Dreams in the Key of Blue (40 page)

“No one knows who I am,” she said. “By the time they figure it out, it won’t matter.”

I focused intently on Dorman’s eyes.

“The perfect psychopath doesn’t feel anything. Unwieldy, ugly emotion doesn’t enter into the homicide equation. You’re carrying emotional baggage that you can’t dump. The obsession that has driven you is based on an erroneous belief.”

Again, her eyes flicked to the right.

“You have your justification, I guess. Your father fucked you.”

Dorman winced.

“Others with your pathology have their rationales.”

“You are my father.”

“When I’m dead, I can’t acknowledge that, can I? Shit. I’m not going to acknowledge it now. That’s your erroneous belief. Katrina pitied you, so she lied. Harper was your father.”

She hesitated. “Katrina is dead. Tell me that you are my father.”

I shook my head. “Lily, I could hug you and comfort you and pat you on the head and tell you to call me Pop. I won’t. You’re not my daughter. You’re just another fucking killer.”

As her left foot moved forward and she raised the gun, I pushed myself from the hearth and swung the poker.

The cast iron hit her upper arm with a boneshattering crunch. Her gun discharged into the floor, then clattered across the wide pine boards to the wall.

I intended the blow to cripple her, to drop her. Dorman did not go down.

She emitted a deep, guttural, rumbling growl. Lily Dorman’s beast had freed itself.

Her left arm, useless, dangled at her side, but she charged. I swung again, cracking her across the face. Twisting from the blow’s force, she fell headlong into the fire.

I dropped the poker and grabbed the back of her pants, yanking her out of the fireplace and onto the floor. Flames shot from her hair. The room filled with the acrid, curdled-milk smell of burned flesh. I whipped off my sweatshirt and smothered the flames, careful to avoid her singed skin. The facial burns were not life-threatening, but had to be horribly painful.

As I pushed myself up, Dorman’s right hand shot out and grabbed my neck. Her eyes were closed, but the body continued to operate.

Her nails dug into my neck. When I could not disengage her grip, I punched her hard in the face. Dorman’s arm fell to her side.

Breathing heavily, my heart booming, I collapsed onto my back. After a moment, I rolled over, pressed my hand to the floor to push myself to a standing position, and flinched in pain. I’d broken bones in my hand when I hit her. I used my left hand, and twisted to push myself up.

The poker slammed the side of my head, and I crashed down. Blood slithered from below my ear and dripped onto the floor. The room spun like a merry-go-round run wild. I
had to get up, at least to roll over, but I could not coordinate arms and legs.

I heard her move, listened as she inched across the floor. Then I felt her hand on my leg as she pulled herself over me on her way to the wall. She wanted the gun.

I grabbed her leg and tried to hold her. She kicked free from my grasp.

The spinning slowed, and I focused on Dorman. Her eyes were still closed. She was like a wolf caught in a leghold trap, using every bit of its remaining strength to survive, even if that meant gnawing off its leg.

Pain knifed from my shoulder to my side. My head and jaw throbbed. I hurled my weight in the direction that Dorman crawled and landed beside her, inches from her seared face. She groped forward, her right hand sweeping in arcs ahead of her, feeling for the gun. I extended my arm, gripped the pistol, and rolled away.

Dorman gave up her search and lay still.

I sat with my back against the hearth and stared at her motionless form.

“I won’t lose her again,” Katrina had said.

“She never came home,” I muttered as the door exploded open.

Jaworski aimed his gun at Dorman, then looked at me. “Jesus Christ. She alive?”

“Cuff her,” I told him. “Then call an ambulance.”

DICKIE STEVENS LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR OUTSIDE
Room 42 at the regional hospital. As I approached, he lowered his copy of the
Ragged Harbor Review
and said, “How come they never get this shit right? You tell em stuff, you give it to em printed out, and they still get it wrong.”

“Comics are good,” I told him. “Horoscopes aren’t bad.”

He smiled. “The docs get you fixed up?”

“Nothing that a few Band-Aids and ten pounds of adhesive couldn’t repair. The chief around?”

“He and Jasper are with Dorman’s doc at the nursing station.”

I glanced into a darkened Room 42.

“I’ve been sitting here since they put her in there last night,” Stevens said. “She ain’t said a word or made a sound. She ain’t even moved. From what I hear, the docs got her stabilized. She’s in fair condition.”

I nodded and walked down the hall.

Two federal officers huddled with a doctor. Jasper scribbled ferociously on her notepad. Jaworski sat with his hands clasped on his ample stomach and chewed gum.

“That tape holding you together?” the chief asked.

“Pretty much,” I said, bending painfully into a fiberglass chair beside Jasper.

“Three Boston lawyers showed up this morning,” Jaworski said. “Whenever Dorman decides to talk, we won’t hear what she has to say.”

“Who called the lawyers?”

Jaworski shrugged. “She has players all over the country. Who knows? We leaned on Edgar Heath again last night after we brought you here. I’m convinced he’s told us what he knows.”

Jaworski nodded at the two feds. “Their buddies are tracking money and not having much success. They’ve located a couple of million in local accounts, and they’re in court now to freeze all of MI’s real estate holdings, but That’s it.”

“The bottom line, Dr. Frank,” Jasper said, looking up from her notepad, “is that we have a case against Dorman for attempted murder. Her attorneys will point a finger at Janine Baker for the killings, Baker and Norton Weatherly for MI’s money-laundering activities and the missing millions, and probably have a good shot at an insanity defense on the attempted-murder charge.”

