The Euthanist (21 page)

Veda was the first to speak. “My name’s Sanskrit.” He wasn’t good at small talk.

I snorted. “I know. It means ‘knowledge.’”

Veda shifted attention back to his father. “Why didn’t you just go after Helena yourself?”

“Because he’d get caught,” I answered softly. To add some sand in the ointment, I said to Leland, “You never talked to him about any of this.”

Tesmer pinched her spork stem like a dart. “This isn’t your issue.”

“It sure as hell is now.”

“She’s got a point there,” said Veda. “Why would you bring someone else into this? What were you thinking?” I wiped my eyes with the napkin. It was fascinating seeing a son claim the moral high ground over his parents. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you don’t like talking about it,” his mother said. “And I don’t blame you. But it’s our job as parents to protect you. That’s how it works.”

“Protect me from who? Helena Mumm? Too late!” He laughed bitterly.

“This was our chance to make good,” said Leland.

“By killing her?”

“Would you really care if she died?” Tesmer asked.

“I would care if you were caught. I’d care that my parents had killed someone,” Veda said. “I don’t want Helena Mumm or Walter Gretsch in my life. I don’t want to think about them. God, it makes me sick. It’s like you’ve brought them into our house.” Some emotion surfaced—maybe fury. I couldn’t identify it. “What was this supposed to do for me
now
? How does this help me
now
?”

Something washed over his face—uncertainty, maybe even embarrassment. He sank in his chair, his expression suddenly vulnerable, like he’d woken up nude in a classroom. At first I didn’t know what had happened. The dog reacted to it before the rest of us, trotting from under the table with a clipped whine.

Veda bolted up from his seat, and his chair tumbled onto the floor. His hands played fig leaves, but they couldn’t hide it. He’d urinated. The khaki fabric around his crotch had soaked through in a wide patch. Neither parent looked surprised. Their son marched out of the room, and Leland simply tossed his napkin onto his dinner plate, signaling the meal had ended. The ammonia stench finished off an already unpalatable meal.

With his son out of earshot, Leland said, “That’s what he does now. He pisses himself. He lives with us because he doesn’t know how to make it on his own. He can’t hold down a job. He can seem like he’s in control, but he’s got triggers. And if those triggers are pulled, he’ll crumble right in front of you.” He pushed his plate away and folded his hands as if he wanted to pray. “You think because he’s the one who got taken, he’s the only one with a say in this. You’re wrong.”

Down the hall, Emmanuel’s collar jangled into what I assume was Veda’s room. It sounded like they were playing together.

Leland got up to walk his plate and spork into the kitchen. Tesmer stayed at the table in case I got the urge to run. From the kitchen he called, “Do you drink beer or wine?”

I looked to Tesmer. “We’re drinking now?”

She tossed her napkin on her own plate, covering her food like a morgue shroud. “We are. So what is it?”

“Beer.”

Leland brought back two beers and a glass of red wine for his wife. Somewhere in the house, a shower hissed. This reminded me of Leland showering off his FlyNap when I was chained to the ranch house bed, pissing myself while he lorded over me. I tried to put it out of my head.

“We’re going to have a drink, and we’re going to talk.” He gestured to both guns in the room. “Unless you do something stupid, we’re not going to shoot you.”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But you’re still in our home, and we could shoot you as a robber fair and square.”

“You think your son would be okay with that?”

Tesmer warned, “He’d get over it.”

I cautiously sipped my beer, sniffing the mist at the bottle’s mouth to detect narcotics. As if I could. I tilted the bottle and dipped my tongue in the suds. Bitter. Too hoppy. I asked Tesmer Moon, “Are you FBI too?”

“I’m an attorney.”

Even the smallest sip of beer made me brave. Not that the alcohol had hit my blood, but the action of pulling lips off the bottle brought back a cowboy cockiness that served me well at the firehouse. I even forgot that I had just been weeping in front of these people minutes ago. “Not corporate. Not with that hair.”

“Prosecutor.”

“So you two form a little assembly line of legal justice. Good for you.” There went that combative urge that my therapist used to warn me about. I swigged. Might as well get drunk at this point.

“It’s worked for us so far,” she said.

With half the beer gone, I draped an arm over the back of the chair. I saw clearly now. A lawyer and a federal agent were taking revenge on the woman who took their son. Kidnapping me as their instrument. Not a crime of passion, but punctiliously staged. Frigid even. If this ever saw a courtroom, a jury might even sympathize with them, but the case would forever tarnish them and destroy their careers, even if they avoided prison.

In an abandoned ranch house on the ass-end of Mount Diablo, Leland Moon might have been able to kill me and dispose of me in secret, but not here in Berkeley. Even if they killed me without a gunshot, one of their neighbors, wheeling out the weekly compost, would catch them hauling me out, feet flopping out of one end of a coiled carpet.

“You honestly think both of you have less to lose than me right now?”

Leland sucked on his own beer, and then leaned toward me. It was as close as our faces had come since we’d grappled in Clayton. For the first time, I noticed the micro-wrinkles around his eyes. “It’s all out in the open. We have our story, you’ve got yours. Gordon Ostrowski was a real scumbag.” Christ, he was trying to bond with me. This was a good sign—he was on the defensive.

“Did you know about him before you lured me to Clayton?”

He admitted, “I only knew you by Kali. I didn’t know your real name until we met, so I didn’t know about your family. It wasn’t too hard to find out afterward. It was a big case.”

Right he was. On morose days I could Google myself and still dig up all sorts of archive articles about the Ostrowski case. Now that Cindy Coates had the correct spelling of my name, I wondered if she’d looked all of it up too. To torture myself, I sometimes found images of Gordon’s smug profile at the defense table, contemplating his 257-year sentence as if deciding which appetizer to order.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry your mother had to go through that.” He sounded sincere.

