The Art of Deception (50 page)

Hostage negotiators never pushed the abductor into making hasty decisions. Walker’s obvious patience came to her as a blessing. He might know the tunnels beneath the city, but she knew the tunnels of the human mind.

Consumed in total darkness once again, she prepared to move
the chunk of glass to her right hand. “How did it start… the idea of him having an accident?”

“Leave it.”

“That’s not something that comes out of nowhere. That builds over time. What was it: He criticized you? Thought he’d taught you to be a better fisherman than you were? Something like that?”

“You don’t know anything.”

“But isn’t that why we’re here?”

“We’re here because I wanted you here,” he said. “We’re here because I
helped you
and I wanted to show you—”

She cut him off. “No, you wanted to
test
me.”

“And you failed the test.”

“I’m here because I understand you, Ferrell.” She got the glass set in her right palm. “Take a good long look at your reasons, because that’s why I’m here. It was your decision, not mine, and you need to face this.”

She allowed the resulting silence to settle around them, like listening for animals in the woods.

“Was it Mary-Ann?” she asked in a whisper. “Something he did to Mary-Ann?”

The flashlight popped back to life. He scooted away from her, and she resented not having taken a swipe at him while she’d had the chance.

“Something you saw him doing to her. Something you heard him doing to her. What? Out on the boat, where you couldn’t escape it? Where
she
couldn’t escape it?”

No indignant rage, no shouting protestations. Ferrell Walker looked over sadly in the dull yellow of the weak light and she knew she’d scored a hit.

“Let’s go,” he said, waving her up.

“Where to?” She would need that flashlight of his after she cut him. If she lost it to the mud … Without the flashlight she’d
be lost down here, forever banging into the mud walls and rotting timbers.

“What you’re feeling, Ferrell … it isn’t something you can escape through a few tunnels. Hurting me is only going to make it worse.”

“You betrayed me,” he said far too calmly, too sadly. “You
both
betrayed me.”

“You want to talk about
both of us?
Answer me this: How would Mary-Ann have felt if you’d put her in this same situation? Dragging her through the mud. And for what? To play some game of yours that’s supposed to justify what you did to your father? Would she have played along, Ferrell?”

They moved in the same direction, heads ducked beneath the sagging timbers. She guessed north, back toward the heart of downtown. The Shelter? That room where Vanderhorst had hung the bodies? Where?

“You saved her, didn’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“Saved her from
him,
and I don’t mean Lanny Neal.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Don’t I? He would drink himself blind, wouldn’t he? Criticize your handling of the boat, of the fish, when all along it was his incompetence that hurt the catch. His, not yours. And then Mary-Ann grew up, developed into a beautiful young woman, and the three of you out on the boat. He took advantage of that, didn’t he? Advantage of her. Drunk as he was. And you on the other side of a bulkhead were made to listen to the whole demeaning thing. And the next morning, that dead look in her eyes, and you with a rage you’ve never felt. But he’s a big, ornery man, and you aren’t about to cross him. You even suggest something and he hits you upside the head. You both carried bruises, you and Mary-Ann, didn’t you? Badges of honor, those bruises. How long did it go on, Ferrell? Months? Years?”

She paused, realizing he’d stopped several paces behind her, his small light aimed down at his feet, head hung in defeat. She’d scored another direct hit. She capitalized on it, taking a step back toward him, careful to conceal her weapon. “Someone had to do something to stop it. You only did what was necessary.” She hesitated, this the most dangerous ground of all. “The only reason it tore you up inside, Ferrell, the reason it wouldn’t go away, kept coming back to haunt you, is because you’re a
good person.
The bad people don’t feel anything. But you felt bad for what you’d done, despite the fact it helped her, despite the fact you saved her.” Amid the silence, a steady drip of water somewhere off in the dark. “And of all the ungrateful things, the minute you save her, she leaves you.”

“She wanted me to tell them,” came the man’s voice faintly.

Matthews felt both victory and dread. She had assumed Mary-Ann’s act of betrayal had been moving in with Lanny Neal. Now she knew she’d had the catalyst wrong.

“Keep moving.”

“You can’t outrun this. You can run me over, you can throw me from a bridge, it’s still going to be inside your head.”

“It just happened,” he said. “Accidents happen.”

“You backed over her, Ferrell. That doesn’t just happen. That’s going to stay in your head until we get rid of it.”

“There is no ‘we.’ Not anymore there isn’t.”

“There’s two of us here, Ferrell. Look at me. Touch me if you want. I’m still here.” She wanted to lure him closer.

The piece of glass begged. This was the moment—when she’d filled his head with enough images to slow his reaction time. But her knees wouldn’t obey.

“No more talking,” he said. “We’re all done talking.”

“She wanted to help you, too,” she said. That was the connection between Mary-Ann and her. Not looks, not tone of voice or sexual fantasies. Mary-Ann had wanted to help him and—
accidents happen
—he’d killed her for it. She, Matthews, had been his chance to try again, and once she understood he’d killed his father and sister, she’d demand what Mary-Ann did:
Turn yourself in, Ferrell. Let us help you.

“Keep moving.”

“No.” She stood her ground defiantly. She would not be willingly marched off to her death. Mary-Ann had clearly run this boy’s life, either directly or indirectly, until he’d killed her. She had to succeed where Mary-Ann had finally failed. “I can help you, Ferrell. I can make it go away. But we both have to see it for what it was. Tell me about the accidents. Share it with me. Please,” she added, no longer feeling the same blood lust. She didn’t want to kill him. Wound him. Escape. Yes. But she felt him as much a victim as herself.

