Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel) (16 page)

“So. We’re going to share our stories. Get some accountability.” The flare of the Pres-to-Logs danced across Russell Pruitt’s face. I realized his features reminded me of the way a face drawn on a balloon is distorted when you blow it up. Not pretty, and not his fault. I felt that compassion again—poor, sick, suffering boy.

He could have just gone to counseling,
Constance said.
He didn’t have to stalk you and take you captive.

“You go first,” I said. “I want to hear what you have in mind.”

“Okay. So. I told you already that when I started out to find you, I wanted to hurt you, and make you witness my pain and feel it too.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I suppressed the lurch of my heart and just listened, keeping my neutral psychologist face on.

“Well, that’s changed as I’ve gotten to know you. I now want us both to get something out of this experience, some sort of healing. I still want to do therapy with you, but now I want to help you with yours. I’ve begun some internship hours, you know. I’m working at a crisis shelter for teens. I talk to all kinds of runaways, abuse victims.”

“Sounds like a perfect fit for you.” I wondered how genuine all this was, this change of inclusion from “me” to “us.” He could be becoming attached to me, and that meant he might not kill me. The firelight flickered on those thick glasses, making his eyes impossible to see.

“Yeah. Well, to start with, my dad wasn’t always terrible at home.”

“They seldom are.”

“I remember my parents being happy. When I was younger. But as I got older, he’d come home late from work. When he came home late, it was a bad night. Mom would have me lock my door. She bought me a CD player that spun stars across the ceiling of my room and played songs through headphones. I turned it on as loud as it would go, but it was never loud enough to drown out the sound of them fighting, of him beating her.”

“That’s very hard on a child.”

“Yes. I wanted to help her, but I was scared of him too. I think on some level I knew he just wasn’t like other people. It took me until I was thirteen to realize he didn’t love me, never had, and all the hugs and Christmas gifts and baseball games—they were only so people thought we were normal. I was a prop in the ‘home and family’ set piece.” Russell Pruitt had begun panting shallowly, the flickering light dancing patterns on his sweating face. “In the morning after a bad night, Mom would be in bed with a ‘migraine.’ Dad would fix my breakfast on those days, always extra cheerful. I remember how he’d make me pancakes with blueberries in them. Only on the days she had migraines.”

“You realized your parents were both participating in the masquerade.” I summarized the content of his story. Doing so helped keep me disengaged from the heartbreaking threads of it. “Your mom came up with a health complaint she could use to disguise the beatings. You were scared and felt trapped and conflicted.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” He ran his hands through his thick black hair, looked into the flames. “I didn’t know anything about the other people he might have killed until the trial, when I read the papers. The allegations about the other women who disappeared and how many times he was questioned—it made me feel sick inside. His sickness was in me, like his DNA was warped—and had warped me.”

“You found a reason for your gigantism.”

He looked at me, a long pause. The flames reflected in those thick Coke-bottle lenses, a spooky effect.

“You’re very good, Dr. Wilson. I can see I have a long way to go as a therapist before I’m as good at getting to the heart of things as you are.”

I didn’t reply.

Silence is also a powerful tool in therapy. He was naming a future for himself, a future that wasn’t yet hopeless but would never happen if he killed me. I had to let that work its own powerful magic on him—its infection of hope.

Russell Pruitt having hope was going to keep me alive. I still wasn’t sure myself if he was too far gone to be salvaged, to be healed, and even to have a future in psychology someday. I’d always believed in change and second chances—I wouldn’t have a career in this field if I didn’t—but at this point, all that swirled around us were possibilities and dust.

“The day he killed my mother was kind of like all the rest. That’s what stands out to me—that I didn’t realize it was going to be different.” Pruitt leaned forward toward the warmth of the flames, which were taking a while to warm the small cavern. The smoke was escaping somehow—there must be a vent in the ceiling. I wished I’d worn my boots after all, and tucked my feet up to keep them warm, wrapping my arms around my knees.

“I did my homework after dinner, thinking he was going to be home late, and that wasn’t good—usually he’d go out drinking, or as I later read, stalking his prey—and he’d come home boozed up with that need to start something with Mom. But he’d been better lately. It didn’t always end that way, so I was hopeful. Now I know that’s intermittent reinforcement—when something doesn’t
always
happen a certain way. You get hopeful something might be different.”

I waited, hoping he wouldn’t get to thinking about hope and what an infection it could be. Hoping he’d tell the story and that it would give him some relief—and at the same time, wishing I didn’t have to hear it. I knew how it ended. I’d been a witness at the trial.

“So I did my homework. Mom helped me with the math. I could tell she was worried and nervous—she kept looking at the clock and cleaning everything even though it was perfect, because how she kept the house was something he’d pick on, or if she didn’t look pretty enough. Mom was always pretty.”

I sighed, remembering his mother’s picture. She’d been an old-fashioned kind of beautiful, with a sweet oval face, olive skin, and curly black hair. She’d been average height, with a nice slim figure. She wasn’t the “type” he’d disappeared—they were chubby, dyed blondes. No one, including me, had been able to figure out what he had against chubby dyed blondes, and Hank Gardo had never said.

“She made me take my shower and go to bed early. I was in bed, listening to music, and hoping it would be okay when he got home. But it wasn’t. It started like it always did, with some accusation and her trying to appease him—and it escalated. I heard them running around and her trying not to scream because she didn’t like to scare me. And I put my pillow over my head and shut my eyes. I fell asleep.”

“You’re still mad at yourself. You wish you hadn’t shut it out. You wish you’d done something.” I named his unspoken guilt.

“Yes.” He breathed a long sigh of relief to be so understood. Firelight caught the tears falling off his chin. This was the gift of witnessing his story. It was all I could give him. “When I woke up, it was over. He’d gone, and he’d left her there.”

