Lucidity

by David Carnoy

  “And when did he start abusing Cathleen?”

  Marcus dropped his head, like he was about to pray or something. Madden had struck a nerve.

  “I don’t want to get into that,” he said after a moment. “But I’ll tell you how it happened. After Cathleen was born, things were OK for a while. They were both focused on the baby. They played family. And he actually was a pretty good father. He was.”

  Marcus paused again, briefly, then switched to the present tense to tell the next part:

  “A year or two goes by and he tells Stacey he wants another kid. So they try to have one. But it doesn’t happen. She won’t get pregnant. So he has her go in for some tests. And they say nothing’s wrong with her. And then he goes in for tests. Afterwards, he tells Stacey everything’s fine. But actually it isn’t. They tell him he’s got some issues with his sperm that would make it next to impossible for him to get a woman pregnant naturally. They can do IVF. They can make it happen. But suddenly he looks at Cathleen and realizes she’s not actually his kid. He says nothing to Stacey, though. Keeps it to himself. He only tells her he knows later on, toward the end, when Stacey finds out what he’s been doing to Cathleen.” He paused here, wincing at the memory. “That’s when he decides to say something.”

  “How’d she find out?”

  “I told her.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know Stacey and I were close. Had been for years. I could see that she was struggling in the marriage. She had to go back to work, get some financial independence. I worked nights and weekends, so I had plenty of free time to help out. I spent a lot of time with Cathleen, always have. Something happened to her when she was around eight. She started acting strange. Withdrawn, sullen. Not her usual self. Everything scared her, especially Ross. Whenever she knew she was going to be alone with him I could see the fear in her eyes. It wasn’t normal.”

  “That’s quite an assumption.”

  “I saw the bruises. On the inside of her thighs. She was wearing these shorts that rode up when she ran or climbed. I asked her what happened and she just clammed up. Disappeared into herself. She refused to say a word about anything. But I knew. I just knew something was up with him. It was textbook behavior, like something from an after school special. I decided to find out for myself.”

  “Who’s kid was she?”

  “Mine,” Marcus said. “Cathleen is my daughter. And I’ve always known that.”

  Madden felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. The whole scene felt surreal. He tried to force himself back to reality, but he didn’t know how. He tried to say something, anything, but no words came out of his mouth.

  So that was it, he thought. That was the motive. It wasn’t money. He was protecting a child. His child. His secret.

  But what about Ross? What about finding his arm in Vietnam? What did Marcus mean when he said he’d brought him there?

  “You said you brought Ross to Vietnam. What’d you mean by that?”

  “He never left California,” Marcus explained. “It was me. After I killed him, I took his passport and went to Vietnam because I knew we had no extradition treaty with them. And to be perfectly honest, I’d always wanted to go there. I bought a ticket to Ho Chi Minh City and entered the country as Ross Walker. Exiting the country as me was a little trickier. I ended up going through Thailand, had to bribe a few people. This happened in the nineties, before September 11. International travel was a lot easier before 9/11. Everything was easier. Stacey managed to get herself a social security number and a new identity without much of a problem.”

  “But what about his remains? What about the arm?”

  “I went to Vietnam twice,” Marcus explained patiently. “The first time as him, the second as me looking for him. For my book. When I went the second time I packed the arm in my suitcase. Well, by that point it wasn’t so much an arm as, well, bones.”

  “A suitcase?” Madden asked, incredulous.

  “Not just any suitcase. I had one made with a special lead-lined compartment, just in case some security person looked at an X-ray of the suitcase. I doubt they even looked, though.”

  “Why? Why only one arm? Why would you do that?”

  “Ah, the arm. That’s actually an interesting story. A few years after she’d settled in New York, Candace started talking to me about this guy she’d met who trained people to be lucid dreamers. You know, control what happens in their dreams. She was really into that stuff. And the damn psychics. Anyway, she was really impressed with this guy, not just because he was kind of a Svengali, but also because he was handicapped. He only had one arm. He’d lost the other one to a bacterial infection or something like that. She talked about him a lot. Anyway, that’s how I came up with the idea. I just thought it would be interesting, that it would really add something to the story, if I went to Vietnam and found Ross’s arm. It would make the book. Not a sure thing, I know. I took a huge risk, but it paid off big time. That piece of arm totally made the book. What was the one thing everybody talked about when they talked about my book? The arm.”

  “What happened to the rest of him?”

  “I was living in Woodside, on the property of this wealthy divorced guy I knew from the bar. He made his money in tech but always wanted to be an artist so he converted one of his barns into an art studio. He had the place all set it up to do some painting but then he never painted. He traveled all the time. I buried Ross up there. And then a few years later, I really got rid of him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Marcus bent down and took some soil from the ground and held it in his hand, showing it to Madden. Then he tossed in the air and it blew away with the wind.

  “You might find a trace of him in our 2014,” he said.

  “You ground him up?”

  “His bones,” he said. “When I bought this property nine years ago, I mixed him in with some manure I spread on the fields. Ashes to ashes.”

  “Where’d you kill him?”

