Blinded (6 page)

Good advice.

“Do not wander from designated paths and trails.” That’s what the first sign said. It was a hundred yards back, where there was still some light from the visitors’ center.

“Do not go near any water.” That order was posted ten yards farther along the trail.

Now here she was breaking all the rules. She was off the trail. She was near the water. Beneath her bare feet she could feel the muddy ground begin to turn into something that was the consistency of wet, putrefied hay. The stench was sour. In the darkness the odor screamed at her.

Gritty moisture squished up between her toes.

She bathed twice a day. Every day. Morning and night. She detested filth.

And decay? Please! Shivers shot up her spine.

The night was moonless. Her eyes found streaks to focus on, but the streaks disappeared as soon as she tried to reel them in. She couldn’t see. It was the smell, and the feel of the rotting life between her toes, that convinced her that the swamp water was near.

And there had been one more sign. It had read, “Do not smoke or litter.”

She wasn’t breaking that rule. Five minutes ago, maybe. No, it had only been two or three. She’d been breaking that rule, sitting there in the car. Smoking, yes; not littering. Fantasizing. Had everything changed so much in two minutes?

Yes. Everything had changed.

She shivered.
And why am I naked?

Oh, yeah.

Sterling
.

Damn Sterling.

Five minutes ago she was still loving it. Every bit of it. The headphones, the tape, the music, the voice, the whole thing. Disrobing in the car. Waiting for him there, naked. Waiting for him to…

She tried to think.

Truth? She was more frightened of the swamp than she was of the gun. She’d grown up around guns in Virginia, was a pretty good shot herself. She didn’t have the gun this time, though. It was pointed at her. That was hard to ignore.

But not as hard to ignore as the swamp.

She hated swamps and everything that lived in them. She hated snakes. She hated alligators. She hated frogs. She even hated the damn harmless dragonflies. When she was thirteen, one had become tangled in her hair at school. She’d been so frightened by the flapping that she’d pulled the hallway fire alarm to get some help.

Her friends had never let her forget it.

She told herself not to panic in the swamp. There was a way out. She had to find the way out.

The voice from the Walkman had instructed her to duct-tape her mouth.
Let that awful stuff even touch her hair? Yeah, right.
She’d thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. She’d done it. Now the tape across her lips limited her to whimpers.

Her wrists were bound in front of her with the same awful gray tape.
The instructions had made sense at the time
is what she told herself.

What was I thinking?

On an exhale, she thought of blue herons. Herons liked swamps. She’d loved watching them on that boat tour she’d taken that time in the Everglades. She liked herons. Okay, she didn’t love them. Birds made her nervous. But she tried to imagine walking into a flock of blue herons. That would be okay. She could survive that.

She stopped.

Behind her the voice said, “Keep going.” It was a hoarse whisper. The same strange voice that was on the Walkman. “Don’t turn.”

The voice said keep going. She kept going.

Her next step took her ankle-deep into the dank water. Two more steps, and her kneecaps sank below the surface.

She’d lived in Augusta for four years. During that time she’d never visited the Phinizy Swamp Nature Park. Not once. She hated swamps. A girlfriend had once said something about there being bobcats out here.

Bobcats? She shivered.

She preferred golf courses. That was all the nature she needed: the back nine at Augusta, across town. Midnight on the thirteenth green again? She didn’t need to be a member for that round, did she? That night was… perfection.

She had no idea what was spread out in front of her. A pond-size swamp? An Everglades-size swamp? Are swamps deep? Shallow?

She heard a splash, then realized that she had made the noise herself. How far behind her was the gun? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t wait. She had to move. She decided to run. In her head she flipped a coin. Tails.

She would run right.

Before her first step, she heard another splash. She knew she hadn’t made that one. She screamed into her gag.

“Keep going.” The gun hadn’t moved with her. “Don’t turn.” The gun was farther away, back a few steps. The odds said
now.

Now!

She lifted her knees high and sprinted to her right, hoping, praying that her next few steps wouldn’t be her last few steps.

She splashed. Can’t run in knee-deep water without splashing.

Please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.

She thought she spotted the glooming outline of a tree. Someplace to hide. Something to provide cover. How far away was it?

She heard more splashing. Her own? She didn’t know. She tripped on something solid below the surface of the swamp and slipped right down as though she’d been slapped. Muck seeped into her nose and ears. She tasted decay as she tried to scream, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” but despite the tape her mouth was full of the effluent of the Phinizy Swamp.

Have to get up.
She tried to stand.

She felt a tug on her thigh.

It was insistent. And then it was crushing.

