She's Not There (25 page)

“But he didn't kill tennis players.”

“No. Only male prostitutes, prostitution being a victimless crime and all that horseshit. Then there was another guy went around killing dogs. He'd follow some guy home who was walking a dog, stalk them for a few days, and then kill the dog when he was tied up in the yard. We found a pattern. Dogs belonged to middle-aged men. Turns out the father killed
his
dog when he was a kid, and so he snapped one day and started getting even.”

“Always goes back to child abuse, doesn't it?”

“Always. Kids who are hurt, they're not only psychologically damaged; that's the minor part. They've been repeatedly concussed. Their actual brains are damaged. Seriously. The dog man's father killed the boy's dog—beat him the same way he'd beat the kid up. The kid survived the beatings even if the dog didn't, but then look what happened.”

We walked on.

Even law enforcers can't discuss injured children for long. And lawyers who defend people who maim and kill children usually do it once and swear to God they'll never do it again. And they keep their promises.

“Thing is, Poppy, have you ever documented death by some infernal racket?”

“Not me. Maybe someone else. Called my assistant after I left Esther's this morning. She'll find out.”

“So if it turns out to be possible, what do you think happened?”

“If it's possible, someone re-created the well.”

He sighed. “I don't know of a sound studio here on the Block, that's for damn sure.”

“Maybe the guy is gone. That's what Willa said to me. She thinks he's gone.”

“What's that got to do with the price of rice? Someone's still going to have to find him.”

“I know.”

“Feet getting cold, Poppy?”

“I don't know.”

“Ever been close to a crime? Someone you knew?”

“No.”

“It gives you cold feet. The way it did your friend Joe. He's close to all this because this is his home.”

“So that's the problem I'm having here, Fitzy?”

“Yes. It'll pass.”

We headed back. I kept walking after he left me. We'd said all we could to each other. Now, we both needed to be by ourselves to think. I took one of the greenways, extensive trails like in England, maintained by volunteers, carved out of the bayberry bushes blanketing everything. Joe had said to me my first day, as we drove from the airstrip to his cottage, “At one time, the island didn't need all these trails you're seeing. You could just walk through the meadow grasses wherever you wanted to. But once the islanders stopped raising grazing animals, we became completely covered over with these bushes. Can't really see the contours of the land anymore.”

“It's still beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

Grazing animals. Maybe cows did have bells around their necks at one time, in case they got past their fences. Or Esther could just have been wrong about that. I kept walking, heading in the general direction of Joe's cottage. Perhaps I'd come upon a vegetable cellar in a hillside. Joe had showed me the remains of one not far away. But I didn't find anything. All I found were more trails, plus one fabulous view after the other—blue sky, bluer sea, soft gray-green bayberry. And as Esther said, even coming from a cellar, people would hear cowbells from one end of the island to the other.

I wandered most of the morning. Wanted to be sure Delby had the time she'd need. I'd told her on the phone, “Delby, I need some information on a case that happened around fifty years ago, give or take ten. Twenty, I'm not sure. It happened in Rhode Island, in Newport. I don't think it's on any official books because the perps were juveniles and they never went to trial. But I have their names. They summered in Newport, but that doesn't mean they lived year-round in Rhode Island. Doubtful, actually.”

I gave her the name of the family.

“What did they do?”

“They tortured a little boy. Three teenage girls.”

“I'll send you what I find.”

Usually, she'd ask for a little more information. But where children came in, she didn't tend to ask, but rather suggested what someone should do to the perps. As she'd done this morning before she hung up.

“Find them, Poppy. Then put those three girls in the back of one of those trucks where they compact garbage.”

“They'd be little old ladies by now.”

“Same punishment holds.”

For the moment, I let her think I was considering solving a fifty-year-old crime. She didn't blink; it's something I'd done before. Recently, I threatened a governor—if he didn't grant a condemned killer a reprieve so I could reopen the investigation, I'd reopen it anyway, even after he signed the death warrant, after the state had executed her, didn't matter.

