The Unforgivable Fix: A Justice Novel

by T. E. Woods

  Lydia turned toward the sound of another set of footsteps coming up the stairs. Paul Bauer stopped at the sight of her holding an automatic pistol while standing over a dead body and drew his service revolver. His eyes communicated a status request.

  “Come on up, Detective,” she said. “It appears to be over.”

  Bauer held his gun in both hands as he climbed to meet her. This space might have been what a Realtor called a bonus room. The area was open and wide, with a wrought-iron railing to overlook the living room below. Zach must have used it as his technology cave. Boxes of cables and cords were stacked next to a desk fashioned from cinder blocks and an old door, laden with control boxes, servers, modems, and speakers. Bauer looked down at Zach Edwards’s body.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes,” Lydia said softly. “Bullet to the head.”

  Bauer nodded to Mort, who kicked Kenton Walder’s gun toward him. Bauer pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and used it to pick up the weapon. He brought it to his nose and sniffed. Lydia could smell the acrid gunpowder stench from where she stood.

  “Mr. Walder, I’m Detective Paul Bauer of the Olympia Police Department. Can you tell me what happened here, sir?”

  Walder sat, staring ahead and saying nothing.

  “Mr. Walder, did you do this thing?” Bauer holstered his weapon and pulled out his phone. While Kenton Walder sat silently, Bauer called for a coroner, a forensic team, and a squad car. He told them to take their time. The situation was locked down.

  Bauer turned to Lydia. “Is he in shock?”

  Lydia had seen way too many siuations like this. Victims overcome by what their bodies did while disengaged from their own minds. Average folks pressed to act in total opposition to the social constructs buried so deep in their core that their behavior, though necessary for their own survival, forced their mind to shut down. She’d witnessed the crash following the rage of a battered and beaten person who’d finally had enough and struck back at her abuser with deadly force. She’d inhaled the stench of adrenaline and sweat mixed with lethal fear. She’d seen the ashen faces drained of all color as overwhelmed limbic systems pumped every spare ounce of blood into fists and legs.

  “Can you hear me, Mr. Walder?” she asked.

  Kenton Walder stared straight ahead, saying nothing.

  “Tell me what you’re doing here, Mr. Walder.” Bauer went on with his questioning in a neutral tone.

  “Dr. Edwards called me.” Walder answered him this time. “He’s been treating my daughter.”

  “That’s not quite true.” Lydia stepped toward him. “He did one assessment and was off the case.”

  Walder turned an expressionless face toward her. “No, Dr. Corriger. Dr. Edwards was seeing Emma on a regular basis. My wife and I were terribly distraught when you refused to see Emma. You’d been so highly recommended. We tried to get you to change your mind, but you insisted you were too busy to take on our case. We knew Dr. Edwards worked with you. He’d done such a wonderful job on the assessment. Emma said she felt she could trust him. So we hired Dr. Edwards to treat Emma. He’s been seeing her three times a week when Emma’s with us. He comes to our home. Dr. Edwards told me you were supervising him every step of the way. It was like the next best thing to having you.”

  Lydia clenched her jaw and looked back at the corpse of Zach Edwards. Of course. That would be the final piece in the puzzle.

  “So you say Dr. Edwards called you,” Bauer prompted.

  “Yes. He told me to come alone, that there’d been a frightful new development in Emma’s case he wanted to discuss. Of course, I came right away. I’d do anything for my daughter.”

  “How’d Dr. Edwards end up dead, Mr. Walder?” Bauer asked.

  Kenton Walder retreated again into silence. His eyes lost their focus and he tilted his head, as if listening to a far-off orchestra.

  The sound of the door banging open a floor below pulled Lydia’s attention away. Mort and Paul Bauer stepped aside, making way for what Lydia assumed would be a small army of crime-scene processors. But only one set of footsteps approached the stairs.

  “Sweetie? You up there?” It was Peggy Goines, Zach’s girlfriend. The star of his many recordings. She shrieked when she saw Zach’s body. Lydia heard a tumble of objects and assumed Peggy had dropped whatever it was she was holding as she hurried toward her dead lover.

  Peggy’s screaming doubled in its intensity when she saw the blood. Bauer stepped toward her and pulled her away.

