Stranglehold (40 page)

There was a subtle reek to human death that not even cold and disinfectant could subvert—the dark wet mold on a decaying flower, bland meat only just beginning to turn. They stood and looked down at the corpse of Arthur
Danse
and Duggan felt the young woman tremble beside him and thought
,
hell, you still scare people, Arthur. I guess you've just got a knack for it.

He'd read the coroner's report by now and noted the clean black wound that had ended him, Lydia's first shot and a classic—straight through the heart. He imagined her luck and the shattered organ sewn up inside him. Her two other shots would not have done the trick. One had chipped the left side of his pelvic girdle before careening off into the wall a foot above his head. The other had sheared a flap of skin off his cheek and cracked his lower jaw. Knowing Arthur, he would have kept on coming.

Not luck, he thought. Providence. Finally in all of this, the hand of mercy.

It was the broken jaw that was his problem though. Marge Bernhardt had not been able to identify
Danse
through the morgue photos. It was not surprising. The dead, he thought, simply did not look like the living. And the smiling amiable snapshots they'd taken from his home seemed not to correspond to the memory of that dark figure attempting to nail her to a tree in the frozen woods. His only hope now was that despite the facial wound and the pale softening of his features there would be something about the mass of him, the man in his totality, that would jar her into a moment of recognition.

But it wasn't going to happen.

"No," she said. "Or maybe. Oh, God! I can't tell!"

She hardly knew Duggan. Yet she leaned into his arms as though urged by a gust of wind.

He held her gently until the shaking subsided though her body and even her hands were cold and then he asked her to look again.

She shook her head.

"I keep thinking," she said. "What if it's not him? What if he's still
out there
? I know you want to—what do you call it?—close the books on this. But what if it's not him? And then I say it is."

He understood. This was a brave intelligent woman and she needed to be sure. So did he. If he was pretty certain that Arthur
Danse
had lived his double life so completely and successfully that not his wife nor even his parents had ever fully known what he was capable of, if he had escaped even in death, Duggan would just have to live with that.

The woman was right. What if he was out there—trolling the streets in a dark car, some splintered soul mate to Arthur
Danse
who was of him yet not him, searching out the vulnerable under the winter moon.

He pulled up the sheet.

She was right. In the long run
Danse
didn't matter.
Danse
was legion. It was what they had inherited even in this quiet town, and it would never pay to close the books on that, not for a moment.

He led her quietly from the room and closed the door and listened to the tired weight of their footsteps on the concrete floor and imagined all the bodies settling cold into their frozen beds behind him and thought of how many would follow.

The reporter studied the face of the woman in front of her and contrasted that with the photos she'd seen and the news footage covering the woman's arrest and trial. She knew that Lydia
Danse
was just two years older than she was but she looked older by nearly a decade. She had put on weight. She was still quite an attractive woman in the reporter's estimation, but the eyes looked puffy from lack of sleep, the mouth more pinched than in the photos.

The reporter, who had no children of her own but who had talked on the telephone with Andrea Stone at DCYS and the woman's own lawyer and who had listened to her firsthand story for almost an hour now, could fully understand the change.

Over a year later it was still clearly difficult for her to talk about the killings and what had happened to her son. Knowing most of the details of the case beforehand the reporter thought she had guts even to agree to the interview. When he heard what Lydia had to say, she amended the word guts to courage.

Her article was on the subject of why women kill. She was now some three months into researching it. She'd seen good deal of courage. Some madness.

And a lot of desperation.

"So his bullet grazed your lung," she said. "Then passed through your back."

"That's right. They found it in the door behind me. I was lucky because the bullet was the kind with a metal jacket and that meant the exit wound was clean, not as bad as it might have been. I was in the hospital a couple of weeks. Then they transferred me."

"So your lawyer said they were asking for two hundred thousand dollars in bail?"

She nodded.

"And you didn't pay it."

"I was already incredibly in debt on legal fees as it was."

"In court you used Robert's videotaped confessions to contend that you had reason to believe that he was in danger at the time, at that very moment maybe, that you were afraid he'd be molested again, and that you went to the house to protect him."

"Yes."

"And the state asked for first-degree murder. The death penalty. I find that ... just incredible."

Her smile seemed to say,
Believe me, you don't know the half of it
. The reporter had yet to see the slightest sign that Lydia
Danse
was sitting here feeling sorry for herself.
Even though it was death by hanging in this state
. Even her occasional bout with tears had only spoken of sadness and waste and her son's emotional pain.

She thought that was incredible too.

"They didn't get it, though," she said.