Suddenly, she was swimming backward involuntarily. Her last thought was
I hate alligators.

“A serial killer?”

“I don’t want to say any more than what I said, Dr. Gregory. I just needed you to realize what is at stake here.”

“ Sterling has killed women all over the country?”

“Yes. Please call the police. He needs to be behind bars. We can’t wait.”

We?

I digested the implications.

“Is anyone else in danger?” If Gibbs identified a future potential victim, it would launch me into a gray stratosphere where I might be required to breach her confidentiality.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

Silently I counted to five. I spent the seconds trying to decide whether or not I believed her.

I had only fifteen minutes to begin to digest what I’d just learned.

The lunchtime appointment that followed my Tuesday morning session with Gibbs belonged to a member of the local bar. Jim Zebid was a defense attorney, a litigator who also did occasional plaintiff’s work on malpractice claims. He had an interesting background, having been around the Boulder County criminal justice system working as a private investigator while putting himself through law school.

I’d been seeing him for a few months during the same Tuesday slot, and the therapeutic relationship continued to fascinate me. At times he was eager to spar with me over seeming inconsequentials; at other times I felt he would be content to curl up in my lap in parody of my foster poodle, Anvil. Not having a solid handle on one of my patients’ psychological profiles was nothing novel for me, but I found Jim Zebid a particularly interesting and perplexing man.

Since our first session I’d been working under the assumption that Jim chose me as a psychotherapist because I was married to a prosecutor whom he knew. His underlying motivation for making that choice? I wasn’t sure, but I felt confident that he and I would come around to it before too long. I suspected that it had to do with competition, or with secrets, or with some curious transference that would follow a serpentine trail back to his mother and his father.

Or maybe it had to do with all of the above.

Jim’s presenting problem was anxiety. His anxiety manifested itself in traditional ways: through nervousness, irritability, trouble sleeping, rumination, and occasional self-medication with alcohol and marijuana. By history, the present symptoms weren’t novel for him. Although only thirty-one, he’d suffered from anxiety problems since his days as an undergraduate at UCLA. Later, when the symptoms had aggravated during law school, he’d rationalized away the problems as stress-related. But the symptoms continued unabated, and Jim had recently, albeit reluctantly, come to the conclusion that something more intrinsic might be responsible for his chronic misery.

Early on I referred him to a psychiatrist for a medication consultation. The Xanax Jim was prescribed had succeeded not only in taking the edge off his symptoms but in making him more psychologically available for the insight work that he insisted he wanted to do with me. Occasionally, though, I thought that his anxiety still proved an impediment to psychotherapy, and I wasn’t quite sure about the ultimate efficacy of the Xanax.

For a few weeks I’d been weighing asking the prescribing psychiatrist to consider an anxiolytic antidepressant instead.

The session after Gibbs’s second individual appointment was one of those days when I wasn’t so sure about Jim Zebid’s desire to work.

I admit that he didn’t have one hundred percent of my attention. Although most days I prided myself on my ability to move from one patient to the next with the clarity of flipping channels on a TV remote, Gibbs’s most recent revelations were still clouding my focus that morning. I was making a conscious effort to fight through the static of Gibbs’s serial killer accusation so that I could make certain that Jim had a sufficient quantity of my concentration.

“Anyway, my client says he sold half an ounce of blow to Judge Heller’s husband. My guy is only up for an aggravated burglary, and I’m not sure I want to complicate things by revealing he’s dealing, so I’m not sure what the hell I’m going to do with the information. But you have to admit it’s something. Too bad it’s not Judge Heller’s case.”

Jara Heller was the youngest judge on the District Court bench. I knew her socially-in the sense that I could have picked her out in a crowded room. I wasn’t sure I could say the same about her husband, although I felt it was likely that I had met him at some legal affair or reception or cocktail party over the years. For all I knew he and I may have commiserated or shared a look of mutually felt angst while fulfilling our spousal obligations by our attendance.

“Still…” Jim said, apparently continuing to muse over the illusion of leverage that came with knowing that a young judge’s husband used cocaine and purchased it in quantities large enough to suggest that he sold some, too.

The look on Jim’s face reminded me of a guy who’d just witnessed a wallet crammed with bills spill from a woman’s purse and was wondering how he could rationalize clipping a few fifties before he handed the billfold back to its owner.

Most days I don’t hear a single fact during psychotherapy that would be meaningful to anyone other than my patient, me, and a limited circle of people who happen to share my patient’s plot in the universe. But that day? I’d already heard an update from a wanted woman, a report about a serial killer, and news about a judge’s husband possibly selling cocaine, and I hadn’t even given a thought to my midday meal.

