Undercurrents

by Ridley Pearson

  “Tell me about it.”

  She stabbed at her food. Boldt consumed his voraciously.

  “I’ve been thinking about your copycat,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. If you close in on him, I’d like you to do me a favor.”

  Boldt suddenly thought he was about to hear the reason for the special treatment. So you want something from me, he thought. Just like Rutledge’s description of Puget Sound, there are things happening on the surface and there are things happening underneath. Nothing is as simple as it seems. “I’m listening.”

  “We, that is, people in my profession, seldom have a chance to work with a homicidal personality prior to arrest. We are brought in later to identify and quantify the degree of an individual’s sickness. We’re meat inspectors for the most part. And by the time we see the individual he is typically resigned to his own failure, to the permanence of his incarceration.”

  “What are you asking?” he wondered in a less tolerant tone of voice.

  “Just thinking aloud, that’s all.”

  “Daffy—”

  “If you know who it is, Lou, and it works out, I would appreciate a few minutes with him prior to his arrest.”

  “My first reaction is, impossible.”

  “I was certain it would be. But a situation might arise.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it might, I suppose.”

  “Let’s leave it at that. Just keep it in mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “The thing about it is, it would be an incredible opportunity. A chance like that might not only help people in my profession but in our profession as well. It might give us some insight into motivations and rationales that elude us once a person is put in an unworkable situation.”

  “I said, okay. Okay?”

  “Sorry I’ve upset you.”

  “It doesn’t take much, these days. It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m sorry, Lou.”

  “Really, no problem. Not your fault. There’s a lot on my mind. Sometimes I’m thinking about so many things that it’s hard to think. How’s that for not making any sense?”

  “It makes plenty of sense.”

  He sipped his wine. He felt pleasantly light-headed. “I’m lonely, Daffy.” His face tightened. “I’ve isolated myself. Being a cop used to be one thing I did. Now it’s all I seem to have. It’s all I’ve left myself with. I’ve isolated myself but good. Being a cop is like a terminal disease or something: it consumes you, entirely, slowly but surely. I’ve allowed it to take everything out of my life. And I’ve suddenly reached the stage where I resent that.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “But I did it to myself. No one made me do this.” No one but the Cross Killer, he thought. “What got you into this, Daffy?”

  “You’ve heard the rumors?” she wondered.

  “There are rumors about all of us.”

  “True enough.”

  “If you don’t want to talk—”

  “On the contrary. I do.” She paused.

  He waited.

  “I had a private practice for a while. Part of a clinic. Had my own patients.” She put her fork down. “People are so complex,” she said, and her voice trailed off. “I had in my practice a young woman. Not very pretty. Not particularly bright.” He could feel that she was very far away. “She had been abused by a stepfather. Sexually abused. Repeatedly. For years. Made to do horrible things. She was too young at the time to know any better. It wasn’t until a few years before I saw her that she began to understand the full weight of exactly what she had been through. She spent a lot of her adulthood thinking about it—looking back—and it was very destructive. We worked on that together.” She seemed mesmerized by the candle. Boldt watched her eyes watch the candle’s flame. As the flame wavered, her expression seemed to change. “Her stepfather had been a truck driver, and while she was in treatment with me, she began to seek out truck stops—hang around truck stops. I tried to steer her away from this. She wasn’t certain why she did it, and she had several blackouts—total blackouts associated with the visits that worried me terribly. I debated institutionalizing her. Decided against it,” she said painfully. The flame straightened. Black carbon rose in a steady stream. “Not long after,” she said, “she was raped by a truck driver. Incidentally, he was later let off by a judge because he claimed she had come on to him. I don’t believe that, for what it’s worth. I told the judge so, but it didn’t seem to help any, did it? Anyway”—she glanced at him—“I still resisted institutionalizing her.” She sipped the wine. “On a Tuesday night—I remember it was a Tuesday—Mary Alice walked into a truck stop waving a handgun.”

  “Oh, God…” Boldt said. She nodded.