“What about her mother?”

“Lucas, she shot and killed a cop and a motel clerk, then beat her mother to death,” Jaworski said. “We have no witnesses, no weapons.”

“She beat Katrina to death,” I repeated dumbly, imagining Lily’s rage and her mother’s terror.

“A heavy, blunt instrument.”

“What about the Magnum she had last night?”

“Different weapon.”

“There is no physical evidence,” I said.

“Nothing,” Jasper said. “We tore apart the Monhegan house, her mother’s trailer, Eleanor McLean’s trailer, the
Mellen and Danforth properties, and the MI facility. When we have secured the remainder of the company’s property holdings, we’ll go through them. The IRS might have some interest, but that’s about it.”

“Let me guess. She programmed the amusement park setup to erase itself.”

Jasper nodded. “The hard drive was blank.”

I ran my good hand through my hair, marveling at Lily Dorman’s throughness. Had she anticipated every possible pitfall?

“None of these assholes is perfect,” I said. “You’re not looking in the right place.”

“Dr. Frank, I’m doing my best to have a civil conversation with you. The FBI’s experts in Quantico have been on this since yesterday. Dorman does not fit any of the profiles of killers who keep souvenirs, trophies, or other records of their exploits.”

“So, if she goes down for attempted murder, with good time she walks in five to seven, disappears with her millions, and doesn’t surface until she decides it’s time to kill again. A good attorney won’t let her go the insanity route. A successful diminished-capacity defense and she walks out of court.”

“We have no evidence,” Jasper said.

I looked at Jaworski. “Give me your nine,” I said.

He sat up in his chair. “What for?”

“I’m gonna go blow Dorman’s brains out. Jasper just told me that’s the only way to close this case.”

“Dr. Frank—”

“Your experts are wrong,” I interrupted. “This was a kid who kept detailed, daily records on her fucking swamp snakes.”

Jasper talked, but I did not hear her. I heard Ellie McLean describe Lily Dorman as a child, emerging from the tidal wetland behind the trailer park.

Vanessa Stripe needs help taking care of the babies. Billy Brown-spot is overweight.

Most students of criminal behavior focus on the violent act, its behavioral precursors, and the offender’s subsequent actions. The organization of personality—the traits, quirks, and idiosyncracies—is ignored because it is considered irrelevant to the act.

“The swamp is where she buried Spike,” Ellie said. “That was her dog. She dragged him down there in a burlap sack, dug the hole all by herself.”

Personality traits transcend behavior. Whether Lily Dorman was in killing mode, painting-a-picture mode, or millionaire mode, she would always be meticulous. Crazy or sane, writing was her self-expression.

“At first I was afraid to walk on the dike,” Lily wrote in her journal, “so I sat in my favorite dry spot, listened to the breeze creep through the bayberry bushes, and wondered why my father, a doctor, after all, did not arrive, fix my mother, and send Harper away.”

When I had walked onto the dike, I had seen the small, weathered cross, fashioned by a child from lattice slats and roofing nails and hammered into the ground to mark the spot where she had buried her dog.

I covered my face with my left hand.

“You okay?” Jaworski asked.

“Herb, do you have to hang around here?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“Let’s take a ride,” I said.

Jasper stood. “Dr. Frank, the special agents asked that you not leave until they’ve spoken with you.”

I held up my hand. “I know. They have file folders to fill. You people chased after Markham until he was dead. Now that you’re finally looking at the real killer, you don’t have a fucking case. They can wait while I finish their job for them.”

AS WE DROVE TO THE HIGHWAY, JAWORSKI SAID, “YOU
plan to tell me where we’re going?”

“Bayberry. Are the feds still there?”

“They cleared out this morning.”

“Does that miracle trunk of yours with the shotgun and crowbar also contain a shovel?”

“Couple of ’em.”

“I know that you don’t climb fences. What about digging holes?”

“How deep?”

“Not as deep as you’d bury a dog.”

“I can handle that.”

I gazed at the crisp, clear sky, the blue that artists can only dream of achieving on canvas.

“She sat at this table and drew pictures,” Ellie McLean told me. “Lily was good at drawing. She kind of wrapped her arm around her pictures while she worked on them, like she was protecting them.”

“You think she took souvenirs?” Jaworski asked.

“You read her journal… ‘The Story of Lily.’”

Jaworski waited.

“She labeled it ‘Part One.’ Lily Dorman was a work in progress.”

“So, there’s more parts.”

“Illustrated,” I said.

Road crews had cleared the fallen trees from the Bayberry Park entrance. Jaworski drove to the swamp’s edge and stopped the cruiser.

“You get out okay?”

I nodded, shoved open the door, grasped the overhead handle, and pulled myself up. As Jaworski retrieved a shovel, Ellie McLean emerged from her trailer.

“You don’t look too good,” she said.

“How are you doing?”

“The FBI people ain’t been gone long. They brought me home this morning. Nice folks. They bought breakfast for me at Denny’s. He ain’t gonna dig up bodies, is he?”

“Nothing like that.”

“What happened to Katrina? They wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“She’s dead, Ellie.”

“I’m all set,” Jaworski said, walking to the dike.

“Lily killed her mother?” I nodded.

“Jesus, Lord,” she said, crossed herself, and gazed at the vacant trailer. “I’ll keep her place tidy. I don’t know why. I feel like I should.”

I left Ellie standing in the courtyard and followed Jaworski.

“Where am I going?” he asked.

“Fifty yards, straight ahead,” I said. “There’s a small wooden cross.”