Habit (20 page)

“Jesus,” he said again.

“You get very angry like this, Brendan, is that true?”

“What? What the hell are you asking me?”

“You didn’t just arbitrarily choose to leave behind your career in neurobiology and become a cop. That’s a substantial socioeconomic shift, and a very different kind of field. You didn’t just wake up one morning and decide take a pay cut, did you?”

“What are you asking me? What are you doing?” His lips felt numb again. He wanted a cigarette.

“Anger, like everything else, is habitual. You know that. People who are quick to temper are that way because the circuitry keeps going that way, isn’t that it? You’ve been working on keeping it all under control though. Maybe you thought that by being a policeman you would be safe. It would be the safest place for you. Surrounded by the law, by duty. But the thing was, you couldn’t keep staying in the same place, the same city, the same house. So you took the job up here.”

He felt sick. Goddamn it.

“Olivia . . .” He felt weak in the knees. Brendan found himself sitting on the edge of the loveseat adjacent to the couch.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, “that I haven’t been able to give you what you want. I am not trying to impede your investigation, or hurt you in any way. I am certainly not trying to be in the way of resolving this horrible crime. But this is my job. This is my life. I must honor the agreement I have with Rebecca, even after her death. Through the proper channels, all will be revealed. But you have to go through those channels, Brendan. This is the way it works.”

She moved closer to him, resituating herself on the love seat.

“In the meantime, I want to help you.”

He lifted his head and looked at her. The sense of defeat he was feeling was starting to give way once more to ire.

“I want you to talk to me about what happened to your wife and child. About what happened to
you
, Brendan. Not as a therapist, but as a friend. And I think it can help you with this case. I do. I may not be able to just hand you over my sessions with Rebecca. But I can talk with you.”

She moved a little closer. “And trust me, I want to tell you. I want to tell you everything, because I care about Rebecca, and I care about you, too.”

Her hand touched his leg and he abruptly stood up. He looked at her office door, the one that was locked.

“We’ll get the warrant and subpoena your session notes. This bureaucratic bullshit has held up things long enough.”

“It’s not up to you, Brendan.”

He glared at her.

“This is my case.”

“My understanding is that Rebecca’s father is coming tomorrow, and you are to make yourself scarce. You told me that yourself. And you have this investigation of your own to deal with, about the shooting. That’s what you need to focus on, Brendan. Let the rest of this work itself out.”

“With Rebecca’s killer out there? Walking around? Breathing air? I’m not taking a time-out to do a little soul searching.”

He started towards the front door. He grasped the knob and then looked back around at her.

“What’s with the children’s Tylenol? Expecting company? Jesus, for all I know, Alex Heilshorn is going to come over and have a tea party with you. Little Leah will run around, and say hi to Auntie Olivia.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said but suddenly looked less composed.

“That’s about how much I can trust you, or anything you say.”

He banged out the door and into the late day.

* * *

As he drove, his fury gradually waned. Dusk was creeping across the land. The Camry moved swiftly from farm country back into the ordered, residential streets outside of Rome.

He formulated a timeline in his mind, with questions arising at every marker.

Rebecca and Olivia meet at Cornell as undergrads. They rent a house together. Around the same time, Rebecca gets involved with some other people, people who lead her into the business of making those videos. Or did they come later?

Did she already know these people? Were there even any people, or did she just up and decide to make erotic films one day?

She drops out of school. She might have returned to Westchester for a while, but Brendan doubted it. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he imagined her father frowning on her return home. Or, more so, her reluctance to return there herself. So, where does she go?

Wherever it is, she meets Eddie Stemp. The two are married. They possibly conceive a child together – that’s Leah, now going on four years old.

But six months years later, they divorce, before she’s even carried the baby to term. Stemp is a local man affiliated with a church in Rome. So, for that matter, is Kettering. Did she meet Stemp in the area? Or did she meet him elsewhere and the two moved here? If so, why would she stay in the area after the divorce? So Stemp could visit his daughter? It was altruistic, and unlikely, Brendan thought.

He made a turn into a busy street. Something occurred to him: Maybe Stemp had something he could hold over her. Maybe he blackmailed her to stay.