I remembered the crime scene photos. I wished I didn’t.

“I came out. She was in the kitchen, on her back. He’d beaten her so much that I couldn’t recognize her face. She didn’t get up, and she didn’t move.”

“It’s a terrible thing that happened to you both.”

“I called nine-one-one, and I didn’t touch her because I watched
CSI
even though I wasn’t supposed to, and I knew not to touch her.”

“You were smart and brave. You did everything right.” I knew I was talking to a kid right now, a traumatized child evident in the high pitch and rapid cadence of his deep voice.

“I sat in the doorway. I prayed they would get my dad, that they would shoot him dead. When the cops came, they asked if I’d touched anything, and I said no.”

“You did all you could. Smart and brave boy.”

“I just sat there in the doorway and looked at the kitchen. There was a broken pane with blood on it in the glass dish cabinet. I thought he must have thrown her into it. The dinner she’d made him was all over the floor. It was meat loaf, mashed potato, and green beans, and the meat loaf was stuck on the wall above the sink. The plate had broken all over where he threw it and she had mashed potato in her hair.”

“You noticed a lot of details and you remember them clearly even though you were in shock.”

“Was I in shock? I thought I must be like him, because I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t cry. I just looked around and tried to remember everything so I could help with the case.”

“You were—what? Twelve? You lived in a world where you’d always been braced for this. You couldn’t afford to feel anything, and you did the best you could to help your mother.”

“I like that better than what I’ve been thinking about myself.” Russell Pruitt darted me another swift glance, and I reached over and set my hand on his shoulder. It was the first time I’d voluntarily touched him. “A social worker came. She took me to a foster family. They were nice, but I didn’t talk. I couldn’t talk to anyone but the cops. They finally had me talk to the police psychologist.”

“Someone like me.”

“I guess.”

“You didn’t want to trust anyone. You didn’t want to care or attach to anyone. It’s a natural response to the kind of trauma you’d been through.”

“Yes.” He looked at me, a quick glance. “You understand.”

“I do.”

“The prosecuting attorney got a psychologist in to work with me, get me ready for the trial—because they’d picked him up that very morning. He’d just gone to his favorite bar, in his dirty shirt and with bloody fists, and waited for them to come get him.”

“He’d gone too far. He knew there was nowhere to run.”

“I guess so.” Russell Pruitt turned his enormous hands over. Gilded by firelight, they almost looked graceful. He turned them back and forth. “I started growing during the trial.”

“And you explained what happened to yourself as internalizing his distortion.”

“Right. But now I’m wondering.”

“That’s what this trip has been about. Discovering what is you and what is him.”

Russell Pruitt nodded. I took my hand off his shoulder and put it in my lap, feeling a bone-deep sadness as I did so. Still, objectivity was good practice, and in this situation, really hard to come by. Russell Pruitt had worked his gigantic, brokenhearted magic on me, and I cared about him now. It was no good denying it. I needed to stay alive so I could help us both.

“Your turn,” Russell Pruitt said.

I shook my head. “No. It’s not about me. It’s about you.”

He took his glasses off, wiped them on his T-shirt. His dark brown eyes were normal sized, long-lashed. I imagined his mother’s eyes had been much like his, since Hank Gardo had had gray eyes. “It’s not just about me. You came on this journey to settle some things for yourself, to figure some things out—to get sober. I interrupted all that, and I want you to get what you came here for.”

“It sounds like you’ve decided to let me live,” I said carefully, repeating the suggestion I’d given him earlier.

He put the glasses back on. “I want to. But I can’t figure a way out of the situation we’re in. So how about we not deal with that tonight, and you tell me your story.”

I sighed, settled back against the bumpy stone wall, tucking my feet under me as best I could.

“Telling my story seems irrelevant when tomorrow I might die. I just don’t see a point. Makes it hard for me to do anything but worry about self-preservation. This is why coercion of any kind is counterproductive to therapy.”

Russell Pruitt considered this, rubbing his chin with the tips of his fingers. “I honestly don’t want to kill you. But how can I let you live?”

“We have several options. Why don’t we talk about them and then you can think about them tonight?” I held my breath, hoping he’d go along.

In the meantime, maybe Bruce will find us,
Constance said.

“Okay. I’m interested in what you’ve come up with.” Pruitt moved a log farther into the fire.

“Good. Okay, the first, and easiest, is that I don’t say anything to anybody about what has happened here. We hike out and go our separate ways.”

“Provided I accept your promise that you won’t tell.”

“True. Second, we walk out together and you turn yourself in. I help you get the proper support for your health. That’s my favorite option.”

“I’d have to be willing to submit to the system, and that’s a big
if
. Watching my dad’s trial and being a foster kid didn’t exactly encourage me to throw myself into the arms of blind justice.”

“Okay. Third, you can tie me up and leave me in the cabin. Escape, take all my money, et cetera, and make a run for it.”

“This scenario has possibilities, but you have too many connections. I think law enforcement would be trying very hard to find anyone who’d laid a hand on their psychologist. I’d have to start a whole new life, and I like the life I have going on.”

The Pres-to-Logs were burning down. Russell Pruitt got up and piled on the ones I’d brought, and the paper-covered tepee flared up again. I noticed the inks flamed different colors: green, red, and blue.

“Well, that brings up one last point I want you to think about. If you kill me, they’re going to be much more on your case, and you’ve left a ton of trace in both cabins, all over my things. If you kill me, don’t you think the stakes will be that much higher for your capture? And how will you be able to resume your old life? The statute of limitations runs out on terroristic threatening and kidnapping, which is the most you’ll face now—but there’s no statute of limitations for murder.”