Dreams in the Key of Blue (38 page)

“Any point in hanging around?” Jaworski asked. “They won’t let us near her until they finish with her.”

Jacobs glanced at her watch. “I’m gonna hang around a few minutes.”

I gazed into the courtyard. Visibility was near zero in the fog. The indistinct light from a lantern glowed deep in the park, and the muffled sound of voices drifted through the thick, damp air.

“Sounds like Dorman flipped her shit,” Newman said. “She’s sitting in the dark at McLean’s kitchen table drawing pictures.”

All that remained was for Lily to kill me and run. Instead, she returned to the trailer park.

“Where’s Katrina Martin?” I asked.

Newman’s radio continued to fill the night with static and distorted voices. “Dorman’s not responding,” Newman said. “She put her face in what she’s drawing and covered her head with her arms. Jasper wants Mental Health out here.”

The trooper looked up from his radio. “Martin’s not in the park,” he said. “When I arrived, they’d gotten the residents out of there. Feds are putting em up at the Breakwater Motel. No way to know how long this will go on. That lantern you see in there is in front of McLean’s trailer.”

“Is Dorman armed?”

“There’s a gun on the table, but they didn’t ask for an assault team.”

When Lily was young, Ellie’s home was a refuge, a place to retreat from horror. She’d been functioning for years, albeit psychopathically. What terror could trip her now?

The answer to my question sent a chill from the base of my neck across my shoulders. Lily Dorman feared nothing. She had wealth, cunning, and power. She had ripped the doors from her closets and throttled the gnarled, green-eyed trolls that terrified all children in the night.

I turned to Jaworski. “You’re right, Herb. We won’t get near her. Let’s head back.”

“Yo, Doc,” Jacobs said. “What’s with the Nash broad? She don’t like heads? I thought Squires was weird. Nash has all these fucking mirrors to help with her cheese flow.”

“Chi,” I said.

“Whatever. We still haven’t found the slugs from Squires’s gun.”

“The shattered mirror at the foot of her bed,” I said.

Jacobs shook her head. “That one was Nash’s forty-four. Same as we found in the hall from when she tried to blow you away. We’ll keep looking.”

The squat cop turned her attention to Newman. Jaworski and I retraced our path to the cruiser. I tried to focus my attention on Nash’s broken mirror. I could not concentrate.

We were twenty yards from where Jacobs and Newman continued their banter, punctuated by the crackle and static from the trooper’s radio. Leaves rustled to my left. A small animal, I thought, gazing through the trees, watching the lantern flicker in front of Ellie’s trailer. Then a shadow passed between me and the light.

“Herb, somebody’s out there,” I said.

He glanced into the woods. “Probably one of the officers.”

No, I thought. The cops were in the courtyard—not concealed in the forest.

A twig snapped and I gazed again into the darkness. Fog licked around my ankles, the same heavy mist that drifted among the pines. All sound was muffled except the cracks and snaps of someone walking slowly through the woods.

The unsettling feeling that I was being watched washed over me. “Can you check on private flights out of the jetport?” I asked as we slipped into the car.

“The manager won’t be there this time of night,” he said. “I can check with air traffic control. What are you thinking?”

“Curiosity,” I said. “I wonder if Dorman planned to leave tonight.”

Jaworski flipped open his cell phone, called information, then punched in a new set of numbers. He explained who he was and offered his law enforcement identification number.

I continued to stare into the foggy night, through the trees, at the lantern’s dim glow. Again, a shadow passed between me and the light.

“MI has two private jets out there,” Jaworski said. “One is scheduled for a two
A.M
. departure. The pilot filed a flight plan for Miami.”

I sighed deeply. “Might be best if airport security put a hold on the plane and the pilots.”

Jaworski talked as I drifted into the place between consciousness and sleep. I heard the engine start, felt the cruiser’s motion, and watched the crazy collection of images that caromed through my mind.

Spinning mirrors, oscillating lights, a soundtrack of manic, metallic laughter, and explosions from a computercontrolled Magnum handgun.

Lily planned to run tonight.

Layers of time slipped away and I smelled the fragrance of rugosa roses drifting on summer air.

In the late sixties, beyond the Provincetown dunes, Katrina Martin danced to the ocean’s edge and stared at the dark sky as water washed over her feet. From high on the dunes, the scent of the wild roses carried on the breeze. As if struck with a sudden insight, Katrina ran to where I sat.

“I want to be an actress.”

She was stoned—a laughing, frightening dervish who inhabited a chemically enhanced universe, and who wanted to occupy a permanent place in my life.

I patted the sand and asked her to sit.

The training I had gained on long weekends spent as an aide in a Boston mental hospital emergency room had taught me the patience that was necessary to work with drug cases. Most of the E.R. walk-ins were bad trips; they bought LSD laced with amphetamines, they ingested too much of their drug of choice, or they were so unstable that they should not have eaten anything stronger than a Fenway Park hot dog. Katrina’s pharmaceutical travels
were alive with an ebullience and a feverish imbalance that were both seductive and startling.

“There’s no point in praying to an empty sky,” she said.

She curled into the fetal position and wrapped her arms around my waist. Her voice faded to a whisper and she slept.

I looked down at her long blond hair, matted from an earlier swim, gleaming with grains of sand that sparkled in the starlight. I brushed away sand from her eyebrows, her forehead, her ear, my fingers lingering on the soft skin of her neck. She was the most beautiful woman I’d known, the most fragile and, I felt, the most dangerous.