Still, Brendan felt hung up on
why
this area in the first place. But maybe that was because he felt
his
living here was random. He asked himself “why this place?” almost every day. Not that there was anything wrong with the area. There was a certain rugged charm in between the more central leatherstocking region and the Syracuse metropolitan area. There was a mélange of architectural styles, from Colonial to Federal, Victorian, and Georgian. There was a good deal of poverty, but the people had grit. Historically the region had suffered a great deal.

Early stockaded villages had been settled by Dutch fur-traders. Merchant villages were often viciously attacked by marauding parties of French-Canadians and Indians. From Schenectady to Rome, villages were often built with defensive barriers of timbers driven side by side into the earth.

Aggressors burnt villages to the ground. Inhabitants were killed, others were taken as prisoners, but the burgeoning region could not be stopped. Two years later, the Stockade was once again flourishing as a fur-trading outpost and a place of industry and commerce. The Dutch settlers endured, along with English and Scots, building robust, unyielding homes, the ones Brendan admired.

He liked the idea of something fortified, something unyielding.

He returned his mind to the timeline, but discovered that he had already come to the end of the lighted path. Rebecca used her parent’s money to buy a house. Her motivation for resettling in the area remained unclear. He did wonder, though, if it had to do with Olivia.

Maybe Rebecca had relocated to the region because her former roommate was now a practicing psychotherapist. Maybe Olivia represented to Rebecca a time in her life before things had turned ugly. Or, maybe she had been drawn, like Brendan was, by the power which lurked beneath the crumbling façades, the kind of desperate strength of a place with cities named after kingdoms, villages which refused to be conquered and spawned tough cities.

Yet,
Nero fiddled while Rome burned
.

He suddenly turned around, leaving the city limits behind. He headed towards Eddie Stemp’s farm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX / SUNDAY, 7:12 PM

Brendan was greeted by a man with a rifle. Stemp was cold and unemotional at first, not the warm and caring Christian that Brendan had anticipated. He handled the weapon like a military man.

After he defused the situation and got Stemp to put away the Winchester 30.30, the men got to talking. Stemp insisted they stay outside.

The sun was setting, drawing a lavender twilight around them as it sank. With it, Brendan felt that time was running out. For him, for Rebecca, for catching her killer.

Brendan was as forthcoming with Stemp as he could be. The man had intense eyes that exuded both intelligence and a strange, cultish edge. To put a finer point on it, he looked drugged, as though he’d drunk some of the Kool-Aid.

“You’re dealing with the life of a very troubled woman,” said Stemp.

The two men sat at a picnic table near the barn. There was a clothes line and a small flower garden. The farmhouse was warmly lit, in the near distance. The night was cool but not uncomfortably. The insects, however, were coming out. Mosquitos whined in Brendan’s ears, and he swatted at the air. Stemp didn’t seem to notice the bugs. He sat with his hands folded, the rifle on the bench beside him. He wore a flannel shirt and tan Carhartt overalls.

“Tell me about her,” said Brendan.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I told the other detective. Cortez, or what have you.”

“Colinas.”

“Colinas, right. I told him about the laptop, too, by the way. I bought that when Rebecca and I were together. I have no idea why she threw it out, or burned it, or whatever he said she did. But most likely it was where she had kept certain . . . information about her other life.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“So, I pray for Rebecca every day. I pray for her soul. We said a special prayer for her in church this morning.”

“I’m sure she . . . I’m sure that’s appreciated by her family.”

Stemp nodded as if he heard this all the time.

Brendan looked around, taking in the night. It was a nice spread and back from the main road. Things were quiet, with only the crickets singing and mosquitos whining.

“Well, you know, like I said, troubled girl,” Stemp said.

“Like what? What were her troubles?”

“Well, it’s not for me to judge. That’s for the Lord. But I can recognize the symptoms of a sickened soul.”

“Could you please share them with me? I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts.”

“Like lewd and lascivious behavior, that’s what. Now, like I say, I’m not one who can talk. I had my share of a dark night.”

“A dark night?”

Stemp made eye contact. “A dark night of the soul. Everyone has them. Some are longer than others. Some dark nights . . . they get complicated. There are forces which can get in there and . . . just make things a whole heck of a lot worse.”

“Forces?”

“Demons.”

“Ah.”

“My mother would say that once visited by demons, and then purged of them, a person would have to replace the void with something else. Something holy. If not, the demons were invited to return, and they would return sevenfold.”

