Rabid (65 page)

“Not even blood from a steak?”

“The knives appeared to be brand new.”

“Well, let’s stop a minute.” Heath walked over to the drawing of the kitchen. “If Beverly Sloan was bleeding from her hand here,” he took a red permanent marker out of his pocket and drew red spots on the countertop while the prosecution attorneys muttered about him messing up their drawing, “and Conroy Sloan had her blood on his hand and on the knife, and we know that he was standing here when that fine spray of blood hit the cabinets here,” he scribbled red jagged lines on the cabinets, “which is practically just above the drops of Beverly Sloan’s blood.”

“Drops and
droplets
,” the girl said.

“Then Conroy Sloan was standing over her, holding the knife with her blood on it just before he stabbed himself, wasn’t he? So he cut her first, didn’t he?”

The girl blinked her blue, glittering eyelashes. “That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing.”

Bev listened for three more days to the tales of blood and gore and force of the knife (“enough to slice off a chunk off a tough steer steak,” said the gruff medical examiner, and pressed his Texan mustache around his lips, and that the deceased had bruises in various stages of healing on the wrist, arm, and left eye, which was consistent with ongoing abuse) and repetitive analysis over four days by the psychiatrist and the police 9-1-1 operator and yet another forensic technician for the 9-1-1 tape (two minutes of her own coarse voice grabbling, “I think it’s his heart. I think it’s his heart,” and “fifty-one Vita Place, the townhouses by the hospital, number fifty-one, Vita Place,”) and the horror of it filled her mind with scarlet and shining steel until she understood why God hated her, because a gentle and loving God could not gaze upon such atrocity and barbarism (the slitting of wrists, the breaking of arms, the stabbing of
hearts
) without turning away in revulsion from everyone who committed such sins, who was even capable of committing such sin.

When Bev had found those pink, terrible, pink, horrible pink silk panties, her soul had devoured itself, and she had changed into an evil, damned creature. That was it. That was why she was forsaken.

