by Polly Iyer
“Yes, sir,” Cash said.
“I hope the hell we’re in time, Sam. If not, I’m going to find that bastard and kill him with my bare hands. And I will show no mercy.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
The Priest and the Confessor
“Why are you doing this?” Diana asked, finding her voice. “You know you can’t get away with it.”
“Says who? I’ve gotten this far. Alice is such a talented makeup artist, they won’t know who to look for. Man or woman. Young or old. I think we can stay one step ahead, don’t you, Alice?”
“A whole mile ahead, Harley.” Alice cocked her head into the backseat and looked at Macon as if he were a god. “He makes a damn good-looking woman, don’tcha think?”
“What’s in this for you, Alice,” Diana asked, “besides the rest of your life in prison?”
Alice snorted into a throaty laugh. “We ain’t gonna get caught. Harley’s a genius. He’ll get us outta here. Won’tcha, Harley?”
“Keep driving, Alice. Let’s not push our luck. They must know about the car by now. We’ll have to dump it and get another, but until then let’s not stay on the road any longer than necessary. Keep under the speed limit and pay attention.”
They drove another fifteen minutes. Diana didn’t recognize the area, not that she would. Her knowledge of New Orleans was limited to a few tourist sites, restaurants, and the inside of the theaters she played. This place looked like an industrial park, new buildings near the entrance, deserted warehouses at the end, where there was another entrance. Alice took a right onto the last street and drove behind the last building on the left, an outdated structure resembling an abandoned factory. She pulled into one of two parking spaces cut out of the back of the building, next to an old red Mustang.
Macon yanked Diana out and pushed her ahead to follow Alice up a side stairway. They entered a large loft-like room with polished wide-plank pine flooring, industrial track lighting and stainless steel appliances. Chrome and leather contemporary furnishings filled the center space. Diana saw a bathroom off to the side and a closed door she presumed was a bedroom. Not quite magazine quality, but from the abandoned looking exterior she’d never have guessed the trendy interior.
No one would ever find her. Not in this deserted place. This was someone’s love nest, and she’d bet only the owner and his lover knew about it. At least it was a much better place to die than the creepy bayou cabin.
Macon indicated a chair and she sat. Nothing she said or did now would make any difference. He’d beat her at her own game. Her only hope was to stay alive as long as possible. Lucier found her once. Maybe by some freak chance, he would find her again. Maybe. If she could distract Macon, get him into a conversation. Stretch out the hours of her life.
“What do you want with me, Harley?” Use his first name. Make him feel a connection. “This has gone way beyond proving whatever you wanted to prove. Are you afraid I know too much? That I’ve seen inside your soul? Is that why you have to kill me?”
Macon took a seat across from her and laughed—a tortured laugh, like somehow she had struck a nerve so deep he didn’t know it existed. He leaned toward her. “My soul? Do you really think I have a soul, Diana?”
Keep him talking. She willed her frantic heart calm. “Everyone has a soul, Harley. Don’t you want to set the record straight?”
He laughed again. “For who?”
“For me. I’d like to know, to understand.”
He showed anger for the first time. “That’s bullshit.” He got up and paced the room, mumbling under his breath. “Don’t lay any psycho-babble crap on me, acting like you care. I’ve dealt with the best of them. They all wanted to find out what twisted psychological perversion turned a brilliant teenager into a killer. They supposed answers from my childhood would explain my behavior. Maybe they would. But the simple truth is I enjoyed it. Having power over another life is like playing God. I learned from a good teacher. It was like taking an advanced class in murder, and I was always an A student.”
He was confirming what she’d already seen in flashes when she’d touched him. But she sensed something else, though he’d be loathe to agree. He wanted her to know, as if she were a priest and he the confessor. “I know what happened in South Carolina.”
“You know jackshit.”
Macon pulled off his wig, exposing his dark blond hair, wet with sweat, hugging his neck and framing his beautiful face. There remained a soft femininity, yet he was masculine, as if he were two people inside one body. Then, when he wiped his hand across his painted mouth, he destroyed the perfection, and Diana saw a frightening transformation that went deeper than makeup. Harley Macon was breaking down before her eyes in a clash of sexual identities. She felt strong sensations, an aura that surrounded him. With nothing to lose, she forged ahead.
“How did you feel last night, Harley? To be a woman. To have men look at you like your stepfather did? Like the men in prison did.”
Macon’s eyes narrowed. He stammered. “You…you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He paced back and forth, then went into the bathroom and scrubbed a wet towel over his mouth and eyes. Streaks of black mascara and stains of red lipstick converted the once lovely face into a macabre mask. Distracted, he came back into the room without looking in the mirror and pointed his finger at Diana. “How dare you stand in judgment as if you’re better than me. All that money, the houses and fame. You’re from the same dirt-poor trash I’m from. We’re no different, you and I.”
