by L. L. Soares
Or maybe Viv had simply been able to make Maggie’s last moment alive as pleasurable as possible.
Viv got out of bed and began her exercise regimen. She had all this energy to burn, why not use it constructively?
* * *
“How does it look? Colleen asked, modeling the outfit for Jeremy, who looked on approvingly.
“It looks great.”
“Oh, I’ve never worn anything this nice in my whole life.”
“Then it’s yours,” Jeremy said. “You can wear it to the fundraiser.”
“What fundraiser?”
“There’s an AIDS charity next month. I get these invitations all the time. I guess I used to go to a lot of those kinds of events, before the accident. I’ve been itching to get back into the swing of things. This would be the perfect excuse, if you’re interested that is.”
“And you want me to go with you?”
“Who else?” Jeremy asked her.
“Oh, that sounds wonderful, Jeremy.”
“I’ll reply to the invitation soon, then.” He smiled. His grin was slightly lopsided. “I have to admit, I’m pretty nervous about the idea, though.
“Don’t worry,” Colleen said. “I’ll be there, right beside you.”
Right then, Turney’s death was the furthest thing from her mind. She was finally starting to feel normal again.
“The dress is beautiful,” Colleen said, hugging her arms.
Jeremy laughed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sam stopped in front of a house. He’d wandered through the park and found himself in a neighborhood he didn’t recognize. In shock, aimless, he simply kept walking. The neighborhood was unfamiliar, but the house he stopped in front of seemed to spark some sense of recognition in him. He had been here before.
He walked up the steps and stood in front of the door. Instinctively, he pulled out his keys. There were a few new keys there he hadn’t noticed before. Keys he didn’t recognize. He put one in the door and turned.
The door opened.
Slowly, cautiously, he went inside. It was like part of him knew already what he would find in there. But the part of him that was conscious, aware, didn’t have a clue.
Sam locked the door behind him. All the shades were down, and there was a distinct odor in the house. The house was in a shambles, everything in disarray.
He wandered from room to room, flicking the light switches, but the power must have been shut off, because none of them worked. But he moved around as if he were very familiar with the layout of the house.
Then, in what was probably one of the bedrooms, but was devoid of furniture, he stumbled on something. He went over to the window and raised the shade.
There were bodies, strewn across the floor.
He lowered the shade again and sank to his knees, as the realization hit him that he was somehow responsible for the horrors that unfolded before him. And on some other level, unrelated but just as devastating, was Maggie’s death. A tremendous wave of grief washed over him.
His body was wracked with sobs. The tears came without warning, mercifully blocking out the carnage before him.
PART THREE
THIS CONTAGIOUS RAGE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LITTLE LEAGUE RIOT CLAIMS 10!
He’d already read the article three times, but something compelled him to read it again. Perhaps it was the description of the incident as “an eruption of pure rage.” The possibility of such a violent free-for-all seemed far-fetched, even by today’s standards, and yet, here was the proof. Children, parents, coaches all involved in some bloodthirsty melee. Ten people dead, including several children, as well as a pregnant woman and her unborn child. She had been kicked in the stomach and ribs repeatedly.
What fucking animals, Sam thought, amazed by what he read. I guess rage management really is a necessary profession these days.
The incident had happened a week ago, but for some strange reason, he couldn’t bring himself to throw the paper away. There were still daily updates. A couple of kids who had been in the hospital had finally died. There were still some in critical condition, and the doctors weren’t sure if they’d make it. A woman suffered severe brain damage.
Charlie had an appointment for nine that morning, but he was late. Earlier in the week, his mother had called to say he wasn’t feeling well. Sam could tell she was lying, but even if it had been the truth, he should have been better by now. He’d already rescheduled the boy twice. Sam looked at his watch. It was a couple of minutes before ten. The session was over.
He isn’t coming back, Sam thought. Does he really think I’m going to just forget about him? I’m going to have to go see him sometime soon and try to talk some sense into him.
Sam thought they had an understanding, but he had been wrong. This showed him that Charlie had no respect for him or his abilities at all.
He’s not coming back.
The phone buzzed and Sam picked up the receiver. It was Carla.
“Would you like Mrs. Carlisle to come in now?”
“No, Carla, give me a few more minutes. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”
There were photographs in the newspaper on his desk of the police trying to break up a crowd of people who were intent on killing each other. A man with a bloodied face was off in one corner, trying to cover his head. A woman appeared to be lifeless on the ground beside him. It seemed more graphic than what the papers usually printed.
It hadn’t happened very far from where he sat now. Almost a stone’s throw away. In the park. He walked by there almost every day at lunchtime. In fact, he’d seen baseball games being played there all the time during the summer months.
He looked at his watch again. Inwardly, he cursed Charlie for not showing up. Then he got to his feet and went to the door of his office. He opened it and went out into the lobby.
“Mrs. Carlisle, I’ll see you now,” he said to the woman seated on the other side of the room. She got up from her chair, put down her magazine, and followed him into the office.
