What Doesn’t Kill Her (23 page)

“I don’t
want
to know, Jordan. But I need to know.”

She nodded. “Help me clean up first.”

They were at the sink, and she was running cold water on her plate and she smiled over at him to hand her his. The scent of her shampoo filled his nostrils, and he leaned in and kissed her.

Or tried to. His lips had barely touched hers when she shoved him back so hard, he almost lost his balance and got dumped on his ass.

“You have lousy timing,” she snapped, and she swallowed and her eyes brimmed with tears.

“I’m an idiot,” he said, and he swallowed and felt tears trying to come.

“You are, kind of. An idiot. Get us a couple more glasses of that diet shit, and I will still talk to you. Don’t ask me why. By the way, I don’t kiss on the first date. I don’t kiss on the tenth date, either. Got that?”

“Okay.”

Then the damnedest thing—and that was the word that sprang to his mind:
damnedest
—she touched his cheek, just briefly, but it was warm, so warm, and so gentle.

“Someday maybe,” she said.

“Eleventh date?”

“We’ll see.”

They returned to the table—it was really the only place where two people could sit and talk in this cell. For maybe a minute, Jordan sat there staring into nothing, or maybe the past; but at any rate, saying nothing.

Finally, in a voice small and emotionless, she said, “It was after dinner. I was up in my room doing my homework.”

Her hands were folded as if she were saying grace, and she looked down at them. She would tell her story in her own time, her own way.

“That’s not true,” she said after a while, shaking her head, her voice normally modulated now. “I was
supposed
to be doing my homework—algebra. What I was really doing was daydreaming. About a boy I liked who never had the brains to call and ask me out.”

“Sounds like an idiot I know,” he said.

They exchanged tiny smiles.

She continued, back in the emotionless manner: “I heard a crash downstairs, then a struggle, a fight. I got up, went to the door, and I had just stepped out into the hall when my mother screamed for me to run.”

No tears. Perhaps she had drained the horror out of the memory, created distance, to be able to revisit the terrible night.

She seemed to be staring into the past now. “I saw a man in a policeman’s uniform fighting with my father.”

Mark sat forward. “A police uniform?”

“Yes.”

“That’s new. First mention of that.”

She looked at him curiously, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Maybe it was only that one time that he wore a uniform like that.”

“Maybe not. It may be part of his MO. You’re the only survivor who was actually home during an attack, to report this detail.”

He wanted to reach over and pat her hand, but thought better of it. “Jordan, you’re doing fine. Just fine. Go on.”

But she wasn’t ready to let go of the previous point. “Is it possible he is, or
was
a cop?”

“Unlikely. The CPD canvassed all the neighbors at all the crimes and no one reported seeing a police car until the first-response units arrived.”

She seemed skeptical.

He continued: “There was nothing in the police report that indicated any of the neighbors noticed a police car at or near your house that night, either. Wearing a uniform might be a way to get someone to open the door for him.”

Again, she was staring into the past. “The badge, the emblem on his shoulder… he wasn’t from Westlake. He was from somewhere else.”

Sitting way forward, he reached his hand near hers, not touching. “Jordan, what was on the badge? What did it look like? Was it star-shaped? Did it have sharp corners? Did it—”

“It was oval,” she cut in. “Silver. A sort of… shield. Like on that old show on Nick at Nite,
Dragnet
? It had a number.”

“What was the badge number?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“What about the shoulder patch? Did you get a look at it?”

Jordan thought about that. “A triangle, tip down.”

“Jurisdiction?”

“Well, this is going to sound weird,” she said. “I don’t remember ever seeing the name, but when I think about it? The patch is blue with silver letters and it says… I’m sorry, but what I see is
FUNKY TOWN
, all in capital letters.”

“Funky Town,” Mark said.

She shrugged. “I told you it was going to sound weird.”

