The Devil's Menagerie (30 page)

Beringer chuckled. “Whatever you say. And after that, son … I think we’ll just give your mom a call so she won’t worry.”

He smiled, but there was something strange and unsettling about the smile, as if his eyes and his mouth were sending different signals.

G
LENDA SLOWLY PUT
down the phone. “He’s got Richie,” she said.

“Beringer? Goddammit, that’s kidnapping!”

“A father can’t kidnap his own son. Besides, he says Richie came looking for him.”

“And you believe him?”

“You heard Richie last night. It doesn’t surprise me.” Suddenly she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “Oh my God …”

Her despair welled up, and the tears she had been holding back overflowed. Dave held her in his arms until, gradually, the convulsive shudders tapered off and she was still.

After a while she pushed off and turned away. “I need a tissue. I’m a mess.”

“You’re not a mess. You couldn’t be a mess if you tried.”

They went into the den. Elli was asleep upstairs, and the house seemed unnaturally quiet. You almost forgot how much noise two children made in a house, Glenda thought. They sat in silence for several minutes before she said, “It never ends, does it?”

“This will. I promise you.”

“You think you’ve buried the past, but it’s always there, waiting for you. It’s like you’re going in circles. Didn’t Einstein say something about time possibly being a circular track, and that opened the possibility of getting on or off at different times?”

“I don’t know,” Dave said, trying for a light, bantering tone. “I could never figure that guy out.”

“You know all those cases you hear about child abuse, about abused children growing up to be abusive parents—or worse? It never stops. What Ralph started when he began beating me … it’s not over, Dave. It’s affected all of us. I was changed, Richie … and now you and Elli.”

“Take it easy, honey. If he intended to harm Richie in any way, he would hardly have telephoned to let us know Richie’s with him.”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“It would make no sense.”

Glenda was not reassured. She looked away. The backyard was dark and she saw her face reflected in the window. Over the past two weeks, since Ralph’s return, she had lost weight. The hollows of her cheeks and under her eyes were more pronounced. Ironically, the shadowed features made her familiar face, which she did not regard as beautiful in any way, more interesting, giving it a haunted quality. She looked a little like one of Dave’s favorite actresses from the forties, the one who played Laura. Gene Tierney, she thought, in a blond wig, staring back at her.

Dave said, “What Beringer is doing will count against him when it comes to custody, let’s not forget that. It’s irrational and irresponsible.”

Dave still didn’t get it, Glenda thought. This wasn’t about custody. Ralph didn’t want to be saddled with a ten-year-old. Richie would drive him crazy in a week. This was about revenge. Punishment. What Ralph thought of as payback time.

In that moment she had a sense of the answer to Ralph’s scheming being right there in front of her, if only she were smart enough to see it. But before she could pursue the question Dave said, “We’ll find them. I’ll stay out all day tomorrow looking for them if I have to. This town isn’t that big.”

“I have this terrible feeling that we’re missing something. I told you Ralph knows exactly what he’s doing, but why has he waited this long? Why call up out of the blue and then avoid us? Is he just trying to drive me crazy?” She laughed harshly. “If that’s it, well, it’s working, Ralph, you son of a bitch. God damn you all to hell!”

“Take it easy,” Dave said again, the words thick with restrained emotion. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go straight to the police before I go out looking. This time they’ll have to do something.”

Glenda stared at him in silence. When she spoke her tone was bleak. “Ralph has that all figured out, too. They won’t do anything.” An image of the small automatic pistol in her purse flashed before her. Dave didn’t know about the gun. “Whatever’s to be done, no one else is going to do it for us. We’re on our own.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY
R
ICHIE’S
newly discovered father took him to the beach. He insisted on it. A warming Santa Ana condition was building. The sky was a clear blue except for scattered white fluffy clouds running on the desert winds, and the temperature rose into the high seventies. As a result the beach was crowded, parking lots nearly full. Crawling along in the Buick LeSabre, Ralph Beringer saw a family in a Dodge Caravan waiting for another car to back out of a parking space. The car backed toward the waiting van, preventing it from reaching the spot. Beringer raced forward and, just as the car drove away, swung neatly into the vacated space, cutting off the van. He grinned broadly.

