Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

Elliot’s cold intellectual forecast of probable events was like a stab to my chest. His inference that Cassie could be the next victim, and mutilated like the others, was a logical progression of events, but one I had refused to verbally acknowledge. It seemed heartless for him to give it breath in my presence.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “Where can I reach you, Elliot? Your cell?”

  “Yeah, but hear the beeps? It’s losing juice fast. I haven’t charged it in a couple of days.”

  “Call me back, then. Call me every half hour. I’m scared. Lipton wants to meet me at a secluded area in Patterson Park. He says he knows where Cassie is. I don’t believe the little rat, but he knows more than he’s saying.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “They’re getting a warrant for the Sherman/Lipton lair even as we speak. And Carlyle knows what I suspect. Whoever the killer is, he’s run out of options. He’s at the end, Elliot. I can feel it. It’s almost over.”

  Elliot heard the call-waiting beep on my phone. “Who’s calling you? Is that Rod?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to go.” I hit the send button on my cell.

  “Mari. It’s me. Laurie. Listen to this. Emily Barton was drugged with homemade GHB this time. Same as in the first two murders and different from the first time she was tested in the hospital after the rape. Heinz Distilled White, and this time she ended up dead.”

  “Nazir too?”

  “Nah, she didn’t get the benefit of drugs. He just lopped at her wrists for a quick kill. She had a gash to her carotid too. Poor girl had it the worst.”

  “Laur, my phone’s beeping again. Keep in touch.”

  I hung up and Rod was on the line.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Drive down into Patterson Park by the dirt road to the river. There’s a picnic area with tables. I’m here waiting. Get here, now, if you want to see your sister again.”

  “You little fuck! Where is she!”

  “Get here.” He hung up on me. I hit received calls and then the send button to the last call, but of course there was no answer. He knew I would meet him now if there was even the slimmest chance he knew anything about Cassie.

  I took the dirt road turnoff toward a picnic area by the water, behind overgrown pines and weed bushes. Directly beyond the long wooden tables, down a deep slope, was the water’s edge. I drove down the ravine as far as I could before braking and then cutting the engine to the quiet of the lapping shoreline.

  At another time, the scene would have been soothing, a step into a romantic past, the cold ground thawing, an early spring picnic by the lake. But Rod Lipton sullied the dream as he sat on one of the tables with a canned beer in his fist, his muddy sneakers on the bench. Directly over his head a mammoth weeping willow tree was sprouting tiny lime green shoots.

  One can was missing from a six-pack sitting on the seat beside his feet. He was bending down for a second beer as I approached. He snapped the flip-top open for me and placed the can on the table. Without looking at me said, “Join me for a beer?”

  “I have a gun in my bag. Start talking. I’ll give you one minute before I start shooting. Where is my sister?”

  Rod and I both jumped when my cell phone rang. He looked at me. I looked at my phone. It was Mike. Keeping a peripheral view of Rod, I turned partially away to take the call privately.

  “Where the hell are you?” Mike growled. “Ken called me. He said you’re stalking Sherman and I’m supposed to stop you. But we both know if I tell you not to do something, you’ll do it twice just for spite.”

  “Three times, babe, maybe four.” Mike always seemed to challenge me like I was some silly girl who needed looking after. He had a tendency to talk to me the way I talked to Cassie—like a parent. And like Cassie, I acted like a headstrong child and lashed out at him in a blind white heat—while taking my eyes off Rod. “Go to hell! I’m with Rod Lipton down by the river and—”

  Rod’s cold, clammy fingers ripped the phone from my hand. His hair, usually slicked back and clean, was overdue for a wash. Greasy clumps hung over his forehead as he stared down at my phone in his hand.

  “Who keeps calling you?” He looked up at me. His eyes crinkled like they were staring into direct sun. “Who were you talking to?”

  “You’re stoned again,” I said. “What’s going on? Just lay it out for me and I’ll help you get through it.”

