“I understand you’ve called Mrs. Steele’s mother.”
Her head bobbed. “She and her husband—her second husband, Mrs. Steele’s stepfather—live down in San Diego. She’s a pediatrician, semi-retired, I think. Nice lady. I got her answering service and left a message.”
Sheppard handed Mrs. Lee his business card. “Please have her call me as soon as you talk to her.”
“She’ll be on the first plane out here. I know that much. Carl is her only grandchild.”
“Mrs. Lee, can you tell me anything about these?” He removed the tarot cards from the envelope and fanned them out on the table in front of her. “I found them in Mr. Steele’s desk.”
She nodded and stuffed the hanky in a pocket in her skirt. “They came in the mail. Every few months for the last year or so, Mrs. Steele got a package in the mail and one of these cards was with it. She thought one of her students was sending them.”
Students didn’t send expensive watches, rings, or jade figurines, he thought. “What were in these packages?”
“Chocolates. That’s all I saw. Anyway, when the last one arrived, Mr. Steele was quite disturbed by it. He said he… he was going to have the police look into it.”
Sheppard made a mental note to check on that.
“I really am not feeling very well. I’d like to leave now.”
“Just one more question,” Sheppard said. “Do you think the difference in age was a problem in the Steeles’ marriage?”
He expected her to answer quickly, just to get out of here. But she considered the question carefully. “Their problems were about his absences, not about their ages. Besides, it was only ten years.”
“Was he seeing someone else?” Is that what this is about? Another woman? Infidelity? Is it going to be as common as that?
But Augusta Lee looked at him as though he were crazy. “There wasn’t any room in his life for anyone else. He was always working. His life was about work.”
“What about Mrs. Steele?”
Augusta’s prolonged hesitation didn’t bode well. She looked down at her hands. Flicked at something on the tabletop.
“Anything you can tell us, Mrs. Lee, will help us out,” Crick said softly.
She rolled her lips together and looked up at Crick, then at him. “Yes, I think she was seeing someone. Sometimes when Mr. Steele was out of town she called me at the last minute and asked me to sit with Carl. She was never gone all night or anything,” she added quickly. “But she often came in quite late, two or three in the morning.”
“Was this recently?”
“No, maybe six or seven months ago. My birthday’s in March and it was around then that she stopped calling me at the last minute.”
“Do you have any idea who the man was?” Sheppard asked.
She shook her head. “No.” She stood then. “I really don’t feel well. I’ll be glad to answer your questions some other time.” She started to turn away, then gestured at the object she’d removed from Steele’s body. “I don’t know what it is, but maybe it’s important.”
Sheppard nodded and thanked her. As she and Crick walked across the deck and out of sight, he fiddled with the small knobs on the device, but nothing happened. He turned it over and slid open the piece that fitted over the battery compartment. He removed the four triple A batteries, which appeared to be new, and put them in again. The device still refused to work. Sheppard pocketed it to turn into the lab later. But a part of him gnawed at the puzzle of the device. Why would Steele wear the contraption to bed?
He walked around the pool, eyeing the forlorn toys, the lone raft. Down below, on the beach, sunbathers gathered despite the cool air. By noon, they would be out in droves with their umbrellas, their colorful towels, their sunblock #50. Beyond them, the Atlantic stretched forever, clear and calm, waves breaking gently against the sand. Sandpipers scurried about as the waves receded. A slice of paradise where something had gone very wrong, he thought.
Crick strode back across the deck toward him. “Sergeant Jenks said to tell you he and Franklin are going to start their rounds with the neighbors.” She motioned toward the tarot cards and wrinkled her nose as if she had bitten into something sour. “What do you make of those?”
“Do I look like I know anything about tarot, Paula?”
“Honey, you look like you know stuff I’d love to learn.” Then she winked and laughed. “Hey, that was a joke, Shep. C’mon, lighten up. The closest New Age bookstore is that one over by the river. You’ll probably find someone there who knows about tarot.”
