Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

  A moment later, Nolan was on the deceased’s phone talking to an assistant at the L.A. morgue. He had closed the office-bedroom door behind him.

  “Have you guys started the Renee Gauld autopsy?” he asked.

  “Not yet. We just got her in a little while ago.”

  “Hold off. I’m bringing in somebody to identify the body.”

  “To what?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “But Jesus, Grobowski, the stiff was identified back at—”

  “Humor me, okay? I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Nolan hung up the phone.

  Okay, lady. Here’s your chance to show me what you’re made of.

  *

  Marianne sat impassively in the passenger’s seat as Lieutenant Grobowski drove them through the rain to the city morgue. Dawn must have been on its way, but it was impossible to see it through the clouds and gloom.

  In a way, this was the worst part of the experience so far—just sitting here, letting someone else drive. She wanted to be doing something—driving, talking, anything. But now she was forced to sit silently here in a darkened car with a taciturn detective who obviously didn’t much care for her.

  Why should he like me? He thinks I’m a murderer.

  She could hardly believe the ease with which she’d arranged this trip to the morgue. Of course, the lieutenant had his own reasons for letting her see the body. He wanted to observe her reaction. He wanted to note exactly how she would take it. Still, he seemed awfully credulous about her proposing the idea.

  Her body’s been identified already. How could it not be? All the tenants knew her. Does he think I don’t know that? He must think I was born yesterday.

  Well, if the cops were that convinced of her naïveté, she could use their naïveté to her own advantage. She wanted to be a part of this investigation—and if being suspected of murder allowed that to happen, then she would be suspected of murder.

  She remembered Stephen’s reaction on the phone.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he’d yelled. “Get away from those cops! They’re investigating a murder! All they want is a suspect—any suspect. How does lethal injection sound to you?”

  She’d awakened him, of course, and he wasn’t at his best. He might have half-supposed that he was dreaming.

  Poor Stephen. Haven’t you figured me out l now? The surest way to get me to act like a crazy woman is to call me one.

  She wanted to laugh at the memory, but her capacity for laughter had not yet returned. She wasn’t sure it ever would return. She wasn’t sure of anything. All she knew was that she had to see Renee’s body. She didn’t understand quite why, but she had to see it. She had no idea how she would react, much less how the lieutenant would interpret her reaction.

  She thought again about how Renee had invited her to the party and how she had failed to come. She struggled for the hundredth time tonight to hold back her emotions, especially her swelling and unfathomable guilt.

  In a way, the cop is right. In a way, I’m guilty as hell.

  *

  Clayton was relieved when Nolan and the Hedison woman were gone. He hadn’t seen his partner so agitated for a very long time, not even over the Judson case. Now Clayton and a couple of uniformed officers were the only people left in the condo unit. He was glad to have some quiet, to let his intuitions go to work.

  At times like this, when exhaustion reached a certain threshold, when the next good night’s sleep seemed nothing more than a flimsy hypothesis, Clayton’s mind often gained its greatest clarity. As far as he was concerned, it was a simple fact that Marianne Hedison had not murdered her friend.

  During the questioning, Clayton had studied the woman’s eyes. They were green and clear—just like those creeks in South Carolina with rippling water so transparent that you could see the algae-covered rocks below. Clayton had imagined he could reach down in this woman’s eyes and pick up a crayfish. Eyes that clear could never conceal a lie. Clayton was sure of it. But he knew that his partner’s no-bullshit common sense—or perhaps closed-minded pigheadedness—would never accept that kind of intuitive conclusion. The only way he could persuade Nolan would be to get a good hit on who was guilty.

  Clayton walked into the bathroom. He took note of the brightly flowered robe hanging on the back of the door. He also observed the black bathroom fixtures and the little wax puddles where candles once had been. All of those had been in the cartoon, and the animated character taking a bath did resemble the publicity photo they had found in the victim’s desk—more than it resembled the discolored body they had removed from the bathtub, anyway.

  But so what? Does it mean anything? Somebody who knew the victim reasonably well might have re-created the scene. This somebody might even know that the victim had a penchant for candlelight and bath oils. None of this necessarily had the first thing to do with the murder.

  He wanted to picture the scene of the murder, but the overhead light was too glaring, so he checked the little pools of wax. Two of them had some semblance of wicks left. Clayton lit them and turned the light off. He lowered his head and let his eyes go slightly out of focus. In his peripheral vision, he could just make out the white tape marking where the body had been sprawled in the black tub. What had happened here? Could he see it? He summoned up the incident, tried to coax it to play across his brain. He mentally scripted it out …

  Scenario A: She knows the killer. She’s taking a bath with him—a romantic, candlelit affair. Perhaps they’ve made love already, or perhaps this is a prelude …

  But Clayton stopped before the scene even got going. Could that be right? Was the killer actually in the bathtub with her? Did he flip out over something, perhaps some sort of sexual rejection, then do the murder? The tub was certainly large enough. But the image didn’t come clearly into his mind. Something was wrong with it. Something didn’t fit.

