The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  I found a tissue in my purse and blew my nose. “You know the trusts I manage? My mother’s estate? One of her donations before she died was to a women’s co-op in Guatemala—Rosa Guevera and her friends starting their businesses. I think it was like five hundred bucks to each woman. Something tiny like that.” I took a sip of wine and dabbed my eyes. “Amazing what such a small amount of money can do. She changed that woman’s life.”

  “You know anything about her?” he asked. “I mean other than the jewelry? Does she have kids or anything?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I never thought to find out. Funny. Maybe I’ll see if I can learn more about her. I think the grant application is still in the files somewhere.” I raised my glass. “To Rosa. And her new life.”

  He clinked his glass with mine. “And to your mother. Who is responsible for two creations at this table. That necklace. And you.”

  The antipasti came, which we lingered over. I can’t remember when anything tasted so good to me. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Being stalked by an ax murderer can help you work up an appetite, I guess.

  “What was her name again?” David asked, spearing a slice of salami.

  “Whose?”

  “Your mother’s.”

  “Mary Nell,” I said. “Everyone always called her Nell. She hated it. My brother and I had all sorts of variations on it. Mary Nelly, Mary Nelly Jelly, Mary Nelly Jelly Belly.”

  He laughed. “I bet she loved that one.”

  “She hated them all. She thought Nell was a more appropriate name for a bovine than a woman. She claimed she was named after a little red heifer.”

  “Was it true?” he asked.

  “Her dad raised cattle. Outside Hillsboro, actually. She spent her whole childhood milking cows, cleaning stalls, and kicking bales of hay out the back of her dad’s pickup.”

  “Ah. The origin of the Texas milkmaid image.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Pass the garlic bread, please.”

  “Have you suspended your new thigh fitness program?” he asked, adding quickly, “Not that I think you need one in the first place.”

  “Thigh Recovery Program. They used to be there. I just want them back.” I took a bite of bread. “I have a greater need for garlic bread and gnocchi than for firm thighs at the moment. It’s been a rough week.”

  “Any new developments?”

  I told him about Gordon Pryne. And the weird, murderer-stalker note.

  “I might have to rescind my toast,” he said. “I didn’t think your life could get any worse.”

  “Well it is.”

  “You have a knack.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Pardon my provincial, controlling male attitude, but I don’t think I can let you stay at that house by yourself.”

  “Let?” I raised my eyebrows. “Did I just hear you say let? Surely you didn’t say let.”

  He nodded. “Let is exactly what I said. Don’t even start with me.”

  “I don’t think it’s really up to you, David. But I appreciate your concern. I really do.”

  “You are the most impossibly stubborn woman I have ever met in my life.”

  I smiled sweetly. “Thank you.” I held out my glass for more wine. “Truth is, I don’t have anywhere else to stay. It occurs to me that I have no friends. Which is pathetic because I have lived in this city pretty much forever. I work too much.”

  “No kidding.”

  I glared at him.

  “And even if I did have someone to stay with, I’d just be leading an ax murderer to their house. The man’s attacked two women at once before.”

  “A hotel,” he said. “What about that?”

  “A hotel wouldn’t do me any good. I wouldn’t be any safer there.”

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  “I’m not commuting from Hillsboro, David. And besides, it’s a small town. People would talk.”

  “People talk anyway. The women of that town have had me married, divorced, and gay all in the same week.”

  “You’re fast. And adaptable, apparently.”

  He feigned modesty. “I do what I can.”

  “McKnight suggested I buy a gun. Or get a dog.”

  “How about both? I’ll pick out the gun, you pick out the dog.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I was tired of talking about Gordon Pryne and worrying about getting whacked with an ax. I wanted to enjoy my birthday supper. So I raised my glass and changed the subject, and we finished our dinner talking about regulation boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. I had my first taste of normalcy in days. Not to mention the gnocchi. Which was lovely.