Gibbs’s revelation that she feared her husband was a serial killer, and not merely a killer, had changed things for me. The shocking news that he’d left a string of victims across the country not only cemented my decision to make the call to the detectives in California but also subtly altered my resolve. As I drove across town to visit Sam after Jim Zebid’s session, I turned down the radio and pondered the philosophical underpinnings of it all, ultimately concluding that John Donne wouldn’t be pleased by the metamorphosis of my attitude. One death should have been as consequential as many. One death should have been sufficient.

Sam had one additional “should” for me: “You should’ve talked to me as soon as you knew” was how Sam admonished me after I gave him the headline about the California murder.

He was feeling better. Although he was still in the telemetry unit when I was with him during my late lunch break, he and his cardiologist had radically different opinions on how long he should remain tethered to heart-monitoring equipment.

“You’ve had a few other things to deal with,” I said.

The automated blood pressure cuff encircling Sam’s biceps chose that moment to inflate. Sam jumped. “Damn thing scares me so much that it probably sends my blood pressure right through the roof. Hey, maybe you can convince my cardiologist that my mental health requires that I return home immediately.”

“Good one, Sam. But I don’t think you really want me to go on record commenting on your mental health.”

“Point.”

After I’d heard the multiple murder accusation, I negotiated one final rider to my bargain with Gibbs Storey. I would go ahead and make the call to the homicide detectives in California only if she would permit me to consult with a friend of mine who was a local detective regarding the Louise/Sterling situation, and with an attorney, if I chose. I told her I wouldn’t need to use any names, just the facts of her accusation. Gibbs had agreed to my request without protest.

Actually, what she said was “The whole world is going to know my family’s dirty secrets in a few days, Dr. Gregory. What’s to be lost by giving this detective friend of yours a head start? If it will help you better understand the legal process that’s about to happen, please go right ahead. Talk to a lawyer, too. I don’t care. But just about Louise. And no names until it’s in the press.”

I’d had her sign a release.

Once I’d explained the broad outlines of the Louise/Sterling situation to Sam, he asked me to clarify some facts about Gibbs’s accusation before he said, “So when you called the detective in this other state, this mystery state? Did he hang up on you, or what?”

“She came close. It actually didn’t come down the way I thought it would. When I called, there was nobody there who could talk to me. I left a message. Eventually a Detective Reynoso called back. We didn’t stop playing phone tag until about an hour ago.”

“Well? Is your lady’s story for real?”

“Reynoso seemed interested enough in what I had to tell her, but she didn’t reveal much to me. It was kind of like trying to get information out of you.”

“Be nice. I just had a heart attack.”

“What’s going to happen next, Sam?”

“Hard to say without knowing how closely your client’s story meshes with what the cops already know. That’s the gold standard.”

“If it meshes, then what?”

“If it were my case and I got the call? I’d go to my superiors and make a case that I should fly to wherever the woman is and interview her. Maybe talk with her husband, too.”

“Would you make an appointment with her or just show up?”

“I’m a big proponent of just showing up.”

“Why?”

“In my business, when you make appointments, you almost always end up talking with lawyers. As much as I adore your wife, she’s a rare exception to the breed, you know? I’m trying to arrange my life so that I interact with as few lawyers as possible. It’s a good stressreduction strategy-you know, for my heart.”

“So you show up. When you get to town, do you have to call the local cops?”

“Absolutely. My guess is that one of my colleagues has already spoken with your detective-what’s her name?”

“Reynoso. Carmen Reynoso. Can you find out who?”

“Can I find out, or will I tell you? What’s the question here?”

“Will you tell me?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. So this Detective Reynoso talks to one of you guys at the police department, and you do what?”

“We listen to her story, weigh what she wants to do, and decide whether we want to cooperate. Odds are that her requests are somewhere close to reasonable. We consent, maybe we tag along on the interviews, whatever.”

“How long could all this take?”

“Depends how hot it all seems. Reynoso could get on a plane today if she wanted to. Politics might be tough on her end and that might slow her down, or she could spend a couple of weeks, maybe even longer, getting her ducks in a row before she comes out.”

“And the whole time a murderer is just wandering around doing his thing.”

Sam made a dismissive face. “Perps are like snakes, Alan. They’re always out there, living in holes. They’re always close by, doing their snake thing, whether you see them or not. The ones that end up scaring the shit out of us are the ones that slither across our backyard during a barbecue. Well, this one-this lady’s husband-just slithered right across your yard. But the truth is he was out there for years before you knew about him. And he may be out there for years longer before anybody does anything about him. Fact is, he’s just another sick snake.”

