Life Sentences (16 page)

Mr. Barsum took Anna's sneakers
and socks off and began to rub her feet.

"
Ow
,"
she said, "pins and needles."

"I know." He lifted her
small foot to his mouth and blew on it. "Here. I'll warm them."

Daisy's stomach hurt. She didn't
know what to do.

"Come inside and close the
door," he told her. "I'll make us some hot cocoa. Would you like
that?" His voice was soothing, like the voices on the radio.

Daisy's hair was wet and tangled,
her clothes were soaked through. They dripped onto the kitchen floor,
like
meltwater
melting off of her.

"Come here, sweetie." He
snuck his hands around Anna's middle and pressed his rough cheek against
her rosy one.

Daisy felt her scalp shivering beneath
her damp hair. "We got lost," she said. "But I found the way
home."

Mr.
Barsum's
face was hidden in the folds of Anna's body, and Anna seemed to be a million
miles away.

"We got lost," Daisy repeated.
"In the woods."

Anna licked her bluish lips.

Daisy's face flushed. A spring breeze
was coming in through the open doorway. It blew long strands of her hair
forward over her eyes, long blond strands that whipped back into her face
like rat tails. "We got lost in the forest," she said, but it
wasn't any use. Nobody was listening. She wriggled her toes around inside
her sneakers and noticed they made a squishy sound.

"Close the door," Mr. Barsum
said, and finally, she did.

Jack found Daisy in a dive bar across
the street from her motel. She was slumped over her drink like a wilted houseplant,
her long blond hair done up in a sloppy ponytail. She wore vintage jeans
and a high-tech T-shirt, and something was different about her. Or maybe
he was the one who had changed. He slung his leg over the cracked vinyl stool
and said, "What are you doing here?"

She looked at him briefly.
"Drowning my sorrows."

"Drown a few for me while
you're at it."

"You've got sorrows,
Jack?"

"No, Daisy. Us police officers
are perpetually happy creatures."

The aging male bartender had an
oddly youthful hairdo,
poufed
out to the sides
and dyed a lusterless brown. "What can I get you?" he asked Jack.

"Splash of Coke. I'm the designated
driver."

The bartender nodded and filled
a glass with cola, then slapped down a coaster. "Two bucks."

"For sugar water?" Jack
got out his wallet.

"So this is the human face of
the police, huh?" Daisy glanced at his off-duty attire-old jeans, a
Billy
Corgan
T-shirt and a scruffy pair of basketball
shoes.

"You'll never catch me wearing
a polo shirt."

She smiled and nodded. "Can I
ask you something?"

"Sure."

"What happened to your three
marriages?"

He shrugged. "I suffocate
people, apparently."

"What do you mean?"

"I keep wanting to rescue people,
even when they're perfectly okay. I have no off-switch, I'm told."

She frowned. "You must have
an off-switch someplace."

"Be my guest."

She eyed him curiously. "So
none of your ex-wives needed rescuing?"

"In the beginning, they all
did. Tess had a terrible family situation. She was nineteen, I was
twenty-one. She was a true innocent who never should've married me. Then
there's Margot, a runaway from a middle-class family in Birmingham and
a hard-core junkie by the time I met her. I got her into rehab, made her
go back to school and get her degree. She turned out splendidly. Became
an attorney and fell in love with her law partner. Penny was a six-month
mistake. A very disturbed person. I got her into therapy, and her therapist
talked her into dumping me."

"Ah," she said. "You
like victims."

"I guess you could say I'm a
victimaholic
."

"Well, Jack… you're safe with
me."

He wasn't so sure about that. He
had tracked her down for a reason. He had a grim favor to ask of her.

She was drinking a dark liqueur
mixed with cream. He knew what she was doing. She wanted the grief to somehow
magically disappear, only it wouldn't disappear. It would sit inside
of her like a bed of embers, burning dully for months, maybe even years.
Jack of all people knew that you couldn't put out a fire with alcohol.
"Why don't you tell me about your family," he said gently.

Daisy was quiet for a few minutes.
A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray, never too far from her fingers.
"My brother, Louis, died of
Stier-Zellar's
disease," she said.