  Somehow the effort of conducting ourselves in a nonemergency manner wore us both out. I asked him to take me home after supper. David checked the house for me before he left, and then I sent him away with a good-night kiss, faking bravery but secretly wanting to be protected and rescued and saved from the bogeyman and the bogey-demon.

  After he left, I paced the house for a while, unable to settle myself down. I finally landed at the dining room table I’d inherited from my mother, perching myself on a needlepoint chair cushion with a yellow legal pad in my hand. I wrote down everything that was on my mind.

  Most of the scribbles were about Drew Sturdivant, Gordon Pryne, and Peter Terry. Were the three of them somehow connected? Or was Peter Terry simply acting on impulse, taking advantage of a bizarre crack in the normally serene routine of my days to insert himself back into my life?

  There was no way to know at this point, but I did know one thing. I needed a plan. If for no other reason than to manage my own anxiety. Helene was right. I could not sit on my hands and wait for the police to tie this mess up. I wanted my own answers, in my own time.

  I made a list of the things I knew.

  I started with Drew Sturdivant. Nineteen years old, a student at El Centro College. She was supporting herself by stripping at Caligula, a nasty men’s club for nasty men, in my opinion, on Harry Hines. She dyed her black hair a sort of bright orangy red. And she was dead. Murdered Saturday night, in an alley behind a Harry Hines car lot, by someone wielding an ax. The blows had been from behind and directed at her head, intended to kill her instantly.

  Okay. Gordon Pryne.

  Forty-six years old, career criminal. White. A hundred and fifty-five pounds. Five foot something. Five foot nine? Or ten?

  I wondered how tall Drew was. And whether her height and his matched up in any way. Maybe there was something forensically important about the angle of the ax wound that would be illuminating.

  Back to Pryne. He had wild brown hair and bad skin, at least in his mug shot. His criminal career ran the gamut. Theft, robbery, assault, sexual assault, and one manslaughter conviction. He’d escaped from prison by switching wristbands with a nonviolent criminal and faking a seizure. Pretty wily.

  He’d tied up and raped two female college students this past winter, threatening them with a hatchet. His other assaults had involved a knife of some kind. He was a blade man, McKnight had said.

  Pryne had a child. I wasn’t sure how old the kid was or whether it was a boy or a girl. I didn’t know whether he’d ever been married to the mother. And I didn’t know the mother’s name. I was pretty sure Jackson and McKnight had said she worked at Parkland Hospital.

  On to Peter Terry. Demon with a sick sense of humor. Liked to bother me in annoying, disgusting ways. Had infested my house last year with flies (could he be responsible for the rodents?) and infused my home with the horrible, sulfuric smell of deviled eggs. Seemed to enjoy devil references, in fact. And puns. Axl Rose indeed.

  Oh. I had forgotten about this. A year and a half ago, Peter Terry had introduced himself to me the same day I received two anonymous gifts—my mother’s wedding ring, which had been buried with her two years before, and a necklace made by Rosa Guevera. John Mulvaney had received an identically wrapped gift that same day, which led to a series of bizarre misunderstandings and almost got me fired. I had never been c
ertain that Peter Terry had sent the gifts. But it seemed the logical conclusion.

  Peter Terry had haunted Eric Zocci, the patient who had died last year. And had also targeted another student of mine named Gavin, who had attempted suicide and landed in the psych unit, and who had later become a Christian. Gavin was a sophomore at SMU now. I hadn’t seen him in a while.

  I put down my pen, went to the kitchen, and made myself some hot chocolate. I sat there in my cold kitchen, in the dark, drinking my hot chocolate, thinking about my list, and listening to the rodents crawl around behind my water heater.

  12

  Tuesday is a clinic day for me, so I was up and in by nine, stirring my tea and listening to a nineteen-year-old girl complain about her boyfriend problems and obsess about her half-pound weight gain. Which is exactly what nineteen-year-old girls should have the luxury of worrying about.

  Why was Drew Sturdivant, at nineteen, stripping for a living instead of waiting tables or mooching off her parents? At a dump like Caligula, I imagined the money was terrible. I was inexperienced in such matters, though, so was purely guessing.