Harley’s face flushed anger red.
“Oh, yes we are,” she said. “We’re nothing alike. But you are right about one thing. We’re from the same place.” She braced herself. “Only I didn’t fuck my father.”
The attack never came. He stopped, depleted, as if all the air whooshed out of him.
“You see, Harley, I know all about your boyhood sex life.” At first, the facts didn’t fit, but as other images of Harley’s life appeared, as more of Jason’s information surfaced, she saw the horror.
Until this moment, Alice had kept silent, fixing a hateful stare on Diana. Now she perked up. “What’s she talking about, Harley?”
“Nothing,” Macon said, his eyes riveted on Diana. “She’s making up shit. Anything to turn you against me.”
“Tell her, Harley,” Diana persisted. “Tell her about how you and your stepfather got it on, about the payback to your mother. She turned you out of her bed for him, didn’t she? You wanted to teach her a lesson. Did you try to make him leave her for you, or did he have the best of both worlds? How close am I, Harley?”
“Shut up,” Macon screamed. “It’s not true, Alice. You know how I make love. She’s making up stuff.” He moved toward Diana, getting right up in her face but avoiding contact. “Tell her you’re lying.”
Diana took a deep breath. “I’m not lying, Alice. I knew everything about him the first time he touched me.”
Macon released a manic laugh. “Ha. You’re lying,” he said, and resumed pacing. He kept turning around, looking sideways at Diana, then looking away. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “You’re not that good.”
“That’s why he broke the neck of the first guy that made a move on him in prison, isn’t that right, Harley? Not because you didn’t want him to come on to you, but because you did.”
Macon slapped her off the chair and onto the hard floor, jarring her healing ribs, sending pain coursing through her already damaged body. But the contact flashed an image in her mind, an image he couldn’t keep out of his. She sat on the floor staring up at him.
Don’t stop now. You’ve got him reeling. Then she felt a pain spike up her back and wondered if maybe it wasn’t the other way around. If she weren’t the one reeling. But she had to keep going. “You see, Harley, I know more about you than you think.”
Alice reached out to touch him. “What’s she talking about, Harley?” He pushed her away.
Diana scooted backwards on the floor, putting m
ore distance between them. “The truth is hard to face, isn’t it?”
“What truth, Harley?” Alice persisted.
A long stride put him face to face with Alice. “Shut. Up. For once, just keep your mouth shut and let me think.”
To Diana’s delight, Alice wouldn’t stop. “No, I want to know what truth she’s talking about.”
Harley lunged with the swiftness of a cobra and swatted Alice to the floor. “You don’t listen.” He pulled back his arm to hit her again. She scrunched into herself, preparing for the onslaught, but he stopped and stared at her. Then he punched his balled-up fist into his other hand and circled the floor, stopping halfway, turning around, circled some more.
Alice lay stunned on the floor, watching. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “I just wanted you to tell me, that’s all. Like we shouldn’t have any secrets.”
His gaze rested on her. “Don’t badger me like that. Can’t you see, I’m not myself?”
“I don’t care what you done, Harley. Whatever it was, no big deal. You should’ve figured that out by now.” She held out her hand and he pulled her up. “At least you and your stepfather weren’t related.”
Diana watched the scene, wondering what fate had turned Alice the child into Alice the adult. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. One thing she was sure of: Macon was coming unglued by his own admission, and she’d ride the downhill slide to its conclusion.
She’d spent more than half her life acting, but this would be the performance of her career. She’d already tapped part of Jason’s information. Now she’d incorporate the rest into the stage technique she used to draw out her subjects.
In a soft, compassionate voice, she said, “What did he do, Harley? Did he tire of you? Did he play both you and your mother? Or maybe he found another young boy to replace you?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Is that why you killed him?”
When Macon spoke, he sounded whipped. “I ought to kill you right now.”
Instead of moving back, Diana inched toward him, slowly. No quick moves to rouse him out of his lull. “But you’re not going to do that, are you? You know why? Because you want me to know. We understand each other.”
“No, I don’t want you to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”
“You went to prison for a murder you didn’t commit, didn’t you?”
Macon turned with a quick cat-like motion that caused Diana to jerk away, afraid he might hit her again. “What? How did—” He caught himself then laughed. “I told everyone that, but they didn’t believe me.” He laughed again. “You’re about twenty-two years late, Miss Diana Racine. Twenty-two years late.”
He continued laughing. Diana needed to keep chiseling away the layers of lies he’d constructed to cover the truth. How far could she go before he self-destructed? Or before he killed her to shut her up?
“Your mother loved you until he came along, didn’t she? I mean really loved you. Just the two of you. Every day.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Every night.” Diana spoke as if they were alone, discussing their own private secret. Alice took a seat on the sofa. She listened but didn’t speak.