After speaking to Delby, I'd called this shrink friend of mine who is the best psychological profiler in the business. He's an academic. He won't work for us. He's also a high roller. The FBI would not approve. I met him in England at a conference a few years ago. We had this thing going for a while. He took me to meet his mother. The family homestead was not unlike Buckingham Palace, only with more land. Half of England, it seemed to me. His mother told me I was the only woman her son had ever brought home. “You must be quite special in addition to being beautiful,” she'd said. I thanked her. She also told me her son was the last of the male line. “The very last,” she'd said sadly. Then she took me to a room with a safe. She opened it and took out “a bit of the family jewelry” and laid it out on a desk. It was a large desk, and the jewelry display covered it. The rest was in London, in a vault. It would all be mine if I married her son.

“I'm not being obtuse, Miss Rice,” she said. “I just want you to know what such a marriage would mean for you.”

And then we left the room and joined her son, who had spent a half hour making sure to inquire after each of the servants and staff, since he hadn't been home in five years.

There was this emerald ring.…

My rich ennobled shrink picked up the phone. Good. He wasn't in Vegas. When he was in Vegas, he turned off his voice mail. He said he could hear the messages as they came in. In his head. He couldn't have this happen while he was sitting at a hundred-dollar blackjack table counting cards; he would lose track of how many kings, queens, and jacks were out. I told him he needed a shrink. He said that if he didn't live to excess, what would be the point to living at all? I thought back on his mother's excessive jewelry collection.

Now I said, “I'm so glad you're in.”

He laughed. “As soon as I heard the first note of your voice, Poppy, I was glad I was in too. Tell me, dear angel, how is your lovely head and your perfect ankle?”

“All healed, thanks.”

“Come and have a tryst with me then, seeing as how charmed you are that I'm in.”

“It'll have to wait. Listen, I need you.”

“And I need you.”

Best to ignore him a lot of the time. “Listen, this is a case you're going to identify with—you can connect it to the dreadful visceral assault created in a cavern packed with slot machines all paying off at the same time.”

Incredibly, he said, “I'm all ears.”

First I spoke of events that trigger a person to do something terrible. A person who has never been known to look at anyone cross-eyed and then turns around and kills in cold blood. He said, “We both know, of course, the commonality here and that its source lies in trauma to that person as a child.”

“Yes.” He and I knew that, as did Fitzy.

“We are making enormous strides in this area, I am relieved and happy to say. We used to think that a deliberate injury to a child created a tiny cancerlike cell—this is metaphor, Poppy—that remained benign until some set of circumstances occurred, causing it to grow and split and wildly multiply, pushing the cells of rationality out of its way. We no longer speak metaphorically. Now we know that when a part of the brain receives physical damage during the time the victim is a young child—irreparable damage when it comes to the brain—that child will behave abnormally. Sometimes in small ways—hyperactivity—and sometimes in serious ways—a child who is unable to learn to read or to play with other children, say. When that child reaches adulthood, the injury can manifest itself in many new ways, also abnormal, but not terribly unusual—reclusive living, alcoholism, various destructive phobias. But once in a great while, we do see the development of psychopathy. We see the serial killer.”

“We know all that
now
?”

“Of course, we've known it a long while. We're only just now beginning to say it aloud. Not so politically incorrect a notion today as, perhaps, ten years ago. And we do need money from the government, after all. We must go slowly.”

“We execute people whose brains have been damaged when they were children. Damaged by parents who get off scot-free. We
can't
go slowly.”

“Not
we
, you. I'm a British citizen. We don't execute anyone.”

“Forgot. You know, you're losing your accent.”

He laughed. Then he said, “When do we get to the part about how this conversation is connected to slot machines?”

I described the connection, telling him the story of the three sisters and what they'd done to the little boy. Even though I couldn't see him, I could tell he never batted an eyelash. The more farfetched a crime, the more intrigued he'd be. So when I was finished, he immediately mused. “Overweight girls coming together, walking together, near this man damaged as a child.… Maybe one of them taunted him. Or maybe none of them did anything at all. He could still have been triggered, just by their mere physical presence in his life. In his ongoing daily life, I'd have to say.”

I came right out with what I'd wondered, what I'd so tentatively suggested to Esther. “The thing is, would he take it upon himself to re-create what was done to him and do it to these girls?”

“Obviously, he has.”

