Pattern of Wounds

by J. Bertrand

  “Roland,” she says. “You actually showed up. Come on in.”

  I follow her through an arched doorway into the dining room, recognizing the table and chairs that used to belong to my uncle and aunt. On the table, lined up like soldiers on parade in four rows of three, a series of glossy red bags with rope handles, stuffed to the gills with green tissue.

  “You caught me at a bad time,” she says. “I’m hosting a jewelry party tonight, and these are the favors.” She leans over the table to adjust the perfectly aligned bags. “It’s the perfect time of year with all the last-minute shoppers. I just hope I have enough treats here.”

  “I have some questions for you,” I say.

  “Questions?” She wheels on me. “Questions for me. I can hardly believe it. You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting. But I knew this day would come.”

  “I want you to tell me about someone,” I say. “A man named Dave Bayard.”

  “Bayard?” She touches her chin in thought. “Bayard, Bayard, Bayard.”

  “He was at your conference. The one where Brad Templeton spoke. Brad signed a book for him.”

  She snaps her fingers. “Oh, Bayard. Right. I know exactly who you mean. What an interesting evening that was! You should have been there, Roland, you really should have. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. The conference was such a success. Everybody thought so.”

  “I’d like you to tell me everything you talked about with him.”

  “We talked about everything. We talked for hours. You can’t expect me to remember it all. And anyway, why are you suddenly interested in my work? You’ve done your best to ignore me up until now.”

  She walks me through the kitchen, immaculate and bare, then into an open plan living room as tall as it is wide, where two tapestry-covered wingback chairs and a plush, overstuffed sofa squat below a pendulous brass chandelier. I reach into my breast pocket for my slim digital recorder, the one I use for interviews.

  “Oh,” she says, slumping onto the couch. “You’re going to record this?”

  “Start at the beginning and tell me everything about Bayard.”

  “Everything?” She clears her throat. “Well.” She raises her voice for the tape. “As you know, I’m the founder of an organization devoted to the victims of murder here in Houston.”

  “Talk in your normal voice,” I tell her.

  “We hold regular meetings for our membership, but a couple of months ago we hosted our first event for the general public. It was an unqualified success, with so many new faces in the audience, so much fresh enthusiasm. I invited Mr. Templeton to talk about his books. We’ve been working together on his latest: a new history of the Dean Corll case. I’m an expert on Dean’s crimes, naturally, so Mr. Templeton thought—”

  “Dean,” I say. “You’re on a first name basis?”

  “Mr. Templeton thought it would be a good idea to pick my brain. You might have a hard time believing this, Roland, but there are people out there who take what I do very seriously, and he’s one of them. One of the many, Roland. My website has an international audience.”

  “So Bayard showed up at your conference? Had you ever seen him before?”

  She shakes her head. “He must have seen one of the flyers we put up, or maybe read about it online. He sat in the back through all the sessions, but I could tell he was riveted. Hanging on every word. And he wrote a lot of things down. At first I thought maybe he was a reporter. But no.” She frowns at the memory of disappointment. “Still, he’s the one who made the Q&A session such a success. He asked so many good questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “The detective speaker, Mr. Lauterbach, went over all the things a modern investigation would do differently hunting a serial killer like Dean. It was so fascinating. David wanted to know whether they really were hunting any serial killers, right this minute. The detective said he couldn’t comment, but then Mr. Templeton said there were a couple of cases he’d been looking at, some murders that seemed to be connected. And the detective got this shocked look on his face, because one of those cases was his—and he’d made a connection too, but to a third murder. They started going back and forth. The rest of us went along for the ride.”

  This is more or less the scene Templeton described.

  “He wanted to know everything: why the killer would kill, why he would leave the bodies in the swimming pools, everything. Motive questions. Method questions. He was eating it all up. We all were. He’d never heard about the Fauk case before—Mr. Templeton talked about the case during his slide show—and he asked a lot of questions about that.”

  “Brad did a slide show, too?”

  She nods. “It wasn’t as fancy as the detective’s, just the pictures from his books.”

  “His books? Do you have a copy of The Kingwood Killing?”

  She goes to the bookcase on the far wall, her sequins shimmering. “I have that one and the new one. He signed them both for me, too.”

  I flip through The Kingwood Killing, turning the glossy image from the Nicole Fauk crime scene around so she can see. “Was that one of his slides?”

  She nods. “It’s bloodcurdling, isn’t it? The way he bleeds them and dumps the bodies.”

  The present tense isn’t lost on me, but I ignore the implication. Turning the book back around, I gaze at the black-and-white photo.

  All this time, the pristine condition of Bayard’s book has been gnawing away at me. It should have been annotated and dog-eared, a physical artifact of his homicidal obsession. Instead, the pages were clean, apparently unread. Now it makes sense.

  The book wasn’t the focus. The book was never the focus. The image drove him, and he didn’t need the book for that. Templeton had projected Nicole Fauk’s murder onto the big screen; he’d narrated the details, leaving nothing to the imagination, stamping the image indelibly into Bayard’s memory. He could have drawn on it anytime. Staging the scene to resemble Fauk’s was just another dodge, just another improvisation to make his crime blend in with those of the serial killer the detective and the author had just hypothesized into existence.

