Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  Jasper stood. “Dr. Frank, the special agents asked that you not leave until they’ve spoken with you.”

  I held up my hand. “I know. They have file folders to fill. You people chased after Markham until he was dead. Now that you’re finally looking at the real killer, you don’t have a fucking case. They can wait while I finish their job for them.”

  AS WE DROVE TO THE HIGHWAY, JAWORSKI SAID, “YOU plan to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Bayberry. Are the feds still there?”

  “They cleared out this morning.”

  “Does that miracle trunk of yours with the shotgun and crowbar also contain a shovel?”

  “Couple of ’em.”

  “I know that you don’t climb fences. What about digging holes?”

  “How deep?”

  “Not as deep as you’d bury a dog.”

  “I can handle that.”

  I gazed at the crisp, clear sky, the blue that artists can only dream of achieving on canvas.

  “She sat at this table and drew pictures,” Ellie McLean told me. “Lily was good at drawing. She kind of wrapped her arm around her pictures while she worked on them, like she was protecting them.”

  “You think she took souvenirs?” Jaworski asked.

  “You read her journal… ‘The Story of Lily.’”

  Jaworski waited.

  “She labeled it ‘Part One.’ Lily Dorman was a work in progress.”

  “So, there’s more parts.”

  “Illustrated,” I said.

  Road crews had cleared the fallen trees from the Bayberry Park entrance. Jaworski drove to the swamp’s edge and stopped the cruiser.

  “You get out okay?”

  I nodded, shoved open the door, grasped the overhead handle, and pulled myself up. As Jaworski retrieved a shovel, Ellie McLean emerged from her trailer.

  “You don’t look too good,” she said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “The FBI people ain’t been gone long. They brought me home this morning. Nice folks. They bought breakfast for me at Denny’s. He ain’t gonna dig up bodies, is he?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “What happened to Katrina? They wouldn’t tell us anything.”

  “She’s dead, Ellie.”

  “I’m all set,” Jaworski said, walking to the dike.

  “Lily killed her mother?” I nodded.

  “Jesus, Lord,” she said, crossed herself, and gazed at the vacant trailer. “I’ll keep her place tidy. I don’t know why. I feel like I should.”

  I left Ellie standing in the courtyard and followed Jaworski.

  “Where am I going?” he asked.

  “Fifty yards, straight ahead,” I said. “There’s a small wooden cross.”

  “Feels like I’m in a friggin’ horror movie.”

  “You are.”

  I SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE DIKE, HOLDING THE wooden cross. Jaworski stripped off his jacket.

  “You said you’ve been wrong, Lucas.”

  “More times than I care to think about.”

  “I hope this ain’t one of ’em,” he said, his breathing labored as he shoveled dirt into a pile. “At least the ground’s soft.”

  Minutes later, with sweat dripping down his neck, Jaworski stuck the shovel in the dirt pile and snapped on latex gloves. “It’s a plastic garbage bag,” he said, kneeling above the hole and brushing away dirt. “This ain’t the dog, is it?”

  “Pull it out.”

  He yanked at the bag, dragged it from the hole, and slit it open with his pocketknife. “Aren’t you going to look?”

  “Notebooks,” I said.

  “A dozen of them. They’re damp and stink of mildew.”

  “Find the most recent.”

  Jaworski prowled through the bag, selected and discarded notebooks, and finally settled on one. He was silent as he slowly turned the pages.

  “This is incredible,” he said, holding up a sketch.

  The pencil drawing of Harper Dorman was nearly as detailed as the photographs Norma Jacobs had shown us. Red-brown streaks sliced across the lead-shaded lines.

  “I think you’ll find that Harper Dorman supplied the pigment.”

  “It does look like blood. She didn’t sit in front of the body and draw this, did she?”

  I shrugged. “She has an artist’s eye and an archivist’s memory. She also has patience, determination, and an unfailing belief in her invulnerability.”

  Jaworski flipped pages. “Here’s one of Markham.”

  I struggled to my feet. “You’ve got your evidence,” I said.

  TWO DAYS LATER, I STOOD IN LILY DORMAN’S DOORway at the regional hospital. Dickie Stevens sat at his post reading The Boston Globe.

  “Ragged Harbor make the big-city newspaper?” I asked.

  “They call me Richard in here. I told ’em my name is Dickie.”

  “She talked at all?”

  “When the lawyers go in there, they make me move across the hall. She ain’t made a sound that I know of. I swear she ain’t alive.”

  I stepped into the darkened room and brought Stevens up from his chair.

  “You can’t go in there, Doc,” he whispered loudly behind me. “Those lawyers will shit concrete blocks.”

  “Fuck ’em,” I muttered, watching Lily Dorman’s wrists strain against the leather straps that held her down.