  His jaws ground together. “What’s going on? The whole fucking world is falling apart,” he shouted. “I’m hanging out with Cory Sherman, that’s what’s the matter. And I’m going to fall flat on my face in his shit while Cory gets fished out of the sewer by his father and his uncle. They’ll swoop down in the family jet to hoist him up. And on his way up and out, Cory’s not going to be thinking about saving my ass.”

  “Rod, listen to me. I no longer care about Carlyle, or Cory, or drugs, or even the murders for that matter. I just want my sister.”

  I walked closer to him, slowly, calmly, barely breathing. He was an ignited bomb ready to explode at the slightest tremor. His hands still held my phone in a death grip.

  “Did you tell anyone else you were coming here?” he asked.

  “Of course I did.”

  “You told McCoy, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And the Feds are on to your little drug enterprise with Sherman. Now tell me about Cassie so we can both get away from this in one piece and let Sherman take the hit.”

  “You bitch.” He hurled my phone in to the bushes. “You think I’m a moron, don’t you? Cory’s not going to make me take the rap for murder. I don’t give a shit who his father is. I had some fun with Emily and some of the others, but I didn’t kill her, or Lisa or Melinda.”

  I heard his teeth grinding into each other. Rod’s eyes were turning burnished silver again, glossing over.

  “Some of these girls . . . they love being abused,” he said. “It’s their pathetic attempt to punish their overindulgent parents. Every time they spread their legs they’re daring their old men to look between them. These fucking sex parties of Cory’s. Who do you think gets the most thrill out of them? Not Cory. He can have any piece of ass he wants anytime. The girls love it, because they love being dirty. In their minds they’re fucking their rich fathers.”

  “Emily said she was raped in the park, not at your parties.”

  He laughed. “Which time? She was so drugged, she doesn’t remember shit anyway. She probably walked out confused and then passed out in the park on her way home.” His head snapped to the sound of my phone ringing from where it rested in the bushes. “Who’s calling you?”

  “I don’t know.” I was getting tired of chatting with him. His time was up. I took a chance and moved toward the high weeds. “If you don’t know anything about my sister, I’m done with you. I’m going for my phone.”

  He pulled my hair from behind and dragged me down to the ground. I twisted around trying to face him, thinking I needed to look him in the eyes as he killed me. Thinking maybe I could stop him with my eyes.

  He looked at me and seemed to hiccup, like a child’s strangled spasm of tears. “Cory got the roofies but he never needed to use them. I told you. Girls screw Cory for nothing. He didn’t have to drug them. He’s fucking famous. But me? I got the leftovers.”

  I lay on the ground, completely drenched in sweat, while my body shivered. “It was all you, wasn’t it? It was never Cory with any of the girls because he didn’t need to use drugs to have sex with them. You needed the GHB. You drugged them first and then raped them. And it wasn’t just Emily.”

  He rubbed his eyes like a child waking from sleep. “I’m so scared. I haven’t slept in days,” he said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  I believed him. Or at least I believed he thought he hadn’t killed anyone. When a mind is askew with drugs and fear, memories are deceitful counselors, like vivid dreams you awake from convinced they were real.

  “These r
oofies you got from Cory. They were pills, like from a pharmacy?”

  “Yeah, pills. Cory must have done it,” he said again.

  “Why would Cory kill Emily? Or the others? Why?”

  “He’s afraid because of the drugs. His cover getting blown. Lisa, Melinda, and Mila were loose cannons. And they loved their coke. Ask McCoy. He was always around picking up the pieces.”

  “Pieces of what?”

  “Ass. I don’t know! He knows more about Cory than I do.” He studied the ground as if he were trying to count the blades of grass or find something hidden there. “It was Cory doing it all. It must have been, but I swear I didn’t know that part.”

  “Maybe it was you trying to cover things up. Because you’re right about one thing. Cory’s father will save him. And McCoy will probably vouch for him too. You, on the other hand, will take all the heat. So you tried to cover up the loose ends by killing the witnesses to the drugs—especially the GHB you were using on the girls to rape them. Am I right, Rod?”

  Rod clamped his eyes shut and then brought his hands up to cover his face, cloaking himself from the violence that seemed to be splitting his conscience open. He was breathing heavily, his hands still covering his face, and while he struggled with what I assumed was an imminent admission of guilt, I jumped away from him and ran to the woods to get my phone.