  “She fired one shot into the ceiling. No drugs. No substance abuse. She had simply come undone. I had lost her, and I was too green to realize it. It was my fault, Lou,” she said in a way he found impossible to contradict. “She never killed anyone. Never even wounded anyone.” She continued, “He was a rookie cop. His partner was in the men’s room at the time. Someone shouted, and I quote, ‘She’s flipped out, she’s got a gun.’ Mary Alice spun around and the patrolman fired four shots into her chest. She never knew what hit her.” After a long hesitation she said, “After that, I began to look around and I saw a void in law enforcement that no one seemed to be addressing. The mentally ill are vastly misunderstood, Lou. Mary Alice didn’t go in there to kill anyone. She was a sick individual who needed more help than I was giving her.”

  “You couldn’t have foreseen—”

  “You never can foresee. But you learn to anticipate. That’s why I’ve been browbeating you over this case. I want to see that he gets help, not a bullet through his head. The only mistake that’s unforgivable is a repeated mistake.”

  She came out of her chair and was standing next to him. She placed her warm hands on his head and pulled him against her chest. She was soft and good. She held him there, whispering something incoherent. He reached out and awkwardly hugged her around the middle, his big hands resting gently on her hips and the slick surface of her skirt. Her heart continued to drum, out of sync with the music. He sensed she was crying. She trembled in his arms. Crying for Mary Alice? he wondered. Crying for me? For herself? No, he thought, just crying. Crying perhaps because she doesn’t understand this any more than I do. None of us has it completely figured out.

  He pulled her down to face him. He kissed the tears from her face, wishing he had tears of his own. She blurted out his name a few more times, shaking her head, her message obvious. Her message ignored.

  He kicked away the chair. It tipped and crashed to the floor, evoking a giggle from her. She was unbuttoning his shirt. He worked loose the oversized buttons on the back of her blouse, and as it came free she slipped out of it, allowing it to gracefully slide down her long arms and cascade to the carpet in an uneven heap of peaks and contours.

  He wanted to disappear inside of her, to meld into her and dwell there alone with her thoughts and her tenderness. Their bare chests touched and he sensed the first awakening within him. He kissed his way down her chest and felt her shiver as he took her into his lips. Her fingers wormed in his hair. Then their lips met again and she seemed filled with a renewed intensity. His thoughts vanished. He was nowhere but with her. Her sensitivity overwhelmed him, overpowered him to the point that all was lost but their mutual frenzied effort at intimacy. Their attempts developed into a kind of restrained wrestling, an awkwardly compassionate, aching bid at consonance. They rolled beneath the table and Boldt banged his foot against a table leg. Laughing, she pulled his pants off, simultaneously thumping her head and crying out. And then, free of her own undergarments, she spread herself atop him, drawing him into her warmth. For a moment they were awkward with the intimacy, but then it developed into a playful, empathetic rite, a private ritual not born out of love as much as from mutual need.

  As they joined, Boldt was consumed by the smooth, lusciou
s warmth that enveloped him. In their careless affection they had become one, however briefly, and nothing could ever remove that from either of them. She moved steadily above him, her head occasionally thumping the underside of the tabletop. She smiled down at him, and then bent to kiss him hotly as the timing of her efforts increased. He relished their physical exhilaration, and the delicious intensity of it. He encouraged her to join him now in his release, his tongue searching for her firm nipple, hands locked under her arms, lifting and dropping her heavily upon himself. He begged for her release, suddenly answered by rippling contortions that directed his senses to the deepest point of their union, drawing his heat from within, flowing into her as she cried out softly and clutched him firmly. They sang together briefly, an odd harmony at best. Soon—too soon, he thought—the moment passed; she sank peacefully into his arms, their skin damp and salty, their chests heaving in long, uncontrolled breaths, their hearts pounding out “Big Noise from Winnetka.” And slowly—too soon, he thought—he returned to the somewhat embarrassing reality of their nakedness, of their joined bodies below a dining room table, of the silence left behind. Ornette Coleman was finished. They were finished.