“Later, when I don’t know you anymore, I will rewrite your lines,” she said.

She rewrote all the players lines, altered her daughter’s reality, cast me as the father of her child.

“There really isn’t anything real,” Katrina said, her mouth a tight, serious line, her eyes luminous with mischief.

Lily Dorman was left to define her own reality.

As we approached the turn onto the causeway to Ragged Harbor, Jaworski responded to a radio call. I listened as his dispatcher told him that Detective Jasper and the federal agents had Lily Dorman in custody and would transport her to the P.D. for processing.

“She making any sense?” Jaworski asked.

“Negative, Chief. Jasper doesn’t seem to know whether Dorman can’t talk or won’t talk, but she hasn’t said a word.”

Jaworski replaced the microphone. “What do you think?”

“Something about this is fucked up,” I said.

JAWORSKI AND I WAITED IN HIS OFFICE. DICKIE STEVENS
brought a pot of coffee and joined us.

“That ain’t Maxwell House,” the chief said.

Stevens glanced at me. “It’s some stuff the doc gave me.”

Jaworski grimaced. “Jesus.”

“No, Chief. Honest. This stuff is good.”

“Looks like something Public Works uses to pave the streets. Probably tastes like it, too.”

“We’ve been drinking it downstairs,” Stevens protested.

“That’s why you’re downstairs.”

“Herb, you drink it black, right?” I said.

“Yeah, black, but light passes through it. I’ve been happy with my coffee for fifty years. Never got heartburn from it. Not once. Now you want to feed me that shit.”

As Stevens argued with his chief, I drifted.

“Why do I sense heartburn in my immediate future?”
I
asked.

Kai Lin reached into the bag. “Hot,” she said, holding up one jar, then lifting a second. “Mild.”

“There are some Tums in there, too,” Sara said. “Amanda bought them, but I’m sure she’ll share.”

“Thinkers are prone to acid indigestion,” I muttered, echoing the group’s description of Amanda.

“You stay out of this,” Jaworski snapped, and continued arguing coffee with his corporal.

“This is for you,” Amanda said, handing me a narrow white box.

A carved ivory letter opener.

Scrimshaw, Jaycie said. Then she asked Amanda to explain the etching on it.

Jaycie rubbed her wet hair with a bath towel. “We nearly got wrecked driving up here. Some idiot coming down the hill wanted the whole road.”

Lily Dorman.

Jaworski’s phone rang. He grabbed it, listened, muttered a few words, and hung up.

“Jasper’s got Dorman in interrogation. Sounds like a waste of time; she ain’t talking. Want to take a look?”

I followed the chief through the corridor to the observation room. Two federal agents stood at the glass and watched as Jasper asked questions, and a silent Lily Dorman stared at the ceiling.

“Is your name Lily Dorman?” Jasper asked.

There was no response.

“Is Katrina Martin your mother?”

Dorman was motionless.

“She had no ID,” one of the agents volunteered. “Nothing on her at all.”

“Weapons?” I asked.

The agent nodded. “She never made a move for it.”

I looked at her blond hair, her slender hands, the metal cuffs that gave her wrists a fragile appearance. “This is a waste of time,” I told Jaworski. “Jasper won’t get anything out of her.”

“There’s an emergency mental health counselor on the way,” he said.

I stared at Lily Dorman, struggling to find a resemblance to Katrina—something in the eyes or the shape of her face.

“Could you get her to talk?” Jaworski asked.

“All I have to do is walk through that door.”

“Detective Jasper doesn’t want to be disturbed,” the agent said. “No interruptions.”

“Right,” I said. “She’s got momentum going in there.”

The agent glared.

“I’d like to see your face, Lily,” Jasper said.

Slowly, Dorman lowered her gaze and stared at the mirror. Her hair was in disarray, her makeup smeared. She smiled and said, “I have my father’s good mind.”

“Talk about weird,” Jaworski said. “It’s like she knows you’re out here.”

“Fuck it. I’m going home.”

“Lucas, at least it’s over.”

He was right, of course. Eventually I would talk to Lily, in one institution or another. Perhaps then I would learn how her demons drove her to slaughter.

“Night, Herb,” I said, found my way out through the back hall, and stepped into the cold night air.

A BLACK HALO, LIKE A GARLAND OF COAL DUST IN THE
mist, surrounded the illuminated sign. Breakwater Motel.

I stood in the walkway’s shadows and stared into the brightly lit office, where the clerk watched
TV
and a police officer read a newspaper. I looked in the other direction and counted the units.

Ten.

I don’t like long odds, so I placed my shark persuader—a three-foot length of oak used by fisherman to stun large fish thrashing and snapping on the deck—between two vending machines, walked to the office, and stepped inside. The cop glanced up, then quickly returned his attention to the sports section. The clerk was reluctant to pull away from the news account of Lily Dorman’s capture.

“Right with you,” he said.

“Not good enough,” I said, removing the gun from my coat pocket.

“Huh?” he grunted, turning slowly and offering me a clean shot at his chest.

I squeezed off a single round that slammed him from his stool to the floor.

The cop’s newspaper flew into the air, his feet lifted from the floor, and he fumbled with his holstered gun. He was a cartoon character, startled, helplessly flailing. I fired the gun and watched him settle back in the chair.

I circled the desk, stepped over the clerk, typed my mother’s name into the computer, and hit Enter. The screen blinked, then offered the information I wanted: Katrina Martin, Unit 7.