Over my first cup of coffee early that morning, I would probably have been placated by Sam’s assertion that Sterling was just another sick snake. But no longer. If Gibbs was right about Sterling, I knew he wasn’t just another sick snake. He was a cobra with blood from some undetermined number of women dripping from his needlelike fangs.

I reminded myself that Gibbs hadn’t given me permission to talk with Sam about the other women she believed her husband had killed, only about Louise. “Some guys are… more dangerous than others, Sam. Right?” was all I could think of to say.

“You mean this guy? I don’t know. From what little you’ve told me, I’m thinking the murder was a heat-of-passion thing. What are the odds of a repeat? Higher than you and me-or at least me, anyway-but statistically not that high. Contrary to public opinion, most people don’t develop a taste for it. For murder, I mean. What does he do, anyway? For a living?”

I wondered whether I could reveal that information based on the limited release I had from Gibbs. I decided I could. “He’s involved in the production of sporting events for a national cable TV channel.”

“ESPN? Does he do hockey?”

“I’m not going to tell you any more than I’ve told you.”

“Have I heard of him?”

“I doubt it. Maybe if you read credits.” If Sam read credits, I’d eat a hockey puck.

“It’s not like… Barry Melrose or Don Cherry, is it?”

I didn’t know who Barry Melrose was. Don Cherry? I knew I’d heard of him, but I couldn’t have guessed who he was, either. Given that Sam was asking, I assumed that both of them had something to do with hockey, and neither was in the production end of the game.

I said, “Production, not talent.”

“Cherry has a temper. Impulse problems, you know?”

“And that’s unusual among hockey players?” I asked innocently.

“It’s all relative.”

“Don’t worry; it’s not Don Cherry, Sam.”

He sipped water out of a cup with a straw. “She’s going to stop by to see you, too, you know.”

“Who is?”

He burped and lifted his hand to the center of his chest.

I almost screamed for a nurse.

“Reynoso. She won’t make an appointment, or ask you to Starbucks for a latte. But she’s going to show up to talk to you, too.”

“That’s okay. I’ll tell her exactly what I told you. That’s all I have permission to tell her.”

He stuck the tip of his finger so far into his ear canal that I wondered whether he was missing some essential part of his aural anatomy. “That might not satisfy her. Some cops aren’t as easygoing as I am.”

“Now there’s a scary thought.”

“You know more, don’t you? Your client didn’t give you permission to tell me everything, did she?”

“I can’t answer that, Sam. Confidentiality. I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “I may get out of here today. Doc’s coming by later. Says he may let me go home and get into an outpatient rehab program. You know: exercise, diet, stress reduction.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Maybe Adrienne can get you doing some yoga. It’d be great for your stress.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Hockey players do yoga.”

“Now you’re giving me chest pain.”

“Don’t joke about that, Sam. What about work?”

“My captain came by, made reassuring noises about me going back. He says they want to make sure I’m in the best possible shape before I’m back on the job. A million docs will have to clear me. He said I shouldn’t even think about working until after New Year’s.”

“A six-week vacation will do you good. Give you a chance to break in your new healthy lifestyle.”

“Six weeks at home right now is not exactly my idea of a stress-reduction prescription. Sherry’s already making noises about having to roast tofu instead of turkey next week. She’s not going to be happy having me moping around the house until after New Year’s.”

I knew I didn’t want to ask Sam what was going on in his marriage. I sensed he didn’t want me to ask, either. I played along with his denial. I didn’t feel good about it, but that’s what I did.

“You’ll have a great time with Simon, Sam.”

“He’s in school during the week, takes the bus up to the mountains to snowboard with his friends every weekend. Copper Choppers, you know about it? When Grace gets older, you will. Anyway, I don’t think my cardiologist is going to endorse me doing a whole lot of snowboarding this winter.” Sam asked, “Why did she stay with him so long? Your client? She’s known he was a murderer for a while. Why did she stay with him for so long?”

“Fear. Loyalty. Denial. That’s a tough question, Sam. Why do women stay in unhealthy marriages? We both see it all the time.”

He turned away from me and from my question. He moved a tissue box on his bedside tray. “Why is she turning him in now?”

“Another tough question.”

Sam picked that moment to adjust his bed. Once he had it right he said, “If it happens-if I get released from this place-would you maybe be around later to give me a ride home?”

I almost asked, “What about Sherry?” But I didn’t. I said, “Of course.”