The Watcher in the Wall (13 page)

“Mom’s in Cincinnati,” he told Windermere. “But she hasn’t seen her son in more than fifteen years. Says he cut out on her shortly after they left Louisville, hasn’t shown his face since.”

“No phone calls?” Windermere said. “No letters?”

“Not even a postcard. Didn’t sound like old Tammy was too broken up about it. I got the feeling she was happy to be rid of her little boy. Said he was always a bit of a weird kid, kind of gave her the creeps.”

“Imagine what she’d think of him now,” Windermere said. She thanked Mathers and told him good-bye, ended the call before he could get all wishy-washy again, that
Carla, we need to talk
crap.

“Tammy Gruber’s in Cincinnati,” she told Stevens as they walked out of the terminal. “But she can’t point us to her boy.”

“So what do we do?” Stevens asked her.

Windermere scanned the parking lot, found the rental car. “I have some ideas,” she told him. “Toss me those keys, would you? I’m driving.”

•   •   •

They picked up Randall Gruber’s trail at a psychiatric hospital in southeast Louisville, a pleasant, five-story brick facility set amid a campus of rolling lawns and the odd copse of trees. Windermere parked the rental
car in the visitors’ lot, and they rode the elevator to the residential ward, where a doctor named McCarthy met them at a security station in front of a pair of locked double doors.

“Call me Rosemary, please,” she said as she led them through the doors and into a cluttered office. “We try to keep things informal in this part of the hospital. Try to keep the whole situation as humanizing as possible.”

“Sure,” Stevens said. “I imagine the kids you’re dealing with here have it rough enough as it is.”

“Very true,” McCarthy agreed. “And if you’re here about Randall Gruber, you already know all about it.”

“So you remember Randall,” Windermere said. “That would have been, what, twenty, twenty-five years ago?”

“I remember,” McCarthy told her. “I was younger then, just starting out, and Randall . . . What happened in that trailer out there is one of the saddest situations I’ve ever come across, professionally or otherwise.”

She picked up a file folder from her desk, opened it, scanned the contents. Stevens and Windermere watched her.

“You treated Randall here because of what happened to his stepsister, correct?” Stevens said. “And because of what his stepfather—Earl Sanderson—had been doing before Sarah died. I assume that’s standard procedure in child abuse cases?”

“It is,” McCarthy replied, “though not to the extent that we treated Randall. This was something more than simple child abuse.”

“I don’t understand,” Windermere said. “How do you mean?”

McCarthy put down the file. Slid it across the table. Photocopies of drawings, an unsteady hand. A girl or a woman with hair the same color as the rope around her neck.

“I began treating Randall under the assumption that he’d played a bystander’s role in everything that went on,” McCarthy told them as they studied the drawings. “I assumed he’d been a victim of his stepfather, and nothing more. But that was before Randall told me about the hole in the wall.”

Stevens felt a bolt of electricity, his cop instincts perking up. “The hole in the wall,” he said. “Can you explain?”

“Randall watched her,” McCarthy told them. “From the day they moved into that trailer, five or six months before Sarah’s death, he watched her through the wall. He told me it was sometimes the only thing that kept him going, knowing that he could watch her, like his own private movie.”

“Did she know?” Stevens asked. “Was this some secret game of theirs?”

McCarthy shook her head. “Not until the end, Randall said. Not until the moment before she died. He said he tried to hold his breath, but he couldn’t, and she saw him as she was setting up the rope. She saw him, he said, but she did it anyway. That’s how he knew it was okay.”

Stevens and Windermere looked at each other again. “So he watched her,” Windermere said. “Just like Ashley Frey.”

Stevens nodded. “Only, Ashley Frey has a webcam.”

“Is there a connection here?” McCarthy asked, frowning. “You mentioned this pertained to a case you’re investigating. Is Randall involved in some way?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Windermere said. “We’re dealing with a predator who finds depressed teenagers online and encourages them to hang themselves while she watches. So far, we count five victims, and the similarities are striking. Right down to the color of the rope.”

“You treated Randall Gruber,” Stevens told McCarthy. “We don’t want to ask you to make a leap that you can’t, but does this sound like something in Randall’s ballpark?”

