Where Monsters Dwell (23 page)

She lay down on the sofa. Here she had lain a whole summer, until one day, when she almost died of an overdose. And it wasn’t very comfortable either, she thought. She got up. Inhaled the musty basement smell deep into her lungs. The desire for a drink was gone.

From the basement she went up to her father’s apartment and let herself in without knocking. Her father lay dozing on the sofa.

“So the retired guy just lies here taking it easy,” she said in a loud voice.

He opened his eyes and looked at her, sat up, and began clearing off the table. An empty beer bottle vanished among rolled-up newspapers, and he took everything with him into the kitchen. When he came back he said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you for at least a few weeks. A hell of a case you’ve got on your hands.”

“You can say that again,” she said, glad that her father was still keeping up with what happened at the station. Lately she’d been thinking more about the age difference between them. Her father had been over forty when she was born. When she was going to school and he was working, it had seemed perfectly normal. Now the age gap felt like an eternity, as if her father had suddenly turned into her grandfather. She didn’t know how long she would still have him around, and she was often afraid he would lose his capacity for clear thinking.

“But I didn’t come here to talk about the case.”

Her father seemed disappointed, and that made her happy. The cop was still in there.

She sank onto the recliner where he always sat when he watched a game. That was the only thing he watched on TV. Always baseball, never anything else.

“I came to ask you about that time,” she said.

A shadow passed over his face. Was it surprise, fear, or relief?

She thought it was relief. This was something she had been waiting to talk about, and she had known for a while now that she shouldn’t wait too long. Her father wasn’t getting any younger.

He sat motionless for a moment. Then he did something that surprised her. Maybe it surprised both of them. He stood up, went to the kitchen, and opened a can of beer. He had never done that in front of her since that summer. He came back into the living room and set the beer on the coffee table after he took a sip.

“I think you’ve made enough progress by now that this shouldn’t bother you,” he said.

“It doesn’t bother me. As long as you don’t have too many,” she said in the motherly tone she’d involuntarily adopted after her father ended up living alone.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve turned into an old man and can finally do what I want,” he said with a smile. Then he began his account without waiting for any more urging.

“It was Holly who found you. Your first shot of heroin was an overdose. It was one of God’s miracles that Holly came home from vacation on that very day and was determined to find you. She’d spent her vacation thinking about you and had realized that something was wrong. She refused to stop until she found you. She interrogated us and went around to all your friends. Finally she called up the neighbor boy, Brad. It turned out that he’d already saved your life the week before. You’d asked him for a dose of heroin, and he’d refused. He thought he’d talked you out of it, but you were harder to save than that. You’d gone across town and bought what you thought you needed. But it was Brad who mentioned the secret club room in the basement. He thought that’s where you might be. It’s strange that none of us had thought of it. I have no idea how much he knew and how much he was guessing. And I don’t want to know about how much he was involved in getting you the pills you’d been taking all summer without our knowledge.” Here he paused and took another swallow of beer before he continued.

“You were lying on the sofa, unconscious, with a syringe on the floor next to you. Holly ran upstairs to get us to call an ambulance. I remember that your mother was terribly pale. She couldn’t believe what had happened. We went with you to the hospital but had to sit in the waiting room until they managed to revive you. Your mother didn’t say a word the whole time. Then they let us in to see you, and you were lying there with a little more color in your face, but still pale. That’s when the tears came. Your mother cried like I’d never seen her cry before.”

Felicia sat looking at her father. She’d never heard him tell this story. She could hardly remember what happened herself. The whole thing was like a muddled haze. She remembered that detox was hell, and that they drove her to a rehabilitation center in West Virginia. She remembered that she was lucky to be there, and that it had really helped. And then her father came and got her, and they moved to Alaska, where her father had taken a job as a sheriff in a small town. That was what saved her. It was almost a symbolic action. A year on ice. A year away from the world. A new start. In Alaska she got to work as her father’s assistant at the sheriff’s office. To her amazement, she liked police work. At the end of the year her parents decided that they couldn’t protect her up there away from the world forever. So they moved back to Richmond, and she started at the police academy.

But she hadn’t actually come here to listen to her father’s account of what happened. She was the one with the secrets. Her parents had never asked her why she changed from being a happy high school graduate to shooting heroin in two short months. She knew that this must have tormented them. But for some reason they’d let her keep that secret, no doubt hoping that one day she’d find the strength to tell them.

“We’ve never talked about this before,” she said.

“No,” said her father, chugging the rest of his beer.

“It’s good that we’ve started.”

“Yeah.”

Next time it’s my turn to say something, she thought. Next time.

“I have to get back to the investigation. You know how it is,” she said, getting up.

Her father nodded. He knew very well how it was.

“What you need to ask yourself…” he said, as she was on her way out the door.

She stopped.

“… is what he’s doing with the skin.”

She nodded thoughtfully, then left the apartment. She was glad that she’d taken this detour home.

On the way down the stairs her thoughts turned again to Ed Gein. He’s real, she told herself. Killers who flay their victims do exist. At the same time she realized that one of the biggest challenges she had to deal with during the remainder of the case was going to be the strange feeling of unreality. And she didn’t know how much it would help to think about Ed Gein. He was the inspiration for movies like
Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and
The Silence of the Lambs.
Just like the murderer she was hunting, Gein was a figure from another world. He had danced around his dead mother’s untouched bedroom wearing a suit he had sewn from the skin of dead people.

You need to ask yourself what he’s doing with the skin, her father had said. But how could she find a rational answer to that question? Rational people don’t do anything at all with human skin. But she already knew the answer. He writes on it, she thought, closing the front door of her father’s building behind her.