  I had a break after my first session. Marci, the bipolar office manager, had taken the day off to see her shrink, which meant she’d be fully medicated and back on the warpath in no time. I took advantage of her absence to continue searching my archived files.

  Since I didn’t really know what I was looking for, the search was directionless and ultimately fruitless. None of my patients seemed like ax-murderer types. Some of them were angry. And entitled. And one or two had been violent or had violent fantasies. Lots of them were into pornography and strip clubs, but they were college-age boys. Though I didn’t find these to be particularly palatable habits, I’d hardly call an interest in naked women aberrant behavior at that age. None of the boys had mentioned Caligula specifically No one had transferred from El Centro College. And none of them had mentioned Drew Sturdivant.

  I printed out a few files anyway, just in case, but I was convinced they would lead nowhere.

  I shifted gears and fired up the Internet, searching for Parkland Hospital. Maybe there was some way to track down Parkland personnel. I wanted to find out more about the mother of Gordon Pryne’s child. I scanned the website, searching under the last name “Pryne” for staff members, but came up empty. Most of the staff wouldn’t be listed anyway. Just the physicians.

  I gave up and went to the Texas Sex Offender Registry. Surely Gordon Pryne was a registered sex offender. Maybe it listed spouses’ names or something. I typed in his name, and sure enough, there he was, along with a list of his sexual crimes. His last known address was in west Dallas. There was a map and everything. I wrote the address down.

  I scanned the crimes. Pryne’s mug shot bio had listed them only generically but this list included more specific details. He had two sexual assaults on his record. He’d been convicted of sexual assault of a child at age nineteen and given probation. And he’d been convicted of raping a thirty-four-year-old woman at knifepoint, six years ago. I guess that was the aggravated sexual assault Jackson and McKnight mentioned earlier. The rape and attempted murder of the two Arlington girls wasn’t listed. Maybe he was never formally charged with that crime.

  I went to the website for the Dallas Morning News and searched the archives for the week of the knifepoint rape. There it was in Metro. A local doctor had been raped in her apartment. The article didn’t list the victim’s name, of course. Or Pryne’s. The report had appeared the day after the assault, probably before there was a suspect. The victim was an OB at Parkland.

  Back to the Parkland website. Of the ninety ob-gyns listed, fifteen were women. I clicked on each name, one by one. A brief bio and vita of each woman appeared, including photographs. I went back to the article for details. The victim had been thirty-four at the time of the assault. That would make her forty now.

  I went back to the vitae and checked medical school graduation dates. Taking into account age, and whether or not the physician was working at Parkland at the time, only one name matched. I clicked on her name and saw a smiling photo of a striking Hispanic woman. Her name was Maria Chavez.

  Dr. Chavez was an assistant professor on the teaching faculty of Parkland Hospital. She’d done her undergraduate work at the University of Texas at El Paso, majoring in Spanish, graduating with a B.A., then completed a second undergraduate degree in pre-med at the University of Texas in Austin. B.S. in biology. Ambitious girl. And smart. She’d gone to UT Southwestern Medical School and done her residency at Parkland.

  A knock on the door scared me almost out of my chair. A student intern stuck her head in the door.

  “Sorry to bother you, Dr. Foster. Your eleven o’clock is waiting.”

  I checked my watch. It was ten after eleven. I was going to have to improve my time management skills.

  “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  I finished scribbling some notes and closed the computer files.

  I floated through the rest of my day in a haze, anchoring for fifty minutes at a time during sessions. Somehow I was able to focus on my patients, which was probably the Holy Ghost intervening on their parts, not mine.

  I ate lunch at my desk and got caught up on paperwork and phone calls. I called Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal and scheduled a visit for tomorrow morning. And then I spent some time trying to track down Maria Chavez.