“The spider package was a cheap shot.”

“That was my idea,” Tesmer admitted. “We were working with a limited window of time. We had to motivate you, and quickly. And we didn’t want anyone else involved. We wanted to keep Holt out of it.”

Leland added, “We have no present plans to go after Jeffrey Holt. That might change, depending on you, but we have no
present
plans.” Now he went back to threatening me by putting the Holt family in jeopardy.

“How did you track me up there? I burned my clothes and wrecked my car. Was there a tracking device on the syringe?”

“When I put you to sleep in Clayton, I put something on your body.” I should have known. I had way too much adrenaline pulsing through me to pass out on my own.

“Where?”

“Your navel ring.”
Fuck me.
I lifted my shirt and examined my stomach. That tiny turquoise nub I’d worn for so long it seemed as much a part of me as a fingernail. Never thought to check it. Sure enough, when I felt the underside, the tiniest of bumps rose from the surface of the ball bearing.

Leland could boast about outsmarting me, but he didn’t seem proud of himself for duping me, nor did he wish to belittle me for having been duped. He brought us back to my stepfather. “Did you ever want something bad to happen to Gordon?”

“Today and every day.”

“Then you can understand where we’re coming from. I’ve been acting as that boy’s father here, not a federal officer. Justice was not served for Helena Mumm. You saw the softer side of Helena when you met her. She’s been worn down by disease. That’s what the parole board saw and that’s why they let her out. She gets all smiley and people think she’s a saint. The reality’s much different. She’s a psychopath, just like Walter. Just like Gordon. She destroyed children, and the families of those children.”

“Their crimes are unimaginably horrible,” I said.

Tesmer said, “You meant that.”

“I do mean that.”

“Then help us.” Tesmer said.

“You can’t be serious.” Empathy was one thing, but they were flip-flopping between bullies and buddies. My head spun.

Morbidly serious, Leland said, “We’re trying to be nice here. We could still shoot you. I could arrest you. You’re still a registered sex offender. There are any number of ways things could go bad. Then there’s Jeffrey Holt—the entire Holt family. What’s going to happen to them? And once Holt goes down, there goes the movement with it. All because of you.”

He’d made those threats before, and I hadn’t numbed to them.

Tesmer cautioned, “Leland, don’t.” Tesmer was going to be the nice one. I wondered if they’d practiced this yin-yang style of coercion. “Let’s just talk for a while.”

I wasn’t eager to help anyone in that family. Threatening me and the Holt network didn’t help their cause. I had stamina, and I hoped the talking would wear them down. “What exactly does my sex offender profile claim I’ve done?”

Leland explained, “You were a babysitter, and you molested a few of your neighbors’ kids. Mostly kissing, but some touching as well.”

“You fucking prick.”

He assured, “That can all go away.”

The sound of running water from the bathroom stopped, which brought back thoughts of Veda. “Your son doesn’t want this.”

“Our son doesn’t know what he wants. You saw him. For God’s sake, he just wet himself. You don’t have kids—you don’t know. Sometimes you have to make decisions without them.”

In my esteem as a nonparent, this was a hot fudge sundae of bullshit. I’d rescued my share of injured children, where their negligent moms and dads excused themselves with, “You don’t have kids, do you?” Gordon Ostrowski had married into my family and told others he was my father. “In my experience, not every parent makes the right choices. Not everyone deserves to be a parent.”

“Let’s try this out a different way,” urged Tesmer, tapping her skills in argument construction. “Kali, why do you do what you do?”

“She means, why do you kill people?” Leland clarified.

I’d already thought through this plenty. I wouldn’t have committed to this work without knowing why I was doing it. “I remove suffering.”

“You’re obviously not a Buddhist,” said Leland. “The Dalai Lama himself would argue that suffering is inevitable. Part of the challenge of life is coping with that suffering.”

Christ on a crumpet. They were going to beat me down with logic.

“Then the D.L. and I have a divergence of opinions. I never said I speak for everyone. Just myself and the people who want to end their suffering.”

“You’re comfortable with the idea that death is inevitable.”

“Of course I am. You’d have to be delusional not to be.”

Tesmer argued, “If we’re going to die anyway, and you’re comfortable ending lives, how much of a stretch is it to extend this to someone who deserves to die, thereby easing the suffering of the families involved?” She was trying to corner me. I could see how she’d make a good attorney.

“It’s the difference between mercy killing and vigilantism. My clients ask for it.”

Leland weighed in. “Do you believe that some people deserve to die?” Like a professional wrestling duo, the Moons played off each other well. In my imagination I outfitted them both with colorful Lucha Libre masks.

“Yes, but I’m not the person to give it to them.”

“What about Gordon Ostrowski?”

I puckered. “Even him.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would make me as awful as him. It’s the difference between compassion and execution. If you can’t see that, you really don’t understand what I do.” I finished my beer and squint-eyed through the bottleneck as if it were a telescope.

Leland stood. “Let me show you something.” He walked toward the kitchen.

Tesmer took a hold of the gun, but didn’t point it at me. “Come on,” she said. This was not a suggestion.

Overly bright lights weren’t kind to the kitchen. The fixtures needed updating and the linoleum blistered. Across the room, a door led to a dark descending staircase.

Leland noted, “It’s rare to have a basement in Berkeley. Not unicorn rare, but pretty uncommon.”

“There’s no way I’m going down to that basement with you.”

Tesmer switched the lights onto a carpeted floor. Not as foreboding as cracked concrete, but not inviting either. “There’s nothing bad down there.” She saw I was afraid. “We’re not monsters. We’re not Helena and Walter.”