For some reason, Brendan found himself thinking about Delaney, and his sunflower seed habit. He knew cross-addiction wasn’t entirely what Eddie Stemp was referring to, but maybe it was, just a little bit.

Stemp looked at Brendan flatly. “Do you have access points?”

“Sorry?”

“Spiritual access points. Ways for unclean spirits to enter you. My guess is that you do.”

Brendan rubbed at his jaw and looked away. He needed a moment; he didn’t want to offend Stemp. Demons, and demonology, as far as he was concerned, were nonsense. Life was conducted through chemicals, not angels and demons. When Brendan didn’t answer, Stemp moved on.

“My dark night and Rebecca’s dark night coincided. Sometimes that’s how it goes with people. You meet when you are in crisis, and you can’t do anything to help each other. You’re attracted to the darkness in each other. At the same time, maybe you want to believe that the other can heal you. There’s some people who think we’re just searching for our mothers and fathers in our chosen partners, and that we expect our partners to meet the need that our parents didn’t, or couldn’t.”

“I’m familiar with the idea. Do you know Olivia Jane?”

Stemp frowned. “No. Don’t think so.”

“Was Rebecca seeing a therapist when you were together?”

“I have no idea. It wouldn’t have done her any good anyway. Therapy and pills can’t treat the soul.”

“Was she involved in pornography when you were together?”

Stemp made eye contact again. His expression turned grave. “I’ve made my peace with that. I tried to get Rebecca to atone for her own sake.”

An alarm flashed in the back of Brendan’s mind. Especially at the reference to atonement. And he realized that Stemp wouldn’t likely have said any of this to Colinas, because Colinas hadn’t known about the videos. Inadvertently, Brendan’s eyes dropped to the rifle sitting beside Stemp.

“What else? Can you tell me more? How did you try to get her to atone?”

“To pray. To join the church. Look, I was no good for her when we were together, I know that. So does the Lord, which is why it was pleasing to Him that I had the marriage properly annulled. But He made a deal with me.”

“The Lord?”

“Yes. He granted me my forgiveness and annulled the marriage, he gave me the wonderful gifts of my wife, Trudy, and our two children, and in return, he asked me a favor.”

“To turn Rebecca towards the faith?”

Stemp raised his eyebrows. “Yes. And to have her come to understand her dark night for what it was. To show her that the light existed, and she could find it, as I had.”

“So you visited her frequently in the time before her death?”

Now Eddie Stemp looked forlorn. “No. Things were complicated with our first birth, Trudy and me. The Lord gave us a child very quickly, but it came at a price. Our first baby has CF – that’s cystic fibrosis – and I wasn’t able to get away much. I was needed here. And by the time she was older and things were smoothing out, the farm here was in full swing, our second baby was arriving, and I was a leader in my church.”

“Did the Lord let you out of the deal?”

Stemp searched Brendan’s face, perhaps looking for guile. Brendan was only speaking to the man in his own language.

“We amended the deal, you could say.”

“How so?”

Eddie shifted on the picnic table bench. It seemed to Brendan that they had reached a juncture. It was a place that almost every interview came to, where the person being questioned stepped out of their comfort zone. It was a critical moment. The dusk had fully enveloped them now. The evening sky had turned indigo, with a solid deck of low clouds and only an umber scattering of sunlight. Brendan urged Eddie forward. “Please, how did you amend it?”

Possible answers to the question tumbled through Brendan’s own mind.

The Lord told me to save her brother, Kevin, instead.

The Lord told me to kill her.

The Lord told me I was born under the black smoke of September.

“First, you need to know something else. I’m not some man who is hopped up on his own self-importance. Not because I found the Lord, or my church. I know you’re sitting there in judgment of me, and that’s okay. I would have been, too, years ago. I’m not some dumb country bumpkin. I lived a lot of life before I came into the fold. And I made some terrible decisions. One of those involved aborting my own child.”

Brendan leaned back, absorbing this. He thought for a moment, and reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. Stemp watched as Brendan lit one. Brendan offered.

“No, thank you. I quit those like I quit a lot of bad habits.”

Brendan exhaled smoke. “Rebecca had an abortion?”

“
We
had an abortion. I don’t care what they say; the father is just as complicit.”

“Okay.”

