by phuc
"The counselor called it retrograde memory jags or something like that. She said it was normal after a long term trauma. Sometimes I'd think I was seeing him when he wasn't really there. But it went away years ago."
"And now it's back?" Maxwell asked.
Kathleen nodded. Tears dried to crust on her face. "I don't understand. Why? After all this time, why?"
"There must be something in your life, something that's happened recently, to trigger it."
The killer, she thought. But it was really no surprise. The killer was abused as a child, you were abused as a child. But she knew she could not tell Maxwell about the killer. She knew she could never do that...
"Sammy's still in prison. Christ, I even asked my father to make sure."
Maxwell cradled her, gently rocked her. "You should try and go to sleep now," he said. "You'll feel better tomorrow."
But she didn't want to go to sleep. She couldn't. "It went on from the time I was nine 'til I was about 17 or 18. And I never said anything, I never told anyone, until years later when he got caught. I still don't understand that."
"It's just what the counselor said. Your uncle was able to secretly abuse you for all those years because he'd developed himself as a symbol of trust to you. You were just a child then, Kathleen.
Children are totally vulnerable to their impressions of adults. Your mother was dead, your father was always away on business. The only person you had to look up to to trust was your uncle. Of course you never told anyone. You'd been brainwashed into believing that nothing bad was happening."
That's just what the counselor had said. She'd even said it was commonplace in similar situations.
The most naive question touched her then: How can people be like that? How can an adult, any adult, do something like that? To children, for God's sake? To children?
"Sometimes people can be very evil," Maxwell answered, as though he decrypted the thought by her eyes or the look on her face.
Eventually she drifted into sleep, Maxwell gently rocking her in his arms. The dream came back the instant she closed her eyes: Naked, shivering in sweat, she lay paralyzed atop the bed. The figure leaned over her in tinted darkness. The moon stared at her.
"Embrace your hatred," eddied the woman's voice.
Kathleen could not reply.
The stack of Polaroids dropped onto her stomach. The joints of her fingers clicked as she picked them up. She squinted. She could see them this time.
The first picture showed a cigar box, like the one booked as evidence at Uncle Sammy's trial. But it was closed. The second picture showed Kathleen exactly as she was in the dream: naked on this same bed, her legs parted, paralyzed. Her skin looked garish in the light of the flashbulb. Her sweat glittered like sprinkles of crushed glass.
Third picture: The cigar box again. This time, however, its cardboard lid stood open.
Something dark was in it. Something stout, coiled.
A snake, Kathleen realized.
Now the paralysis bolted her down, plucked her eyelids open. The snake seemed huge despite the confines of the box. It seemed jammed into it.
The fourth picture showed the snake being dumped out onto the bed between her legs.
A black plastic cat clock on the wall ticked hypnotically. Eyes and tail switching back and forth.
Its hands moved backward.
"Embrace your hatred," eddied the woman's voice.
In the fifth picture the snake was slithering forward.
In the sixth picture the large, pointed head was about to enter Kathleen's vagina.
(III)
"Can I blow you?" she asks.
He chuckles. "What am I gonna say? No?"
He's naked on the bed.
She's naked next to him, legs crossed.
She feels electric.
"But let me give you a back rub first. I promised you one, didn't I?"
His erection throbs. "How about blowing me first?"
They're in Daddy's Room. It's different now, it looks like a bedroom. "All good things to those who wait," she says. "Come on, turn over." He turns over on his belly. Sometimes she'd cry when Daddy was doing it to her, or when he let his friends do it to her. But she always cried the most when he made her watch through the mirror. His friends did horrible things to her mother. "Fire her up first," one of the men said and then they held her mother down while Daddy injected heroin into a vein in her breast and then they'd beat her mother up and all take turns fucking her and then Daddy would take her into the closet and make her watch the men and he'd put his finger into her vagina after he was finished fucking her.
but no man will ever touch her there again.
Now she looks up at The Cross in The Window.
He's lean and muscular, a Spa Boy.
She gets up to get the massage oil.
He doesn't see her slip on the double pair of Becton Dickinson vinyl examination gloves.
She straddles him at the small of his back, squirts on the oil.
The squirting reminds her of Daddy.
Behind her is the cabinet, the Box of Souls.
She can feel The Cross on her back.
She feels sexy and beautiful.
You're beautiful, her mother says.
"I know," she says.
"What?"
"Shhh."
She rubs the oil into his back.
Her fingers knead the slick skin, mold his shoulders, run up and down his spine.