He took a swallow of soda.
"Never heard of it."

"You wouldn't. It's very rare.
So rare the carrier frequency hasn't even been measured yet. Less than
a hundred children in the United States have the disease at any given
time. So it gets lumped in with all the other orphans."

"Orphans? What orphans?"

"
Stier-Zellar's
,
Huntington's, hemophilia,
Tourette's
syndrome,
narcolepsy,
Tay
-Sachs… the list goes on. Any disease
or rare disorder that affects fewer than two hundred thousand Americans
is called an 'orphan disease.' About six thousand of them fall under this
category. Once you add it up, though, you're talking about twenty-five
million suffering Americans."

He let out a low whistle.
"Twenty-five million, huh?"

"That number really gets the
politicians' hearts pumping. It's how we finally got congress to pass
the Rare Diseases Act. It provides incentives for companies to fund
research into orphan diseases."

Something was different. Something
had changed in his feelings toward her since yesterday. He was tempted
to touch her silky blond hair. She had such a sad flower-bud mouth and was
encumbered by the most beautiful face imaginable. "How old were
you when Louis died?" he said.

"Twelve. Anna was nine."

Jack waited. He breathed in, he
breathed out. He sensed she was about to tell him something important
He could see her trying to hold back the pain.

"My sister and I were molested
by a family friend." She sat for a moment with her heavy heart.
"I believe that the sexual abuse contributed to my sister's illness
in a big way. She was molested between the ages of five and nine, then
had her first psychotic break when she was thirteen."

"Who was this person?"

"A bank teller. We called him
Mr. Barsum. My mother met him through her job. She's a CPA. My father died
several years earlier, and I think Lily-my mother-was lonely. She loved
my father very much. She didn't want to get married again."

"So this guy… this Mr. Barsum…
lived with you?"

"Me and Mom and Anna and Louis."

"When did it first happen? The
abuse?"

She took a long drag, then put out
her cigarette. "When my brother was two years old, he started showing
the classic symptoms of
Stier-Zellar's
. We'd never
heard of it before, so it came as a complete shock. Mr. Barsum ended
up taking care of us while Mom shuttled Louis back and forth between
hospitals. I should've told her what was happening. I should've put an
end to it, but I was deeply conflicted. I didn't think she'd believe me,
for one thing. He made plenty of threats. I was terrified the whole time
it was happening. The weird thing was, Anna grew very attached to Mr. Barsum.
She loved him, in a way. When my mother finally found out what was going
on and sent him packing, Anna became traumatized. It was as if we'd lost
our father all over again." "How old was she when her real father
died?" "She hadn't been born yet. I was three." "Do you
remember him at all? Your father?" "I think I have false memories
of him. I've seen so many pictures, you know? I have images of him in my
head that could've come from home movies."

He didn't like toying with her emotions.
He wanted to be up-front with her, to come clean and ask her for this favor,
but he was afraid she would refuse him. So he hesitated.

"Schizophrenia's still a
mystery," Daisy went on. "They don't know exactly what causes it,
but they think there's more than one gene involved. It's not purely genetic,
this disease. Environmental factors play a big role. Unlike Huntington's,
where a single faulty gene can doom you." She stared into her
drink, lost in thought. "Each of us is born with a biological life
sentence. We have three trillion cells in our bodies, and each cell carries
all of our hereditary information. Go back in time and find your ancestors-these
people hold the key to your genetic makeup."

Jack found himself gazing at her
lips. They were generous and curvaceous and showed very little of he
teeth, even when she smiled. Even when she spoke.

She looked up. "What?"
she said.

"Nothing."

"What're you thinking,
Jack?"

He liked it when she called him
Jack. Too quick see, since he concealed it so well, was the way his both
jumped at the mention of his name. An old song was playing on the jukebox.
"Billy, Don't Be a Hero" by B Donaldson and the
Heywoods
. It took him back to the mid-seventies, when
Jack wanted to be a hero, too, just like the cops on Freddie the Fuzz. He
would call himself Jack the G-Man. "What's Vermont like?" he asked
her.

"Wet in the spring. Cold in the
winter." She paused swallow. "Did you know it's against the law
in
Vermon
for a woman to wear her false teeth
without her husband's permission?"