  “Who are you?” she wailed. “Is Zach dead?” Peggy turned toward Lydia. “Why are you here?” she screeched. “Did you do this?”

  Bauer showed her his credentials. “This gentleman is Mort Grant, chief of detectives with the Seattle Police Department. You’ve met Dr. Corriger, and I assume you know this man.” Bauer pointed to Walder, still seated in the overstuffed chair.

  “No.” Peggy’s blotchy face was tearstained. “Who’s he?”

  Lydia stood and exchanged glances with Mort and Bauer. “This is Kenton Walder, Peggy. Mr. Walder says Zach invited him here today.”

  Peggy nodded. She started to sway. Bauer wrapped an arm around her before she could fall.

  “Do you know this to be a fact, Peggy?” Bauer asked.

  Again, Peggy nodded. “Mr. Walder is investing in Zach’s business. Zach’s a psychologist. He’s going to make training tapes for students.” She wiped a trail of snot and tears away with the sleeve of her sweater. “Zach and I had made some demonstration tapes. I played a patient named Brianna. The tapes were good. Zach said we were going to be rich.” She turned to Lydia. “But then you sent Zach away from your clinic. He was so upset. He stayed up all night working on new stuff. This time he didn’t need my help.”

  Lydia assumed it was the frame-up tape that had him burning the midnight oil.

  “Zach said we had to move back to Oregon. He made a list of things we needed and sent me to go shopping while he and Mr. Walder discussed business. He said Mr. Walder was going to give us an advance on the investment money and we’d be set to go.”

  All eyes focused on Kenton Walder, whose head swayed as he kept time to a concerto no one else could hear.

  Paul Bauer turned to Lydia. “Has he had some sort of psychotic break?”

  Just as Lydia had experience with the shock people can sink into when compelled to do the unspeakable, she’d also seen Walder’s behavior dozens of times. The frightened innocence and disbelief. The shell-shocked expression, the murmurs of gratitude for being rescued. The retreat into what they hope will be explained away as traumatic withdrawal; fully expected when a good person is forced to commit heinous brutality.

  It was all an act.

  Her rage mounted as she recalled Zach’s words. He’s going to get away with it.

  Lydia shook her head. “He’s trying something different.” Her tone telegraphed her weary disgust. “He’s already tried ‘I don’t know what happened,’ followed quickly by ‘Thank God, you’re here.’ Don’t worry. He’s fine.” She saw a brief image of Will Sorens weeping helpless tears. She’d had enough.

  “I know what you did, Walder.” Lydia walked toward the man sitting stunned in the chair. “You raped your stepdaughter. In fact, I’m betting you chose Darlene Sorens specifically to get to Emma. An attractive woman with a young daughter comes to work for you. You start flirting with her. She bites. You court her. A wedding follows. It looks to all the world as though you’re the answer to every woman’s prayer. But it wasn’t Darlene or Dee or whatever it is she’s calling herself you were after. You wanted her daughter. You start grooming her with presents and big adventures. Then you make your move. Subtle lingering touches at first. Just to see how she reacts. Then promises of how special she is…how much you love her…how it’s her fault for being so wonderful you can’t help yourself. Then maybe you offer to wash her back in the bubble bath. She’s a little uncomfortable when you dry her off so slowly, but you assure her everything’s fine. It isn’t
very long at all before you’re raping the little girl who wanted nothing more than for her mommy to be happy.”

  Kenton Walder, his eyes fixed on something far away, said nothing.

  “But you hadn’t counted on Emma’s father. When she started cutting, trying so hard to make herself ugly enough you’d leave her alone, Will Sorens protected his daughter. He got the whole story out of her. Every disgusting detail of how you were brutalizing his little soccer star. Will went to the cops. And you got busy trying to save your sorry ass.”

  Walder didn’t move.

  “The judge acted quickly. You had to be supervised any time you were with Emma. Since you couldn’t get to her and manipulate her to change her story, you decided to discredit her in a whole other way.” Lydia knelt down beside Walder, staring at him while he focused somewhere else. “You and your family have been in Olympia for generations. You lived through what happened a quarter century ago. That hysteria with Paul Ingram. How poor questioning techniques and inept therapy led to Ingram and his daughters remembering things that never happened. And you experienced how the community reacted once it was discovered the girls’ accusations—the Satan worshipping and all the sexual abuse that went with it—never happened. You were probably part of the chorus swearing such a thing would never happen in this town again.”