"Does that feel good?"
"Yeah," he drones.
Her vagina is rubbing against the small of his back.
She wants to touch herself but not yet.
You're such a smart girl, her mother says from somewhere. I'm so proud of you.
Later, he starts to fade.
"I'm really tired," he drones.
Now she turns him over and climbs off.
"God, I'm so "
"Try to get up," she says, her eyes earnest, inquisitive.
It's funny watching him.
He tries to lean forward, then slumps.
He tries to slide off but his legs barely move.
"What...did...you..."
She walks over and opens the closet to get her things.
She comes back with the stainless steel tray.
"Look," she says.
She slaps him hard across the face.
His eyes are slits but she can see the terror there.
The gorgeous terror...
"Look."
The tray contains a biopsy curette.
A length of Vicryl suture.
A radial needle.
Bruns serrated shears.
| |
Chapter 12
(I)
Maxwell wondered what she wanted out of life. What are her dreams? he thought. What does she see in the future?
He felt poisoned by the past, one relationship gone bust after another. It was part of life. He'd almost gotten married twice, but almost meant nothing at all.
His poetry was how he defined his life, and life in general. It was impulse. Without it he'd have no purpose.
He remembered saying to her last night: Sometimes people can be very evil. This was true. How could a person live with that? How could she trust anyone ever again?
He didn't dare wake her. All that she'd told him, her own poison spilling like a dark cascade, must've exhausted her. He got out of bed as quietly as he could, took up his clothes, and slipped out to the living room.
This was where she did her writing for the magazine, instead of the second bedroom. He wondered why. Maybe she doesn't like enclosed places. Or perhaps the smaller bedroom reminded her of her past.
He glanced at some papers on the desk.
Dear Kathleen:
When I was in college I had a lesbian affair with my roommate. I always considered it an experiment so I never gave it much thought. A year later I married a man, and I never had any reason to question my heterosexuality. Recently we divorced, though, after 10 y
ears, and suddenly I've become attracted to a woman at my place of work. Now I feel very disoriented about myself. Am I a lesbian?
Dear Very Disoriented:
The best way to determine your true sexuality is to first isolate the motives of your divorce. If your marriage disintegrated because of a lack of sexual interest on your part, then you may well have been repressing genuine lesbian urges for the entirety of your marriage. On the other hand, you may be using a lesbian tendency to merely escape the possibility that your marriage failed for other reasons. When love relationships fail, we often seek escape rather than acknowledgment.
See a psychologist.
Maxwell wondered what it must be like to counsel others on their problems and uncertainties. He was glad he was a man; it seemed far less complicated. He felt secure that he was living as honestly as he could. His poetry wasn't an escape, but a recognition...
He put on his pants and went out on the balcony. A nice building and complex, clean; the maintenance fees must be sky high. Even this early 8:30 the heat and humidity smothered him.
He thought about Kathleen.
He didn't know what she wanted. He didn't know what she liked or disliked. He didn't know anything about her political views, her social views, her philosophy or religion. At least not really. And he didn't know how she felt about him. But he loved her.
So at least he knew something.
Am I an idiot? he wondered. His hands gripped the railing as he looked out. Yes, he loved her, he knew that. I love Kathleen Shade, he thought in increments. I've known her what? three days? He didn't care. It didn't matter to him. He'd fallen for women very quickly in the past and knew it was a mistake. But something told him this was different.
Providence? he wondered.
No.
Resplendence.
He rushed back into the apartment. He must get rid of everything from his past now, right now.
Poetry was his exorcism. For years he'd been seeking to write the one poem that would release him from the failed love of his past and invite him into the future. I've got it! he celebrated. It's here!
He'd never been more excited.
If he severed his past, then he could really be in love.
He could really be in love with Kathleen Shade.
The past was a crush of feelings, mostly bitterness, rage, and despair all negatives. He believed that negativities were evil; they could never be constructive and therefore they could never make him a better person.
Resplendence! he rejoiced.
He sat down at her desk and turned on her typewriter. She wouldn't mind. He had to write it now, right here, before the moment, and its truth, evaded him.
He typed the poem, entitled "Exit," in four quick lines. He looked at it, or past it, or through it.
This is it, he thought very slowly. His dedication to all the loves of his past. We're all trying to escape something, he realized.
I'm free now, he thought.
He took the poem out of the typewriter, took it out onto the hot balcony, and burned it. It would seem weird to anyone but a poet. Creating it, then burning it, made it real.
