by Steven James
When Lien-hua and I were alone in the hall, I said, “Could you do me a favor? Are you heading back to the Academy?”
A pause. “I can.”
“Could you take my 2:00 class?” I could hear that my voice was urgent, rushed. “Just thirty minutes maybe. We’re supposed to do a walk-around of the body farm.”
“Pat, what’s going on?”
Go on, lay it out. Then move.
“It’s Tessa’s father. We found him last month, and he’s trying to take her away from me. He’s suing for custody. I need to meet with a lawyer, and it can’t wait.”
There. On the table.
“I’ll take the whole class period. Go.”
“Thanks, I owe-oh man. Cheyenne. She rode here with me. She’ll need a ride back to the Academy.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll give her a lift.”
“You sure?”
“If we’re going to be working together, we’ll need to get to know each other.”
Unintended consequences.
Without thinking about it, I squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Thank you.” Touching her felt both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Different tones of the past.
I was about to pull my hand away, but she put her hand on it and her fingers curled around mine, ever so slightly, but they did. “You don’t have to thank me. Now get going.”
Then the moment disappeared. She returned to the conference room and I jogged to the parking lot, my thoughts flying ahead to my meeting with Missy Schuel.
24
So, according to Tessa’s dad, Julia Rasmussen was someone he’d met when he lived in DC six years ago. Apparently, she was the one who introduced him to sculpting.
She was a sculptress.
How nice.
“Will you be seeing her while you’re in the city?” Tessa asked.
He was slow in answering. “Tomorrow. Yes.” He gestured toward a sculpture about twenty feet away. “Well, here we are.”
Tessa stared at the figure Paul was walking toward: four-feet tall, made out of some kind of plastic resin. The sculpture’s feet were fins that slowly morphed into thickly muscled, hairy legs and then changed into a naked torso and neck, then a face of a girl with a tragically sad smile but optimistic eyes.
It had an explanatory plaque. Of course.
Paul was beaming. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Julia, huh?
The sculptress.
“It’s… interesting.”
“What does it say to you?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“It says she couldn’t decide what to make-a frog, a gorilla, or Shirley Temple.”
He looked at her oddly.
“I’m sorry, I mean, okay, how about this: it’s the history of life on this planet, from fish to ape to man, moving inexorably toward happiness. But our race hasn’t reached it yet-we’re still dragged down by our animal nature, and that’s why her face is so downcast. She’s hopeful, optimistic, but has yet to reach enlightenment.”
He blinked. Glanced at the plaque. Looked again at Tessa.
“No, I haven’t seen it before,” she said.
“That’s extraordinary.”
“Yeah, but it’s not honest.”
“Not honest?”
“The sculpture. About life. It assumes natural selection always moves toward happiness, which is imposing a value judgment on it, which is illogical. And who’s to say animals aren’t happier than we are? Not too many of them commit suicide. Besides, a lot of people think we’re shaped by the hand of God, not simply natural processes. Mom believed that. I do too.”
A pause. “You’ve thought about this before.”
“Yeah.” She considered telling him that Patrick had told her more than once that truth is not afraid of scrutiny. But she held her tongue.
“Do you believe in God, Paul?”
He was slow to answer. “I’m not sure.”
“Does Julia?”
“Tessa, this is-”
“None of my business?”
He looked at her closely. “No, I don’t think Julia believes in God.”
Tessa felt it in the air: awkwardness, awkwardness, awkwardness.
“So.” He pointed to a nearby sculpture: a toilet seat surrounded by fake fur and framed inside a giant green triangle. “What about this one? Let’s see if you can get two in a row.”
Oh, please don’t tell me Julia the Sculptress made that thing too.
Tessa glanced at the name on the placard.
Good.
“Well?”
“Come on, Paul. I just want to talk. I’m really not into this whole sculpture-interpretation-thing.”
“You nailed the last one.”
“Luck.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She held back a sigh. “It’s a toilet seat in a giant triangle. Can we move on? Please?”
“Come on, you can do better than that. Can you tell me what it means?”
All right.
Enough with this.
“I’m no artist, but I don’t think the point of art is to mean, I think it’s to render. If it doesn’t do that, if it needs a plaque to explain it, it’s not art. It’s like nature-what does a bird mean by its song? What does a flower mean when it blooms? It means beauty. Any explanation beyond that is superfluous.”
He stared at her.
“Look, what did you do before moving to Wyoming and becoming a recluse?”
“I worked for the government. I told you that before. How do you know so much about-”
“Yeah. The game and fish department.”
“That’s right.”
“Why are you living out there in the middle of nowhere? Are you running from something?”
“I needed a place to be alone to work on my sculptures; we went through all of this when you and your stepfather came to my cabin. Did you study art or-”
“Patrick. When Patrick and I came to your cabin. Please use his name.”