  How does one stay there? he wondered. How can one preserve that moment of tranquillity and bottle it for future use? Is it sex that makes us feel this good, or is it the fundamental knowledge that we are willingly participating in a shared emotion? That we are contributing.

  “The latter, I think,” she whispered tenderly into his ear. And he realized he had spoken his thoughts aloud. “You don’t need to tell me you love me, if that’s what’s bothering you,” she said. “And I won’t tell you, if doing so will make you uncomfortable. Even if it is the truth. But what just took place between us transcended sex so completely, so totally that the word loses all meaning by comparison. I was so far gone from this room. I was off with you… well aware of you… lost in a combined fulfillment of epic proportions. That one was for Cecil B. DeMille,” she said, drawing a laugh from him. “When we first began,” she admitted, “I felt it was the wrong direction to go. It was awkward and even frantic. But my God, Lou…” She wiggled on top of him and felt him stir inside of her. “Good Lord, that was wonderful.”

  He kissed her lips lightly at first. Their hearts and breathing had slowed. Her fingers twisted in his hair, her breasts slid moistly across his chest as she adjusted herself to entertain his rekindled enthusiasm. Her skin was soft, her buttocks firm, and her hips powerful as she began to respond to his swelling and the delightful wavelike motions he offered her. He took hold of her rib cage and with a surprising quickness inverted them in a single roll. She swallowed him up with her thighs, trapping him so that each of his motions transferred to her. She held to him tightly at first, then surrendered, throwing open her arms and taking hold of the table legs at either side. With an arched back he looked down upon her flushed and glowing chest; he could not move that she did not move; he could not feel that she did not feel. Held so firmly, so deeply inside her, his movements were minimal though wrought with power. He placed his hands on the spikes of her hipbones and drove rhythmically against her swollen lips, tiny circular motions, lifting and falling, lifting and falling, her movements echoing and countering his. Her chest glowed an even darker scarlet, hands still clutching the table legs forcefully, her nipples spiked and teasing him to kiss them, which he did. Her mouth fell open and she coughed gutturally and he felt the moment arrive. Her legs gripped his even more tightly, a spongy softness as they rocked on her flexing buttocks. He experienced the same dizzy delirium as before. The total freedom. She threw her hips into him, harder and harder, her sounds growing louder and more anxious, words and emotions mixing in an incomprehensible language.

  “Yes,” he managed to wheeze.

  “Yes, yes,” she uttered behind gritted teeth. “It’s perfect.”

  40

  Daphne left that evening nearly as quickly as she had arrived. After collecting herself, and offering to do the dishes, which he steadfastly refused, she organized the kitchen goods she had brought and was gone with a simple kiss to his cheek. No excuses were made. In fact—it occurred to him later—following a short time of nestling, and a hesitant return to their clothing, no mention of their lovemaking had been made at all.

  He began the task of dishes—a small task at that—but abandoned it immediately. He felt too damn good to do dishes. Dexter Gordon wailed from the radio. Boldt leaned back against his rented couch. The tenor flowed lyrically from the speaker, soothing him. Images of Daphne’s reckless lovemaking stormed his brain and assaulted his groin, and he wanted to catch up to her—wherever she was—and be with her again. He had not been this virile since his teen years and he wondered what chemical had renewed him so quickly and so completely. To him it seemed a miracle. Yesterday he had been impotent.

  The guilt began to seep into him slowly, like groundwater rising after a storm. His time with Daphne had been fiery, too good for a married man to feel anything but guilty about. He knew how Elizabeth would feel if she was to find out about the tryst, and despite her own assignations he could not find the contempt necessary to exploit his situation.

  The phone rang just as the sax took a solo. Boldt was so tired of receiving wrong numbers created by the phone company’s ineptitude, that he nearly didn’t answer it. He stared at the phone and moved over to it slowly, reluctantly. If it was for him, it was too late—nearly ten o’clock—for it to be anything but bad news.

  As he lifted the receiver, he was startled by a pounding on his front door—Daphne behind the ugly, translucent drapes.

  “Detective Boldt?” the voice asked over the phone.

