by Casey Dorman
“I’m terrified. I know something terrible has happened to her. I’ve even started dreaming about her.”
Even though he couldn’t see his face, George noticed that there were beads of sweat on Lucas’ forehead. Whatever he’d dreamed bothered him even more than usual. “Tell me about your dream.”
“I saw her dead. Her dead body laid out in the ground. But my dreams have become weird.”
“What do you mean, weird?”
“Last night I dreamed I was walking through this field, only it was at the edge of a cliff. And then there was a hole in front of me. I was going to go around it, but it kept getting wider. Then I decided to jump across it. I backed up and took a run at it, but then my legs wouldn’t move. No matter how hard I tried, my legs were stiff, paralyzed, I couldn’t run at all.”
“What happened?”
“I kind of dragged myself up to the edge of the hole, like a paraplegic in a movie I saw once. When I got to the edge, I looked down and there was Regina’s body, naked.”
“Naked?”
“But that wasn’t the weird thing. She was naked and I could see she had a penis. It had a card attached to it with a string.” He raised up enough to turn and look at George. His face was red.
George decided to ignore Lucas’ embarrassment. He was too interested in the dream. “A card?” he asked.
Lucas lay back down. “Like when they attach a card—a tag—with a number on it to the toe of a body in the morgue, only this was attached to her penis, Regina’s penis.”
“What happened in the dream after you saw her body with the card attached to her penis?”
“I woke up. I was sweating, shaking almost. I moved both my legs to be sure they weren’t paralyzed, then I tried to get the picture of Regina’s body out of my mind.”
“And were you able to get it out of your mind?”
“I had to get up and have a drink of Scotch… two in fact. I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack.”
“What frightened you so much about the dream?”
“The card tied to the penis, Regina’s penis, I guess, even though that doesn’t make sense. Like I said, it was weird.”
“Why do you think the card attached to the penis frightened you? Did it make you think of anything?”
Lucas heaved a sigh, as if explaining any further was difficult. “My brother. When he died, I had to go to the morgue and identify his body. He died suddenly, in his car while driving. He had a heart attack but he crashed his car and the paramedics took him to the hospital. The doctors at the hospital declared him dead, but they needed someone to confirm that it was my brother. He had my name and number in his wallet so they called me.”
“And the card attached to the penis reminded you of when you identified your brother’s body?”
“There was a card just like that tied to his toe in the morgue.”
“To his toe, not to his penis?”
“His toe. I guess they do that.”
“And were you frightened then, when you saw your brother’s body with the card tied to his toe?”
“First I was angry. They hadn’t cleaned him up at all from the traffic accident. His face still had streaks of blood on it, and his arm was bent at this impossible angle. I was mad that they had just left him like that. I mean, he was dead, couldn’t they have cleaned him up and made him presentable before they showed him to me?”
“So you were angry, but not frightened.”
“At first. I mean I was anxious going into the hospital morgue, hoping that it wouldn’t be Jerry, that they’d made a mistake. But when I saw him, I got mad. Then after I cooled off, I looked around and I saw these other bodies, all with similar tags attached to their toes. Suddenly I panicked. I remember I got dizzy. They made me sit down, brought me some water. When I tried to stand up, my right leg wouldn’t move.”
“It was paralyzed?”
“Completely. They had to get me a wheelchair. They took me upstairs, and one of the hospital doctors examined me. I had an MRI, then the doctor told me that there was nothing wrong with me.”
“But why was your leg paralyzed?”
“I don’t know. The doctors there didn’t know what was wrong with my leg so they said it was all in my head. I didn’t believe them. I could tell that my leg wouldn’t move. It was paralyzed and I had no feeling in it. That couldn’t have been in my head.”
“And you never saw another doctor to diagnose what the problem was? I seem to remember you telling me that.”
“Like I said, I was busy, then it went away on its own. Maybe they were right, it was some kind of stress reaction.”
The symbolism of castration anxiety was almost too blatant to be real. George reminded himself of Susan Lin’s warning about Lucas having read The Interpretation of Dreams. “Paralysis shows up in your dreams a lot. It was in the dream when you were following your mother through the forest and came upon the man with the saw; it was in your dream you had last night about seeing your wife’s body. It seems as if when you become anxious, you think of losing power in your legs.”
“I don’t know why I think that way.”
“Boys often think of their penis’ as a ‘third leg’.”
“Really? Yeah, I guess, maybe. A third leg that boys have but girls don’t. I remember thinking that when I was a kid.”
“It can be frightening to a boy when he first sees his sister or his mother, that she doesn’t have a penis. It’s like something happened to her penis and she lost it.” George watched Lucas’ body, to see how he reacted to such a direct suggestion of castration fear.
Lucas showed no visible reaction. “I didn’t have a sister. I don’t remember seeing my mother without clothes on.”
“We don’t always remember something that frightened us.”
Lucas shifted his weight on the couch. “I don’t remember anything like that.”