  Only the killer is real. He just happens to be behind bars up at Huntsville, spinning stories in front of The Donald.

  “Afterward,” she says, “when everybody else had left, me and David stayed behind to listen as the two of them went back and forth. It was fascinating, Roland, the way they built up the profile. Like there were four of us to begin with, and by the time they were done there were five. Like another person was with us in the room.”

  “The killer, you mean.”

  She nods.

  “Did Bayard tell you why he was so interested?”

  Her face lights up. “He was so sweet. I’m a little surprised he hasn’t come back for the regular meetings. I really took a shine to him, too. But I couldn’t help it. My maternal instinct kicks in. He reminded me of my own boys. The two of us stayed after Mr. Templeton and the detective left, and he just poured out his whole life to me in a gush. And he wanted to know all about me, too.”

  “About you,” I say. “And did my name come up?”

  She frowns. “So I’m not allowed to mention you, is that how it is? Not even in private conversation? I’ve always made a point in my writing not to mention you by name, not after the way you freaked out—”

  “Did he want to know about me?”

  “He did ask a question or two. It’s only natural since you investigated both of the cases in Mr. Templeton’s books, and since I’m your sister—”

  “You’re not my sister.”

  “—he naturally wanted to know. Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything negative. I told him you were very successful, that you were married to a beautiful woman. A lawyer, no less. A wealthy heiress.” Bitterness in her voice. “How for all your achievements in life, you still live in the old neighborhood, you’re still so down-to-earth—”

  “Tammy, stop it.”

  “Well,” she says. “I ha
ve to lie to people or they wouldn’t understand.”

  The anger inside me. A kettle on the boil. I try to suppress it, to keep the lid halfway on. I can’t storm out. I can’t hit back. There’s something in all this I’m not seeing.

  My maternal instinct. My own boys.

  “How old is Bayard?” I ask.

  “Roland, I don’t know exactly.” An annoyed shake of the head. “He must have been in grad school. He said he was studying criminal justice, that’s why he came. He was doing a paper on serial killers.”

  “You’re talking about David Junior,” I say.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  My head fills with white noise.

  I stop the recorder. I put it into my pocket. I rise from the chair. I retrace my steps to the front door.

  “Roland, wait,” she says, looming behind me, snatching at my arm.

  She stops me at the Christmas tree, her grip surprisingly strong. Her nails dig into my arm, gripping my sleeve in her fist. She jerks again with enough force to turn me toward her.

  “You can’t just walk out on me like this. We still have some issues to confront. You need to face up to what happened.” She shakes me like she did when I was a kid. “Listen to me, Roland. I know this is hard for you to accept, but it’s time to let go of your guilt. It’s not your fault Moody died the way he did. It’s not your fault Dean killed him. There’s nothing you could have done, but what you need to do now—what he needs you to do for him—is accept what happened. Stop fighting the truth. You know what happened.”

  I try to pull my arm free, but she holds tight. I jerk harder, dragging her forward, until a ripping sound shocks us both into silence. She drops her hand. The left sleeve of Lyndon Pellier’s Donegal tweed jacket hangs free from the shoulder, my shirt visible through the weft of veiny threads.

  “Oh, Roland,” she says, stepping backward. “Your nice jacket. I’m so sorry.”

  I move toward her. “You’re right about one thing: I do know what happened. And, Tammy, I’m not the one fighting the truth. I face it head on every day. I look it in the face and I don’t blink. The truth is Moody wasn’t murdered by some depraved pedophile. I know that and your father knew it, too. Dean Corll didn’t kill him. Nobody did.”

  “That’s not true, Roland. You have to face the truth.”

  “I know what happened, Tammy. Listen to me.” I take her glittering sleeve in my own hand now, shedding sequins on the floor. “I know what happened because I saw what happened. I saw it with my own eyes. He stole a gun from your dad’s shop. He left me on the sidewalk and went with them. He got into the car, Tammy. It was a green Ford—an LTD, I think. They all left together, Moody and those boys he’d been running with, and they were going to Dallas and who knows where after that.”

  “No,” she says. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong. I saw it.”

  “You were just a kid, Roland. You don’t know what you saw. He didn’t go with those boys. Daddy already warned him off them. That gun was to protect himself. He was afraid of the Candy Man, and that’s where he was heading when you saw him. He was on his new bike and the bike disappeared—”

  “It didn’t disappear,” I say. “I took it.”

  She shrinks back. “What? ”

  “They never found the bike because I took it. I hid it in the space between two of the storage buildings. Moody said I could have it, but I was afraid your dad wouldn’t let me. So I kept it there. When I went back to ride it later, somebody had stolen it. That’s why the bike was gone. Simple as that.”

  Her face drains. “You never told me.”

  “It’s hard to talk when you’re being smothered,” I say. “I told your dad. Later. Once the search was over. Moody told me to wait so he couldn’t be found.”

  “Daddy never said anything like this to me.”

  “That’s between you and him. I told him, and I assume he did some checking, but your brother was long gone. A few years later, when I was working with him in the shop, he told me not to worry about it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he’d given up and moved on.”

