Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (12 page)

“Recognize
me
?” Dani said. “Tommy—people recognize you everywhere you go around here. People recognize you in China.”

“Tell you what—I’ll go in the back door and you stand out front. If he recognizes me, he’ll run toward you.”

“Just order a cup of coffee and sit down,” Dani said. “Keep it simple. I’ll join you in a minute.”

“Excellent,” Tommy said. “I’ll order a coffee and sit down, and you join me in a minute.”

U STILL THERE
? she texted. She waited for a response, then shook her phone, as if jarring it would summon a response.

While Tommy waited in line for coffee, he discreetly scanned the crowd as he put his phone on vibrate. A poster on a bulletin board by the door listed a support group for families still dealing with the Julie Leonard murder. Next to it was a small photograph of Julie above the words
WE MISS YOU!

During the day the place was generally full of female real estate agents
and retired bankers reading the
Wall Street Journal
and young moms having coffee while their kids ran amok. At night it was a teen hangout. Tommy had hoped to spot one sending text messages. That was simple. All of them were sending text messages, poking at their handheld phones with their thumbs without speaking or even looking at each other. A kid could spontaneously combust in the middle of the room and none of the others would look up from their smartphones.

Dani stood in the dark outside the window looking in. There were a dozen boys and twice that many girls, middle schoolers and high schoolers. She knew the parents of three of the girls, including one whose mother would have been shocked to see the skimpy outfit her daughter was wearing. Some kids had their laptops out and were trying to study. Many more had their laptops out to make it
look
like they were trying to study as they played video games and updated their Facebook pages.

Tommy’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

“He stopped texting me,” Dani said. “I’ve got nothing.”

“I haven’t spotted him. Maybe the kid in the black hoodie?”

“I’ve seen him before somewhere,” Dani said. “I think he might be a bag boy at Stop & Shop. I’m still outside. Can you see me?”

“Yes,” Tommy said. “And I don’t want you to freak out, but there’s someone behind you who looks like he wants to talk to you. Just pretend to hang up but don’t—let your screen time out and I can listen in. Say the word . . .
elephant
and I’ll come running.”

10.

The person behind Dani said, “Dr. Harris?”

She spun around to see Julian Villanegre, the art historian, smiling.

“So good to see you again,” the white-haired gentleman said warmly. “I know these Starbucks places make a fine cup of coffee, but I came tonight to see what they do to a cup of tea. Would you care to join me?”

“That would be nice,” she said.

Villanegre held the door open for her. On their way in they passed Tommy sitting on a stool at the front window counter, his cell phone pressed to his ear. Dani briefly made eye contact while Villanegre found two empty seats. Dani set her phone down on the table, screen side up.

“This must be my treat. What would you like?”

“Oh, thank you,” said Dani. “A venti vanilla soy latte.”

As the Englishman stood in line, Dani again made momentary eye contact with Tommy, who nodded to tell her he could hear the conversation.

Villanegre returned a few minutes later with their drinks. She thanked him as he took a sip of his tea.

“Does it measure up?” she asked, thinking that the old man did not, tonight at least, seem as threatening as she’d first thought.

“It will do just fine,” Villanegre said.

“Do you have Starbucks in England?”

“Oh yes. Not quite as ubiquitous as here, though.”

“Where in England do you live?”

“Morningside, Hinksey Hill. A little place south of Oxford. It’s been in the family awhile.”

“I’m picturing a castle with a moat.”

“Well, you’re right about the castle, but we had to fill in the moat when we started getting water in the basement. That’s the problem with moats.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I buy a castle. What do you think of the McMansions of East Salem?”

“Lovely little town. I like it very much. We’re having the painting scanned in a high-definition digital format, which is a slow, laborious process, so I’m here until that’s completed.” He took another sip of tea. “You said you’re a forensic psychiatrist—tell me more about that. What is it you do day to day?”

“I work with the district attorney,” Dani said. “When there’s a suspect or a witness whose mental state may be called into question during a criminal proceeding, they need an expert who can evaluate that individual and speak with authority in court.”

“So when someone declares innocence by reason of insanity, are you the one who determines if they’re insane?”

“No. The jury or the judge decides that, but I testify on behalf of the prosecution. The defense calls their own expert witnesses.”

“I have to wonder where one draws the line. Can a person who intentionally kills another human being ever be considered wholly sane? Are you insane if you chop the body up into little pieces, but sane if you don’t? What distinctions can possibly be made?”

“There’s a lot of work being done on that,” Dani said. “But you’re right. I wonder all the time about where we draw the line.”

“I find this fascinating,” Villanegre said. “I hope that doesn’t make me seem ghoulish. Though working with a painting like
The Garden of Earthly Delights
could make anybody a bit ghoulish, I suppose. Now tell me—as
a forensic psychiatrist, suppose you had a man in jail, and your district attorney showed you
The Garden of Earthly Delights
and told you the man in jail painted it. Could you make a determination as to whether or not that man was insane?”

“Well,” Dani said, considering again the very question she’d asked herself the night she and Tommy had attended the exhibition, “I would ask how the painting might express his interior landscape.”

“And?”

“I’d note that the artist pays considerable attention to detail in a way that suggests a mentality on the lookout for things it’s afraid of. Constantly searching or sweeping the spectrum of experience, like a police scanner or an early-warning system, hoping to spot the smallest clues or the hidden signs of things that threaten him. That suggests a paranoid or obsessivecompulsive personality, as opposed to the kind that doesn’t want to see and looks away, eyes closed, head in the sand, the way a hysterical personality might cope.”

“Intriguing. What else?”