  Clayton focused his eyes and looked around the room. One thick peach-colored bath towel lay on the black floor tiles a few feet away from the tub. He squatted down and looked at it.

  One end of the towel was still folded like the ones hanging on the towel rods. The other end was crumpled as though it had been used. The other towels in the room all looked fresh and clean.

  A person who had actually been in the bath would use more towel than this. Time for a rewrite …

  Somebody’s in the unit—a boyfriend. The boyfriend comes into the bathroom while she’s bathing, perhaps bringing her a drink. He sits down on the toilet lid and chats with her. Or maybe he bends over the tub, giving her a massage—a massage that turns violent and deadly.

  Again, Clayton stopped. The drain had been opened. By whom, and why? If the killer cared about her, maybe he wouldn’t want her to get all bloated or discolored like corpses did when they soaked for even a short while. But no, that wasn’t it. That kind of killer would take time to arrange the body or even to cover it. The deceased’s body had been sprawled awkwardly, left just as she had died.

  So what happened to the bathwater?

  Clayton looked at his notes.

  The coroner said something about contusions on the toes.

  So maybe she had let out the water herself—accidentally perhaps, but more probably knowingly, in a last ditch effort to stave off drowning.

  Ugly.

  But his gut now told him something definite—the killer was not somebody the victim knew. It wasn’t exactly an inductive conclusion, but Clayton was quite sure of it.

  Scenario B: She got killed by a total stranger

  If so, where did the stranger hide? Clayton wandered out of the bathroom into the short hallway that connected the two bedrooms, the bathroom, and the living room of the condo unit. He pictured the corridor filled with partygoers. It was a chaotic scene, and somebody could hide himself ea
sily, waiting to come out later. If so, the deed had definitely been premeditated.

  Clayton went into the office. It apparently doubled as a guest room, and was not where the victim herself customarily slept. A single bed was pushed against the wall and scattered with pillows. The computer desk held the Mac and a large monitor—the very machine that had displayed the strange cartoon a little while ago. A number of cables snaked from it to other attachments. Kim Pak had mentioned a modem, a printer, and an external hard drive.

  Got a feeling I’m going to have to learn all about this stuff.

  He opened the closet door. A dresser took up most of the closet floor, and the rest of the space was filled with stacked luggage and boxes. There wasn’t enough room for anyone to hide. And Clayton doubted that the perp had risked just waiting around in the office itself, which didn’t offer anyplace else to hide.

  He went back down the hall to the master bedroom, directly across from the bath. Sergeant Tyler was carefully going through the drawers, lifting things, looking beneath them, placing them back as closely as possible to the ways he’d found them. She was looking for anything that might indicate an enemy, a lover, an entanglement of any kind—letters, photos, business cards, a man’s clothing—anything that might point to a motive for the murder. The investigating team would later check the deceased’s bank accounts and debts. They would find out whether she had insurance policies and a will. They would note the night spots she frequented, the books she was reading, the videos she watched, even the music she favored. Little and perhaps even none of it would tell them anything useful at all.

  “Anyplace in here a guy could’ve hidden?” Clayton asked.

  “There, maybe,” Tyler replied, gesturing toward the bedroom closet. “Haven’t been through it yet.” Sergeant Tyler went on with her work.

  Clayton walked over and opened the closet door. It was a walk-in space, furbished with rods at different heights and sections of drawers and open shelves. The floor was covered with the same pile carpet as the rest of the bedroom. A half dozen clothes bags hung on one long rod, but they were not pushed all the way to the end. There was a space between the bags and the end wall of the closet.

  Clayton felt a sudden chill of certainty. At times like this, he congratulated himself on having come from a credulous family that believed in auras, divining rods, and religious healing. He didn’t believe in any of those things himself, and he certainly did not consider himself to be a psychic. But at crucial moments, Clayton simply knew what he knew. It was something like a birthright.

  There was a ghost in this closet—not a literal ghost, but a very palpable one. He could feel its presence. It was as if time had looped around itself, and the killer was in there even now, waiting for his opportunity. It was as if Clayton had only to grab him and slap the cuffs on him to stop him from killing—and in a magical stroke, the irrevocable would be revoked.

  Clayton edged toward the far end of the closet and looked at the space. Yes, there was enough room for someone to stand. On the bottom edge of the wooden shelf, he saw some fibers caught on a splinter. He took a pair of tweezers out of his shirt pocket and carefully removed the strands, put them in a bag, and labeled it.

  Clayton stepped back out of the closet, handing the bag to Tyler.

  “Don’t touch anything in there,” Clayton said. “I want forensics to go over it.”

  *

  Filed.

  That one word flashed through Marianne’s mind as the coroner’s assistant reached for the handle on the metal door. The drawer slid out with a sickening, metallic rumble. The contorted, naked body lay beneath a translucent plastic sheet. The assistant pulled the sheet back discreetly, just below the shoulders, as if protecting the corpse’s modesty. This gallant gesture struck Marianne as vaguely necrophiliac.

  Marianne took a good look at the corpse’s face.

  “That’s her,” she whispered. “That’s Renee.”