  “Just a minute,” he said, hurrying to the front door, which he unlocked and opened gladly.

  She threw her arms around his neck. He closed his eyes and sighed at the splendor of the sensation. He wrapped his arms around her tightly. “Oh, Lou,” she moaned. He leaned away because he could hear she was crying. Tear lines marked her cheeks.

  “Daphne?” He looked back at the phone receiver lying on the cheap tabletop. “What is it?” His heart began to drum forcibly.

  She saw the phone now and glanced alternately between it and the dark, terrified eyes of Lou Boldt. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I just heard it over dispatch…”

  “Daphne?”

  “It’s the Levitts,” she blurted out. “The Cross Killer. He killed the Levitts…. Both parents…”

  He released her and stumbled back, turning to look at the phone and then quickly back to Daphne. “Justin?” he asked loudly, his face tensing. He shouted, “What about Justin?”

  She shook her head.

  “Justin? Daphne? What about Justin?” He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Daphne!”

  Tears poured from her eyes and she trembled. Her mouth opened, but the words would not come out. She finally managed to groan, “He’s missing, Lou…. Signs of a struggle…”

  41

  As Lou Boldt stepped inside the Levitts’ living room he cringed. Despite all the confusion, the noise and the commotion of the dozens of policemen and the background strobe of the patrol-car lights, he could feel the terror of the victims. On the wall, drawn in the darkened brown of drying blood, was the single word:

  S T O P!

  “Everybody out,” the voice of Lieutenant Shoswitz called, and Lou Boldt knew the order didn’t pertain to him. He stayed roughly in the middle of the room as the other detectives left. The brightly colored police-car lights continued to swirl about the walls of the room, giving the illusion of a merry-go-round. Shoswitz laid a hand on his shoulder. “Tough break,” he said. The room was a horrible mess. Beneath an overturned chair he made out the bare leg of a man.

  “The boy?” Lou Boldt asked sullenly.

  “We don’t know. Right?”

  “Don’t know?”

  “There are signs of a struggle in his room. His body hasn’t been found.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Boldt took a st
ep forward.

  Shoswitz explained, “He disemboweled the woman. Kitchen knife. Raped her, we think. Evidence of cannibalism.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “He’s flipped out, Lou. We think it has something to do with the boy having seen him. He thinks it has blown his cover—something like that. Daphne should be able to tell us more.”

  Boldt nodded in order to silence the man.

  The boy’s room was a mess. A struggle had occurred but Boldt saw no evidence of blood. “He’s alive,” he whispered.

  “It’s possible,” Shoswitz agreed. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”

  42

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning before Shoswitz, Boldt, and Daphne Matthews met in interrogation room A. Daphne’s complexion was pasty and she moved slowly. She offered the men a hapless, halfhearted smile and took a seat in one of the chairs. She heaved an exhausted sigh and referred to her notes.

  Boldt could not rid himself of the image of a frightened Justin Levitt in the clutches of a wild man.

  “As for the boy,” she said in a lifeless professional voice that reminded Boldt of prerecorded telephone interrupts, “we can assume he is still alive—this based on three similar hostage cases provided by the FBI’s VICAP computer. A lust murderer’s enemy is almost always the woman victim—”

  “But the husband,” Shoswitz reminded.

  “Yes, I know.” She nodded solemnly. Boldt could see the steady beat of her heart in a vein at her temple. She bit back the tension and swallowed noticeably. “I realize that killing the husband doesn’t fit. The husband may have come upon the scene after the killer had arrived. Would he attack with a male present? I don’t think so. His excessive violence may have even been triggered by the husband’s arrival—his father catching him in the act, his own memories as a boy. On sight of the husband Mrs. Levitt became his mother—a target for his anger. It may help to explain the disembowelment.” She went silent and didn’t look up from her notes for several long, heavy seconds. “The writing on the wall is also new. A warning, certainly. Your guess is probably right, Lieutenant: he’s desperate now. He fears being caught. It’s possible he’s convinced himself that by holding the boy he will force us to temper our investigation—”