“Please take a seat.”
She did as she was told. She was one of his success stories. Her volatile temper was a thing of the past. She was calmer now. She didn’t even feel the need to smoke anymore, an unexpectedly pleasant side effect of his treatment.
“Dr. Wayne, did you read about that awful riot in the park?” Brenda Carlisle asked him. She was about thirty-five, brunette hair, slightly stocky build. She dressed tastefully, but not expensively. She was an executive assistant in an office. She was taking time off from work to be here, and yet she didn’t have any trouble making it to her appointment on time. Unlike Charlie.
“I saw,” Sam said. “It was pretty horrible.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have helped those people,” Mrs. Carlisle said. She was not particularly old looking, nor was she unattractive, but there was something matronly about her. He had a hard time thinking of her as Brenda. Mrs. Carlisle seemed to fit better, for some odd reason.
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Sam said. “But unfortunately, I can’t help everyone. Only those who come to me. Like you.”
Mrs. Carlisle smiled.
“How have you been doing, Brenda?” he forced himself to use her first name, as she had requested in past sessions.
“I’ve been doing wonderfully, Doctor,” she said. He was going to correct her and say that he was not a licensed psychiatrist, that he was a psychologist, but he saw no point in saying it. In her healing process, she had seen him as an authority figure, a doctor. Many of his patients did. He did not correct them, if their mistake helped them define his role in their minds.
“In fact, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“Of course, Brenda. Please go on.”
“I’ve been doing so well lately, thanks to you of course, that I wanted to stop coming here for a while. To see how I can do without the sessions.”
“Hmmm,” he hummed.
“I don�
��t mean it as an insult, Dr. Wayne. In fact, it’s the opposite. You’ve done such a good job, I feel like I can handle this myself from now on. Or, at least I hope I can. You know, I used to come three times a week, and now its just once a week. I know things are a lot better. I was just thinking maybe it’s time for the next step.”
It was funny how she’d demanded he call her Brenda, and yet she continued to call him Dr. Wayne. She wanted him to be the dominant figure and had no desire for them to be equals.
He had an image in his mind of her on the floor. Her clothes torn off. He was trying to force a pen into her rectum.
The image bothered him. He tried to put it out of his mind. Instead, he thought of Charlie skipping his session.
“Doctor Wayne?”
“Yes, Brenda. I think you’re right. I think we’ve made a breakthrough, and your desire to move on is definitely a healthy one. I won’t stand in your way on this. In fact, I totally agree with you.”
“You do?”
“Yes, you’ve made incredible progress over the last year. And I think it’s become very clear that you are not the same woman you were a year ago. You are in control of your life now. You are free of the confines of your temper.”
“I owe it all to you, Doctor.”
“You owe it mostly to yourself. I simply provided the tools. You had to want to heal yourself; you had to make the effort. And you did. A year is actually quite remarkable, you know. Some people take many years to reach the point you have.”
Which was only partially true. While most therapists did take years to heal someone like Brenda, he found that his methods were much more effective, and worked much quicker. He was able to heal most of his patients in a very short span of time, considering the severity of many of their maladies. The thing was, most of them didn’t know when to move on, and continued to come long after the sessions had lost any effectiveness. He didn’t tell them otherwise, because he had to pay bills, after all. But it was nice to see someone come to the realization on her own.
Besides, the ones like her, who had been coming for a while, had nothing to offer him anymore. The adrenaline rush he got from patients when he first started seeing them always fizzled out over time. The thrill was diminished the more he healed them.
“Thank you for agreeing with me, Dr. Wayne,” she said. “And thanks for making a difference in my life.”
“All this praise,” Sam said. “I’m not used to it.” Which was a lie. He’d had many grateful patients who had showered praise on him in the past. Too many.
“I mean every word of it, Doctor,” Mrs. Carlisle said.
“Well, thank you. I have grown so used to seeing you every week that I have to admit, I’ll miss you, Brenda.”
I’ll miss your perfume, and the curve of your thigh, Sam thought. And I’ll always wonder why I didn’t make a move on you when you made it so obvious that you were interested.
She smiled at his compliment. “Well, thank you, Doctor. I’ll miss you, too.”
“So there’s really nothing else to say at this point. You can tell Carla on your way out that this was your last session.”
“Don’t we have anything else to talk about?”
“I think that about covers it.”
She looked disappointed. Perhaps she really did want him to at least try to seduce her. He couldn’t be sure. Those kinds of signals were often wasted on him. It wasn’t because he was a professional, although he did try to uphold the integrity of his profession. Was it because he was a married man? Had been a married man, he corrected himself. Maybe he still felt a loyalty to Maggie, after all these years. But an even bigger reason was because he just had a kind of awkwardness about these things. Here he was a confident, sophisticated adult, a professional healer, and even now he had vestiges of the feelings he had back in high school when a girl would flirt with him, and he’d get all tongue-tied, not sure how to respond. It was a wonder he ever got beyond that enough to have relationships at all, much less find someone like Maggie. And now she was gone.
