Method 15 33 (30 page)

As for my actions in captivity and my testimony during the trial, I was a girl then, but I understand now how my mind worked, even if I had not yet harnessed the rationale behind my actions. My captor threatened to kill or take my child, and he meant to follow through with both threats. Because of this, he deserved to die at my hand. The others who were complicit with these threats also deserved to die, or rot in jail while being tortured. I am not ashamed for seeking revenge or for having to lie to do so. I am, however, ashamed that I failed to exact revenge more efficiently, in one act taken them all out. My assets, although wonderful, did not afford me such luxury.

Mostly, I’m ashamed of my abject disregard of time. Some days I can barely look myself in the mirror for having practiced so much for perfection, when I should have acted sooner and saved Dorothy.

Today, at age thirty-three, I sit in my lab and divert my attention from examining fingerprints by writing this story. On my driftwood desk is a picture of my son, who I labeled…I’m kidding, who I
named
, Vantaggio, which, if you don’t know, means “asset” in Italian. We affectionately call him Vanty. He is seventeen. He is beautiful. He, too, is a scientist, thank God
and his black butterfly angel
.

Vanty should be getting home from school soon. He’ll be roaring down the driveway in the used black Audi he saved to buy—such a presence he cuts across the high school campus. I’m sure all the senior girls in his grade and the juniors below, the sophomores and the freshmen, long to nuzzle into his neck and bury their faces in his blond hair. But I don’t really care how cute the rest of the world thinks he is; his after-school job is working in the lab with me, so he better get home soon and he better remember to get the mail at the end of this long driveway. No one is good enough for Vanty, anyway. And that’s not me being biased. That’s me keeping it real. I’m his mom. I would kill again and again and forever for him.

Above a red armchair in the corner by the decontamination chamber is a framed shard of china, which I stole before forensics bagged it for evidence. There is still a smear of
his
browned blood on this bone fragment, which I choose to believe is both his and that damn plate’s blood, commingled in hell. When I got married, only three years ago and just as scheduled seventeen years ago, they asked if Lenny and I would like to register for china. I couldn’t
breathe from laughing so hard. Lenny, knowing I had transferred hatred of toile to all china everywhere, answered through his own laughter, “We won’t be needing any china, thank you.”

I’m looking at this framed art of crime today, thinking on the thing I need to pack in my pocket for my and Liu’s visit to Brad’s prison tomorrow.

After the ordeal, my parents rehired my evil-eye-curse-warding nanny, dependable Gilma. Because Vanty was born in June, I finished sophomore year—with a hired home tutor—and had the summer to cuddle with him. I know I am very lucky. I do. So many other girls have not been as fortunate. I honor them by allowing the switches that control feelings of gratitude and relief to remain open; I keep those for fear, remorse, and uncertainty sealed. And while I’m sure there is judgment and social commentary to be had about teen pregnancy, this tale is not about apologies or lessons in that regard.

My parents spent loads of money on family and personal counselors for me and for them and they supported me. I was lucky to have their unbridled love. But, I was lucky for them for other reasons too. All along, they provided Assets #34 and #35, a scientific mind and disdain, respectively. Had I not been able to divorce myself from my predicament and treat the whole event as a science problem, I would have crumbled under the weight of fear. And, had I not thought myself better than those despicable creatures, I might not have spent so many hours plotting their demise. Of those among you who call me a sociopath for my unwavering disconnection, then I ask what you would do if a man put a barrel of a gun to your baby and threatened to pull the trigger. You might welcome my demeanor and resolve. You might wish you had my science and fortitude. Sure, you’d use your assets in your own way, and I don’t judge you for that, as I hope you won’t judge me. After all, we all seek justice in our own ways. I seek mine without remorse.

My indelible time of torment is long over now, but my thoughts during it will never fade. I’ll lock this manuscript away, for
I fear with its finding might go the life sentences we did secure. The Obvious Couple, they’ll be released next year, and, well, let’s just say there are other safeguards in place as far as they’re concerned.