“But you’ve somehow connected the thought of death with losing power in your legs, as you did when your brother died. When you dreamt of your wife being dead, you gave her a penis but tied the tag that signaled she was dead to her penis. And in your dream, you were paralyzed again.”
Bonaventure was silent. George could see that his eyes were closed. Lucas’ breathing had quickened. “You’re getting pretty complicated, doc. I can’t say that it makes a lot of sense to me,” he finally said.
George knew that Lucas’ defenses were fighting against his realization of the truth. “It’s a lot for you to absorb,” he said. “I think we should talk more about this next session.”
“Can you stop me from having these dreams?”
“I don’t want you to stop. Your dreams are messages from your unconscious telling us what you’re really thinking about. I’m sorry that they make you uncomfortable, but that’s because you’re fighting against realizing what they mean. Once we decipher them completely, they won’t bother you anymore.”
“I hope you’re right,” Lucas said, sitting up.
“Oh I am,” George said, but he was less sure than he sounded.
Chapter 31
The “tip line” set up by Ben Murphy with the aid of his grandchildren was yielding diminishing returns. Nothing substantive had come in since the anonymous call sending him on the wild goose chase to Crystal Cove State Park. The volume of calls had been reduced to a trickle. It was time for Ben to take more aggressive action. He decided to follow Lucas Bonaventure.
Lucas spent his days at his office, with occasional forays into the nearby community: to Doctor Farquhar’s, to the bank, or to lunch, often by himself, usually at a high-priced restaurant. After a few days, Be
n dismissed Lucas’ daytime activities and waited until he left work, at the end of the day, to begin his vigil as the man’s shadow.
Lucas’ evenings were even less adventuresome than his days. Typically, he went straight home from work, or stopped at a restaurant, often a fast-food drive-thru to grab something quickly, then went home and stayed there. Ben was almost ready to give up his nighttime monitoring, as he had his daytime surveillance, when, at ten o’clock on a Wednesday evening, he observed Lucas backing his car out of his driveway and heading down the winding hill from his house toward PCH.
Ben could tell that Lucas had been drinking. He took the curves on the narrow street leading down the hill too fast, almost hitting the curb on one occasion. Luckily, no one was coming up the street in the opposite direction. When he reached the Pacific Coast Highway, the road was crowded with cars, mostly traveling above the fifty-five miles per hour speed limit. A least, with this much traffic, Ben was less likely to be noticed following Lucas.
Once on PCH, Bonaventure turned up the coast, heading toward central Newport Beach. Ben followed him past Newport Center, then past the bridge leading onto Balboa Peninsula. After passing Hoag Hospital, Bonaventure signaled his intention to turn right and head up into the hills, inland toward Costa Mesa, rather than continue toward Huntington Beach. Ben followed a quarter mile behind.
Before crossing the border into Costa Mesa, Lucas took a left down one of the small side streets. The street led to a vacant office building on the edge of a wide field of grass on a tall cliff overlooking PCH and the beach beyond. Ben recognized the field, which lay behind a wire fence, as part of Banning Ranch, the controversial new housing development that was perched on a cliff overlooking the beaches and had been favored as a nature preserve by environmentalists. Ben had read about the losing battle by the environmentalists in the newspaper. Although there were no homes on the property yet, there were the beginnings of a network of roads and several leveled homesites.
Lucas parked his car at the rear of the parking lot of the vacant building. Ben parked on the street. He watched as Lucas slipped through a break in the fence, and then began walking down the hill toward one of the homesites. Ben followed.
The site had been recently leveled and there were open ditches on the street side of it where power lines would eventually be laid. Ben watched as Lucas walked around the perimeter of the site, then stood for a minute, looking past the edge of the bluff at the end of the property and out to sea. When he turned and headed back toward his car, Ben crouched down in the brush and waited until he had passed him. After Lucas drove away, Ben walked toward the homesite.
The site was enormous. Whatever kind of homes were going to be built there would be mansions, at least in size. Ben took a turn around the edge of the site, just as Lucas had done, but he didn’t see anything unusual. What had he been hoping for, he asked himself, an open grave? Perhaps Lucas was thinking of moving here. It would garner him a better view of the ocean, he would be within walking distance to the beach, and, because of the size of the lots, he would have considerably more privacy than in his Pelican Hill home. Ben would check it out.
He trudged back up the hill, slipped through the fence and returned to his car. Had his evening been productive? He wasn’t sure. Lucas had led him somewhere, but the significance of his destination was still a mystery.
Chapter 32
“The coroner says the dog was poisoned,” Abe Reynolds told Ben Murphy over the telephone. “Been dead about a week.”
“Six days ago,” Ben answered.
“How do you know?’
“A family reported their two-year-old Collie missing six days ago. I called Animal Control.”
Reynolds was impressed. Murphy was still a sharp investigator. “So someone killed someone else’s dog and then buried it? I guess we’ve got a crime on our hands. But that’s for someone else to follow up. I’m busy with the Bonaventure case and this looks like this has nothing to do with that.”
