Don't Slay the Dragon (The Chronicles of Elizabeth Marshall Book 1) (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

My mind was a blur on my drive back north.  I couldn’t believe what I had just seen.  I felt like I was in the middle of a tug-of-war between mother and daughter, even though one of the two was dead. 

I thought through every detail of my visits with Lisbeth and tried to put the pieces of the complex puzzle together.  I needed to start keeping notes or writing a journal.  I would never be able to keep it all straight if I didn’t write it down.

Once I got home, I found an unused essay notebook and started writing down everything I could remember from my visits, the search of the trailer, and what I’d learned from Logan and Mark Jacobs.  I was so involved in it that I hardly noticed my cell phone when it beeped, telling me I had a waiting text message.

It was
Logan.  He apologized again for not getting together as planned.  He told me the hostage situation had a peaceful ending, but said he was still processing the crime scene and the weapons involved.  He would probably be busy the rest of the evening.

I replied that it was ok, I understood, and we would get together another time.
  I wanted to spend the evening decompressing anyway. 

We were both busy the rest of the weekend and between studying, dinner with my parents on Sunday, and the journal writing, Monday was here before I knew it.

My first two classes, Creative Writing and Calculus, kept my mind so absorbed it was a challenge focusing of anything other than the curriculum.  Before I knew it, I was in Professor Craig’s class and we were discussing another case study.

Thi
s time, the patient was “Susan”. She was in her mid-fifties and had a relatively late in life diagnosis.   She had been in and out of jail and prison, had been convicted on multiple accounts of child abuse to her children, as well as drug possession and trafficking before she’d been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and an alter ego, “Gloria” had been discovered.  Gloria was very violent and had stemmed from abuse she herself had received as a child.  There was also another benign personality, “Deborah”, who manifested infrequently.

The discussion was generally based around the difficulty doctors had in getting the right balance of medication to integrate Susan and the challenge of controlling Gloria.  To date, according to Professor Craig, Susan was still institutionalized and had little hope of being able to live a life outside of a psychiatric facility.  Gloria was simply too violent and unpredictable.

Listening to the discussion, I wondered if Professor Craig had chosen this case to help me understand my own situation.  There were certainly some similarities. 

After class, when I was about to leave and he called my name, I wasn’t surprised.  He approached me after most of the other students had left.  He had a folded newspaper in his hands.

“I guess you’ve read the news,” he began.

I shook my head no, confused.  I really didn’t have a lot of time to read the newspaper.  Once in a while I caught the local news on TV at night, but usually only when I wasn’t studying.

He
unfolded the paper and handed it to me.  It was the front page of the local newspaper.  I scanned the page, noting stories on the economy, politics, an over-night robbery.  At the bottom of the page was a story with a bold headline.

“New Evidence in the Marshall Case.”
  The byline read: “Daughter May Be Found Innocent”.

Frantically, I read through the article.  There were no specifics about what the “evidence” was, only that “a trusted source close to the case”
was quoted as saying there had been new evidence discovered in the case that may prove Elizabeth Marshall’s innocence.  There was a lot of speculation, nothing definite, just innuendos. 

I felt angry and betrayed all at once.  Was
Logan the one who had leaked it to the media?  Was it Travis, the guy in IT, excited to be a part of the case?  I felt it was completely irresponsible to say such things in the media when we were still just discovering information.

It wasn’t until the end of the article, the second half of which was printed on the back page, that it hinted that the source was Mark Jacobs, Lisbeth’s lawyer. 
I felt relief that the source wasn’t quoted as the Riverview City Police Department, but was still suspicious that her lawyer had received his information from somewhere.

“How is she doing?”  Professor Craig’s
question broke through my concentration.

“I had an interesting visit with her this weekend,” I replied, handing him back the newspaper.  “I thought about talking to you about it.”

He gave me an interested look.  I felt more comfortable talking to him about Lisbeth than Dr. Ross. 

“Is it possible, in a case like my friend’s, for new personalities to continue to split and manifest?” 
I asked.

“Well,” he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose in thought, “
in rare cases, such as your friend perhaps, there are so many different personalities that it’s very plausible for new ones to split and fracture, especially if she’s been resistant to medication.  I suppose the number of new alter egos may be limitless, if she continues to experience traumatic events in her live.  Why do you ask?”

I related my experience with both Slayer and Sophie. 
As far as I knew, neither of those two had been diagnosed when she was younger, during her first time at the state hospital.  They had to be relatively recent manifestations.  I shared with him my impressions of Sophie and we discussed her for a while.

“It was as though she enjoyed baiting me,” I tried to explain, “like it was all a game to her.  She was thrilled that I couldn’t tell her apart from Lisbeth.  One minute she was telling me how crazy Barbara was and the next
she was saying she might have killed her after all.”

“Sounds textbook pathological,” Professor Craig nodded in interest.  “I would say that of all the different personalities, Sophie is the one you need to be the most careful with.  She may be the most dangerous.”