The driver of the Caravan honked his horn and shouted, shaking his fist as he leaned out the window. Beringer held up his middle finger. Seeing Richie’s unease, he laughed. “Hey, you gotta grab what’s there, kid. Nobody’s gonna give you anything in this world. Take it from your dad.”

They found an open patch of sand and spread out a blanket. Even though the water was very cold in spite of the warmth of the day, raising gooseflesh all over him, Richie ventured into the light surf. Beringer, wearing khaki shorts rather than a swimsuit, relaxed on the blanket, a cooler beside him holding a six-pack of beer. His father looked very muscular and strong, Richie thought with boyish pride—like an athlete. He had a scar under one knee, white against his healthy tan, and another on his back. Richie wondered if they were battle wounds.

Surfacing after plunging through a wave, Richie saw his father staring after a trio of young girls strolling along the beach in string bikinis. That was okay, Richie thought with a trace of defensiveness; Beringer was divorced, wasn’t he? Why would Mom care? The question was confusing.

They spent two hours at the beach, Richie in and out of the water, his father working his way through the six-pack. When they left they stopped for lunch at the Bright Spot, where this neat blond waitress named Iris made a big fuss over them. She seemed to know his dad, kidding around with him, and she acted as if she were really glad he had brought Richie along with him to the diner. Beringer explained that he was divorced and Richie had been living with his mother. He didn’t say that he hadn’t seen Richie in eight years.

The boy had trouble keeping his eyes off Iris. She smiled whenever she went by carrying platters of food or the coffee carafe. Once, after pouring Beringer more coffee, she reached out and playfully ruffled Richie’s hair.

“She’s nice,” Richie said afterward in the car.

“Yeah,” his father replied thoughtfully. “Real nice. Which don’t mean you can trust her around the corner,” he added with a chuckle. “She’s a woman, right?”

Unlike his mood the previous evening, Beringer had been relaxed all morning. That afternoon, however, back at the apartment, his edginess returned. They watched a football game on TV—Nebraska against Oklahoma—but once, late in the game when Richie happened to glanced at his father, he was startled by what he saw. Beringer was sweating and there was a strange glitter in his eyes. He didn’t seem to be focused on the game at all. Richie started to ask if anything was wrong. A sense of caution stopped him—he wasn’t sure why.

For dinner Beringer sent out to Pizza Hut, ordering a large with everything—Richie’s choice. While they waited Beringer turned on the evening news, watching intently. When Richie tried to talk his father told him to shut up.

It was the first time Beringer had spoken harshly since their encounter on the patio Friday night.

Richie thought the news was boring. Nothing really exciting was happening, and he was glad when the Pizza Hut delivery arrived. While they ate, his father became jovial once more, laughing loudly and often. He had been drinking steadily all afternoon, and he had two more beers with the pizza. Richie had the impression that Beringer wasn’t having that good a time, that the laughter and joking around were forced. It made him uncomfortable.

Like most youngsters, Richie was more sensitive to nuances than adults realized. He knew how adults acted around kids when they didn’t really like them. The euphoria he had felt starting out this first full day in his father’s company trickled away, leaving an emptiness in his stomach that the pizza couldn’t fill.

He thought of his mother. Of Dad—Dave, that is. He wondered what they were doing and if they were worried about him. He even wondered about Elli. Would his little sister be asking about him, curious because he hadn’t come home?

Beringer was staring at him. “What are you thinkin’ about, kid?”

I’m Richie
, he thought. But he didn’t say that, of course. Instead he said, “I was thinking about my sister Elli. She’s just a kid, but …”

“You miss her?”

“Well, uh … yeah, I guess.”

“You’re too soft. That’s somethin’ you gotta learn. You start feeling soft for other people—it don’t matter who they are—you know what’s gonna happen? They’ll walk all over you. You’re old enough you got to start thinkin’ about yourself.”

Richie decided he wouldn’t ask if he could call home. Without asking, he knew what would happen. There would be this shift in his father’s eyes, as if someone else were peering out. It was really weird …

An uneasy silence fell between them. The noise from the TV set—a sitcom Richie never watched—filled the vacuum. The wail of a fire engine pierced the night and faded away, causing Richie to think again of his stepfather in his fire-retardant clothes, blackened with soot.