I love Kathleen Shade, he thought almost giddily.
He typed I LOVE YOU on a piece of paper in the typewriter. He put on his shirt and called a cab.
He left the apartment.
Twenty minutes later the cab picked him up. When the cab dropped him off, he had no idea. How could he?
He had no idea that he had been followed all the way home by a dark blue Ford Festiva.
(II)
Brad Weston's remains had been found at 6:30 in the morning by a D.C. parking officer, a young black woman named Judith Mullins. She worked the 11 to 7 shift; her supervisor, the night before, had reassigned every Parking Section beat without explanation. "Scourge the whore blocks," he'd said at shiftchange. "Write up everything you see, regardless of the time, and call Traffic Branch immediately." "Why the change?" someone had asked. "Just do it," the supervisor had replied. So Judith Mullins did it. She wrote up every single illegally parked vehicle she could find in her new grid, a total of 16. Generally at night the mobile Parking Section officers only tagged vehicles in bus lanes and rush hour lines. These new orders didn't make much sense...
"Nissan Sentra, red," she called in on her Motorola. "Good plates." She read off the tag number.
"Dave and Lee's Parking Lot, 14th and L. Nose in entry."
Judith generally cut slack on a nose in entry, so long as the entrance wasn't blocked, but orders were orders. She filled out the fluorescent orange TB tag and was about to fix it to the car door when she noticed the puddle of blood going pasty just under the trunk.
(III)
Spence carried a Smith & Wesson Chief, a standard five shot snub, while most everyone else carried Glocks now. The Chief was tiny, light; Spence preferred it to today's larger pieces for an absurd reason. A big gun worn under a suit jacket would bulge. He didn't care about being made, he simply didn't want his suits to look bad on him. To Spence a gun was a gun. It fired bullets. If you hit a bad guy with the bullets, the bad guy stopped doing whatever bad thing you were shooting him for. He didn't need to be lugging around some big 19 shot boat anchor and ruining the lines of his suits. If I die because of inferior fire power, he reasoned, then I'll die because of inferior fire power. End of story.
"Any run down yet?" Kohls asked.
"Another bar punk. The guy got more ass than a toilet seat. Worked for an ad firm. Some friends at his office said he was going to The Dome last night. We're grilling all the keeps and waitresses now."
Spence didn't look at the body on the slab; he didn't need to. Kohls had told him it was all the same. "She's knocking them out first," he'd said. "Doing the lips, eyes, and ears while they're unconscious, then bringing them back with Desoxyn. Tricky. She's also scrubbing their backs with isopropanol."
"Why?"
Kohls shrugged. "What's funnier is Calabrice's tox screen showed some traces of isopropanol in his blood. It doesn't figure. We're still waiting on the fourth pass from chromatography."
"Red hairs on the body?"
"Yep. One head strand, two pubes. Same broad." Kohls took a step back in the workup section.
He smiled, sipping coffee. "You ready for the good news?"
"Sure," Spence said.
"Kid's wallet was wiped down, just like Calabrice. But she fucked up."
"What do you "
"I got a latent off the wallet."
Spence stared a moment, then broke for the phone.
"Relax, Lieutenant," Kohls said. "I already called Ident, and I gave them your MSC priority.
They'll call you."
Spence had never been one to show much positive emotion. He had to contain himself. Simmons was right, he thought. He said she'd make a mistake, and she did. A fingerprint could be meaningless if her prints weren't on file, but if they were...
A name, an address...a face, he thought.
"I got TSD doing the Nissan right now," Kohls added. "We'll let you know the minute we get anything."
"Thank you," Spence said. He felt...happy. There was a corpse lying beside him but he felt happy.
"She's very meticulous," Kohls went on. He set his coffee down on top of a SYSTEM 350 helium laser, which could detect fingerprints and even perfect latent pore schemes on human skin. "It's almost like a religion with her, the extremes she goes to inflict pain."
"She's a clinical psychopath," Spence said.
"You know what she did to this guy?"
Spence didn't really want to know.
"She stuck needles in his eyes. After she glued them shut and brought him back...needles, right through the eyelids into the optic nerve. Can you imagine not being able to see but feeling something like that?"
"No," Spence said. "What do you think about the Skins firing Turner? Christ, I think we need him."
"They're long needles too, like dissection pins. She's sticking them all they way down the optic canal into t
he brain."
Spence's mouth went dry.
"And God only knows," Kohls added, "what she's doing to their cocks before she cuts them off."