“You don’t need the knife,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere, am I?” she indicated the tunnel’s tight confines. The truth was, she wanted
him
confined—an easier target. This cramped tunnel was perfect for her needs.

A thought occurred to her and she found herself with no desire to analyze it, to preconsider its every possible angle, its every possible argument. In that fraction of a second where she elected to speak her mind rather than preprocess the thought, she spoke it the moment it came to her: “You could have had me any number of times. If you intended to abduct me, why now?”

Walker waved the knife. “Walk.”

“No. Do it here. Right here. Right now.” She threw her arms open, the chunk of glass still gripped in his handkerchief.

“It’s not about betrayal,” she answered, knowing perfectly well it was, but wanting to steer him away from this. “Don’t kid yourself. It’s about
power.
Control. And I’ll tell you something: You won that game with me for a while. I gave into that. Sure, I did. I played along.”

“You’re wasting yourself on this, Anna,” he said. “Everything’s decided. Save your breath.”

Her teeth chattered.
The son repeats the father’s sins.
He wanted her on a boat with him. He wanted the past back. He wanted what his father had had. The present, the future, were no good to him any longer. “I’m Daphne, Ferrell. I am not MaryAnn. Mary-Ann is dead.”

“We’re going to spend time together again. That’s all that matters.”

“I can help you out of this,” she pleaded. “I can make your father … whatever happened out on the boat … go away. You don’t believe that now because you think you’ve tried everything, but it’s true. I’m your passport out of those nightmares. You don’t sleep, do you, Ferrell? You can’t. You don’t eat much—I can see that just by looking at you. He still owns you, Ferrell. I can make him go away. I can make it right again.”

“That’ll never happen.” He stepped even closer. “Now
walk.”

The batteries were dying, and her chance of escape along with them. If she was going to use that piece of glass on him, it had to be soon.

“Then tell me about the other accident—Mary-Ann’s accident.”

He said, “You like everything neat and tidy. Shipshape. But it doesn’t always work out that way. We’re going to have plenty of time to talk, Daphne.” He actually smiled. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel. You’ll see.”

More likely a boat at the end of the tunnel. Something he’d scouted already. Steal the boat, make for the open sea. Fishermen could stay weeks, even months, at sea. The thought paralyzed her.
They’ll never find me.

I’ll never find her,
LaMoia thought to himself as he faced a bend in the tunnel, its floor covered in a sloppy mud that made tracking difficult if not impossible. For all he knew the prints he was following were sixty years old. But then, the moment he had this thought, he spotted a cluster of prints up ahead, like a group of pigs had stirred the mud.

He caught his foot at the very last second, his heel connecting with the packed dirt, toe about to rock forward—a
sense
of dread, like a soldier about to step on a land mine. He moved his foot cautiously and trained his light into the chips of broken glass where a tiny piece of gold sparkled back at him. A second later, he stood holding her earring.
I’m right behind you,
he caught himself thinking.
Hang tough.

As he closed the distance toward that disturbed area of tunnel floor he picked up the enormous wash to his left, a hole cut out of the wall. Another tunnel? he wondered. An exit back up to the surface, or into another storm sewer?

He slipped his pistol out of its holster beneath the deerskin and quickly chambered a round. “I’m armed,” he called out, but only loud enough to carry a few yards. He contained the flashlight beneath the pistol, took three long strides, and extending both the weapon and the light, lit up the hole.

“Jesus Christ.” His stomach turned in shock at the sight of
the headless deputy. It took him a moment to even
locate
the head lying on its side and identify it as Prair’s.

He caught himself thinking as both a cop
and
a psychologist. This, too, surprised him.
Escalation.
Walker had sacrificed Prair for her—this he knew with all certainty. Killing the man would have been one thing; decapitation signaled a quantum shift, a different paradigm. He checked the cell phone reception yet another time—still nothing. He tried the phone’s “radio” function. Dead as well.

Standing perfectly still as he was, he picked up the faint sound of voices. Like an insect in a dark room. He couldn’t clearly identify its direction. He took a step forward, then back. He turned around, trying a different ear.

He left Prair behind him, back in that hole. Good riddance.

North! He had it now. Then it faded again and he couldn’t be sure if he’d had it at all. But yes. There. A woman’s voice, no question about it. Closer than he thought. He moved quickly toward that sound, staying to the edge of the narrow tunnel and out of the slop in its center, moving as quietly as possible.

It was all he could do to contain himself, to keep from shouting out her name.

The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.

“She fell,” he said. “That’s all it was: an accident.”

“An accident?” she asked. “You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that.”

Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn’t take it—couldn’t take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. “She pushed me … shouldn’t have done that… went off the fire escape … thought she was dead down there … had to move her … the car. That key … the back axle.”

“You had to move her,” she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. “That makes sense.”

“I backed it up to get her. She was
dead.
And there she was … sitting up like that all of a sudden.” His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory. “She’d say I pushed her. But it wasn’t like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn’t. She smelled … of him … of
it.”

“Like the boat,” Matthews allowed.

Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.

“When I saw her sitting up like that … I knew what I had to do.”

“All this,” she said softly, “everything you’ve told me, it’s all understandable.” She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair. “Let me help you—not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all.”

The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.

She pushed up to one elbow.
It had to be now!
She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. “She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?”

His face tightened.

“And you loved her too, didn’t you?”

Walker’s shoulders shook. “No one knows how much,” he said hoarsely.

The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she’d waited for.