Trespass (25 page)

Chapter 57

H
ungry, invisible hands are moving over my body, clutching at me. I’m in the center of a tangle of grasping fingers, hot breath, and pressing bodies. It’s terrifying. I never would have thought these episodes could get any worse. I’m in bed once more, frozen in place, as immobile as a mosquito on flypaper. I moan as loudly as I can in an effort to waken. I can’t see Clyde, but I hear him softly squawking, aware that I’m troubled. The touching becomes intimate. I feel like I won’t survive.

This siege seems to last forever but ends suddenly when Clyde begins a loud screeching.

I leapt from my bed, relieved to have the hideous episode end. I hadn’t taken a sleeping pill because after everything that had happened tonight, I felt like I was too exhausted to have a sleep-paralysis event. I should have known better; my body felt cheated of a night of sexual bliss with Kane, despite my brain insisting that I had fled from his apartment just in time. It ate at me that my body still wanted him, a man who might be responsible for Norman’s death. My trip to the emergency room to have my blood tested hadn’t relieved my feelings of guilt for doing such a foolish thing. Maybe I
had
been drugged.

Now that the effects of the wine had worn off, I was having a hard time believing I had come so close to sleeping with a stranger. I needed to see Lisa. This horrible paralysis episode had stirred up a memory I’ve been avoiding. I had been dishonest with my therapist and with myself; it was time to admit what really happened all those years ago and face up to how it’s screwed up my life.

Chapter 58

R
ichard was asleep on the couch when TJ arrived home. He stirred when she lay down next to him, snuggling in at his side. He kissed her briefly and sat up, pulling her with him. “What time is it?”

“About twelve, I think.”

He looked in her eyes. “You’re spending an awful lot of time on this case. I hope you’re getting paid enough.”

“Yeah. Talked to her about it last week. Since we think Teschler’s murder is probably related to the others, she wants me to work whatever angle is necessary. Money isn’t a problem. She’ll be gettin’ big bucks for the house and lot she inherited from Teschler.”

Richard’s brows rose. “She inherited? I didn’t think they were related.”

“They aren’t. She worked for him a long time, said he kinda felt like she was a daughter to him.”

“Nice. I suppose an empty lot on that street would almost be worth more than the house. It’s a good chunk of change for you, but don’t you have anything else you need to be working on?”

“Not now, no. Been slow, anyway.” He didn’t need to know she recently turned down three security gigs. She hated to lose repeat business, but the risk was worth it. The money would have been peanuts compared to this. And she was doing what she loved, criminal investigation; her goal for the business was to hire another person to do security detail.

“You know, I’ve been thinking, you might want to consider using the back rooms downstairs for a small apartment. If she’d like to, then Donna could stay there sometimes when we’re both busy. JR would enjoy having her here, and you wouldn’t have to keep bringing him over to your sister’s house. Or all the way out to West Bend.”

TJ had thought about renting the rooms out, but not to use them for nanny services. It could work, though. She had always gotten along with Donna, and JR loved her.

“Somethin’ to think about, I guess. Once we get you settled in.” Richard would be all moved in soon, and the upper flat had more than enough room for the three of them. She would miss her alone time, but with their busy schedules, she would have enough of that.

She recalled something she had forgotten to ask Wade. She asked Richard, “Hey, do you know if Tosa’s got the other swingers protected?”

“I haven’t heard anything about it, but they should.”

Something was nagging at her. Something to do with Craig Jackson. “Craig Jackson, Sondra’s husband. Did he make it?”

“He did, but he’s still in the hospital. I don’t think they’ve been able to talk to him yet.”

Then TJ remembered what was tweaking at her. Drucilla. She worked as a nurse’s aide, but she couldn’t remember where. Even with a cop at the door, an employee who looked like they belonged could get into a room. It didn’t matter where Dru worked. She would have a uniform and a stethoscope, wouldn’t she?

“What?” Richard asked. “You just tensed up. Something about Jackson?”

“Just remembered somethin’. I gotta make sure they have a cop on him.”

“Why don’t you go get something to eat? I’ll make a call and see what I can find out.”

Detective Tasha Wade arrived at Froedtert Hospital a brief thirty minutes after TJ’s frantic call pulled her out of the warm bed she had just climbed into.

Craig Jackson had just been transferred from ICU to a private room and regained consciousness. TJ was right. Someone had to be sure he was safe. As TJ had warned her, there wasn’t a guard in front of Jackson’s room. Tasha flashed her ID to the nurse at the desk and asked her to check on him. She followed the nurse, a tall woman with a long, narrow face and a serious overbite, down to Jackson’s room and waited while she went in to check his vitals.

“He’s fine,” she said when she came out of the room. “But you won’t be able to talk to him anytime soon. I gave him something for sleep about an hour ago.”

