The Truth Hurts (18 page)

They’re tolerant.

“Sorry,” I repeat. “I got a little carried away there.”

“Sarcasm beats panic,” Robyn observes sagely.

“Yeah, well, I’ve had some of that, too. When I heard that tape, I thought I was going to run straight off the road. But I’m trying very hard not to panic and to remember that supposedly he isn’t going to hurt anybody as long as I follow his instructions.”

“Which brings us to your assistant—” Robyn says.

“And the DeWeese kids,” Paul adds. “Look, don’t worry about your assistant, Marie. She’s a long way away, and you’ve got her covered about as well as anybody can. And as far as the kids are concerned, that’s out of your hands, too. DeWeese is a big boy—”

“I’ll say he is,” Robyn interjects, waggling her eyebrows.

Paul gives her a disgusted glance. “As I was saying, if anybody has the means to protect his family, DeWeese does.”

“But Paul, now this guy has something to prove!”

“Like what?”

“Like what’s in those E-mails! He threatened certain things—general things—if I didn’t follow his rules. Deb broke one of them. Franklin offended him. Now he’ll have to show me that he means business, or he won’t have any leverage over me.”

“Or,” Paul says, “this may be the end of him.”

“You think he won’t do anything, and it’ll all be over?”

“Sure, it’s possible.”

“Probable,” Robyn corrects.

“I don’t agree,” says another voice, and we all look up to find a motherly-looking woman staring prissily down at us, as if we had spilled our milk. “I agree with Marie that he has to do something now, and I feel convinced that he will do it.” Her glance stops at me. “That is the bad news, Marie. I’m afraid I don’t have any good news. Move over, please, so I can order a cup of coffee.” As she sits down, she sticks out a hand for either one of the cops to shake, and announces, “Dr. Aileen Rasmussen. Who’re you?”

22
Marie

With a draft beer at one hand and a basket of fried clams at the other, seventy-three-year-old Aileen lectures us as if these two cops seated across from her have never handled a homicide case before, and as if I’ve never written about them. “It’s easier to do a profile when there’s a crime scene—”

“We’re kinda glad there isn’t one in this case,” Paul cracks.

Aileen ignores that, pops a clam into her mouth, and gazes coolly at me while she chews and swallows. “When I’m analyzing homicides, I generally start with the closest circle of people around the victim and then work outward. You’re not dead, Marie—”

“Yet,” I murmur, and Robyn kicks me lightly under the table.

“But you’re still the place we should start, first by looking at the people closest to you and then working out in ever-widening circles from there. You probably think it’s some crazy stranger who’s doing this, but I would say that he has a closer connection to you than that.”

“Like somebody I’ve written about?”

Instead of directly answering me, she takes us all in with a glance. “Have the three of you discussed
The Executioners
yet?”

Paul, Robyn, and I exchange glances, trying not to look dumb.

“No.” I speak for all of us. “Should we have?”

“I would think that might seem obvious.”

The cops across the table are behaving suspiciously well in the face of her superior attitude.

When neither speaks up, I ask, “Why, Aileen?”

“Marie, just look at his emphasis on it!”

“But that’s just a—” Paul begins.

“Clue,” she pronounces, leaning forward and saying it as if to a small child. Paul sucks in his cheeks as if he’s holding tightly on to words in his mouth, but I notice a gleam of mischief in his eyes. Oblivious as always to the effect she produces on people around her, Aileen sails on to say, “I believe it holds some kind of key for us, so I went and bought a copy of the book and I’ve been reading it. I also picked up videos of both of the movies that were made from it, and I’ve watched both of them. I don’t suppose you have?”

Three heads shake, but I feel compelled to defend us.

“Aileen, give us a break! Paul and Robyn only just heard about all this a couple of hours ago, and I haven’t exactly had time to watch movies.”

I don’t see that it’s necessary to mention
The Lion King.

It’s Robyn who cuts to the chase, of course. “So what have you figured out?”

“Surely
you’ve read the book?” Aileen counters.
“Some
time?”

This time, three heads nod. The late John D. MacDonald is still one of Florida’s favorite writers, so it’s never remarkable to find three out of three Floridians who’ve read him.

“But I don’t remember much except that somebody was chasing somebody,” Robyn confesses. “I think there was a family that was frightened, wasn’t there?”

“Yes. In the story, there is a terrible man named Max Cady who is clearly a sociopath. He’s the villain. When the story opens, he has been released from prison, where he served time for brutally raping a girl. The hero of the book is a witness against him. Cady wants revenge. So he launches a campaign of terror against the hero’s family, which includes the man, his wife, three children, and a dog— What? Why are you all looking at one another like that?”

“It’s your theory, Robyn!” I say.

