talking. Sissy looked up just as he turned to her and offered his hand; shaking it, she faced a pair of gray eyes so crystalline that they gave his otherwise standard face cinematic good looks. “Gerardo,” he introduced himself unnecessarily; now she remembered having seen him in the Phillips home. Because he had been bent over papers, she had not noticed his remarkable eyes. “Chief Angstrom has told me that you do a kind of profiling from handwriting—”

“
Angstrom
told you that?” Sissy could not hide her surprise.