“Except the family that lost their dog lived two houses away from Lucas Bonaventure.”
“Jesus Christ. Just a coincidence, you think?”
“I told you, I distrust coincidences. Can you keep the dog’s body so the family can identify it?”
“I’d better tell the coroner soon, or they’ll dispose of it. Have you talked to the family?”
“I did. They haven’t a clue what happened to their dog. I didn’t tell them. I lied to them on the phone and said I was with Animal Control. I can give you their number if you want to call them.”
“I’ll do that. I still don’t know what it all means, though. Any hunches?”
“Just a suspicious coincidence as far as I can tell right now,” Ben answered. “But the more pieces you have in a puzzle, the more the whole picture begins to emerge. This may be a piece.”
“I’m not ruling anything out right now, not with the little we have to go on.”
“Any progress on that other case that Bonaventure is involved with? The murder in Irvine?”
“Zip. I think the Irvine people are as suspicious of the shrink as they are of Bonaventure on that one. Could be neither of them, though. They haven’t got much to go on except a body and a murder weapon.”
“What was the weapon?”
“A rope.”
“Should have prints on it then. Unless the perpetrator used gloves.”
“The shrink’s prints are all over it,” Abe answered. “But he was trying to untie it when the uniforms arrived. His are the only prints.”
“Doctor Lin still talking to him?”
“Every once in a while. She actually likes the guy. Says he’s a bit out of touch with recent developments in his field, but she doesn’t see him as a murderer.”
“She seemed pretty savvy to me,” Ben said.
“Savvy and smart, but she’s also new at this. A psychiatrist might be pretty good at acting innocent.”
“I’m willing to bet she figures him out if he’s acting.”
“I hope so. Keep me informed if you get any more hot tips,” Reynolds said, sounding as if he was ready to hang up.
“I’ll let you know whatever I find out. The well has gone pretty dry though. We’re down to a few calls a day.”
“Sometimes the ones who know something wait a long time to tell anyone,” Reynolds said.
“We can always hope.”
— — —
The family that had lost its Collie identified the dog that had been found at Crystal Cove as theirs. Ben Murphy thought it was time to pay another visit to Lucas Bonaventure.
“Just thought I’d drop by and see how you were holding up, maybe update you on our reward call-ins,” Ben told Lucas. He had been shown into the den where he had visited with Lucas the previous time. Bonaventure looked less confident than before. He looked as if he were tired.
“Drink?” Lucas asked. He still wore his work slacks but on his feet were a pair of leather slippers. He had taken off his dress shirt and wore only a white T-shirt. He was starting to get a belly, probably from drinking, Ben thought, but his arms and his shoulders were still large and muscled. He already had a Scotch in his hand. It was seven in the evening.
“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Ben answered.
Lucas fixed Ben a drink, then sank heavily into a big leather armchair. “I’d hoped something would have turned up by now. The police act as if they’ve already concluded that Regina is dead.” His face looked strained. He finished the remnants of his drink in one long sip, then got up and poured himself another. “I’m having trouble sleeping,” he said, holding up his drink as if to acknowledge that he was using it to deaden his senses.
; “What’s changed?” Ben asked.
“Time I guess. At first, I thought it would just be a few days, maybe a couple of weeks before I had some news; now it’s been more than three weeks and still nothing. I’ve read enough about disappearances to know that the longer they go on the less the likelihood of finding the victim alive. And that guy who got killed isn’t going to tell anyone anything. If he did it, we may never know what happened to Regina.” He took another long drink, a morose expression on his face.
“I understand the police talked to you about another case… a murder over in Irvine?”
“My secretary, or former secretary. They just talked to me is all. She’d quit a few days before. I didn’t have anything to do with her at the time she died.” He looked disinterested in talking about the topic.
“How many times did the police talk to you about her?”
“A couple. Two or three times, I guess. My psychiatrist found the body. I think they may suspect him.”
“They think your psychiatrist killed your secretary?”
“Former secretary. They haven’t come out and said it, but it looks suspicious even to me. What was he doing with her in some lonely parking lot? He’d only met her once before.”
“How did your psychiatrist know your secretary at all? That sounds odd.”
“I asked him to talk to her once. She was complaining about me and I wanted him to evaluate her complaints, tell me if I was doing anything inappropriate.”
“She said you had?
“She was acting that way. Anyway, it turned out to be nothing. But maybe my doctor saw her again after that.”
“Did he?”
“Who knows? Anyway, it might just all be one big coincidence.”
“Speaking of coincidences, we got a tip on our hotline that someone had seen a car just like Regina’s parked down at Crystal Cove on the night she disappeared. I told the police and they searched the area. Found a grave with a dog in it… a Collie dog. Turns out that your neighbors just down the street lost their Collie about a week ago and that was it. He’d been poisoned and buried.”