“If I were a Freudian, I might want to look for divisions between id, ego, and superego,” she said. “The trios in the center panel where one figure has authority over the other two might be interpreted as the superego struggling for control over the more dangerous male id and the more vulnerable female ego.”

“But you’re not a Freudian?”

“I think his work was groundbreaking, but as a clinician I’m not sure I’d call myself a Freudian. There’s been a lot of excellent work done since then.”

“I knew his grandson, Clement Freud,” Villanegre said. “Terribly quick wit. He was on a game show in Britain, and when a fellow panelist asked him why he was so fat, he said, ‘It’s because every time I sleep with your wife, she gives me a biscuit.’ What do you think Clement’s grandfather would have said about Bosch’s hellish dreamscape in the right-hand panel?”

“I think I’d be more interested in what Jung would have to say about the archetypal symbology and the integrated opposites. You called them ‘hybrids’ in your lecture.”

“Indeed I did. So you think Jerry Bosch was a madman? Hieronymus is the Middle Dutch form of Jerome.”

“You’re more the expert here than I am. Do
you
think he was?”

“By today’s standards?”

Dani nodded.

“Oh, quite,” Villanegre said, chuckling. “Quite so. But I think he fell under someone’s sway. Someone truly evil. Like your infamous California madman, Charles Manson. Were his followers insane when they carried out his orders to commit murder? The man who gave the orders surely was. Can you be insane by proxy?”

“Another good question,” Dani said. “You have a gift for asking them.”

His questions reminded her that she and Tommy had concluded Amos Kasden acted alone, but at the behest or under the guidance of someone else.
Who?
was one of the central questions they were trying to answer. One of the girls who’d been at the “passage party” the night Julie was killed had asked Dani, “Would it be possible for someone to give you a posthypnotic suggestion that could make you kill someone?”

Dani had said no, it wasn’t possible. The girl had been convinced, but Dani was not.

“And you have a knack for dodging them,” Villanegre said. “I asked you if you thought someone could be insane by proxy.”

“Not insane by proxy, but evil by proxy,” she said. “Evil can be taught. Insanity is more organic.”

“Have you taught, Dr. Harris? If you haven’t, you should. I wasn’t very good at it at first. I’d ask my students a question, and when they didn’t answer, I’d answer it for them. But I learned to wait them out. That’s how I met Udo Bauer, you know. He was my pupil at Oxford. After he’d finished at St. Adrian’s.”

“Was he a good student?”

“He was. Surprising, considering his family had so much money that he didn’t have to apply himself. I think he concentrated on art history because of his family’s collection.”

“He didn’t study pharmacology?”

“Oh no—why would he? Business administration. Biology too. Had the most extraordinary collection of poisonous tree frogs. How is it that God gave the most beautiful colors and patterns to his deadliest creations?”

Dani gave Tommy a quick look. Abbie Gardener had handed him a dead frog that night in his yard, and the frog had dissolved when he threw it back into the pond.
“These are the first, you’ll be the last,”
Abbie had said. He’d later found a frog in a pond on the St. Adrian’s campus that didn’t try to jump away when he reached for it; it just sat calmly in his hand.

“One of Udo’s associates told me studying frog toxins has been leading into some very promising medical applications,” Villanegre said. “Dr. Guryakin. Did you meet him?”

“Briefly. What does Dr. Guryakin do for Mr. Bauer?”

“He’s the head of research at Linz, I believe. Intelligent enough chap, but I don’t know what he was doing at the exhibition. No particular grasp of the subject as far as I could tell.”

“Perhaps he was there to learn.”

“Perhaps,” Villanegre said. “We were all there to learn something. If I may ask—are you married, Dr. Harris?”

“I am not, Dr. Villanegre.”

“Julian,” he said. “Please call me Julian.”

“Only if you call me Dani.”

“Agreed, Dani. So is there someone special in your life?”

“There is,” Dani said. “Quite special.”

“Then I suggest,” Villanegre said, rising to his feet, “you avoid the young gentleman by the door who has been staring at you this entire time.
Unless, of course, he’s the special one. Good night, Dani. Very nice chatting with you.”

Once the art historian was out of sight, Tommy joined Dani. “What?” he said as he sat down. “I was being inconspicuous.”

“Obviously not inconspicuous enough.”

“Next time I’ll cut a pair of eyeholes in a newspaper, like in
The Three Stooges.
So what do you think?”

“About Villanegre?”

“Please, call him Julian.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I’m not sure,” Tommy said. “At first I thought he was one of them, but now . . .”

“I agree,” Dani said. “In all my years—well, okay, it hasn’t been that many years—
during the time
I’ve worked with the criminal element, I’ve had one criterion that has yet to steer me wrong.”

“Which is?”

“I like him. I’ve never liked someone who was guilty. Though I’ve disliked plenty who were innocent.”

She was about to say something more when her phone chirped. She opened her message screen.
LOOK BEHIND THE SWT’N LOW
.

She quickly scanned the room as she showed Tommy the message. She saw nothing unusual. No one was looking at her.

Tommy jumped up and walked to the coffee station, where he reached behind the small pink packages of artificial sweeteners. He probed until he felt a small capsule. It was pale blue and about a half-inch long with no markings. He pocketed the capsule and rushed through the front door, looking both ways in the parking lot, hoping to see if someone was fleeing, but the lot was empty.

He returned to the table and set the capsule in front of Dani. She picked it up and examined it.

“Can you tell what it is?” he asked.

“Not by looking at it. But I know someone who can figure out what’s inside it.”

“Quinn?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When are you going to see him?”