He broke the silence. “I was wondering, uh … maybe we could go to a movie. The mall is just down the street, they’ve got these six theaters—”

“Shit, you expect to be entertained all the time, is that it? Is that the way it is at home? Everybody’s jumpin’ all over themselves to keep Richie entertained?”

“No. I … I didn’t mean …”

Tears stung his eyes. Ralph Beringer turned away in disgust. “Shit,” he muttered again as he went to the kitchen for another beer. The snap of the top on the can made Richie jump slightly in his chair.

Returning to the living room, Beringer stared down at him. Finally he said, “I know just what you need, kid. And so does your old man.”

He went down the hall to the bedroom. When he returned several minutes later he was carrying a stack of videos. “You’re old enough to start your real education, kid, and tonight’s as good a time as any.”

Richie sat erect, his tears forgotten, watching curiously as his father began to set up the VCR.

S
TANDING ON THE
balcony outside her room at the Red Roof Inn, after watching the sun set in another gorgeous flameout, Karen Younger reflected that murder and mayhem seemed more terrible in this bright, sunny place, as if the very acts were more suited to cold and darkness, to chilling rain and crashing thunder. You seldom heard thunder in Southern California, she had been told. Only if a Southern Pacific storm strayed this far north, a product of
El Niño
, whatever that was. Murder preferred the shadows. It seemed more bizarre where there was so much color and light.

Where, in mid-October, she had been too warm in her jogging sweats even at six in the evening. It was seductive, no question about that, but she wasn’t sure if she could deal with life as well in so beguiling a climate. Once needed reminders of nature’s harshness. You were going to face it sooner or later. Best if it didn’t come as a total shock.

She smiled at her thoughts. After a while the air became cool enough to drive her back into her room. She took a quick shower, changed into sweater and slacks and went out to a solitary dinner at a nearby Coco’s, an upscale coffee shop. She returned reluctantly to her room, whose bland contemporary decor had, like her solitary meals, become overly familiar in the past ten days. With a wry smile she wondered which she feared most about going into the field as a profiler—the monsters she had come to find, or the rooms in which she would have to wait for them.

Propped up on the bed with a couple of pillows behind her, she thought about her parents, who had moved from Philadelphia to a retirement community near Reading, Pennsylvania. This weekend they would probably go for a drive, delighting in the autumn foliage, maybe take in a fall craft festival or drive in to Reading to shop at the big outlets—her father hated them but her mother loved browsing and he could never refuse to indulge her. Poor family conditioning, Karen thought, for what she would find in her work.

She glanced at the telephone across the room, wanting to call them, to hear their familiar voices, answer the familiar questions. She was fine. No, no one new in her life. Yes, she knew it was getting late, her biological clock was ticking …

For a number of reasons, she never called when she was in the field. Someone in the Bureau was sure to complain of a potential security lapse. Someone in accounting would scream about unauthorized long-distance calls on the motel bill. Karen herself—the real reason—would feel that she was making herself vulnerable, exposing too much of herself to the monsters she hunted. In the field she built a wall between her personal life and her job. She couldn’t let it be breeched.

She thought of Tim Braden and her mother’s query about someone new.
Yes, Mom, I’ve met someone interesting. Unfortunately, he’s a cop
.

Suddenly restless, she drew her briefcase onto the bed beside her and pulled out her case notes. Something there was teasing her, but it had stayed just around a corner out of sight. She scanned the accumulating copies of reports she had obtained from Braden, the coroner and the FBI’s lab relating to both Edith Foster and Natalie Rothleder. Nothing jumped out at her. Factoring Lisl Moeller into the mix didn’t help. Still nothing.

Her thoughts strayed back to Detective Braden. Not exactly what she had expected, but then her record on reading men was not something to hang from the rafters. Braden was stubborn, dogged, honest; what you see is what you get, she thought. She believed she understood what had happened to him that night he earned his fifteen minutes of celebrity. His reaction to the woman striking at him with a corkscrew had been a cop’s reflex.
You swing an arm at me and I’m going to grab it. Not tentatively, but quick and hard, and ask questions later. That way I’ll keep all my teeth, and stay alive
. The media had made it something else.