  She rests her hand against the front table, clinking two of the hand-painted cottages into each other. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would he run away?” she sobs, her throat raw with emotion.

  “I don’t know, Tammy,” I say, moving my hand to the doorknob. “I was eleven years old. To be honest, I always assumed it was because of you.”

  I regret the words the moment they’re out. I regret them more when she slumps against the wall, pulling the cotton ground out from under the nearest cottage, sending it crashing to the floor. I could spare a fellow cop like Lauterbach the indignity of a stab in the back, deserving as he is, but for my half sister, for the daughter of the people who raised me, there is no such mercy.

  The air outside is thick. There’s even a hint of the accustomed Houston warmth. I walk to the car, my ripped sleeve drooping with every step. At the car door I start to pull the jacket off, then change my mind and leave it. I strap myself in, turn the key in the ignition, and back into the cul-de-sac, narrowly missing a red-framed bike lying on the pavement.

  I pause. I shift into park. I undo my seat belt. The door pops open and I stand.

  Tammy stands in the open doorway, bracing herself against the frame. Her shirt twinkles, forlorn in the gray light. I strip Lyndon Pellier’s torn jacket off, first one arm and then the other, balling the fabric and tossing it onto the backseat. My gun exposed. My cuffs and badge. My true and only nature revealed.

  I glare at my cousin and she glares back.

  I get in the car and I drive.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17 — 6:28 P.M.

  I am stumped. I am confused. I am staring at a computer screen on the sixth floor of police headquarters. I am in my cubicle. I am clicking through the records. I am trying to make up my mind whether David Bayard Jr. is a victimizer or a victim. I am wondering whether this is a useful distinction anymore.

  When I debriefed Aguilar on the results of my interview with Tammy, he studied his shoes a little while and went, “Huh.” Now he’s on his way across town, running late for his daughter’s Christmas recital. “It’ll keep,” he said. It’ll have to. The lawyer representing both of the Bayards has the right idea. For her clients, anyway. Not for me. They won’t be making statements to the police at this time. They won’t be cooperating with the investigation.

  There’s not much in the system about David. No adult record, and if there was any record of juvenile offenses, it’s been expunged. Which is why I’m cold-calling after normal business hours, hoping to get lucky with past associates.

  The College Station landlord says he never had a problem with the man personally—the rent was always on time—but David hasn’t lived there for over a year, and when he left, there was a charge assessed for damages to the property.

  “Cleanup mainly,” he says, “and the cost of repainting. He’d written all over the walls. Taped and tacked stuff up everywhere. It was like some kind of psycho pad. I like ’em quiet, but there’s such a thing as too quiet, you know?”

  “You never had an issue with him,” I say. “But did anyone else?”

  He pauses.

  “This is important, sir.”

  “There’s a tenant of mine you should talk to,” he says. “She lived right across the hall from him. I’m not saying anything one way or another, ’cause how do I know? But talk to Kristie and see what she has to say.”

  Kristie turns out to be a sweet-voiced economics major with one semester to go before graduation. She confirms that David lived across the hall from her until last year, but says as long as she knew him, he’d never been enrolled as a student. She assumed he dropped out. If he had a job, she wasn’t aware of it. People assumed he was living off his parents.

  “He can get really intense. Really . . . obsessive. People kind of stayed cle
ar of him, you know? And that’s just not my way. When I see somebody ostracized like that, I always try to reach out. Not everybody knows how to make friends, but they still want to have friends, right?”

  “Were you and David friends?”

  A pause. “I thought so.”

  “But something happened.”

  She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. “Something did happen. We were talking in the hallway one time, and he had something he wanted to show me in his apartment. I’d never been inside and I was kind of curious, so I went in. He shut the door behind us, and this little voice in my head was going, Something’s not right.”

  “What did the apartment look like? The landlord called it a ‘psycho pad.’ ”

  “Pretty much.” She takes another breath. “There were pictures he’d taken. The bedroom window overlooked the pool, and when we’d lay out in the summer, people would say they could see him watching from the window. I thought they were just being mean, but there were a lot of pictures. All the girls in the building, all the ones who laid out. He had pictures of me, too.”

  “How did he explain that?”

  “The pictures are what he wanted to show me. He wanted to know if I thought they were good. I said I didn’t think so, that it was illegal, but he said if you’re displaying yourself in public, then it’s not. That’s what he called it: displaying yourself.” She gives a nervous laugh. “I mean, I’m standing there looking at these pictures of myself, and I’m trying to be polite, but I just want to get out of there, you know? And he’s not letting me. He put his hand on me—he has something wrong with his hand—he’d put it on me and then he’d push. Not hard. Just this little push. Backing me up a step or two. I told him to stop, and he acted like it was a game. He kept doing it. He’d touch me and I’d push his hand away. But he was backing me into the bedroom.

  “I told him to let me go. He ignored me. Then I heard people passing in the hallway and I started calling out to them. That’s what spooked him. He started laughing again and saying he was just joking with me. I got out of there and I never talked to him again. I had extra locks put on the door. Even then, I think he’d watch me through the peephole, keeping track of my coming and going.”