Good. This shrink never had the need to censor discussion of possibilities, no matter how farfetched, no worry as to a supervisor thinking he'd gone off the deep end.

I said, “Not in a well, though. There are no wells here.”

“It needn't be a well. It could be a basement, no?”

“But ringing bells?”

“No. Not from your description of the corpses. Torture through sound. But it would take more than bells to create what must have been a horrible death. A noise far worse. Something more high tech, diabolical as that sounds. But, of course, that's outside my line of expertise. Once I know exactly what went on—what measures the killer took—then I can tell you who to look for. Who that child grew up to be.”

There was no evidence of anything high tech on Block Island that I'd seen. “So you have never heard of a death caused by relentless, overwhelming sound?”

“No, I haven't. You must ask your friends in Washington if they have.”

“I am.”

“I detect a tentative note in your voice.”

“What if they say no?”

“Then your work is that much harder, isn't it? I have never known you to shirk hard work, my darling. But if you're not feeling up to the challenge, go back to your neurologist, make sure that head of yours is all right. After all, you were coshed twice in a very short space of time. An adult's skull can take much more than a child's. All the same, I do wish—”

I interrupted and told my shrink friend how much I appreciated him, always taking me so seriously, his unquestioning respect, his comfort, his advice.

“Your reputation precedes you. Everyone takes you seriously, Poppy.”

I had to admit to myself that if I told Joe this story, he would have choked on it.

Then I said, “I really like these girls. They're wonderful.”

“Of course they are. Why wouldn't they be?”

“I just don't understand why they're here. Why they came to begin with. You can lose weight at your neighborhood gym.”

“Your neighborhood gym would require that you wear minimal clothing. Why should you expect that these girls would put themselves in such a humiliating position? No one is interested in making fools of themselves.”

Oh. “I like to think I'm sensitive. I guess I'm not.”

“You are, darling, you are. Sometimes we just can't see the forest for the trees. Overweight teenage girls are outcasts. But at such a camp as you describe, they're not. Simple. Comfort in numbers and all that, so off they went.”

I said to him. “You're never skeptical, are you? I do appreciate that.”

“Ah, if you only appreciated my romantic side as much as you do my professional one.”

“I do appreciate it.”

“But not enough, Poppy, not enough.”

True.

“Poppy?”

“What?”

“How long between the deaths of the two girls?”

“Three days.”

I had to wait a moment for him to respond. Very unusual for him to have to take any time to think. He never needed to. Fear is what gave him pause. He said, “That is treacherous, then. A serial killer will leave quite a length of time between the initial victims. He'll actually feel a kind of remorse after the first, though the remorse is mostly in the form of self-pity, as in
Why me, God?
Months might go by while he re-creates the killing in his mind, and only then does he begin to understand that he did it because he received so much pleasure. And only then and under the right circumstances will he do it again. After the second victim, he's hooked. The space diminishes with each subsequent murder thereafter. A serial killer may eventually come to kill more than one victim in a single day, but that only happens—if he remains unhampered—after two or three years.

“But, Poppy, this serial killer—the little boy in your newspaper articles—is unorthodox, because he is on a
mission
. He is not receiving pleasure, only eliminating the danger to him that he perceives. I would wager this is not a sexually motivated crime although there is a sexuality inherent in most of the work of those who torture. He has not raped the girls, so he is acting on something far outside of rage. He has an overpowering need simply to wipe out the enemy before the enemy wipes him out. He only has the summer to kill them all. Most serial killers might be psychotic, but they're never delusional or they'd be caught far more easily. They're never reckless, either. Serial killers take great pains to be sure to hide their victims so they're never found. They destroy them if necessary. Cut them into small pieces and see that the pieces are properly disposed. Or eat them, if they really want to be sure. At the same time, serial killers, though aggressive with their victims, will not fight back once you corner them. They elude, but they don't go after those who seek them. They have no interest in revenge. When confronted, they become quite meek. They're intelligent, they know when the jig is up, they don't fight it. Your man, though,
is
reckless. He is in a hurry. He would like to hide the bodies efficiently, but he's in too much of a hurry to take the time. He is suffering from a severe psychotic paranoia. Your man is entirely unpredictable here.