  Gauze bandages concealed most of her face and extended to her neck and right shoulder. Except for the intermittent pressure she exerted on her restraints, she was motionless.

  “Go sit down, Dickie,” I said. “Let me know if any lawyers show up.”

  Stevens hesitated. “The chief will have my ass.”

  “The chief won’t know.”

  After a moment, I heard Stevens return to his post. I stared at the woman who had grown up believing that I was her father, and that I had left her at the mercy of a madman who happened to live with her mother. Lily had nurtured her hatred of me, used it to drive herself to wealth, power, and an elaborate plan of vengeance.

  I watched Dorman’s mouth move and barely heard her raspy voice. “I can wait,” she said.

  I did not doubt her fortitude. Maybe I should have left her in the fireplace, I thought, as I turned and walked from the room.

  JAWORSKI’S DISPATCHER DIRECTED ME TO THE CHIEF’S office. “He’s still upstairs with Mr. Saymes,” she said, “but he shouldn’t be much longer.”

  Karen Jasper sat in her corner with her laptop and notebook, translating her copious scribblings into report form. She looked like Linus arched over his piano.

  “I still don’t like you,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

  “It’s hard to like insufferable old men,” I said as I sat opposite the TV and watched a muted soap opera. “No more live coverage of the front door, huh?”

  “Don’t talk to me. I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “I’ve decided that I do like you, Detective Jasper.”

  She swiveled in her chair. “I don’t want you to like me.”

  I grinned. “Didn’t think so.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  I leaned forward. “Conflicts in relationships, collegial or personal, are most likely to occur when both parties are a bit insufferable.”

  She spun around to her laptop. “I have work to do.”

  I gazed at the silent TV. A black-haired man had a permanently raised eyebrow; his opposite eye was frozen half-closed. I thought that he might be trying to look skeptical or suspicious. A blond woman who shared the scene was taller than the man, busty and semi-exposed, with a coy smile suggesting that she controlled the encounter.

  When curiosity got the best of me, I lunged out of my chair and turned up the volume.

  Black-haired man said, “We can meet them at El Diablo.”

  Blond woman responded, “I love Mexican food.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jasper snapped.

  “Misreading social situations,”
I said, and killed the volume.

  “Jesus. You’re as bad as…”

  Jasper stopped and stared at me. I was certain that she waited to see whether I would complete her sentence. I did not know what her problem with her father was, and I had no interest in finding out.

  Jaworski came through the door and relieved the awkwardness. “This just came in,” he said, placing a lab report on Jasper’s desk.

  Jasper scanned the blood analysis form, tucked it at the back of her notebook, and returned to her typing.

  “Saymes give you a raise?” I asked.

  “Hah. I ain’t had cost-of-living the last three years. He gave me this spiel about how we all have to be reasonable. We settled on two years. I had in mind getting out when I turned sixty-seven, so that works.”

  “You talk to your prosecutor?”

  “She doesn’t figure she’ll do much on Heath. Gilman will walk with probation and a fine. Baker will do serious time. Dorman ain’t even talking to her lawyers. It’ll be six or eight weeks before they can ship her for a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “Feds having any success with the money?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me.”

  Jasper remained silent.

  “When does your class start up again?” Jaworski asked. “A lot of students are already back on the hill.”

  “No seminar,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m headed for Boston to spend a few days with my friend Ray Bolton, then I’ll be back here to close things off with however many of my students return. After that, Lake Albert.”

  “When do I get my debriefing?” he asked, in what I now recognized as Jaworski’s droll tone of voice.

  I laughed. “First thing when I get back.”

  As I walked to the door, I reached for the lab report that Jasper had stuck in the back of her notebook. She slammed down her hand on the spiral-bound pad.

  “Disappointed?” I asked.

  She said nothing.

  “You ran a comparison on my blood and Lily Dorman’s. You were certain that I was her father. You followed your gut, Jasper, and you were thorough. That’s admirable. If you were right, you would have shifted some fraction of the guilt from her to me, and felt justified in relegating me to your scrap heap of insufferable old men.”

  I waited. Jasper remained silent.

  “Get over it,” I said, and walked out the door.

  JOHN PHILPIN is a retired forensic psychologist—an internationally renowned profiler. His advice and opinions on violence and its aftermath have been sought by police, newspaper writers, TV producers, mental health professionals, private investigators, attorneys, and polygraph experts throughout the country. He is the author of Beyond Murder, the story of the Gainesville student killings, published by NAL/Dutton in 1994, and Stalemate, which tells the true-crime story of a series of child abductions, sexual assaults, and murders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with Patricia Sierra, he is the author of The Prettiest Feathers and Tunnel of Night. He lives in New England.

  DREAMS IN THE KEY OF BLUE

  A Bantam Book / August 2000

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by John Philpin.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57339-1

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