  Lydia was close enough to see his hand twitch. Despite his continued pose of detached trauma, she was getting to him.

  “It wouldn’t have been difficult for you to find Zach,” she persisted. “He’s well published in the area of implanted memories. It must have been easy to convince him. You could have played on his scientific ego. And then backed it up with money.” Lydia held her hands to indicate the room. “Look around you. Zach wasn’t exactly living large. You hired him to play the role of bumbling therapist. Find a few patients, implant memories of sexual abuse, and let the accusations begin. You knew they would be proved false. Especially in Olympia, where folks have learned their lesson about believing without verifying. And you have him treat Emma. As the stories of the false memories emerge and the charges against those truly innocent folks fall apart, so would yours. Emma would be branded as just another poor victim made crazy by bad therapy. She’d be returned to your home and you’d have your perfect victim for the rest of her life. You could do absolutely anything you wanted to her and no one would believe any complaint she dared to lodge. Zach’s reputation would suffer, of course, but you’d offer him enough money that he could retire comfortably at the ripe old age of twenty-six. A pretty damned perfect plan, I’d have to say.” She leaned in closer. “Whose idea was it to make it look like the entire scheme was my idea? I’m guessing it was Zach’s. He needed some insurance to force me into submission on the off chance I figured things out. You wouldn’t want anyone other than you and Zach involved. Because then, once you were cleared, all you had to do was kill Zach and make it look like a suicide. Who could blame him, after all? He’d ruined the lives of so many young women with his worthless attempts at therapy. The only one left who’d know what you’d done would be Emma…and soon she’d be so crazy no one would listen to her at all.”

  A bead of sweat formed on Walder’s upper lip. Still he sat, immobile and silent.

  Peggy Goines stepped clear of Bauer and headed toward Walder. “Zach said you were going to give him five hundred thousand dollars. He said if you didn’t, he had a package that would make you want to give him even more. Did you do this to my Zach, Mr. Walder?”

  “Peggy, stop!” Lydia barked. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “Can you show me the package, Peggy?” Bauer asked.

  Peggy looked confused. She took another look at her dead boyfriend and started to shake.

  “Peggy, where’s the package?” Bauer’s voice was calm and reassuring. “It may help us learn who did this to Zach.”

  Peggy pointed toward the stack of boxes. Mort crossed the room.

  “This one?” he asked, picking one up.

  Peggy shook her head. “The one next to it. Inside. The envelope with zebra stripes.”

  Mort pulled out a padded envelope with black and white markings. He carried it over to her. “Is this it?”

  Peggy opened the envelope and pulled out three flash drives. She handed them to Paul Bauer. “Zach says this explains all about the business plan between him and Mr. Walder. He says there’s even an audio contract on there.” She started to cry again. “Zach was so good with technology.”

  Lydia slid her Beretta back into her jacket pocket, crossed the room, and took the sobbing girl into her arms. “Yes, Peggy. Yes, he was.”

  When Peggy’s tears had subsided enough that she could focus, Lydia led her back downstairs, careful to put herself between Zach’s body and his distraught girlfriend. As they descended the stairs, she heard Paul Bauer read Kenton Walder his Miranda rights. She wondered how Walder was going to explain this to Dee.

  Chapter 52

  Lydia looked at her watch for the third time in ten minutes. She’d agreed to pick up Mort’s daughter at the salon, and Allie was supposed to be ready a half hour ago. Bauer had asked Mort to stay with him at Zach Edwards’s place until the police came to haul Kenton Walder off to jail. Mort hesitated, saying he needed to get back up to Seattle. Lydia knew he was eager to learn how vulnerable Allie was now that Patrick Duncan was dead. Lydia offered to fetch Allie and keep her at her house.

  “For as long as it takes,” she’d promised him. She understood that if Mort determined Allie had nothing to fear from the Russian, he’d get busy trying to save her from the DEA.