  I heard his feet crunching on the leaves behind me. Within seconds he was at my heels, his vinegary breath washing over the back of my neck like dirty steam from a city subway grate.

  “I didn’t kill anyone!” he said, yanking me back by my shoulder. Like shards of glass, pain shot through my chest and arm as he pulled on me. I dug my heels into the ground fighting against his pull, but he kicked me from behind and my legs buckled at the knee. I was back on the ground, kneeling, my head bent forward from the pain. He rushed in front of me and fell to his knees, and shoving his face into mine, he gripped my chin with anicy hand and dug his fingers into my skin. “What did you do? Tell people I killed Emily just because I fucked her?”

  I fought against his pull, afraid to look the devil in the eyes and let Rod’s thoughts corrupt mine. Killing is no simple thing. It is screaming. It’s a struggle. It is the protruding bloodshot eyes of a strangled victim. It is pain. It is blood. But with each successive kill, the act becomes commonplace, and as necessary to the killer as eating or sleep. I had to stay calm long enough to figure out how to get away from Rod before he made his decision to kill me.

  His forehead was covered in sweat and his eyes were wide with panic, filling with tears. He let go of my face. “No,” he whined. “You got it all wrong. Maybe it was Cory. Maybe you’re right. I didn’t think so, but if you’re sure the killings had something to do with the drugs then maybe you’re right, it was Cory, because I didn’t do it. I swear. I swear it wasn’t me.”

  I felt my body relaxing at the lament of his pleas. His face was a mask of terror at the realization that I was so logically accusing him of the murder of fellow students. He pushed his face into mine again, inches from mine, beer on his breath. “Listen to me,” he said. “Cory and Mila were bringing the drugs in and selling them from campus. Carlyle found out, and instead of expelling them he gave them a half-ass warning. Carlyle only cares about the money. You should know that by now if you’re working for him.”

  “Carlyle allowed the drug dealing? Absurd. You’re a goddamn liar,” I said.

  Stunned at my reply, he grabbed for me as I bolted up and tried to run to my car. This time he pushed me forward to the ground and then flipped me over like a rag doll. Facing me, his hands tightened around my neck, his teeth clenched in struggle, I choked until my eyes began to bulge.

  Unable to avert my eyes, I looked deep into his, trying to understand what he was thinking, or if he was thinking at all. They had emptied of their fear and their hate. They were empty of anything I recognized as emotion. What I saw in Rod’s eyes was merely the effort of a difficult act. The calling forth of the strength needed to break the bones of my neck and crush the air out of me. He was lost in a stupor of brute strength. And when he was finished, exhausted, he would pant for air and look down at the inert body at his feet—my lifeless body, as the girls would see it, crumpled in a heap on the ground.

  As Rod tightened his hold on my neck, I lifted my hand, weak and shaking, and reached for his sweating forehead to stroke it with a soothing grace and try to awaken him from this horrid nightmare we were sharing—when behind him, just over his head, Elliot appeared, holding a seven-inch hunting knife high in the air.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Wet Dreams

  ROD LET GO OF my neck and turned toward Elliot, whose face was masked in resolute calm. His eyelids were heavy and half closed, as if he might fall asleep at any second. My throat was throbbing in pain. When I tried to talk, my voice was stuck and strangled, so I watched wordlessly and without protest as Elliot slammed the point of the knife into Rod’s neck, pushing it in with such force that Rod’s whole body bent backward, his gaping mouth gurgling blood, trying to scream. Backwards Rod fell, but Elliot still wouldn’t let up. He pushed the knife harder until Rod buckled over on his back into the grass, and still Elliot forced the knife deeper through Rod’s throat until the blade and Rod’s neck became impaled in the ground. Elliot finally released his hand from the knife and sat back on his haunches, and thus relaxed, with his head tilted, he surveyed his achievement: Rod’s neck nailed to the ground by the embedded knife. Like a fountain from his carotid artery, the blood from Rod’s neck was spouting in a heavy flow down toward the river.