Sheppard glanced at the toys floating in the pool and felt the descent of that ethereal black cloud again. “How do people like this end up as statistics?”
“Oh c’mon, Sheppard. You’ve been spending too goddamn much time on the wrong side of the tracks. Rich people fart, they hurt, they make bad choices.”
He didn’t think it was quite that simple, but he couldn’t say it eloquently.
In Venezuela, where he had lived much of his childhood, the poor occupied hillside shacks called ranchitos which surrounded the rest of the city. In Iquitos, Peru, they lived in huts on stilts in the middle of the Amazon’s tributaries. In Rio they roamed the streets in gangs and slept where they happened to be when they got tired. People like that didn’t have access to the basics, much less to power and privilege.
He supposed this held a message for him, but damned if he could figure it out.
Chapter 4
Her eyelids felt as if they had been glued together with some cheap substance that had dried on her lashes. Her mouth tasted of sand, deserts. Her left arm had gone numb. Her bladder threatened to explode. The hollow ache in the pit of her stomach told her it had been awhile since she had eaten.
Rae Steele rolled onto her back, felt the cool, indifferent pressure on her left wrist, and opened her eyes. Metal. A metal object encircled her wrist. Gradually, her field of vision expanded to include the rocking chair to which the metal was attached. Handcuffs.
She lifted her head. Walls, wooden walls. Charcoal sketches on bright white sheets of paper covered the walls. She raised up a little higher and stared at the sketches.
All of them depicted the same woman involved in various activities. The longer she stared, the clearer the women’s face became. She was the woman.
Panic fluttered like a trapped bird at the back of her throat. She sat all the way up, the handcuff pulling hard on her right wrist, her other senses kicking in. She was lying on some sort of cushion, sweat had soaked through her clothes, she smelled water.
She squeezed her eyes shut and sank back against the cushion, desperately seeking the safety of sleep. It eluded her, but she still didn’t open her eyes.
Andy and I were arguing, I left in a huff, drove out to the cabin, and on my way home… What?
Headlights. She remembered headlights shining in her rearview mirror as she had crossed the bridge to the beach. It had been early, just past seven, and the car had followed her closely. Once she reached the other side of the bridge, she’d lost sight of the headlights and figured the car had turned off. She’d been more concerned then about what she would say to Andy, that things between them would have to change if she continued in the marriage.
She had parked, gone into the house, and found a note from Andy saying that he and Carl had gone out for a bite to eat. Ten minutes later, the doorbell had rung, and…
Don’t think about it now.
Rae opened her eyes again, sat straight up, and looked around slowly, taking in the room, the details other than the sketches of her. The odd chairs that hung from a ceiling beam. The handmade furniture. The high sheen of the floor. The colorful hammock strung up near a window. The beanbag chair with a big red H on it. On the wall to her right, she saw a childlike sketch of a hanged man, the kid’s game, guess the letters or hang in the noose.
Through an open doorway in front of her she glimpsed trees. She couldn’t tell from here w
hat kinds of trees these were, but they looked dense. Impenetrable. She felt fairly sure that water surrounded this weird little house.
Gradually, noises impinged on her awareness. Clicks and hums, the soft whisper of water, birds. She sat up slowly, careful not to rattle the handcuff, and craned her neck to peer over the edge of the window. Trees, sky, water, afternoon light. She heard a noise and glanced quickly toward its source. A dark figure stood in the doorway on the other side of the room, face lost in shadow. A man. Five-foot-ten or so, brawny shoulders, muscular legs slightly spread. He held a tray. When he stepped forward, out of the shadows, something monstrous swelled in her throat. She tried to swallow it back, failed, tried again, and air rushed past her teeth. The monstrous thing sank to someplace deep inside her; her mind snapped into clarity.
A sequence of events loomed in her head and collapsed into a single event. This man had rung her doorbell, slapped something over her mouth, brought her here, handcuffed her.