Before I could agree, my cell phone rang.  Normally, I would ignore it, but it was Logan, and I had some venting to do.  I excused myself and told Professor Craig we would talk again then went out in the hall to answer my phone.

“If you’ve read the newspaper I’m so sorry,”
Logan began as soon as I said hello.  I tried not to laugh.  He was certainly good at diffusing the situation quickly.  I wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily, though.

“Why did you tell him?”  I demanded.

“He’s her lawyer,” he defended, “he called me yesterday, going on and on about how worried he was about defending this case.  I thought I’d toss him a bone, help him out.  How was I supposed to know he’d so straight to the media?”

I could sy
mpathize.  If you couldn’t trust the one person paid to defend her, who could you trust?  I remembered back to that early conversation I’d had with Mark.  He’d talked then about wanting a BIG case for the notoriety it would bring him.  What better way to get his name out there than to win a seemingly unwinnable case?

“Well, it may be a bit premature
to say she’s completely innocent,” I told him as I left the building and began my trek across campus to my car.

“I don’t think I like the sound of this,” the caution in his voice was evident.  “What’s happened since Friday?”

Briefly, I described my introduction to Sophie and how she baited me about possibly killing Barbara.  I explained a possible scenario where Lisbeth leaves while Barbara is alive, drives around for a while, then Sophie comes back and does the actual murder.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,”
Logan exclaimed.  “Do you think this Sophie is capable of doing that?”

I remembered looking into her bright, excited eyes as she said that maybe she
had
stabbed Barbara thirteen times and enjoyed every minute of it.  It was pure evil looking right back at me.

“I think she’s
very
capable of it,” I replied as I reached my car, unlocked it, and climbed inside.  “If you had been there, you would have thought the same thing.”  I began to turn on the engine to start warming it up when I remembered the things we were looking into on Friday.  “Have you found out anything more about the canvas or the napkin?”

“I ran them both over to forensics downtown,”
he explained.  I knew that since Riverview was such a relatively small town that the county probably had the best forensics labs.  “They’re still working on both.  The tech working on the canvas did say that the Black Dragon was painted over something else.  They were doing some chemical testing, X-rays and digital imaging to determine if they could remove the oil paint on top without damaging what was beneath.”

“It sounds like they’re being very thorough,” I commented, “I hope they find something.  I wouldn’t like to see them go through all this for nothing.”

“We’ll find out if there is something important under the painting,” he reassured.  “I also had a good look at the napkin.  They didn’t check it for fingerprints the first time because of the fabric and the fact that they didn’t think it was an important piece of evidence.  With a little bit of urging, they agreed to not only do fingerprinting on it but to check it for blood splatter evidence.  The density and the pattern could tell us if it was just lying next to her at the time of the stabbing or if it was actually used to hold the knife during the stabbing.”

“I have to admit,
Logan, my head is spinning with all this.  I don’t know from one moment to the next who caused Barbara’s death.  The more we find out the more complicated it gets.”  Just trying to think through all this was giving me a headache.  “Have you heard anything more from Travis?”

“Not yet,” he answered, “but I do know these things take time.  Why don’t we get together tonight and we can talk some of this through?”

Before I could answer him I heard a beeping in the phone.

“Just a sec, I’ve got a call coming through,” he paused and I suspected he was checking his caller ID.  “Speak of the devil, that’s Travis now.  Let me grab this and I’ll call you back later.”

As we hung up and I began the drive home, I worried and wondered what more Travis would find on that hard drive.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“Can you come by the department?” I was just pulling into my parking space at my apartment complex when Logan called me back. 

“Did Travis find something?” 

“Yeah, and it’s a fairly lengthy document.  I want your input on it.” 

“What’s it about?”  I couldn’t help asking.

“I’m not entirely sure yet.  Can you come?”

“I’m on my way.”

I pulled into traffic and headed across town almost before hanging up.  Logan told me he would meet me at the back door again and I was relieved to see him at the door shortly after I entered the parking lot.  I followed him down the stairs and through the halls to the IT department.  He was silent most of the way and I could tell he was thinking through something.

“Hey Travis,” I greeted him as we reached his personal cave.  His hair had neon green tips now and he had on a Metallica
T-shirt. 

“Hey Cate,” he greeted with a happy wave.  “Wait until you see what I found for you.  Man, this is better than my
Battle Corps game.”

“Show me what you have.”  I couldn’t help smiling back, he was so excited.

“Well, I found a few more internet searches.  Her system was pretty out-dated, so it took longer than I expected. The operating system was so old I had to research how to hack into it.” His big hands flew between his wireless mouse and his custom keyboard.  “Ok, here it is.  Just your basic searches.  Superficial stab wounds.  Non-fatal injuries. Not exactly your most common searches, but, hey, you never know what you’ll find in someone’s PC.  Then there’s - ”

“Wait!” I stopped him and came around to get a better look at his computer monitor. “Why would she be searching that?
Non-fatal injuries? You don’t think…” I let the sentence drop, my mind racing.