*   *   *

Back at the police station, Felicia sat down at her desk in one of the cubicles that made up the homicide division. She had a laptop in front of her. The techs had already examined Bond’s PC and extracted the files from it, including what they could retrieve from the deleted folders. It turned out that Bond only used his work e-mail for work-related purposes, and even then not often, pretty much just to answer inquiries that he couldn’t ignore. The curator may have used a Web-based service, such as Gmail, for his private e-mail. But nobody other than people with whom he’d had a purely professional relationship could recall being given the solitary old man’s e-mail address.

She copied the files on Bond’s PC to a folder on her own machine, and started searching for image files. To her great disappointment, she didn’t find what she was looking for. She found only pictures of the inventory of the museum, a few unsuccessful snapshots of Bond’s colleagues, all taken on the job, and otherwise very little. One picture piqued her curiosity more than the others. It was of a very fat lady with red hair. Felicia didn’t recognize her. Someone in his family, she guessed. Maybe Bond’s daughter. But what interested her about this particular picture was that it wasn’t taken inside the Poe Museum, like all the other images were. It was taken outdoors, and she recognized the lake in the background. It was Westhampton Lake, on the university campus. She started to wonder who might have taken this picture but couldn’t come up with anyone. In frustration, she closed the laptop and phoned Laubach.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Here,” said Laubach, putting his cell phone down on her desk.

“Good grief, I didn’t even hear your phone ring,” she said, and had to laugh.

“On vibrate,” he explained. “Useful for when you have to sneak up on somebody from behind.”

“Good job. But listen. I’m not finding out anything at all from Bond’s PC.”

“All right, but how do you know these pictures you’re looking for really exist?”

“I don’t. It’s just a hunch. A lot of stuff would fall into place if they did.”

“So it’s really just something you’re wishing for.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She sighed heavily.

“It’s usually best to work with the evidence we have and not the evidence we wish we had,” said Laubach.

Felicia Stone gave him a wan smile.

21

The rest of that
week and the next were spent on fruitless interviews and an endless examination of Bond’s papers and effects. No new pictures were found. Reynolds and Patterson visited Bond’s relatives, without result. But Patterson was able to rule out the red-haired woman in the picture on Bond’s PC as a family member. “Only dark-haired, skin-and-bone types in that family,” he reported. This made the image of the fat, red-haired woman far more interesting to Felicia. Since Bond didn’t have his own camera, not even one on his phone, and hadn’t received the picture through his work e-mail—which was the case with the other pictures—there was a good deal of discussion about where the picture might have come from. Patterson thought it could mean that Bond had an e-mail address they didn’t know about, and that he had downloaded it from there. But there were many other ways an image could end up on a computer. So it remained a mystery.

Patterson learned that Efrahim Bond hadn’t been much of a family man. His children didn’t have anything directly negative to say about him. They actually seemed to have warm feelings for him, but they had given up on him taking an active role in the family. He never called or took it upon himself to contact them. As the years went by, he had just slipped further and further away from all of them.

Reynolds added that they all had good alibis, and none of them seemed to have a motive for killing their father, particularly in such a bestial way.

The case had come to a standstill. What had seemed a promising start had led them nowhere.

Several days later Felicia Stone decided to Google “curator Nevins.” Not that she hadn’t done it already. They had checked him out in detail, through vigorous searches on the Web and in various databases, but she also knew that the more times you Google someone and cross-Googled one or more names, the greater the chance of finding unexpected connections.

Apparently a quarterback in college football named John Stuart Nevins had had a good season. There were more hits for him than for the curator. Still, she didn’t want to type in the middle name Shaun in the search box for fear that it might lead to more hits on Nevins Jr. than she wanted. So she sat there scrolling through the list, and some of the hits were for the correct Nevins after all. Several were from Web sites for the library and the university. And then there were some from local newspapers, mostly rather old, in which Nevins commented on some anniversary celebration honoring a writer at which a first edition was displayed from the library’s collection. Nevins’s name also popped up as the author of a number of scientific articles, and as a participant at various conferences all over the country. None of this seemed to have anything to do with the case, though.

Felicia chewed on her pencil and stared blankly at a photo of Nevins she’d stumbled upon. There he stood, wearing elegant white gloves, holding out an old book. The picture was from the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
. The headline on the accompanying article read:
LOCAL COLLECTOR BUYS VALUABLE BOOK COLLECTION.

The article recounted how Nevins had bought a number of valuable books from the estate of an elderly widow from one of Richmond’s old, well-to-do tobacco families. And how Nevins bought and collected old books privately, which Felicia already knew. But suddenly she noticed the title of the book that Nevins was holding up.
Peer Gynt.
Henrik Ibsen. The letters were stamped in gold on red cloth. There’s something familiar about that, she thought. Henrik Ibsen. Wasn’t he Swedish? At any rate, he was from somewhere in Scandinavia. Nevins claimed that he didn’t know much of anything about Scandinavian book collecting. Sure, she thought. And yet here he stands holding a book by Henrik Ibsen. She realized that of course it could be pure coincidence. The book Nevins was holding in the photo was not from a foreign collection. It had been bought here in Virginia. But why had Nevins chosen to hold up this particular volume for the photographer?

She had an idea. On Google’s search page she clicked on search settings. A number of choices came up for the category of search language. She clicked on Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. This time she searched for the full name: John Shaun Nevins. A single hit was all she got. It was an article on a site called adressa.no. It was probably a newspaper.

Nevins did in fact have a point. He hadn’t made himself very well known in Scandinavia. But here he is, she thought triumphantly. Her eyes fell on the photo accompanying the brief article. It showed a room that looked like it was furnished sometime in the nineteenth century, with books lining the walls, completely in Nevins’s style. A group of people posed, all smiling. In the middle was Nevins. The only place in the article where his name was mentioned was in the caption. It was obvious that the curator from Virginia was not the most important person in the room. But what was he doing in the picture?