“You’re remembering it wrong, but are probably close. Frankfort, maybe? Fullertown? Fultonham? Funk? There
is
a Funk, Ohio, south of here.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”

Mark thought out loud: “Two-digit badge number—small town, maybe. This might be a real cop from a small town, who drove his own car to the big city.”

But what about Basil Havoc? Had he been zeroing in on the wrong guy all this time?

One way to find out. Finally, just this one way to find out, though it was a risky breach of prodecure.…

On his cell phone, Mark brought up a photo he’d snapped of Havoc, surreptitiously, the night he’d followed the gymnastics coach to the Italian restaurant. “This is a recent shot, but look at it hard. Have you ever seen him before?”

“Yes.”

“
Yes?
”

“He’s that stupid full-of-himself gymnastics coach. If you mean, is this the man who attacked us? No.”

“You barely looked at it.”

“It’s not him.”

“You seem sure. It
has
been ten years.”

“How old is that creep—fifty?”

“Around there.”

“Meaning ten years ago, he was forty.”

Mark shrugged. “Yeah.”

“The intruder was in his twenties, young, strong. This guy has dark hair. The intruder was blond.”

Every word she spoke gave fresh information, but it also underlined that Mark had likely spent a very long time pursuing the wrong suspect. In his head, he was reeling.

“Should I go on?” she asked.

“What?”

“Am I boring you?”

“I’m sorry, I just… I was… go on, please.”

In straightforward language and in an emotionless manner, she told Mark about watching her mother die, getting pulled out from under the bed, being forced to group her family’s bodies together. She never cried, but Mark wanted to.

Then she stopped and frowned, looking beyond him, into the past, but her eyes were moving quickly.

“You’ve remembered something,” he said.

“He made me take pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“Photos. He had a digital camera.” Her eyes dropped to the table and she rubbed her forehead, as if it were a genie’s lamp and she could wish her life into something else.

She sprang to her feet and began to prowl the apartment, talking more to herself than him, as if she had forgotten he was there. “Why
photos
? And where are they? Did the police find a camera?”

“No. Jordan… come sit back down…”

She didn’t. “If he’d posted them on the Net, the sick fuck, we’d know, wouldn’t we?” She whirled and planted herself and pointed an accusatory finger. “Did he send them to the police? To brag? Do you people have them? Is that one of the things the cops held back? They always hold something back, they always hold
something
back…”

She was prowling again. Searching the floor for answers.

“Are they still on the camera?” she asked. Not him. The floor. “Did he print them so he can jerk off to them or some other sick thing?”

“Jordan… take it easy.”

She came over and leaned on the table and, eyes wild, demanded, “I want those photos! Those are the last photos of my family and I want them, and they are for me to have and for me to destroy. If
you
people have them, goddamnit, I
want
them!”

“We don’t have them. Jordan. Sit down. We really don’t.”

“It’s not your case. You don’t know—”

“I know. I have access to the file. Sit. Please.”

She did.

He said, “Serial killers often keep souvenirs of their atrocities. Mementoes.”

Her eyes disappeared into slits. “They’re evidence. Mark, Jesus, Mark, he must have some kind of horrible scrapbook, and monstrous as that is, that’s great!”

“It… it is?”

“Find that scrapbook, and you’ve found him.”

“True. And that book, or maybe data file, will put him on death row.”

They sat in silence for what felt like a very long time, to Mark at least. She was staring at her folded hands or maybe the tabletop. Anyway, not at him.

Finally, still looking down, she said, “What David and Kay wouldn’t tell you? That I had told them?”

“Yes?”

“That’s the reason I reacted like that. When you tried to kiss me.”

“Wh… what is?”

Her eyes lifted from the table and they were clear and lovely with no sign of tears. As if telling him what tomorrow’s weather would be, she said, “He raped me.”

Mark felt like he’d been struck a blow to his stomach, so hard a blow that the wind was knocked from him. His vision blurred, and he felt very sick.

“Where,” he said softly, “is your…?”