“ ‘We had an abortion.’ That’s a euphemism. Meant to sound like something procedural, almost cosmetic. ‘We killed our child.’ That’s the correct phrasing. I don’t care what you believe, what faith you have or don’t have, the minute that cell divides in the womb, that is a human being. Left uninterrupted, unmolested, it will become a one year-old baby, a twelve year-old girl, a seventy-year-old grandmother.”

Brendan nodded. In no way was he going to engage this man in a debate on abortion, which was the biggest quagmire of all topics, in his experience.

“But she got pregnant again very quickly, didn’t she? Or . . .?”

Stemp seemed to search Brendan deeply, as if evaluating whether or not the man could be trusted. He then made a decision.

“Leah is not my child.”

Brendan swallowed and found his throat was dry. “So you and Rebecca didn’t get pregnant again.”

“No. We had the abortion, but then we tried to marry – but the death of our child haunted us, and it did what it tends to do – it pulled us apart. And, rightfully so. It was the Lord. The Lord pulled us apart in His wisdom.”

“Do you know who the father is?”

“No.”

“You mentioned that the symptoms of Rebecca’s spiritual distress were her lewd and lascivious behavior. I take this to mean you knew about Rebecca’s involvement in making erotic videos.”

“That wasn’t all of it.”

“No?”

Stemp shook his head, somberly.

“Can you tell me what else?”

“It all goes together. Not for everyone, I’m sure; it’s not all the same for everyone. But Rebecca started out seeking something . . . I don’t know. She was in Albany for a while. She was someone . . . one of those girls who escorted the rich businessmen, the government officials, in secret. The Elliot Spitzers.”

This was a vital piece of the chain. Rebecca had started not in videos, but in a higher-end escort service, if he was to believe Stemp.

“How do you know this?”

“I wasn’t always a farmer. You’re not the only man around here whose past is very different from his present. Look around you. Why else would we be tucked away up here? I wasn’t born here.”

“What do you think you know about me?”

Stemp shook his head, dismissively. “Now, don’t get all detective, Detective. It’s just a call. You have an accent, like Putnam, Rockland, maybe Westchester County. The way you dress. Walk. I don’t know.”

Brendan decided to let it go. “What did you do? In your previous life?”

“I served in Desert Storm. Later I worked as a bodyguard. That’s as far as I’ll care to go along that line. My personal history is immaterial.”

“Can I ask you one thing?”

“Maybe.” Stemp glanced at the house, as if growing impatient.

“You said that your deal with the Lord was amended. You were no longer meant to cure her of her ways, because you just didn’t have the time. You had your own family to deal with.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘cure her of her ways,’ but . . .”

“Sorry, best choice of words I could come up with.” Brendan stubbed the cigarette out on the table without thinking about it. Stemp looked at the burn mark and frowned. “So if you didn’t have the time for that,” Brendan continued, “What did you have the time for?”

Stemp sighed. “I put in some calls. I used some of the information I had gotten from Rebecca, some names, and I decided that the best thing I could do was help to try and prevent something like this from happening to anyone else. But I was out of my league.”

“You mean you called . . . who? Officials? Police? People you used to work with? Did you call her father?”

Stemp stood. He picked up his rifle. “I’m sorry, Detective, this really is where I have to get off. My family is waiting for me to come to supper, and I have nothing more I can add. None of what I did made any difference. That’s something I have to live with. Like a lot of things.”

“Please, I need to know. Her killer is still out there, and you still have a chance to help Rebecca. If you could just give me something. Anything. Anyone. Just a name. Who did you call?”

Stemp sighed again. “Maybe I made a call to her father. And maybe he made an anonymous phone call to the State Attorney’s Office. It was all I was able to do in that regard. In the end, that wasn’t the real amendment, anyway.”

“What was?”

“To pray. Now, thank you, and have a good night.”

Brendan stood, too. He called to Stemp as the man turned away.

“Eddie.”

Stemp stopped and slowly turned back. Both men were in the dark now. Standing a few yards away, Stemp was just a sketch, his rifle hanging at his side.

“Is the child in danger? Is Leah in danger?”

“We’re all in danger, Detective. Not from one another, but from God’s righteousness. What we do to one another is ineffectual. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but the sinners are punished. Always.”

“Did you give
The Screwtape Letters
to Rebecca? With a highlighted passage? Addressed to the name she used in pornography?”