There are three more things to mention. First, my husband, Lenny. Lenny has been my best friend since we were four years old. He agonized over my disappearance and pleaded with investigators to keep up the search. “She did not run away,” he’d yell at them. He organized search parties and vigils and stayed up many nights with my parents strategizing my rescue. Lenny provided the very best asset of all: my condition, which ironically got me into the whole jam in the first place. Lenny—he’s the compass to this little family of ours: me, Lenny, and Vanty. There’s a few perfect lyrics in a perfect song that make me think of him. It’s basically a guitar journey by Santana with a couple of lyrics sung by Everlast:
There’s an angel with a hand on my head
…
there’s a darkness living deep in my soul
…

There’s still a darkness inside me. Every day, every minute, I battle the darkness, I fight the switches. Lenny, he’s that angel with his hand on my head—leaving me to cool into some less malicious purpose. Perhaps Vanty too is a compass, but there are other things to consider with my developing Vanty. I lean most, we lean most, on Lenny for the moral road. Lenny’s the one who remembers when we need to call relatives on birthdays; he’s the one who handles the bills and the house maintenance and the life responsibilities. Vanty and I, it seems, are left to other requirements.

Second, my company. I am the Owner, President, CEO, Supreme Empress, and Ruler of my very own forensics consulting company. We hold contracts with law firms, police departments, corporations, wealthy barons and billionaires, and a handful of federal agencies I am not at liberty to divulge. One such agency inherited “Lola” from the FBI, and this is how I get the good cases. As Liu has mentioned, given Lola’s unconventional tactics, her obvious conflict of interest in contracting with me, and her constant status as “underground and dark,” we need to keep her identity masked in this tale. Sometimes she brings suspects in off
the grid and holds them in the basement here for questioning. I usually turn the green mixer in the company kitchen up high so as not to listen to her interrogations. I then deliver her batches of her favorite cookie, the cinnamon-and-sugar-laced snickerdoodle, and watch her swallow each cookie in one bite. One after the other.

I study crime scenes, analyze blood samples, dabble in metallurgy, defy chemical compounds, research, solve, and, as I am doing today, compare fingerprints if my lab tech calls in sick. I’ve testified as an expert witness for countless parties in countless trials. My building is filled with flat panel iMacs, the big ones. I recruit from MIT and Berkeley, the
summa cum laudes
only, and steal the top scientists from megacorps and governmental bodies by tempting them with high salaries and a lower-priced real estate market. I hired a very good consultant on staff as well, a former FBI agent, Roger Liu. He’s about twenty-five years my senior and, besides my husband, he’s my best friend in the world. His wife Sandra keeps us sane by reading us the sitcom scripts she writes in the office she shares with Roger.

I own instruments so advanced, NASA might believe my suppliers are aliens, and I develop even better ones, for which I hold several patents, on which I exact unconscionable licensing fees from those very same megacorps from whom I steal established scientists. I own my building, which I purchased with trust fund money Nana set up for me when I was born and which fully vested when I turned twenty-one. By that point, at age twenty-one, I had set my sights on this particular building for a good long five years. I had asked Mother to intervene with the banks and the state and the federal government, all of whom wanted to lay claim to this winged structure with rolling fields and an apple orchard. Quarry too. Mother did a fine job convincing my competitor buyers to hold their bloody horses.

I renovated and retrofit from the remaining shell of this former boarding school, one that presides over a field smelling of cows, and used to have a kitchen with long steel tables and a black oven. In Indiana. Yes, the very one. There are a couple of rooms
on the third floors of Wings 1 and 2, which I converted into twin terrariums, at no small cost I might add. In these terrariums, I breed exotic, poisonous plants, tanked pit vipers, African tree frogs, and anything else I come across in nature that might “leave a mark.” I’ve labeled all of these assets “Dorothy” and dedicated both rooms to “Dorothy M. Salucci.”

Poisonous assets might be necessary someday, you never know. You know, if I’m ever asked to solve a crime involving their venom or such. Or, maybe if someone other than The Doctor helped to kill three girls and two unborn babies and thrown them in a quarry. Who knows…

The Dorothy M. Salucci Terrariums are powerful and lively, exotic, and dangerous, and only a fool would enter unprepared.