He cracked a smile. "I did
not know that."

"And it's illegal to whistle
underwater."

"I'll remember that the next
time I'm passing through."

She heaved a sigh. "How about
you, Jack? What's your sad story?"

"You want my saddest story? Or
my second-saddest story?"

"Oh, the saddest. Please."

"My first wife," he told
her, "was a good person. I'd come home from work, and Tess would ask
me about my day, and I would usually make the mistake of telling
her." He finished his soda. "So one day she gets pregnant. We couldn't
be happier, right? Everything's fine. Everything's great. Then I almost
get shot on the job. I almost get killed on the job, and she hears about
it. She sees it on TV. There's been a mix-up, and they tell her I'm dead.
It's a terrible mistake, but she files for divorce shortly afterward.
She divorces me because of this faulty information."

She looked at him pityingly.

"She moves to Toronto and
marries a dentist. Very safe, you see. Dentists don't ordinarily get
shot on the job. So now I see my kid every summer for two weeks. I don't even
know my own daughter. She's growing up without me." He studied his
hands. "It's the hardest on weekends. Whenever I have too much time
on my hands, my thoughts will turn morbid. So I pour all my energy into my
cases. Dead bodies consume my every waking moment. If you don't believe
me, ask my ex-wives."

"No, I believe you," she
said.

"It's tough on a relationship
when you can't wait for Sunday morning to roll around because there's a
fresh batch of bodies down at the morgue, you know. Truth is… I like whiskey
way more than I like people."

"I don't believe you,"
she said. "I think your whole problem is that you care too
much."

He picked up a black matchbook
that spelled out boo
yay's
in red lettering.
"When Tess was pregnant, we couldn't decide about a name. So we called
the baby BOLO."

"What's BOLO?"

"Be on the lookout for. It's
cop code. Cute, huh?"

"What's your daughter's real
name?"

"Bonnie Lou. The BOLO influence
is still there."

"That's a pretty name."

He dropped the matches and said,
"Colby
Ostrow
was strangled to death."

The nod was a reflex.

"He was dead two days when we
found him inside a steamer trunk in Gaines's apartment. We think Gaines
was about to bury him in the Angeles National Forest."

Her eyes never left his face.
"What about the woman you thought was my sister?"

"Her name is
Katja
Webb. She's a Hollywood prostitute."

"Was she strangled,
too?"

He nodded.

Her eyebrows lifted, supple as
green twigs. Her face was delicate-boned. Snub nose, the better to snub
you with. Wise blue eyes behind the pain. "How old is
Katja
?" she asked.

"Nineteen when she died. A teenage
runaway who got caught up in drugs and prostitution. Colby
Ostrow
,
Katja
Webb… both were
victims of opportunity. But with your sister, it's a whole new ball game."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember our teenage witness,
Christie? She saw your sister and Gaines on the promenade together, several
times. And there's a tenant who recalls seeing them in the building as
far back as eight months ago."

She stared at him. "Eight
months?"

"They were friends or acquaintances.
Maybe he was her drug dealer. I don't know. But it's unusual, because the
other victims had no connection to Gaines. These were classic stranger
killings. Victims of opportunity."

She cupped her hand over her mouth,
and her eyes filled with tears. The jukebox in the corner was playing Chet
Baker's "Let's Get Lost." Every time somebody came in the door,
smoke poured out of the bar.

"Why don't you ask him?"
she said in an anguished voice. "Ask Roy Gaines what his relationship
with my sister was."

"He won't elaborate."
He narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun coming in through the
plate-glass window. "He refuses to say anything else."

"So she knew him for eight
months, and then one day he just killed her? Is that what you think?"

"I don't know. Maybe she went
off her meds. Maybe that triggered a reaction in him. Whatever, Gaines
isn't talking. Not to me, at any rate."

"Can't you do something?
Can't you force him to tell you?"

"Daisy," he said as
gently as possible.

"What?"

"I went to see him this morning.
We have his full cooperation now, if only…"

Her eyes narrowed.

"If only you'd accompany us
again."

Her pain was visible in every pore.

"He promises to take us to
her grave this time."