The image of Mrs. Carlisle on the floor, on all fours, and him exploring her orifices with his gold pen, came back to him.
She stood up. Her skirt rode up for a moment as she rose, revealing a brief glimpse of a thigh. “Well, I guess this is goodbye,” she said.
She hesitated, then held out her hand.
She clearly was as clueless about this moment as he was.
He shook her hand. “I am very proud of you, Brenda. You have proven to me how strong you really are today. But please, if things get difficult again, don’t ever hesitate to come back. It is not a sign of failure to need help. In fact, realizing you need help is the first step to victory.”
As he said the words, he knew it sounded like so much bullshit, but he felt the need to say something, and he just couldn’t bring himself to ask her if she wanted to fuck right then and there on the dark green carpeting.
“Thank you, Dr. Wayne.”
They released hands. He saw something in her eyes that told him he’d had a chance at something this morning. A chance he’d let slip by.
It’s not a big deal, he told himself. It’s not like she’s a knockout or anything. And Maggie just died, for Christ sake. They just buried her this week; I was standing over her grave as they lowered her coffin in the ground. There was a proper amount of time to grieve, after all.
He watched Mrs. Carlisle go. She closed the door after her, and he was alone in his office again. He wanted to just grab his coat and leave, go to Charlie’s house, talk some sense to the kid before it was too late to save him. But he had responsibilities here.
Carla had told him he should take a few more days off, it being so soon after
Maggie had been laid to rest, but he couldn’t stand to stay in that empty house alone. His patients needed him. And he needed to be as far from that house as possible.
The phone buzzed. It would be Carla to ask if he wanted to see his next patient now, since Mrs. Carlisle had left early, or if he wanted to wait until the appointed time. He stared at the phone, unable to bring himself to answer it. After three buzzes, it stopped.
He stared at the newspaper headline again, wondering why the story bothered him so much. Sure, it was a horrible thing that had happened. But why did he feel so close to
it all? He didn’t know anybody who had been there, who had been hurt.
And then he noticed the date. It had happened the same day that he’d identified Maggie’s body. Maybe that had something to do with his fixation.
He sat back in his brown leather chair and closed his eyes, trying to empty his mind and failing miserably.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“What do you got?” Detective Ben Carroll asked, finishing his fourth cigarette of the morning.
“Wait til you get a load of this, Carroll,” Fred Chapin told him, leading him to the site. “A guy was walking his dog through the park and his dog noticed something strange, I guess, and tried to dig it up.”
They went behind some trees. There was a mound of fresh-dug dirt on the other side. And a pit. In the pit, were bodies. Actually, bodies was the wrong word. There were pieces of bodies. Body parts. Hands and feet, legs and arms, upper and lower torsos, heads. All mixed together like some gigantic, obscene salad, mixed in with the dirt. Forensics was trying to sift through it all.
“So far, we’ve counted twelve bodies. There are probably more.”
“What kind of fuck could have done something like this?” Ben asked, crushing his half-smoked cigarette underfoot. “It looks like a fucking holocaust or something.”
“They’ve been here awhile. Months, maybe. But Frankie seems to think that someone capable of doing this—this might not be all of it.”
Carroll nodded, watching passively as body parts continued to be removed from the pit and put in bags.
“We’re dealing with some kind of fucking animal here, Ben,” Fred said, clearly frazzled by the whole thing. Carroll had been doing this long enough
to know how to keep his emotions in check. Some guys never learned how to do that. But he had to admit, even he hadn’t seen anything like this before.
“You think it’s the Shredder, or whatever they called that guy?”
“Could be,” Carroll said. “It’s the same kind of carnage. But the last time he went wild, there were maybe five people tops. Now, who knows how big this thing is.”
He was past the point of wondering how a human being could have been capable of such violence. There were witnesses after all, even if they were no help in identifying him. At first, Carroll was sure the tearing asunder of human flesh had to be the work of a real animal, or some kind of machine, but people had seen the Shredder, or whoever this guy was, rip people apart with his bare hands. Something that really defied logic, but they’d seen his handiwork, and for now, there wasn’t much else to go on. Somehow, a man with superhuman strength was going around tearing people to shreds.
“This is fucked up,” Fred said.
“Yeah.” Carroll lit up another cigarette. “You can say that again. Sure is some spooky shit.”
“You got any leads on that guy yet?”
“We got jack shit, Fred. Nobody got a good look at him. We can’t even put a sketch together. A guy just goes wild in the streets and nobody can even identify him.”
“Sorry to hear it. Well, there’s not much you can do here right now. Things are under control. They’re collecting all the evidence, and I have some other guys making the rounds, asking questions. But you know there won’t be any leads. If the bodies have been here that long, and nobody’s spoken up yet, it’s a lost cause at this point.”
“I know,” Carroll said. “Keep me informed. Get me copies of any paperwork. I want to be totally updated on this thing.”