She pointed, and he ran, and he knelt over the stool and threw up the pizza and the cola. It came up hard and wrenching and he was still kneeling over the stool when she entered, flushed it for him, knelt by him, and slipped her arm around him, patting his shoulder.
There there, there there.…

She helped him to his feet and then slipped out and let him wash up. He threw water on his face, looked at himself in the mirror and saw an exhausted, emotion-ravaged wreck.
You’re really showing her some great support, pal,
he told himself, and toweled off his face.

Then they were sitting at the table again. Now she was watching him until he was ready to speak.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Did he do that to anyone else?”

“Huh?”

“Rape anyone else?”

“Not… not that’s been reported.”

“I never told anyone.”

“I know.”
You didn’t talk for ten years.
“They didn’t examine you?”

“I bathed and changed my clothes before the police came. A doctor looked at my bruises from the struggle, but that’s all.”

“I’m so sorry, so sorry you went through that. All alone.”

“Don’t start crying. If you cry, Mark, I’ll cry, and I don’t want to fucking cry. Get it?”

He nodded.

She was frowning. “I don’t understand why he did it to me.”

“Power. Rape is about power.”

“I know that! But I’m the only one, seems like, that he did it to. He killed my family. Power? He could have killed me at any time. How much power does one fucking asshole need?”

“He… he wanted to
own
you, to show you that whether you lived or died was
his
decision.”

She grinned at him. How could she grin? “Wonder why I was silent all those years? Why I haven’t talked to anyone about this until lately?”

“Tell me.”

“Because he said he
wanted
me to tell his story.”

“Wanted…? His story?”

“That’s right. Well, fuck him. That was my attitude, from that first night on. I wasn’t going to say anything about him—ever.”

He frowned at her. “Why break your silence now?”

“The Strongsville homicides. I saw it on the news. I
knew
it was him. I had to stop him.”

“You had to… stop him?”

“Yes. And I’ve let you and the support group in, because I don’t think I can find him on my own.”

Mark was studying her. “And if you find him? What then?”

“… Turn him over to the police.”

It almost sounded like a question.

He said, “I hope so. Because I can’t help you, if you’re looking for revenge.”

“I want revenge, but I’ll settle for justice.”

Mark put his hand on hers. She started to draw it away, then left it there. Their eyes were locked as he said, “Do I have to tell you how dangerous this individual is? You cannot deal with this yourself. Tell me you won’t try to deal with this yourself.”

“I’m not. Who was it said, ‘I get by with a little help from my friends’?”

“Stopping him is what’s important. Getting even… you can’t get even with a lunatic. You can only stop him.”

She sighed. Nodded. “There is one other thing about that night.…”

“Yes?”

“When he was… done? He said some very weird shit to me.”

“Weird how?”

“ ‘Thou shalt not wear a garment of different sorts, as of woolen and linen together.’ ”

“Deuteronomy 22:11,” Mark said.

“You know the
Bible
?”

“Some. Enough to recognize that’s not the King James version.”

“No?”

“King James uses the phrase ‘divers sorts’ instead of ‘different sorts’.”

She was frowning. “What the hell does it
mean
?”

Mark said, “What it means to us isn’t important. What it means to the killer, and his twisted take on it, could be vital.”

“So… where do we go from here?”

“If you’ll allow it, I’ll meet with you and your team. They can show me what they have, and maybe I can bend a few rules and share some of what I’ve learned.”

Her half smile had a wry tinge. “Isn’t that better?”

“Better?”

“Than going behind my back?”

“Much,” he said, and grinned at her. “It’s, uh… getting late. I really should go.…”

He hoped she’d have a different opinion, but instead she just walked him to the door.

“Trust me, Jordan. We’ll catch this SOB.”

She smiled at him. “Pretty salty talk.”

“Maybe you’re a bad influence on me,” he said, and as she closed the door on him and her own small smile, he found himself wishing she’d be a much worse influence than that.