Rae watched him as he crossed the room, his movements assured, deliberate. She’d seen her share of cons when she had worked at Manatee Prison. These days, they called prisons “correctional institutions” and convicts were “inmates,” as though the labels mitigated the truth. But she knew otherwise. She knew that the worst cons, like Bundy and Manson, were the exceptions, not the rule.
Men like the one in front of her didn’t make the news, no books had been spawned from their lives, they hadn’t been featured in TV movies or documentaries. But that didn’t diminish their evil. The only quality they seemed to share with the likes of Bundy and Manson was that they rarely looked the way she imagined killers should look. Sometimes they even looked like this man did.
Forget Freddy Krueger and Hannibal Lechter. This guy’s eyes burned blue, a brilliant, guileless blue, the focus of his attractive face. No acne scars pitted his cheeks; his skin was smooth, bronze, like rich, dark honey. His hair and beard were blonde. Someone’s heartthrob, a model on the cover of a magazine, that was what he looked like.
His quick smile attempted to assure her there was nothing wrong with her being handcuffed to a rocking chair, inside a weird house in the middle of Christ knew where. He looked to be in his early thirties, but she knew he wasn’t. Before last night, she hadn’t seen him in nine years.
“I made some soup,” he said, setting the tray on the wooden crates and pushing them over to the cushion. “I figured you’d be hungry. You’ve been out a good while.” He unrolled a cloth napkin with a soup spoon inside of it. “This is fish soup with potatoes.” He dipped the spoon into the soup and raised it toward her mouth. “Open up now. It’s really delicious.”
Rae’s unshackled arm flew up, knocking the spoon out of his hand. “How much money do you want?” she hissed. “Just tell me! How much?”
He stared at her with murderous eyes, then grabbed her unshackled arm with one hand and her jaw with the other. He leaned into her face, leaned so close she could smell the sweat on his skin. “I don’t want your money. This isn’t about money. We clear on that?”
Tears filled her eyes and she whispered, “Yes.”
He released her jaw, rubbed his palms over his jeans, gestured at the soup. “You want this or not?”
“I … I have to go to the bathroom.”
A deep furrow formed between his eyes, he looked injured. “You don’t even remember me, do you?”
“I remember.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re afraid. If you really remember me, what’s my name?”
The H on the beanbag, she thought, and the name popped up from some thick, ugly darkness inside of her. “Hal. Your name is Hal.”
No last name. But apparently the first name satisfied him; his frown vanished, his eyes brightened like a kid’s. “I never forgot your name either, Rae.” He set the bowl in front of her, the spoon inside it. “You need to eat.”
He sat back on his heels, watching her. Rae leaned over as if to pick up the spoon, but instead swept up the bowl and hurled it at him. Hot soup splashed into his face, the bowl hit a beam behind him, and she leaped up and ran toward the door, dragging the rocking chair behind her, her breath exploding from her mouth.
She burst through the doorway, the rocking chair banging against the floor, into sunlight and heat. A startled flock of blue herons lifted from the nearest trees, their wings beating against the stillness. She gaped at the water, at the mangroves. Sweet Christ, she was in the Everglades.
Then he tackled her and Rae crashed to the wooden platform and sank into a place beyond hunger, despair, beyond fear.
Hal unlocked the handcuff from the rocker, picked her up, and carried her back inside the chickee. He set her on the cushion. Stupid bitch.
But he sympathized with her fear. He knew what it was like to feel trapped. He had felt that way every day during his stint in the joint, except for the brief respites when he reached.
He left her on the cushion and went into the kitchen for the Darvon. A nurse he had met during one of his lonely periods had provided the Darvon, syringes, and a number of other vital medicines for his first-aid kit. You didn’t live in the Everglades unless you were prepared.
The big drawback to the Darvon was that he had to run the generator to power the fridge so he could keep the stuff cold. Nothing he could do about it now. He needed the Darvon because it silenced the chatter in her head and allowed him access to the deeper levels of her personality.