“What theory?” the criminologist asks impatiently.

“That the real target is Franklin, not me.”

“It fits the story,” Paul says. “Somebody that DeWeese has put away wants revenge now, and so he’s persecuting DeWeese’s family—”

“Which,” Robyn eagerly breaks in, “sort of includes you, Marie.”

I turn to Aileen. “What do you think about
that ?”

But the damn woman ignores us again. “One of Cady’s first acts against them is to kill their dog. It was an Irish setter, I believe. Do you have a dog, Marie?”

“No!” I feel shocked and chilled at the thought of this. I’d completely forgotten that part of the book. “Neither does Deborah. And Franklin’s children don’t either.”

A small frown appears on the criminologist’s forehead. God forbid she should be wrong. “Well, the dog itself may not be an exact parallel, then. But I think what’s important is that the man who is after you may commit some kind of act that is a kind of equivalent to that, by which I mean he may do something vicious and hurtful to show he can, but he won’t kill anybody yet. He seems to move by increments, drawing you in, just as in the book.”

“Okay, but what about Robyn’s theory?” I insist. “Could it be Franklin he’s really after?”

Paul interrupts. “Wait a minute.
Yet ?
What did you mean by ‘yet,’ Doctor?”

Aileen looks over at him. “I read Marie’s correspondent as being capable of murder, although”—the frown deepens—“there’s something finicky about the way he writes to you, Marie, in his use of language, for instance, and his vocabulary. There’s no cursing, no dirty language. He’s actually quite a different kind of person than the villain in MacDonald’s novel. That man was coarse and brutal. This one strikes me as rather old-fashioned. It’s possible that he’s an older man. Alternatively, he may be a young man who’s stuck in a time warp—reads the classics, hates contemporary culture, that kind of thing. He’s a snob. Definitely, a snob. He feels himself to be superior to the run-of-the-mill person.” She glances back at me. “And superior to you, Marie. I think that on the one hand he wants to feed off your fame, but on the other hand, he resents your great success, probably feels you don’t deserve it compared to a man of his vast intelligence and talent.” Her inflection is ironic. “I think our man is well educated. I think he is neat in his personal habits. Very clean, very presentable. Maybe not compulsively hygienic, but a bit on the fastidious side. You might find him wearing a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a tie and well-shined, possibly expensive shoes. If not that, then at least dressed quite neatly. Certainly, history is replete with murderers who could have fit that description, but my point here is that men like that don’t necessarily want to get their own hands dirty. They arrange for clean ‘accidents’ to happen, or even for other people—minions, if you will—to do their killing for them.” She smiles. Her first. “That’s an excellent description of some battlefield generals, actually.”

“That fits the incidents so far,” Robyn points out. “The E-mails, the tape in Marie’s car, the advertising flyer and the birds. It all has a kind of clean and distant feeling about it, now that you mention it.”

“Are you saying,” Paul asks Aileen, “there could be more than one person involved?”

“I’m saying that I see an ambiguity in his letters, as if he’s a man who is capable of murder, but who might not enjoy the mess of it or the feelings he would have afterward. I’ve never run across killer communications quite like these before. I must confess I feel a little baffled by them.”

My jaw drops. Aileen, confessing weakness?

“The one thing I know for sure is that he’s dangerous, Marie. Very dangerous. I suppose—” Her expression clears, as if she’s just figured something out. “I know what it is. I feel as if it’s not your death he’s after, or not
just
your death, it’s something else.”

“Robyn’s theory—”

“No, not Franklin’s death, either.”

“What
then?”

“I don’t know. But I feel there’s something else he wants from you. I think that your murder, or even Franklin’s, may not be the point of all this, no matter how much he claims it is.”

“He wants the book that comes out of this,” Paul reminds her.

“Maybe he does, or maybe that’s just a ruse to keep her too busy and distracted to be able to think straight.”

“It has certainly done that,” I grumble.

“So what
does
he want?” Paul says.

The criminologist produces from her purse a copy of
The Executioners
and slaps it down on the table. “The answer is in here, I feel sure. The obvious one would be revenge.”

“Marie?” Robyn prods me. “Who’s that pissed at you?”

My answer is to hand her a copy I have prepared of a list of the killers I have known, interviewed, written about, and rejected, as well as the names of their kin.

“My, my,” she says, perusing it. “A regular hall of fame of murderers. You do keep the most interesting company, Marie.”

“Apparently,” I say, sweetly. “I’m here with you guys, aren’t I? ”

Paul laughs, then points to the page. “Anybody on this list fit the description you just heard?”

I turn the paper back around so I can go down the list again, and as I do, I try to picture everybody on it. “No, I’m sorry, not really.”