A hard look. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here. Are you angry at me?”
“No.”
“Let’s try to switch this from an interrogation to a conversation, okay?”
She felt a sharp itch of anger. “I’m not interrogating you.”
“How about we just go back and forth, okay? You ask me a question, then I’ll ask you one.” He gestured toward some leather chairs near the window, but she didn’t move.
“How long did you and Mom go out?” she said.
“Three weeks.”
“And did you-”
A smile. “It’s my turn, Tessa.”
She said nothing.
“Do you love Patrick?”
“I love him. Yes. What about Mom? Did you love her?”
A pause. “We went out for three weeks, Tessa.”
“And?”
He didn’t answer.
“So,” she said, “you slept with her even though you didn’t love her?”
“We slept together. Yes. Three or four times.”
“Three or four? You don’t remember?”
“My turn for a question. Has he ever done anything to hurt you?”
“Who?”
“Patrick.”
“To hurt me? What are you talking about?”
He pointed to her right arm, to her scars. “Did he do that to you?”
“How could you even think that? I did that to myself. You can’t remember how many times you slept with my mom? How many other women were you sleeping with at the time that made it so hard for you to keep track?”
“There weren’t any others.” Then back to the scars. “Some of those look recent. Why didn’t he stop you?”
She stared at him coolly. “I think I’m done with this little conversation-bonding-time.” She slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “And I’ve had enough art appreciation for one day. I’m leaving.”
He reached out for her arm to stop her
, but she glared at him. “Don’t even.”
He stopped just short of actually touching her.
“I care about you.” He let his hand retreat. “I want you to be safe. During Basque’s trial last month, your stepfather-Patrick-admitted to physically assaulting him, to breaking Basque’s jaw when he arrested him.”
“The guy was trying to kill him.”
“That’s not exactly how the press portrayed-”
“Patrick would never hurt me. Ever.”
A drop of silence. “I’m glad to hear that.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s with all the questions about Patrick?”
“You’re my daughter. I just want to make sure you’re in a safe environment. You’re important to-”
“Oh yeah? Well, then, answer me this: if I’m so important to you, why didn’t you ever come to see me? And please don’t tell me it’s because you thought Mom was going to abort me. You kept tabs on her. You wrote to her fifteen years later -I found the postcard! You would have known about me.”
She watched him closely. His face. His body language.
“Honestly, I always thought your mother went ahead with the abortion.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t know you were born, Tessa. I had no way of knowing. Before your mom moved away she made it very clear that she didn’t want me in her life.” A pause. “But now we’re here; we’re together, and I’m just trying to make sure that this man who is taking care of-”
“Patrick! His name is Patrick! And he’s more than just the guy who takes care of me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Show him, Tessa. Prove it.
She yanked up her left sleeve, revealing the raven tattoo she’d gotten to conceal the scar Sevren Adkins had given her when he slit her brachial artery and left her to bleed to death.
“Patrick saved my life last year when this serial killer attacked me. He risked his life. He almost got killed doing it.”
“A serial killer?”
“That’s right.”
He was looking carefully at the tattoo. And at the scar.
“I didn’t know that.”
She let go of her sleeve. “Yeah, well, now you do.”
“I’m sorry you were hurt like this. I would never have let someone-”
“I am so done with this.” She turned to go.
“Tessa, don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”
She whirled around. Got in his face. “Patrick would do anything for me, and while you were out there in your little Una-bomber cabin playing with papier-mache, he was busy being a dad to me. Don’t email me anymore. I think I know everything I need to.”
“There’s still a lot we need to discuss. I’ll-”
“Discussion’s over. Paul.”
“I told you before. In my emails. You don’t need to call me Paul. I’m your father. You can call me Dad.”
Unbelievable.
“Patrick’s my dad. You’re just the man who impregnated my mom.”
She strode away, but as she boarded the elevator, she shot a glance at him, and saw that he hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing. He was still watching her with clear, unswerving eyes.
It creeped her out.
The elevator doors closed.
He used your mom. He didn’t love her.
He used her…
She felt a rush of hot anger and a tight coil of disappointment.
He didn’t love Mom. How could he have ever loved you?
And as soon as she reached the ground floor she escaped to the bathroom to think. To hide. And despite herself, to cry.
25
The woman in the back of the van was silent now, and still.
Earlier, as Brad had transferred her from the basement to the vehicle, she’d struggled more than he would have liked, but he’d put a stop to it.
Now, compliant once again, she lay next to the wheelchair that he would use to take her to the room where she would die on the eighth floor of the newly renovated Lincoln Towers Hotel, best known as the place where a would-be assassin tried to kill the vice president six years ago.
He and Astrid had taken a room at the hotel last month and, using the television’s volume, had tested how much sound was noticeable in the hallway. They’d found that, while the room wasn’t as soundproof as the one in their basement, with the television turned up to hide the woman’s cries, it would work just fine.