Bev endured when that faded auburn-haired Peggy Anne Strum swore to tell the truth on the Bible and then she sat up there on the stand and lied and lied and lied.

~~~~~

In the church’s library, Dante sat beside Bev in the counseling chair that he used to think of as
Sloan’s
but now was
the other chair
and held Bev’s hands while she sobbed.

The damp tissue in her hand was streaked with pink and black makeup, and he handed her a clean one. She drew in a shuddering breath and pressed the tissue to her mouth. “That horrible woman.”

“The lawyers have to present their story and ask the witnesses questions in ways that their story is supported.”

“But she lied!” Bev’s back bowed.

“Of course she did,” Dante said, feeling like he was humoring an angry child.

“I can’t believe she lied.” Her caramel hair swam on her back, loose.

“Or Sloan may have lied to her.”

“No, Conroy wouldn’t have done that. Conroy wouldn’t have told her
that
.”

The lying bastard might very well have told the other women just that. “So she lied, eh?”

“Conroy would
never
have set a date to marry her, February fourteenth of next year, assuming the divorce was final. He wouldn’t do that!”

“She made it up,” Dante said.

“He was
married
.”

“Yes.”

“To
me
.”

“Yes.”

“That horrible, horrible woman. What kind of a name is Peggy, anyway? And she came to his funeral. And she talked to me.”

“Yes.” He patted her hand.

“
She
was the one.
She
left the underwear in his suitcase. Her butt was huge.”

He chuckled at this, thinking she was insulting the Peggy woman.

Bev whipped around and glared at him over their hands, still twined on the arms of the chairs between them. A streak of mascara delineated a path from the corner of her eye to her hairline. “And she’s testifying
more
tomorrow.”

“Your lawyer will rip her apart. Make her look like a
troia
.”

Bev sniffed and touched her eye with the tissue. “What’s that?”

“A prostitute. Literally, it is a female pig.”

Bev smiled a little, a relief of those grief-stricken muscles. “A sow.”

“It is funny in the Italian.”

“It’s funny.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I suppose. I hate hearing all of that.” Her hand, under his, stretched and reformed a snug grip around his fingers. “I wish I didn’t have to be there. It’s just one thing after another. And as soon as that troika finishes testifying.”

“
Troia
.”

“—
troia
, then Leila Faris starts. I can’t stand this. I can’t
stand
this.” Her delicate fingers trembled like a grasped bird in his hands.

It had been two days since their hypnosis session. He asked, “Have you tried praying in the church yet? To see if anything has changed since I hypnotized you?”

Her head dropped forward one defeated notch. “It didn’t work. I still can’t feel anything.”

He had hoped that the hypnosis would convince her to start feeling whatever it was that she was calling grace again. “It could be subtle at first.”

She wiped her tears on the backs of her hands. “I must have killed Conroy.”

“Bev, if you don’t remember, then you don’t know.”

“I don’t know if I remember.” Tears, tinged with smoky makeup, fell onto her cheeks, and she wiped them on the cuffs of her pink shirt. “All those horrible pictures of the blood and the drops and smears and the knife, and the diagrams of his ribs and his heart and where the knife cut open his heart, I can’t get them out of my head. Sometimes I think I might remember something but then it seems like I’m thinking about what they’re describing.”

The trial was preying on his mind, too. “So you don’t remember.”

She fanned herself with open fingers and tapped her chest, as if she could air-dry the tears that she couldn’t wipe away fast enough. “And Leila Faris testifies next. I don’t know what she’s going to say. She seems to know everything. Leila told me that Conroy was seeing Valerie Lindh, too.”

Dante nearly stood up. “Leila
told you?
You talked to Leila?”

“She knows about all his other women, who they were, how many there were.” Bev dropped the tissue and her fingers crept into her hairline. “She knows about us, too.”

Dante was aghast and yet it all made sense. “Did you say
Leila
told you?”

“I went to Conroy’s lab a few months ago. She was there. I think she knew about us, or figured it out from something I said. She’ll probably tell the jury.”

“Months?” Dante asked. “Two months ago?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

A cramp drove breath out of him. Leila had been dodging him since about then.

Bev touched her eye with the tissue, and the white tissue sopped up pink, lavender, and black as if the color was draining out of her. Soon she would be monochrome, the reverse process of those tinted portraits from his mother’s living room that were now in his sister’s attic, shell-pink lips and cherubic golden skin.

Bev said, “She told the police I was the only one in the apartment. She’s going to take the stand tomorrow and tell them I did it, that I killed Conroy because he was leaving me for her or Peggy or Valerie.”

Dante did not know what to say. “Does your lawyer know about Valerie, too?”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Valerie would just tell more lies, and those horrible lawyers George and Georgina would lie even more.”

“It’s the prosecution’s case. That’s their story. Your attorney will tell your story, after.”

“What story is that? I don’t even know what happened.”

He stroked her hand. “Don’t cry. Don’t despair.”

“I still don’t know what to do with the girls if I go to prison.” She snatched up the tissue and rested her face on it. “It’s all falling apart.
I’m
falling apart.”

“I’ll talk to Leila. I’ll find out what she will say.”

Bev swiveled toward him. The skin under her eyes was greasy with wiped tears. Tears rolled over her lower eye lids and dripped off her soaked lashes. “Please don’t go there.” She dropped the tissue in her lap and touched his arm. “Not you, too.”

“I could find out what she knows, what she’s going to say tomorrow. She owes me a favor.” He missed talking to her about science, and he missed her long, cool, glances over her cigarette from between the falls of her black hair.

“Not you, too.” Bev stumbled out of her chair and Dante shoved himself farther into his chair’s upholstery as Bev’s soft body landed on his knees. “Don’t go.”

Her mouth covered his, lips smoothed by lipstick and breath ripe with whiskey—when had she had time to drink? He grabbed her arms and tried to set her away from him, back and off the chair and his legs and lap, but she whipped her arms around and his hands dislodged and she grabbed his collar, expertly unsnapped it, and unbuttoned him to the waist.

His body had acclimated to her soft lips and skin and breasts pushing on him, and rushing blood roared in his ears.

He had been dying without this.

His hands crawled up her shirt and reached around behind her back, tracing the ridges and creases quilted into her skin.

Scars.

~~~~~

In the lab that night, Leila read through Conroy’s secretive notes, still trying to figure out what his settings had been on that damned gel.

Conroy’s office door was closed.

She had had it with the gossip from Yuri and Joe and all the others. They all sucked.

Their voices leaked into Conroy’s office despite her efforts, and she wanted to scream.

Joe asked, “Did you see LawTV tonight?”

Leila wanted to walk out there and strangle him for such stupid, idle gossip, but she stayed put. The paper in her hand got damp as she crumpled it.

“No. I had gel running,” Yuri said. “What was wrap-up?”

It sounded like they were talking about the basketball tournament instead of their friend’s death. Leila wanted to yell at them, but she didn’t want to talk to them.

“Peggy Strum testified.” Joe sounded casual.

“The department secretary? What for?”

“Sloan was sleeping with her.”

“No. Her? The secretary? She was other woman? But she so...”

“Flighty?” Joe asked.

“Fat! Old!” Yuri’s accent turned shrill.

“I don’t get it either.”