“That she was planning something?”
Logan finished what I couldn’t. “It almost sounds like premeditation.”

“Do you think she was planning on harming Elizabeth but not killing her?
Maybe a scare tactic or something?” I asked.

“it’s a possibility.” He shrugged, looking skeptical.  “
Look, there’s more.” He was beside me, pointing down at the screen. “Powerful painkillers that are hard to find in a toxicology report.”

‘Non-fatal wounds
and painkillers?” Why would she be looking up these searches? Why try to hurt Elizabeth but give her painkillers so she wouldn’t feel it? It didn’t make any sense, unless….

“What if it wasn’t Elizabeth she was trying to hurt?” Both men turned to look at me, trying to see where I was going with this. “Could it be possible that she was planning on hurting herself?”

“Are you saying she did this to herself?” Travis was engrossed at the idea.

“Suicide?”
Logan asked.  “Remember when we were looking at the autopsy? All the wounds were on just one side of her body. It’s very possible she was looking for a painkiller to help her tolerate the initial injuries, as wild of a theory as that may sound.  Do you think she was capable of stabbing herself twelve times before the fatal wound to her heart?” He ran a hand though his hair in a now familiar motion, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I wouldn’t want to believe anyone was capable of doing such a thing, but I keep finding that nothing is as it first seems.”  I walked a small circle around the cramped space, trying to sort through it all.

“Could she have pre-planned it enough to realize that an autopsy would be done and she would want to use painkiller that wouldn’t readily show up in a toxicology report?” Logan questioned.

“Well, Barbara was a very intelligent woman. There’s no telling what she could have planned.”  I walked back to the computer monitor. “So if our theory is right, she would have
had to have this well planned out for quite a while.”  How much was there about this woman I considered to be a surrogate mother that I really didn’t know? 

“That’s not even the best part,” Travis was
like a kid magician, eager to show off his next trick.  I was almost afraid to know what more he had found.  “Now this here,” he was pointing to the display and a high-lighted file folder, “this was buried deep.  She went to a lot of trouble to try to delete this.  She probably thought it was long gone, but I found it.”

He
grinned a big, toothy grin and clicked on the folder.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the simple typed document on the screen.  It seemed innocent enough.  Just a date and what looked like a first person account.

             
                                                                                    November 2

I’ve lost time.  It’s the second already and I don’t remember anything since
All Hallows Eve.  What’s happening to me?  I feel like a stranger in my own body.  Does that make sense?  I feel so confused.  I’ve decided to keep this journal.  Maybe it will help me figure out what’s going on.

                                                                                                  December 9

Something’s wrong, I’m not sure what.  It’s getting harder and harder to keep from losing my temper.  Sometimes the smallest things will set it off.  I explode then…nothing.  I remember nothing. The next thing I know, hours will
have gone by.  I can’t seem to control my emotions.  One minute I feel fine and the next I’m raging at the world.  I’m getting worried.  If this continues, I think I’ll go see a doctor after the holidays.  I hope it’s nothing serious.

                                                                                                  January 23

I got the results from the scan today.  I couldn’t believe they didn’t find anything.  What could be causing all these problems, the memory loss, the temper, if there’s nothing wrong with my brain?  Dr. Coleman said he thinks I need therapy.  He thinks it’s
psychological, it’s all in my head.  Can you believe that?  I’ve never needed therapy, I’m not about to start now.             

I met Logan’s eyes for a moment as we read through the journal.  It was obvious Barbara was having some problems.  She didn’t add the year to the entries, but I would be willing to bet that first date was after the Halloween I had discussed with Lisbeth.  Something had happened that night.  Something to do with a séance and the Ouija board. 

“Did you know she was so troubled?” 
Logan asked in a low voice.

“I had no idea,” I breathed.
“I was just a kid.  She must have started this journal when I was fourteen or fifteen.  I was always so concerned with Lisbeth.  I didn’t really think of what Barbara was dealing with.”

We turned back to the computer screen and kept reading.  The picture unfolding before us worried me more and more with each entry.

             
                                                                                  
 
February 27

I think I’m crazy.  Maybe I’m losing my mind
. 
There’s something, someone here with me.  Inside of me.  How can I explain it?  It’s something separate from me.  It’s sinister and evil, I know it.  I don’t know how it got inside of me.  I can’t communicate with it.  I can’t control it.  It’s alive.  Living, breathing inside of me.

                                                                                                  April 5

I am learning, understanding.  It required acceptance from me.  Once I accepted my mind was opened.  I see things very differently now.  There are still moments that I forget things.  I still lose time.  But now I’m beginning to understand.  I know that she is in control when I am not. 

May 22

I’ve
have now learned who it is and how to communicate.  I see so much more now.  She speaks to me through my paintings.  She guides my hands.  I am her instrument.  She is my muse.  She is my creative conductor.  She is Atrus Dracona.