In a sweet curl of irony, the woman would die in a room that the corpse from the primate center was paying for-at a tidy sum of $598 per night. And no one would find that out until it was too late.
He hopped off I-95.
12:41 p.m.
The hotel wasn’t far at all.
Let the games begin.
26
I was less than five minutes from Missy Schuel’s office, and in anticipation of our meeting, my thoughts were revolving around Tessa and her father.
We met him in Wyoming at the end of last month.
The air in the mountains had been smudged with rain that day, and the peaks surrounding his cabin were swallowed in a thick gray mist.
A weary, drizzling sky.
As we stepped out of the car, Tessa slid a wisp of hair away from her eye. For some reason I remember that. A small gesture. Frozen in time. “I want to do this by myself.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Tessa, I’m not leaving you alone with him. Not until I know more about him.”
“He’s my father.”
Though I knew the words were true, they stung a part of my heart I’d never known existed until after Christie’s death when Tessa became the most important person in my life. “Yes, he is,” I said. “But if you’re going in there, I’m coming with you.”
A pause. “Fine.”
So together we’d approached the cabin. The fog snaking around us. The mud thick underfoot.
I wasn’t sure how Paul would respond to having us show up like this unannounced. We hadn’t phoned to tell him we were coming; after all, he didn’t own a phone. Or have a bank account. Or a credit history. On paper the man didn’t exist.
And that was one of the reasons I wasn’t going to leave Tessa alone with him. He’d left society behind, and I wanted to know why.
When he answered the door I decided that mentioning I was a federal agent might not be the best way to get off on the right foot. “My name is Patrick Bowers,” I said. “Are you Paul Lansing?”
His eyes traveled back and forth from me to Tessa. “I am.”
I was about to explain the purpose of our visit, but before I could, Tessa held out the diary, opened to a note that a man named Paul had written to her mother seventeen years earlier asking her not to have an abortion. “Did you write this?”
He gazed at the page, and his expression changed from curiosity to mild suspicion. “Who are you?”
“My name is Tessa Bernice Ellis. My mother was Christie Rose Ellis. Seventeen years ago you slept with her and she wanted to abort me and you begged her not to. I’m your daughter.”
I waited for Paul to speak, to say something, anything. But he just studied Tessa for an infinitely long moment, and finally whispered, “So she didn’t…” Neither Tessa or I moved. “I always thought…”
And then a soft tear formed in his eye and he invited us inside.
And in that moment I realized that he had loved Tessa for the last seventeen years even though he hadn’t known she was alive.
Just down the block from Missy’s office, my phone’s ringer snapped me out of my thoughts about that gray day in Wyoming. I answered.
Ralph: “Where are you, man?”
“DC.”
“Good. Congressman Fischer wants to see you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He asked for you. I think it’s about Mahan.”
“Me? Why?”
“Didn’t say. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I need you to-”
“Listen, I’m on my way to see the lawyer Brin told you about. Have Margaret deal with-”
“I know you need to do that, but those things take weeks. You have time. Fischer has a press conference in less than fifteen minutes.”
I pulled into the liquor store’s parking lot across the street from Missy Schuel’s office. “Ralph, this doesn’t make sense. There are plenty of people who can talk to Fischer. Sic Doehring on him.”
“You can stop him from-”
“What about a phone call? Why don’t I just call him?”
“He asked to see you.” Agitation rising in his voice. “I don’t need to tell you that right now is not the time to get him pissed off at the Bureau.”
“Wait.” I was losing my patience too. “Am I talking to Ralph, or is this Margaret?”
A slice of silence.
“The meeting with the lawyer can wait.” Ralph’s tone had turned cold. “You have ten minutes to get to the house minority leader’s office so Fischer can talk with you before he meets with the press, and I don’t want you to be late.”
“Get ready to be disappointed.”
“Pat, the priority right now needs to be-”
“My daughter,” I said and I ended the call.
Then I turned off the ringer, grabbed my satchel with the letter from Lansing’s lawyers in it, climbed out of the car.
And headed across the street to Missy’s building.
Tessa was washing her face, but her black mascara had smeared really bad and she still looked terrible.
How can that man actually be your dad? It’s not possible!
She felt like hitting something, hitting him, and of course, cutting again. Trying to slice the pain away.
Her eyes went to the scars on her arm.
She’d seriously been trying to move past that chapter in her life, didn’t even carry a razor blade or X-acto knife with her anymore. But she could get one. She could buy Don’t go there, Tessa. Not again.
She finished at the sink, dried her face, left the restroom.
She needed to talk to Patrick.
Now.
Tell him everything, apologize.
Oh great. That’s right.
The phone. The BlackBerry Paul had given her with his little Google GPS program on it so he could track her.