McCarthy didn’t answer for a moment. She’d paled, Stevens thought, unless it was just a trick of the light. She exhaled heavily and sat forward.

“It’s in his ballpark, yes,” she said quietly. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve often wondered just when I would have to have this conversation. We couldn’t keep treating Randall after he turned eighteen. We just don’t have the resources, or the legal right. His mother took him away, and I think they moved out of town. But—”

“But you would have kept him here, if you could have,” Windermere said.

McCarthy nodded. “What happened in that trailer, it changed Randall,” she said. “He came to me troubled, and I wasn’t able to reverse it. His stepfather had reached him in a place where I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.”

She looked down at the file folder. Flipped through the drawings. Stevens and Windermere waited, the doctor’s words hanging in the air.

“He told me he enjoyed it,” McCarthy continued, and her words still bore scars. “He hated his stepsister, thought her father gave her special treatment. He told me he made it his mission to push her to the edge. He told me it made him feel powerful.”

She shuddered. “He told me it felt like a game.”

<
50
>

“So Ashley Frey’s
a
he
after all,” Windermere said as they drove away from the hospital. “Leave it to a man to come up with a scheme like this.”

In the passenger seat, Stevens shivered. “He watched her hang herself” he said. “He pushed his sister to do it.”

“A
game
,” Windermere said. She’d scanned Randall Gruber’s file in Rosemary McCarthy’s office. Figured she’d picked up a little bit on the kid. “He didn’t have many friends, apparently. Nobody to really relate to. Even his stepsister wanted nothing to do with him.”

“Alone in that trailer with his stepfather running rampant.” Stevens looked out the window. “Maybe it was his way of asserting himself. Being heard.”

“We’re sure hearing him now,” Windermere said. She signaled, turned onto the interstate on-ramp. Pressed down on the gas, the rental car’s engine straining under her heavy foot. “Let’s go talk to the stepfather, huh?”

•   •   •

Earl Sanderson lived across the river in New Albany, Indiana, a crummy brick apartment building in the shadow of the Sherman Minton, the big interstate bridge running over the Ohio River and back into Louisville.

They found his place pretty easily. But Earl wasn’t home. And the woman who answered his door wasn’t exactly bursting with clues.

“Went out,” she told them, scratching under her worn robe. “Dunno where, exactly. You try downstairs yet?”

Stevens and Windermere exchanged glances. There was a bar built into the first floor of the place, not the most reputable-looking establishment.

“If Earl’s not there, I don’t know what to tell you,” the woman continued. “My satellite surveillance camera’s kind of acting up lately.”

She was an older woman, mid-fifties, a couple fading bruises on her arms, a split lip. Wouldn’t look them in the eye, either of them.

“He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

“Not so far,” Windermere replied. “But maybe he should be.”

•   •   •

They checked out the bar, the Rusty Nail, a flat painted door and boarded-up windows on the outside, a pockmarked bar and a sticky floor and dim lighting on the inside, the pervasive odor of mildew, cigarettes, and stale beer. But no sign of Earl Sanderson.

“Just missed him,” the bartender told Stevens and Windermere. “He shoved off with old Joan about a half hour ago, sounded like they were aiming to party.”

“Old Joan,” Windermere said. “That lady in his apartment doesn’t mind?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” the bartender said. “Don’t think she knows about Earl and Joan, and I suspect Earl’d like to keep it that way.”

He reached under the bar, pulled out a bowl of mixed nuts that must have dated back to the Nixon administration.

“Listen, if it’s Earl you’re after, you’re just as well staying in one place,” he said. “Try and follow that man, you’ll be chasing him around all night. Hard to pin down, what I’m saying.”

“So where would you suggest we stay?” Windermere asked. “If we were aiming to pin him.”

“Tomorrow’s what, Wednesday? He usually comes around Wednesdays. Happy hour, three o’clock. Buck-fifty Budweisers, three-dollar highballs. He’ll be here.”

Windermere surveyed the joint, the scarred tabletops, the hunchbacked regulars. Figured the last thing she wanted was to spend another two or three hours scouring places like this.