  But it was a lie—the first lie she had told tonight. This thing on the stainless steel table was not Renee. The expression, the colors, even the shapes of the cheekbones—everything about it was all wrong. It was an unconvincing forgery. Renee herself was not here—not on this table, not under this plastic sheet, not stashed away in this monolithic filing cabinet. Her corpse might be here, but that was not at all the same thing.

  Marianne was seized with shame at her falsehood. Was it too transparent? Did the lieutenant know that she was lying? What would he say if she told him the truth? What would he say if she told him that Renee simply wasn’t here, that she had to be somewhere else—that she was a missing person, not a dead one? But it was too late to tell him differently.

  She became sick with horror, but she did not actually feel it—not the way she might feel joy, sadness, pain, or rage. It was more like she heard the horror resounding in some distant basement of her soul—the sound of the first death with its contingent anguish echoing down to her throughout all time. There had to be a word for this weird, unfelt, audible horror. She had no idea what that word might be.

  She felt her legs totter under her. She felt the detective catch her. She felt him start to drag her toward a chair. She felt herself jerk away from him defiantly, yanking herself to her feet, furiously commanding the blood cells back into her brain. She staggered back toward the table, propping her hands against its cold steel edge, staring at the pinched eyelids, imagining the dead eyes behind them.

  Renee’s not here.

  With no one inside those eyes, Marianne could look nowhere except into her own heart. And where was her fury? Where was her outrage against this crime? Why didn’t this room and all its adjoining hallways ring out with her cries for justice, for revenge?

  The outcries simply did not come. The deed was too awful, too final not to have been done with some implacable purpose. There was something almost religious about it, something beyond Marianne’s comprehension. The thought of the person who had made this corpse did not fill her with anger but with an inexorable wave of awe-struck humility.

  She could not grasp this crime.

  She could not judge it.

  For these very reasons, she knew she had to find its perpetrator. She had to look into his eyes as she could no longer look into these, she had to search out his heart, she had to learn his purpose and take it away from him before judgment and vindication could at last be done.

  But first, I have to find Renee.

  *

  Nolan Grobowski reached out and touched the woman’s arm. She didn’t shake him off this time.

  “It’s time to go,” he told her.

  She nodded and let him lead her away.

  Nolan kept studying the woman’s expression. It was a perfect blank. It had been blank throughout the whole episode. But he remembered the dead weight her body had made when she fell into his arms. The faint had felt real enough.

  It would have been better if she’d cried, though. It would have seemed more real.

  Besides, she had snapped back too quickly. For her sake, it would have been much better if she had cried. But maybe she couldn’t cry.

  Fainting is easy. Crying is hard.

  01100

  DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE

  After Lieutenant Grobowski returned Marianne to her car in front of Renee’s condominium, she sat at the wheel and stared into space. The bright morning sunlight reflected off a dozen points of the chrome and glass, together with the droplets of water left from last night’s long rain. The light hurt her eyes. She dug in her handbag for sunglasses, but quickly realized she had left home without them. She had taken nothing except her handbag. She didn’t have any clothes to wear other than what she had on.

  So what’s the next order of business?

  First, she had to find a place to stay. She briefly considered the Quenton Parks Hotel. Perhaps it would be a goo
d idea for her to be near one of the murder scenes. But what would be the point? What did she seriously think she was going to do, carry out her own personal investigation? If she wanted to keep tabs on the police, fine, but going back to the Quenton Parks would be too much like a teenager staying all night in a haunted house on a dare. This wasn’t a game. Marianne needed a place where she could collect herself, come to terms with what had happened, and figure out what to do next.

  She drove instead to the Pacific Surf Hotel in Santa Monica and checked in. With no luggage, no makeup, and wearing well worn house clothes, she knew she looked conspicuous. But she couldn’t muster up much concern about appearances.

  The Pacific Surf was a modern hotel, spare in decor, and a welcome improvement over the Quenton Parks’ inhuman gaudiness. Marianne went to her room, took off her shoes, and dropped on her back across the expansive bed. She expected relief to hit immediately. It didn’t. She ached horribly all over. But the idea of rising from the bed to take off her clothes was unimaginable. She was determined to lie there until the aching passed.

  The ache was actually noisy—a kind of hum. It was the sound of overloaded wires and circuitry, the same hum the fluorescent ceiling tubes had made back at the morgue. She also remembered the hum from her childhood. When she was a little girl in Philadelphia, she used to play in a field with a high, sloping embankment at its end. Carved into the embankment was a wall with a fifteen foot stretch of concrete pavement leading up to it. There was a door in the wall bearing a red sign announcing DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE. And from behind that door came that loud, steady, forbidding hum.

  In those long ago days, she used to pause in her play and stand at the edge of that concrete pavement and listen to that hum. She wondered what would happen if she defied the sign and approached the door. She imagined that the electricity would reach out from behind the door and grab her and kill her. She never took that chance. She always stood safely on the grass beyond that pavement.

  A lot of good it did you to play it safe. That ugly noise has followed you through life and caught up with you. Now it’s invaded your body.