  “At his house. Drugged him first then asphyxiated him. It was clean. No blood. I didn’t want any blood. Then I stuck him in the trunk of his car and drove to Woodside.”

  “How’d you end up at his house?”

  “He came into the bar that same night. He knew I knew Stacey. Knew she came into the bar and that I’d gone to high school with her. He assumed I’d slept with her, but didn’t know for sure. And he came in and started asking me questions, like ‘I know you know where she is. I know she’s hiding out somewhere, you tell me where and I’ll make it worth your while.’ Stuff like that.”

  “Where was she?”

  “In Woodside. In the other barn. I was hiding her. She was gone girl years before Gone Girl. Except she left because she really was afraid he would kill her. He choked her, you know? Almost killed her. She had to get away from him. She’d been living in that guest cottage on their property and Cathleen was living in the big house, in her room. Right down the hall from his. It was crazy. Stacey kept saying it’s alright, they’d come to an understanding, they were going to get divorced, and she was going to work out a deal where she’d get Cathleen and would take less in the divorce in exchange for full custody. She wouldn’t press charges, didn’t want to put the kid through it. But then he started to change his tune and didn’t want to give her any money at all so she threatened to tell the police about what he’d done to Cathleen. That was the night he nearly choked her to death. He followed her, let her know it too. Told her if she went anywhere near the police he’d kill her. He’d threatened her before that, lots of times. And more than a few times she had to stop me from going over there and killing him. I wanted to. The guy in Woodside had shotguns, we’d shoot skeet sometimes. And I was ready to go over there and blow him away. But she convinced me not to. And then I came up with the plan to get her out of there and make it look like he killed her. And she agreed.”

  “You planned it for a while then?”

  “No, not really,” Marcus said. “Plannin
g it happened over a few days, but the actual opportunity, him coming to talk to me in the bar, that was pure serendipity. I knew I wouldn’t get another opportunity, and I was ready. I hated that guy for what he did to Stacey, but I wanted him dead for what he did to Cathleen. I can’t say we fully thought everything out, but we figured it wouldn’t take the police too long to dig into his life and realize that lots of people wanted him dead. Because he was a bad guy.”

  “So you had no plan for Stacey to reappear one day?”

  “That was the initial plan, but then the days became weeks and we weren’t sure what to do. Everybody thought he had killed her, but they couldn’t come up with enough evidence to get a conviction, so they held off arresting him. They had the stuff Stacey planted, but they had no body. And by they, I mean the MPPD. Pastorini and that other guy, Burns, were working the case with Dupuy and the DA. You guys never felt you had enough to get a jury to convict him. One day—it was about a month or so after Stacey’s disappearance—I said to myself, ‘Hey, what if this guy disappears, too? Everybody will think he took off because he’s guilty. It’s the perfect murder.’ I just had to make it look like he took off. I didn’t do anything right away, though. I thought it would be tricky because you guys—the police—were watching out for him. Or at least I thought you might be. I was planning the whole thing. I already had the pills and everything when he came into the bar. So I told him, ‘Look I can’t talk about this here, but I might know something.’ I told him I’d meet him at his house after I got off work. I warned him it would be late. After work I left my car parked on a street near the bar and skateboarded over there. I used to do a lot of longboarding. Always kept a rig and some gear in my trunk.”

  “So the opportunity presented itself and you acted on it?”

  “Exactly. And the amazing thing is everything went pretty much as I’d envisioned it. Some stuff I added along the way. Calling Bronsky, for instance, and pretending to be Ross. It was mean, but I didn’t like the guy. I don’t know why she ever hooked up with him. I’m sorry about the backyard, though. It was kind of fun to watch you guys dig it up.”

  That revelation hurt a little. He thought back to Marcus’s whole drone presentation. What a charade.

  “They found Ross’s car at LAX,” Madden said. “You drove it there?”

  “I did, with some strands of Stacey’s hair and traces of her blood in the trunk. I was concerned that someone might recognize the name if I went to SFO and tried to buy a one-way plane ticket to Hanoi through Tokyo. Someone might tip off the police. That said, there wasn’t anything preventing Ross from leaving the country. But I was just trying to be cautious.”

  “How’d you get the time off work?”

  “I was actually scheduled to be off for a few days. I worked Wednesday through Saturday. And when I called one of the other bartenders from Vietnam and asked him to take my shifts, I’d screwed up my foot longboarding and couldn’t stand. I came back the next week. I might have stayed a little longer but I was worried Stacey was running out of food.”

  Madden thought about Pastorini spending all those Thanksgivings and Christmas Eves staking out Ross’s brother’s house. Poor guy, he thought. What a waste.

  “I was lucky,” Marcus said. “But I was also smart.”

  He seemed energized by finally being able to tell someone about the great coup he’d pulled off. And it was great, Madden thought. It was spectacular.

  “Did Cathleen ever see Stacey again?” Madden asked. “After she moved to New York?”