  Getting in touch with a physician is even harder than trying to reach a psychologist. They’re always in surgery or at the clinic, or in meetings, or with patients, and each time you call a different location, you have to leave a message with some nurse or assistant who thinks you’re a patient and starts the conversation with “Date of Birth?” I knew this, of course. My dad is a surgeon. But still it frustrated me, and by the end of the hour, I’d finished about a third of my tuna sandwich and lost another third or so of my sanctification.

  By the end of the day, I was shot out, bled dry and globally pessimistic. I went for a long swim, in the indoor pool this time (I may be foolish but I’m not a complete moron), and tried unsuccessfully to clear my head.

  By the time I got home, I was starving. And agitated.

  I threw my keys and cell phone onto the kitchen table and checked my answering machine. McKnight and Jackson had both called to check on me. My father had called. He sounded angry and demanded an immediate call back. And my brother Guthrie had called. He’d just gotten the news about Dad and Kellee’s pending progeny. Which explained the phone call from my dad. I was about to be assigned to settle Guthrie down, I suspected.

  I ignored the messages and turned on the stereo. Axl Rose had gone out with the day’s garbage. I popped in a Dave Brubeck CD and felt my spine decompress as he tapped his little black and white keys.

  The mail had come, along with a brown package, sitting on my front step.

  Given recent events, I found unexpected mail a little bone-chilling.

  The package had no return address, just one of those UPS bar-code labels. It was in a plain brown box, neatly taped. I picked the package up and returned to the kitchen. I leaned in and listened for ticking.

  Then I realized how paranoid I was being and took a pair of scissors to the tape and opened it.

  Inside was another box, along with a note, written in purple crayon. “Happy Birthday, Dylan.” Purple hearts were drawn on the margins of the note. I felt my spine tighten back up.

  I went to the bathroom and got some tweezers, then picked up the note and set it aside. I was too curious and too anxious to wait for the police to come. I put on a new pair of Playtex rubber gloves (“sassy new color!” the package shouted), and with shaking hands, opened the second box.

  Inside was a bright pink Barbie lunchbox.

  I used a dishtowel to pick it up and examine it. Maybe there was something inside. I sniffed it. A body part? I shook it. It felt empty.

  Pulling open the zipper, I peeked inside and saw another note, folded. I used my tweezers to pick up the note a
nd spread it out on the table.

  My fear quickly morphed into delight.

  The package wasn’t from Gordon Pryne at all. It was from my favorite five-year-old in the world, Christine Zocci, the niece of the student who had died last year. She had obviously picked out the gift herself. And drawn the card. Purple is her favorite color.

  The note was from her mother, Liz. A chatty tome about their family, catching me up on everyone. Liz and Andy were doing great. Andy was running the family business now, and Liz was administering the family charities, which meant she was in charge of an enormous amount of money. Christine was in her second semester of kindergarten and had decided she wanted to be a queen when she grew up. When Liz explained that America doesn’t have a queen, Christine had said, “Then I’ll have to be queen somewhere else.”

  Her two younger brothers, “the little hoodlums” as the family referred to them, had recently gotten themselves kicked out of play group for biting the other children. Mikey, the older one, had decided to cut his own hair before school one day, and now sported a jagged bald spot where his bangs used to be.

  I love this family.

  The lunchbox had a picture of a red-haired Barbie, a thoughtful choice since my hair is auburn. She was wearing a sporty, striped sweater and pink pants. It had a shoulder strap and came with its own hot-pink Barbie sippy cup.

  I picked up the phone and called the Zocci house in Chicago, knowing Andy wouldn’t be home from work yet and that Liz would be wrangling kids and making grilled cheese sandwiches.

  Christine answered the phone.

  “Hi, Punkin, it’s Miss Dylan,” I said.

  “Mommy!” Christine shouted. “It’s Miss Dylan!” then said to me, “Did you get your present?”

  We chatted about the various features of my new lunchbox and Christine told me about the boy at school she liked, and wondered if I still liked the same boy. I said yes, and thought about how little changes in the heart of a girl from age five to thirty-five. I guess we all want to be queen someday, at least in the eyes of the right boy.