He gave her less than before, then waited for the Darvon to take effect. The first time he’d reached into Rae, they’d been sitting across from each other in her office in the education building on the Manatee prison compound.
In those days, she was a teacher and guidance counselor and they were discussing the college courses he would take. He’d been enthralled with her Cupid’s bow mouth, the soft blue veins that ran through her eyelids, the shiny thickness of her hair, a sunlit river that flowed down her back.
He had reached ever so gently, seeking contact, nothing more, and had found Steele right there at the surface of her thoughts. It was how he’d discovered that she and Steele recently had become lovers.
He had leaped away from her and back into himself so suddenly, so violently, she had felt it, he knew she had from the way she winced, as if afflicted with a sudden, very bad headache. After that, he’d reached into her only when they weren’t in the same building. It had required more effort on his part, greater concentration, but as long as she was on the compound, he had managed to do it once a day.
For months, he had spied on her in this way, a psychic voyeur. She had become his obsession, his fix, his addiction. On weekends when she wasn’t working, he’d suffered agonizing withdrawal, an anguish that seemed, at times, almost physical.
He finally had gotten to the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore, so one weekend he tried to reach beyond the compound. He’d failed miserably and repeatedly. He couldn’t get past the buzzing static that emanated from several hundred inmates, guards, visitors. He couldn’t move past his need.
Hal had continued his attempts for weeks until, at the pinnacle of his frustration, Steele had inadvertently given him exactly what he needed to make the difference. He had handed Hal a photograph of a man who could have been anyone.
Reach for this guy, Hal, and tell me what you get.
His success at extending himself had begun then and had brought him to this moment in time, with Rae. And this was what he’d wanted, right? Rae with him. But not like this, Rae terrified, trying to escape, Rae doped up on Darvon. But he didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know how to make her trust him.
Her breathing evened out; the Darvon had done its job. Hal sat at her head, placed both hands at the sides of her face, fingers at the temples. In the movie Resurrection, Ellen Burstyn had done this in a revival tent, while healing a sick child. Hal couldn’t recall what the child had, couldn’t recall much of anything, in fact, except for the shape of Burstyn’s han
ds against the boy’s head.
He would have to watch that movie with Rae, he thought. He needed to remind himself that Burstyn’s talent in Resurrection differed from his own only in the intent. She healed and alleviated suffering; he had been trained to gather information, to injure, to destroy. He needed to learn how to redirect that training so that he could ease Rae’s fear of him.
Hal shut his eyes and reached, trying to fill her unconscious with peaceful images. His cell phone pealed, interrupting him. Manacas was the only person who had this number and if Hal didn’t answer now, Manacas would keep calling until he did. He got up with enormous reluctance, retrieved the phone from the kitchen, and walked out to the edge of the platform, well away from Rae’s range of hearing.
“Yeah, Eddie, what’s up?”
“I told Indrio about Steele. He drove by the place earlier today and said the estate’s swarming with cops, so it looks like they found the body.”
“Good. Then it won’t be long before Fletcher shows up.”
“Indrio wants us to meet in the next few days.”
“I’m tied up right now. I’ll call you tomorrow sometime and we’ll settle on a place.”
“Indrio wants to meet tomorrow, Hal.”
“It’s not convenient for me. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
He disconnected before Manacas could reply, walked out to the edge of the open platform, and sat down. Was it worth it? Rae was worth it, yes, but Rae was his personal business; she didn’t have anything to do with the original scheme he, Indrio, and Manacas had concocted.
Way back when they had first discussed getting rid of Steele and Fletcher, he had only wanted to get even with them for using him, for using all of them. Now he knew that as long as either of them was alive, it would be nearly impossible for him to have a life outside of the Everglades. This was especially true as long as Fletcher was alive, because she had a personal score to settle with him for walking out on her. And, of course, the higher she climbed within the FBI’s hierarchy, the more pressure she would feel to bury Delphi and its numerous errors.
The Hanged Man Page 4