  I leaned over to Rod’s body and felt for a wrist pulse, one . . . two . . . and then nothing. I stared at Rod but spoke to Elliot.

  “Why did you do that? The two of us could have subdued him. I have a gun and you had a knife.”

  Elliot stood and looked up into the heavens, not quite asking for forgiveness, but supplicant, perhaps sorry at this turn of events? Rod’s eyes were still open, staring up into the sky as well, but he was beyond questions. The trees were making a clean rustling sound in the breeze. Rod was dead. Elliot was eerily silent. Only the branches and an occasional bird disturbed the lull. I needed to hear some sane words. Any pre-Holton voice would do. I craved a voice from a time before Melinda Hastings’s body flew through the air in front of me, causing this whirlwind of events that was ending with five dead Holton students and my baby sister missing and possibly dead.

  The girls. I needed to call my friends.

  “I’m going to find my phone. Rod threw it up there in the trees. We’ve got to call an ambulance. I’ve got to get the phone and call for help.”

  “He’s dead,” Elliot said softly. “No point. I told you to be careful, Miss Melone. Sherman and Lipton are stupid, ugly-minded people.”

  Elliot marched purposefully back to the picnic table and found my bag on the ground. He had a plan, so I watched and waited. He was the outsider with no emotional stake in any of this. Maybe he had some clearheaded, rational idea of what to do next and how to find Cassie.

  I watched him and waited, still trusting his superior intellect and assuming that he knew better what to do next.

  “Can you get into Sherman’s place?” he asked while he fished through my bag. “Will the guards let you in?”

  “Those apartments are private property. Not part of the campus. Why?”

  “Let’s go. We’ll find a way to get in.”

  Was he so naive to think we could just leave Rod lying dead on the ground with a knife in this throat? Was it only because of my legal background that I knew, self-defense or not, the police had to be called? I could keep overzealous Elliot out of trouble by attesting to the fact that he killed Rod to save my life, even though, in concert, we might have stopped Rod without killing him. I was willing to tweak Elliot’s fate, protect him for saving me, but the police still had to be called.

  “I’m getting my phone. We can’t leave him here like this.”

  Elliot dumped th
e contents of my bag on the ground. “Where is it? You told Rod you had it in here.”

  “The phone isn’t in there, Elliot. I told you, it’s up in the grass.”

  A gleam appeared in Elliot’s hand. He was holding my gun, fiddling with the trigger, as he barked orders at me. “Get the knife. Pull it out of him. We need it. Then go up to your car.” I heard the click of the gun’s cocking mechanism. “Did I ever tell you that Melinda Hastings called me a fat dirty loser?”

  “Melinda?”

  “She called me a toad, a lizard who should adapt to procreation without sex to spare females from having to mate with me. Pretty big words for a dumb drugged socialite, huh?”

  There was a Holton student on the ground, dead by Elliot’s hand and possibly my complicity. My sister had been missing for days, and if the past murders suggested a pattern, she was already dead. My mind felt like mud.

  Think fast, Melone. Think fast.

  But my brain was on hold because of the live gun twinkling in Elliot’s hand.

  “Elliot, do not play with the gun. It’s loaded. We’ve got to call the police and find my sister.”

  “Your precious sister.” He looked at me with the same piercing eyes I’d seen that first day he walked into my office. “After what you saw Sherman and Lipton do—take her away and get her drunk—you told me I wasn’t allowed near her anymore—”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “But not Rod and Cory, the golden boys. She preferred their filthy company. And you started pushing me away, ignoring my calls, lying to me, treating me like a contagious leper.”

  “Elliot?”

  “Like Lisa Cummings. She’s another spoiled little shit.”

  “Another? Elliot what are you telling me?”

  He trudged back to Rod’s body. “I told you to get the knife and go up to your car!” He leaned over Rod, and as swiftly and stealthily as a bolt of lightning, he yanked the dripping knife out of Rod’s neck. The lifeless body bounced twice on the ground under Elliot’s wrenching force. Elliot remained stoic and unmoved by Rod’s blood that had splattered all over the front of his shirt.