The criminologist places a hand over the paper, covering it, and I look up at her. “We should start closer to home, Marie. Remember, I said that in an investigation we start with the ‘victim’ and the circle of people closest to her. Lovers. Friends. Tell us about your family, Marie.”

“Family?”

“Yes.” She’s sarcastic in the face of my foggy response. “You’ve heard the term before? Mother, father, children?”

I stare off into the distance; the riverbanks disappear; an indistinct green landscape appears to my mind’s eye. Reluctantly, I say, “All right. I’ll tell you what I know about them,” and then I do. For the pitifully few minutes that it takes to tell, I have to endure the surprise and sympathy in the cops’ eyes. Even Aileen looks nonplussed. I feel increasingly exposed, coerced to reveal private and painful things I never willingly tell anybody, and I hate “Paulie Barnes” for forcing it out of me.

“I don’t see what any of that has to do with it,” I tell them. “I wish I knew what he really wants from me.”

The cops exchange glances, looking a little embarrassed. We know what he wants, those looks seem to say. Regardless of what your fancy-schmancy criminologist thinks. He wants
you,
Marie.

Paul makes a stab at lightening the atmosphere. “I’ve heard of people who would kill to get published, but this is ridiculous.”

We all laugh, but it’s a hollow sound.

“Marie,” Robyn suddenly blurts. “Who inherits?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“From you, if you die. Who gets it?”

“Oh, my cousin, Nathan Montgomery. He’s like a brother to me. He’ll get everything I inherited from my parents after my aunt and uncle had them declared officially dead, and he’ll get at least some of my royalties. The rest of it goes to other friends and some charities. But Nathan gets the bulk of mine, and vice versa, unless one of us gets married, or has kids.” I see where she’s heading with this, and say, simply, “Oh, please. No way.”

“How should I talk to Paulie Barnes?” I ask my experts, finally.

“I don’t think it matters,” Aileen says, astonishing me.

“Don’t I have to worry about offending him?”

“Not if it’s really something else he’s after.”

“But we don’t know that—”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Paul says, dismissing the criminologist with a glance. “Since the bastard’s already sitting there at a computer, tell him he should go to the Web and pull up the site for the state prison up at Starke. Tell him he can see a video of a cell on death row up there, a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree video scan of the cell. Might be a good thing for him to think about. And while he’s thinking, you could suggest that he look up Florida State Criminal Statute 836.10.”

“That’s the same one Franklin talked about. What is it?”

“Oh, yeah.” Robyn smiles wickedly, and runs her tongue over her upper lip, as if she’s licking off something tasty.

“ ‘Written threats to kill or do bodily injury,’ ” Paul recites. “Which he’s already guilty of. It’s a second-degree felony punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. If he’s an habitual offender, he can get up to thirty years, with no possibility of parole for ten years. But if he’s a three-time offender or a violent career criminal, it’s a mandatory minimum of thirty years.”

“And this is without even touching you,” Robyn points out.

“I don’t approve of mandatory minimums,” I murmur, on principle.

“He won’t, either,” Robyn says, sarcastically.

“He might like to know about our sexual predator laws, too,” Paul says then, in the false, chirpy tone of voice of a game show host. “How about 00-179, Robyn, you think he’d like that one?”

“Oh, yes, Paul! Why, that’s certainly one of
my
favorites.”

Paul explains, “It provides in certain cases for consecutive sentences for murder and sexual battery, instead of concurrent sentences.”

“What kind of certain cases?” I ask.

He looks suddenly less willing to explain things to me. “Well—”

Robyn gets it over with. “In cases where there’s more than one incidence of murder and sexual battery, Marie.”

“Oh. Like, if he attacked Deborah and then later, me?”

“Yes,” she says. “Like that.”

“Well,” I say, taking a deep breath. “These things are good to know, I guess.”

“He
needs to know them, Marie,” Paul says, turning serious. “He’s got to know that if he wants us to take him seriously, we’ll do that, all right, as seriously as life in prison or, worst case, the death penalty.”

I turn to Aileen. I don’t like her, but she has earned my respect as a professional. “What do you think?”

“I told you. Say anything you want to him.”

Across the table, Robyn is shaking her head.

“You never said what you think of Robyn’s idea that this guy is really after Franklin,” I push Aileen.

“That’s ridiculous,” she pronounces, including all of us in one haughty glance. “His interest in you could not possibly be more obvious. His goal was to drive Franklin away from you, so that he could have you all to himself, although for what exact purpose we do not yet know.”

“I think we do,” Paul says, flatly.

Since none of us wants to talk about those crimes against me that might earn Paulie Barnes the electric chair, we pay up and leave. Aileen leaves first, in an officious bustle of noise and movement suggesting how busy and important she is and how many other things she has to do today.