  “Sure,” Ross said. “I couldn’t tell her the truth right away. But then a few years after Stacey’s disappearance, after my book came out, I told Cathleen I had a surprise for her. And that’s when I took her to see her. We drove up to Mt. Lassen. Stacey met us there. We’d often meet in National Parks. Yellowstone one year, Mt. Rushmore another. The Everglades in Florida. Once she was old enough Cathleen would travel alone to meet her.”

  “So everybody thought she lost both her parents when in fact she lost neither of them.”

  Madden was talking more to himself than to Marcus.

  “Well, she lost one today,” Marcus said. “And she may soon lose another.”

  Madden looked over at him. A sly smile had formed on Marcus’s lips. Madden didn’t like the look of it.

  “Let me give you the rest of the tour,” Marcus said. “Let’s keep going a little bit.”

  He motioned for Madden to follow the path, which curved around to the other side of the hill, a little farther. They walked maybe another twenty-five yards and came to an area that looked like the early phases of a construction site. There was a small backhoe sitting there, with its tail and scoop tucked in, scorpion-like. Someone had been tearing up the hill, then grading and leveling it.

  Marcus stopped near the machine and took in the vista in front of them. “This is my favorite spot,” he said.

  The view was arguably better than the one they had just left. All rolling hills, nature, golden California sun, and more picture-perfect vineyards in the distance. As tense as he was, Madden found himself suddenly at peace.

  “Ready to hear my proposition?” Marcus asked, breaking the silence.

  “Not really, but go ahead.”

  “How much is Shelby going to pay you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “For finding Stacey, how much was the bonus, a million, two million?”

  Madden hesitated a moment, then told him. “A million for Stacey, a million for Ross, and an extra million if I found both of them.”

  “I’ll match that,” Marcus said. “And I’ll even throw in another million for good measure.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “By my count that’s about three million more than what you’d get from Shelby. The fact is you never found Ross and you never will. You can prove exactly nothing.”

  “Once they learn that that was Stacey living in Manhattan, that she was actually alive all that time, they’re gonna figure it out.”

  “They can conjecture. But that’s very different from actual proof.”

  “They’ll prove it,” Madden said. “And they’d certainly be able to figure out that you killed me. I assume that’s what happens if I don’t accept your proposition.”

  “Oh, no,” Marcus said. “I’m not going to do that.” Then he pointed the gun at his own head. “I’m going to kill myself. And Cathleen will, too. We have a pact.”

  Madden looked at him, alarmed.

  “I’m sorry if you thought the backhoe was for you,” Marcus went on. “We’re carving out a spot for events. Company parties, wedding ceremonies, stuff like that. We’re going to put a lawn in. I was hoping to have it ready for the upcoming wedding season, but we’re a little behind.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Put the gun down.”

  “I’m not a killer, Hank. I’m a broker. I don’t have to tell you about the pain of sexual abuse. You know about it firsthand. And you have a daughter. If someone had done that to her, what would you have done? You’d have wanted to do exactly what I did. You gotta let this go, man. We can all go on living happily ever after. Or you can destroy more lives. The choice is yours, Hank. What’s it going to be? The pile of money behind door number one or the dead bodies and carnage behind door number two? I’ll give you five seconds to decide. Then I’m pulling the trigger.”

  Madden stood there paralyzed, his heart racing. Thoughts, memories and ideas darted through his mind, bashing into one another. Marcus started to count.

  “One … two …”

  “Wait,” Madden said. “Wait a minute. You have to let me think. I’m not the only one here. It’s not solely my decision.”

  He still had to clear the chaos and didn’t quite know what he was saying. He just blurted out the loudest thought in his head.

  “You’re gonna have to give me my phone,” he said. “I need to call someone.”

  “Who?” Marcus asked.

  “My guy in New York. My associ
ate. I have a deal with him. He’s the one that found Stacey. He gets half of whatever I get from Shelby. He knows everything. I need to speak to him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a guy. Just a guy who knew Candace.”

  “He the one from the hospital Cathleen told me about?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes. Now give me the fucking phone.”

  Marcus thought about it a moment, then reached into his pocket and handed Madden his phone. There wasn’t much of a signal—it was fluctuating between one dot and two—and Madden paced back and forth as he waited for the call to go through. Fremmer picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hey, Hank,” he said somberly. “I’ve been trying to reach you. You get my message? I’m drained, man. I wasn’t prepared for this. I thought she was out of the woods. The media’s been emailing, calling. I don’t have it in me to respond.”

  “Listen, Max,” Madden said. “And listen very carefully. I’m standing here on top of a hill near Sonoma with a guy pointing a gun at his head. He says he’s going to kill himself if I don’t take his offer and let this whole thing go.”

  The line went silent.

  “You messing with me?” Fremmer said. “If you’re messing with me, it’s not funny.”

  “I’m not messing with you, Max. I found out what happened to Ross, but I’m not sure I can prove to Shelby that he’s dead. I’m with the guy who killed him. And he’s going to kill himself if I don’t accept his deal and let him walk away.”

  “That’s an interesting negotiating tactic,” Fremmer said. “I haven’t heard that one before. He’s really got a gun?”

  “Pointed at his head.” Madden said. “Right now. Three feet away from me. Listen, Ross isn’t Braden.”