The quarry has long been dredged and drained. A team of landscapers filled the empty cavern with rocks and the top eight feet with vitamin-rich planting soil. For years, I’ve curated an amazing rose garden in the middle of the forest. There are lots of thorns among the tempting reds, sun-kissed yellows, blushing pinks, and special strain of blacks.

If you were to walk outside my no longer white building—now painted blue—you’d see my company sign just below a triangular window. It says, “15/33, Inc.”

And this is exactly what I’m doing right now as Vanty hauls his Audi down the dirt road far too fast for my taste. I’ve never switched off my Love switch for Vanty for even one millisecond, and because of this I am perennially traumatized by just about everything he does. When he plays basketball, will he suffer a concussion from all the fouling? When his best friend moved to another school, would Vanty make new friends? When he goes out with anyone other than me, if he were to eat a hot dog or a grape or a fistful of popcorn or any other lethal food, will anyone know how to perform the Heimlich—which is a recurring required course in our household, run by a paramedic I hire to come once a quarter. Can’t practice this too much.

Vanty is getting out of his car, grabbing his backpack, and
doing a pressed, closed-mouth smile to me, looking like a ten-year-old in my eyes, even though he is every minute of seventeen. All I want to do is kiss his creamy cheeks so as to feel once again the peachiness of his infancy, which no matter the years, no matter the lines on his face, will never fade to the feel of my mother’s lips.

“Ah, Vanty, you sweet boy,” I say.

“Ma, I’m seventeen.”

“Whatever,” I say, returning to my regular, clinical self so he’ll stop his forward movement away from me. “Listen, Hal called in sick and we’ve got a big pile of fingerprints to clear. I’m going to need you to prep those slides for the university case. I’m not going to get to those until late tonight.”

“Yes, Mother,” he says, patting my shoulder and pecking my cheek, as if my scientific analysis of major crimes is the most insignificant task in his easy-breezy-beautiful-cover-boy life.

If any other human in my employ so nonchalantly considered dirt samples from a murder happening on the campus of a major Ivy League university—hint, starts with an H and is in Cambridge, Massachusetts—I’d probably stare them into a trembling apology. But Vanty. Vanty has this unique quality, an asset of his own. And it’s not just me, not just because I’m his forever heartbroken mother. It’s with everyone he meets. He snakes you in like a charismatic megalomaniac. This one time, his little friend Franky went grocery shopping with us. They were about ten. Franky pocketed a 3 Musketeers, unbeknownst to me or Vanty. When the alarms sounded and a rent-a-guard stopped us in the parking lot, it was Vanty, not me, who controlled the situation. After much yelling by the guard and crying by Franky, the Musketeers having fallen on the tar, Vanty stepped to the scene, picked up the bar, handed it to the guard, and without a stitch of youthful sweetness and without a stitch of condescension, spoke to the cop as if he were his equal, assuming in his tone a matched intellect. The guard’s nametag said, “Todd X.”

“Todd, I’m really sorry about this. Franky here, he’s my friend, and my mom and I are just trying to cheer him up. His
grandma died last night and I think, Franky right, I think 3 Musketeers were her favorite? Right, Franky? What were you going to do, put this in her casket?”

Any other pre-pre teen who’d delivered these same lines would have sounded like a total puke. But Vanty, and this is hard to illustrate, his delivery was as if he’d very simply known Todd his entire life and Todd was just another respected person in his life, just as respected as himself. Equality is what I think Vanty conveys and what he’s taught me, because I study his techniques constantly. The perception of equality neutralizes and then entraps people. My theory is that this act plays to people’s egos, and once played, they’re sucked into Vanty’s physical appearance, further satisfying their ego that someone so beautiful would take the time to talk to them.

Todd ended up paying for the candy bar.

I never could have pulled it off like Vanty—he’s like melted chocolate on top of a Bundt cake, a perfect-fitting, sugary cover.

Was I mad that he lied? No. There are problems. And there are solutions. Problems and solutions. If Lenny were there, our moral compass may have been forced another way. But since he wasn’t, we went with Vanty’s solution. All in.

Is Vanty devious? I don’t think so, but I do watch. And I worry. I think he’s actually quite loving, but I want to be sure.