Tasha said she would be watching Jackson until she could get a uniform to cover his room. But she would have to call Lukaszewski for the okay. At this hour, she didn’t look forward to it. Rather than disturb him and risk his wrath, she decided she might as well stay and watch Jackson herself.

Tasha moved the one visitor’s chair to a corner where she wouldn’t be seen right away if someone slipped in. The overheated room made it difficult to stay awake. She felt herself in danger of nodding off, so she got up and paced the small area whenever sleep threatened to overcome her. After her eighth round of pacing, Tasha returned to the chair and within minutes drifted off.

Awakened by a soft swishing noise, Tasha stiffened. Someone was in the room; the noise she heard had been the door opening. An unidentifiable form stood over Jackson’s bed, fussing with something pulled from a pocket.

Tasha had really screwed up—fallen asleep on the job—now she had to handle the situation with muddied senses. And without backup.

Her pulse raced. Tasha pulled her gun from its resting place on her hip and walked slowly to the bed. A woman stood there bent over Jackson’s sleeping form, a woman wearing a nurse’s uniform and holding a syringe.

Tasha positioned herself behind her. “Drop it,” she ordered, the gun up in front of her. The syringe fell to the floor, and the woman whipped around so fast that Tasha didn’t see the blade she held in her other hand flash in her direction. She knocked Tasha’s gun hand away and thrust a scalpel into her side. Tasha felt the warmth of blood streaming from her body as her gun clattered to the floor and spun to the edge of the room. The faux-nurse bent to search for the syringe.

Tasha crumpled to the floor.

Haymaker tried Tasha’s phone. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t answering; she had been calling him at nearly hourly intervals. Worried, he tried Peacock.

“Haymaker here. What’s going on tonight?”

“You woke me up. That’s what’s goin’ on. If you’re lookin’ for your partner, she’s at the hospital keeping an eye on Jackson.”

Something wasn’t right. “If that’s all she’s doing, why isn’t she answering her phone?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. She probably has her phone on vibrate. Call the nurses’ station and have them check it out.”

“I’m going over there.” He heard her grousing at him as he shut off his phone. After two unsuccessful attempts to get through to a nurse on Jackson’s floor, he left the apartment, hoping he had downed enough cold meds to keep him going.

The drive to the hospital from his place was only about a half a mile, but it seemed to take forever. He left his car parked in front of the main entrance and whipped out his creds for the security guard who met him at the door and gave him directions to Jackson’s room.

Since the room was on a lower floor, Haymaker pushed into the first stairway he came across and then realized his mistake when he had to take the steps like a senior citizen. He desperately needed his adrenaline to kick in, but maybe the virus had sapped it all.

The nurses’ station was deserted, but he saw a nurse at the end of one of the halls that stemmed out from it, too far to hear him if he called out to her. He followed the numbered arrows on the walls to Jackson’s room.

The room was dark when he opened the door. Except for the patient he assumed to be Jackson, the room appeared to be empty—until he saw a woman lying on the floor. Tasha lay, unmoving, in a pool of blood. He knelt at her side and checked for a pulse. She was still alive.

He flinched as the light burst on and a security guard burst into the room.

“Get her a doctor,” he yelled, before noticing the man was already engaging a communication device. He remembered the nurse he had seen in the hallway. Was she legit or was she the one who had knifed his partner? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave Tasha. He had his hand on her wound, staunching the blood flow.

He looked up at the guard and nodded at the bed. “Get that guy a doctor too, and put this place in lockdown. Now.”

Within seconds, an emergency team pushed into the room and shoved him aside. He propped himself against the wall, swaying as he managed to send the station a quick text message summoning the troops to the hospital.

The last thing he heard before he passed out were the words, “Take her to surgery, STAT!”

Chapter 59

I
arrived at Lisa’s office early the next morning. Before my shame could force me to keep it to myself, I quickly told her what happened the night before with Kane Diermeyer. In the light of day, I found it even harder to believe I had been so foolhardy.

Like she usually did when told something important, Lisa mulled it over for a minute before speaking.

“Gemma, are you sure you weren’t drugged?”

My naïveté had prevented that consideration until TJ called last night and told me to have my blood tested. Sure, I knew about drugs. I even knew a few people who took them, but I had no personal experience with them. “No, I’m not sure. I did have my blood drawn last night for the tests, but the results won’t be in for a while. I suppose it’s possible. But my drink was in front of me the entire time I was talking to Kane. Unless someone put something in my drink before I even got it.”

I would feel better if my urgency to bed the singer might have been outside my control. My loss of restraint hopefully could be blamed on a drug, but the urgent desire I’d felt for Kane? That was all on me.

We exchanged a few more thoughts on the topic before I went on to make the speech that I practiced on Clyde this morning.