  —

  Two women wearing the same black aprons as every other stylist in the salon came smiling toward Lydia.

  “Are you ready?” The woman whose name tag identified her as Nola asked.

  “I wish we’d taken before photos,” Nola’s companion, Sterling, said. “This is our best work, I think.” She waved her hand and Allie stepped around the corner to stand in the center of the day spa’s waiting room.

  Lydia was stunned by the transformation. Gone was the young woman with the all-American good looks. She’d been replaced by a sleek goddess oozing European sophistication from the top of her newly cropped chin-length hair to the tips of her black leather stilettos. Allie was dressed entirely in black, and none of her apparel had come from Lydia’s closet. Allie’s leggings accentuated the length of her toned legs. A silk blouse was cut close enough to showcase her breasts without being the least bit tawdry. She wore no jewelry. Her makeup had been expertly designed to focus all attention on her luminescent blue eyes and fire-engine red lips.

  “What do you think?” Allie tucked a freshly highlighted strand of hair behind her ear.

  Lydia gave a smile to the woman who was so obviously pleased with herself. “I think every dime of your father’s money was well spent. You look terrific.”

  “Good enough to take out on the town?” Allie did a pirouette. “What do you say we call that sexy detective friend of yours and see if he’d like to take a couple of dames out for dinner?”

  Lydia stood and pointed toward the door. “It’s you and me and dinner in the kitchen, I’m afraid. Your dad’s taking care of stuff up north.”

  Allie nodded and Lydia caught a look in Allie’s eye that told her those plans suited her just fine.

  —

  Lydia pulled her head up from the pillow and glanced at the clock beside her bed. Ghostly green numbers glowed 11:14 in the darkness of her bedroom. She’d said good night to Allie more than an hour ago, and still sleep eluded her. She looked outside at the wide expanse of lawn separating her home from the cliff overlooking Dana Passage. Low clouds blocked any starlight. The moon was a faint tint overhead.

  She had to admit the evening had been pleasant. Allie sat at the breakfast nook table wearing a pair of Lydia’s pajamas while Lydia sautéed vegetables, steamed rice, and broiled a steak large enough for two. There was no talk of who knew what about whom. Instead, Allie had been almost melanc
holy as she told stories of her childhood in Seattle. Lydia heard genuine tenderness in Allie’s voice as she reminisced about her mother.

  “She was so incredibly lovely,” Allie had said with a wistfulness that relayed no hint of jealousy. “I remember the way my father used to look at her…even after they’d been married over twenty years. I’d wonder if I would ever have a man look at me like that. The love would just come off him in these comforting waves that made you realize everything was going to be all right. Even when they fought. They made me believe the four of us, them, me, and my brother, we were all snug and safe inside this bubble. Like as long as we stayed together nothing bad would happen.” Allie had shaken her head. “I sure made a mess of that little fantasy, didn’t I?”

  Lydia assumed at that point she was supposed to step in and assure Allie that whatever she’d done wasn’t really all that bad. But Lydia said nothing and was impressed when Allie didn’t pout or ask for comfort. Instead, they’d shared their dinner, making small talk that started out tense, but moved on to a semblance of pleasant. Lydia had even found herself joining Allie in poking fun at her father’s recent move.

  “Had he ever said he wanted to live on a boat?” Lydia had asked.

  “I saw him throw up off the side of a canoe one time when Robbie got frisky on a camping trip. This whole houseboat thing won’t last past summer.”

  A scraping sound pulled Lydia out of her replay of the evening. She pulled herself up onto one elbow and listened. When she heard muffled footsteps, she slid out of bed, reached for the gun in the nightstand drawer, and headed down the hall to the living room. She saw Allie outlined in the moonlight and clicked on the lights.

  Allie turned, obviously startled. “Damn.” She pointed to the Beretta in Lydia’s right hand. “Do you go anywhere unarmed?”

  Lydia was surprised to see Allie in the same all-black ensemble she’d worn at the salon. She looked closer. Allie’s makeup had been refreshed. Her hair was brushed and styled. She looked to the left and saw the Hermès Birkin bag Allie brought with her when she first arrived sitting by the door leading to the backyard.