“Three o’clock,” she said. “Guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”

<
51
>

It was dark
when Stevens and Windermere pulled into the little town of Elizabeth, twenty miles down the Ohio River from Louisville and New Albany, on the Indiana side of the water. The place was quiet, sleepy, little more than a single main road and a couple ramshackle storefronts, a decrepit mechanic’s shop and a general store with greasy windows and a hand-painted sign.

Windermere peered out the windshield, idled the rental slow down main street. Took one lap of the town, then another.

“Place is a ghost town,” she muttered. “Or a horror-movie set.”

She sent Stevens into the general store for directions, watched ragged trees claw at the wind in the shadows as she waited. Stevens came out a couple minutes later, scratching his head. “About a mile out of town,”
he said, sliding into the seat. “Back toward the river. The guy in there said it’s been abandoned for years.”

“Even better,” Windermere said, shifting into drive, her free hand checking her shoulder holster for the familiar weight of her service pistol. Might have been silly, but the place was kind of spooky. And the thought of Randall Gruber out here, somewhere, gave her the creeps.

The guy in the general store hadn’t been lying. The Shady Acres Motor Court came off like more of a junkyard than any kind of neighborhood. The sign over the front gate was pitted with shot, the gate itself rusted and sagging off its hinges. Someone had dragged a log across the driveway, spray-painted a warning on its side for trespassers to
KEEP OUT
.

In the light from the rental car’s headlights, Windermere could see the rusted hulks of old trailers lined up like cemetery headstones beyond the gate, their sides covered with graffiti, their windows smashed. There were no lights on, anywhere. No signs of life.

She pulled the car in close to the log at the gate. Shifted into park and killed the engine. Stevens frowned. “We’re going in there?”

“Might as well check it out,” Windermere said. “Bring a flashlight.”

She climbed from the car before he could come up with a better idea. Circled around to the trunk and dug in her gear for a tactical flashlight. Beside her, Stevens found a light of his own, slammed the trunk down. The noise echoed among the trees, the old trailers. Seemed to echo forever.

Windermere had her Glock out. Caught Stevens eyeing it. “I don’t like surprises,” she told him. “Whether it’s Gruber in here or meth heads or a rabid raccoon, I aim to be ready.”

“Sure,” Stevens said. “Words to live by.”

He drew his pistol, too, she noticed, as they stepped over the log and into the park itself. Shined his light up the main road, the beam dying on the rusted body of somebody’s old speedboat, a hole the size of a fist in the hull.

“Which one of these places is Gruber’s?” Stevens asked. He was whispering, barely audible over the wind in the trees, the blowing leaves on the asphalt, the cracked patch of road.

“Dunno,” Windermere said. “Mathers didn’t have an address, just the name of the park.”

She peered through the darkness, trying to get a sense of the size of the place. Figured there must have been four or five rows of trailers, each ten trailers deep. Fifty homes, give or take, and beyond them nothing but black forest and scrub, a tangle of branches and dense underbrush.

Fifty homes. All of them filled by families at one time, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, lovers and neighbors and friends. And Randall Gruber and his stepsister. And Earl Sanderson.

The wind sent a chill through Windermere’s thin jacket. Or maybe it was the history of the place that was doing it, the knowledge that young Randall Gruber had watched his sister in one of these run-down double-wides, kneeling at his little hole in the wall as she slept, dressed for school, wrote in her journal. As she died.

Windermere kept her flashlight moving, aimed it at each trailer as they made their way down the row, studying the empty doorways and windows for any signs of habitation, anything that might point them to Randall Gruber. Wondered what she’d do if she found him, if she’d be able to suppress the anger that burned inside her at the thought of the little bastard.

Shady history or no, the guy was preying on kids, vulnerable kids. And he wasn’t even man enough to show his face when he did it. Windermere figured she’d have something to say to the guy once she and Stevens found him.

Assuming you do find him.

Windermere pushed forward, into the darkness, the jagged, looming trees, searching the trailers for any sign of the predator.

But Gruber wasn’t hiding at the Shady Acres Motor Court. She and Stevens searched the grounds for a solid hour, paced up and down each row of trailers, shined lights into every open doorway. Found nothing more than a few piles of empty beer cans, a ton of graffiti. The remnants of a few campfires and three or four rusted beaters.