“Lisa, I’ve been lying to you. And to myself.” I hadn’t planned on pausing here, but when her face registered no surprise, it took me down a notch, interrupting the flow of the words.

“If it makes you feel better, Gemma, you aren’t the first person, or the last, to be less than honest during therapy.”

I kept going before I could change my mind. “I had an awful episode last night. There were multiple phantoms in my bed, all grabbing at me. Apparently I was so terrorized that I was able to moan quite loudly. It made Clyde start screeching, and that snapped me out of it.”

Lisa studied me for minute, waiting, I’m sure, to see if I would continue without prompting. “And that paralysis experience made you want to be more forthcoming?”

“Yes, it made me realize you were right; the sleep paralysis is related to my past.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, first, I didn’t tell you everything about the escort service I worked for when I was in college. It started originally as a service for men from out of town who wanted a date for a special event or someone to share dinner with. Not a sexual service. Two students I knew began the service. It didn’t take them long after the startup, with just themselves and two friends as escorts, to find out that keeping sex out of the equation was complicated. No matter what was agreed to upfront, many of the clients expected more.

“I joined them at just about the time they were deciding how to keep it going without it becoming a regular call-girl service. I’d had about four ‘dates’ when they called a meeting of all the employees. There were seven or eight girls at the time, and they told us that from then on, our services could include sex, if we desired, and the house would get forty percent of the extra fee. They warned us about the legal implications and said they would understand if we wanted to opt out.”

“What did you think about that?” Lisa asked.

“It upset me, of course. I had my finances all planned out, and they depended on what I made as an escort. But I was having a terrible time making the men understand I really was just an escort, not a call girl. It became disgusting fighting off all the fondling, the inappropriate touching, the slobbery kisses.”

When I spoke the words, it became even clearer; despite my claims to the contrary, my abhorrence of it all had been manifesting itself as an invisible predator while I slept.

“Now you believe this is the connection to your sleep paralysis?”

“Yes. I should have figured it out before now. But that night at our meeting they told me I didn’t have to have sex with the men if I didn’t want to. I could continue the way I had been, and they would only book me with men who supposedly didn’t want sex. I tried to keep doing it that way until one night I met a man whose wife had just given birth and couldn’t travel with him yet. I went out to dinner with him. He was an interesting person, and I was very attracted to him.”

I gathered my thoughts for a minute. Lisa asked, “This man you’re talking about, he was the first one you had sex with?”

“Yes. After that night, my practice was to go ahead and have sex with men I found reasonably appealing. Staving off the others, though, was almost worse than getting paid for the use of my body, so after a while I didn’t fight them off anymore.” My throat thickened with emotion. “I became a whore like all the others.”

Lisa pushed the tissue box closer to me. “After so many years, what do you think made these memories start bothering you to the point of sleep paralysis?”

A good question, one requiring a moment of thought before answering. “I’ve had sleep paralysis all my life to some degree. But looking back, I don’t think the ones in which I experienced someone grabbing me started until I left Carter.”

“And shortly before that, you had to face one of your old clients at the theatre when you were with your husband.”

That had to be the critical incident, the one precipitating the episodes that were so terrifying. I had been stuffing back my shame, and it all came back up on me like tainted mayonnaise. And added to that, Carter wanted to get back together now, Taylor was pressuring me to have a relationship, and the incident with Kane last night was eating at me; it was no wonder I had the episode with multiple phantoms.

“Does this mean my sleep paralysis will stop now that I know what’s causing it?”

“It’s possible you won’t have the kind that frightens you so badly. The phantoms may disappear, but it’s hard to say. If nothing else, I think they’ll happen less and less frequently. The other kind of sleep paralysis, without phantoms or visions, isn’t uncommon, and you did say you’ve experienced them all your life.”

I hadn’t thought about that. “I didn’t very often, though. Usually only when my sleep patterns were disrupted because of something else going on.”

“An awful lot of people have those kinds of episodes. Hopefully, they’ll be the only ones you have from now on.”

“So, should I consider myself cured?”

Lisa smiled. “You may feel more comfortable, at least in the sense that you’ve discovered the underlying cause of the apparitions, but you need to work on the feelings you’re having about your escort days and everything else that has been troubling you. I don’t think you’ll need the group therapy any longer, although you should go back for at least one meeting and share what you’ve found out with the others.” I immediately thought of Jorge, whom I had been avoiding since the night we attempted the dual OBE. I owed him an explanation.

“I should probably keep seeing you for a while, right?”

“It would be easier for you to get your life organized if you had some help, so yes, I’d advise continuing our sessions. Not as often, maybe every week for a while, and we’ll see how it goes.”

A giant weight rose from my shoulders.

I left Lisa’s office, eager to rebuild my life. Now if only we could find out what had really happened to Norman.