"No, thank god. They gave me aggravated life."

The reporter took a breath. It was hard not to be furious—she was furious, what was hard was not to show her fury—at the whole damn justice system.

"I don't get it. Why not self-defense? He shot you first. Forensics proved it. He couldn't have fired
after
you did because he was dead the moment your bullet hit him."

"We couldn't get self-defense because I went to the house with the gun. Because I thought about it long enough to take the gun out of my closet and put it in the car and bring it there. That made me the aggressor. That's the way they saw it. There was even a big deal about my not having a carry permit."

"And the videotape?"

She shrugged. "Either they didn't believe the videotape or they chose to discount it. The jury, not the judge. The judge took it into consideration and that's what got me life. My lawyers and I never could figure it out, to tell the truth. One of the jurors came forward later and said that he believed the tape right from the beginning and another came forward and said he never did. I don't know why the ones who did believe Robert voted the way they did. Straight law and order, I guess. I suppose it was the gun."

"You're aware that Ralph Duggan and the State Police had been investigating a number of serial killings at the time. And that these murders apparently have stopped since?"

She nodded again. "I'm glad they've stopped. But it doesn't really matter in my case, does it? They never proved it was Arthur. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But I don't know that it would have mattered to me in court or would even have been admissible even if they did."

The reporter glanced at the uniformed matron in the corner of the conference room to their left. The matron was making an elaborate show of not overhearing them. Gazing off into space, arms folded in her lap. It was like every prison she'd ever seen. Every sound echoed in there. Every
scrape
of a chair. The matron was hearing all of it.

The reporter felt strangely vulnerable knowing that. "And you haven't been out of prison since, have you?" she said.

"No."

"And you haven't seen Robert?"

"They won't let him visit. The court won't. Not until he's fourteen. If your article can do anything for me maybe it can at least do that. Get them to allow us to at least see each other now and then."

Secretly the reporter doubted that it would. She felt that Lydia
Danse
was still fighting a losing battle with the system. But she wasn't going to say so. This was a woman who had already failed in one appeal for clemency. She couldn't imagine how trapped she must feel. The reporter wasn't going to add to that.

"How many years before you're eligible for parole, Lydia?"

For the first time during the interview her eyes flashed bright with anger.

"Fifteen years," she said.

"Before parole is even possible?"

"Yes. Robert will be twenty-four. A man. I'll have lost the rest of his childhood. All of it."

Her eyes said she'd been cheated in a nasty game that was never of her making and that she knew it. What Lydia
Danse
had been through and was still going through seemed to press in on the reporter like an invisible heavy weight. A kind of push. It was personal.

What would I have done in the same situation?
she thought.
What would any woman have done?

The reporter had seen Robert's tape and knew he was telling the truth about his father. She believed the tape completely.

She thought that Lydia
Danse
had walked through fire and that the fire was still burning.

She felt suddenly ashamed at simply being able to leave this place. At being able to walk free on the outside while this woman whom she suspected was far stronger and braver than she was wasn't free and probably would not be free—not for a very long time. And for being part of a world that had put her here.

Fifteen years
.

She didn't know what to say.

Unless something happened to change things Lydia
Danse
would be a woman approaching old age.

My god.

"How do you ... I don't know how to say this but ... God! How do you live with that? How do you possibly
bear
it?"

She watched Lydia draw herself up in the hard metal chair.

"Robert's with Ruth now," she said, "he's with his grandmother. The very same woman who raised his father. Who broke the law allowing Arthur to stay there in the first place. For some insane reason the courts decided Arthur forced that on her and would rather give custody to her than to my sister Barbara, basically because Barbara's single.

We're fighting that and I don't like it one damn bit but that's not the point. The important thing is that the men in that family are all dead. That nobody's pointing guns at anybody anymore. The important thing is that I know Robert isn't being abused by his father anymore, that he's safe. That's the one good thing I can see coming out of ... all of this. If it weren't for that I'd probably go crazy. But I have that much, anyway. He's safe."

Even the matron was looking at her openly now in what appeared to be a kind of stony empathy.

"I have that much," she said.

The reporter found that she could think of nothing more to say.

She's just fallen through the cracks
, she thought. Another one the system's failed to protect. This one had fallen deeper and harder than any she'd met—yet look at her, she thought. She's refusing to be buried by it all. She wants out, yes. Badly. Of course she does. Yet something in her clearly remained
uncircumscribed
by dull gray walls and bars and empty looks and all the monotony of her days. Something which stood outside these walls, in the mind and body of her son—and grew there, with her and without her.