Macon gazed off into space. When he spoke, his voice was soft, almost inaudible. “She didn’t see me any more after he came. He mesmerized her, but when I touched him, I saw evil inside. I tried to warn her, but she didn’t listen. I should have seen that he was turning her against me, but I didn’t.” He looked at Diana. “You don’t see everything, do you?” he asked in an innocent, almost child-like way.
Diana didn’t know the right answer or if what she’d say would turn him into the Harley at the cabin, explosive and mean. She decided to tell the truth. “No, I don’t see everything. Not even a fraction of everything. If I did, I’d lose my sanity.” Then she remembered one of the great travesties against Harley Macon and braced for his wrath. But he was too far into another place. Too far from reality. The inference didn’t even click in his tortured mind. She couldn’t lose the momentum.
“But he wanted more than your mother, didn’t he?”
He knelt down next to Diana. “I thought if I let him, you know, she’d see him for what he was and protect me. He…he—” Macon reached for her arm. She didn’t move. “Do you understand?”
She didn’t but nodded anyway. “Yes, I understand.”
“I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t because by then I knew I’d made a mistake, and she’d hate me forever.” Macon slumped down on the floor next to her. “He liked children. Girls, boys, didn’t matter. Guys like him in prison were the lowest of the low, scum. He used my mother and me to present a façade of normalcy. Who’d think a nice guy like him could do what he did? He was Everyman. An ordinary mill worker, churchgoer, father to a boy without a father.” He snorted. “Monster.” Elbow on his knee, he propped his head in his hand.
The irony, Diana knew, was that the monster had created a monster. She looked at Alice and caught her steely-eyed glare. Diana didn’t think she’d ever seen such hate directed at her―at anyone. If Macon didn’t kill her, Alice would.
“He took the first girl,” Macon continued. “At least she was the first girl I knew about. I think there were more where he came from in Georgia. He—”
“Where in Georgia?” Diana interrupted, thinking maybe more unsolved disappearances could be resolved—if she lived long enough to tell.
“I don’t know. Dalton, I think. He worked in the carpet mills.”
“You were saying…the first girl.”
“At first I didn’t know what he was doing, but I figured it out fast. He picked me up from school and drove to a secluded spot. She was in the trunk. She was a kid, maybe eight.”
Diana’s stomach turned. He was telling her things she didn’t want to hear, but the longer he talked, the longer she’d live. He’d placed himself solidly in the past, exactly where Diana wanted to keep him for as long as possible, no matter the horrific story he was telling.
“She begged me to help, but I just watched, hypnotized as he violated her. He said we couldn’t let her go, because she’d tell the cops, and if I told, my mother would know what I’d done. Then he strangled her.”
Macon lifted his head, eyes on Diana, his face twisted in pain. “I threw up. Watching her die sickened me. But it excited me too. Like watching a scary movie. You put your hands over your eyes, but you open your fingers so you can see what’s happening.” He touched her arm. “That’s how it was.”
The contact shot a chill through Diana’s body as if ice had been injected in her veins. She saw what Harley the boy had seen. Felt what he had felt. If she’d just seen it back then. If only she’d found the body.
The body. Find out about the body. If Macon didn’t kill her, if Alice didn’t kill her, maybe she could offer closure for the family of the missing girl. Or families. But she knew he couldn’t let her leave. Not now.
“What did he do with the body?”
Macon shrugged. “I don’t know. I started running. I ran through the woods for miles, I think, before I got home. Then I got sick again. I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t.”
Macon was caught up in the past, reliving the story. Alice watched and listened. And stared those dagger beams that pierced right through Diana’s skin. She looked away, determined not to let Alice distract her. “What happened next?”
“He took me with him for the second girl. I didn’t know what he was going to do at first. This time I didn’t get sick, only excited. When the cops brought you in, one part of me wanted you to find her so he’d stop, but another part blocked you out so you couldn’t. I was too strong for you. You never came close.”
“Where is she? Tell me, Harley.”
“Why?” he asked. “You’re never leaving here alive. What good would it do you to know? You never found her. That’s the important part.”
Diana chastised herself. By interrupting him, she’d pulled him from the past into the present. Stupid. Put him back there. “What about the third girl? What happened
with her? How did he kill her?”
Macon thrust out his jaw. “He didn’t. I did. I didn’t mean to, but I did.” He slipped back in time to the moment that turned into a murderer. “She came on to me, kept telling me I was good looking. I didn’t know she was thirteen. She was small but looked eighteen, all made up and strutting her stuff. I just wanted to have sex, but she started screaming when I entered her. She was little and I’m…well, you know what I am. Even then.”
Diana heard Alice’s intake of breath, heard her rustle in her seat. As if the woman didn’t hate Diana enough, now she knew what Macon had done when he’d kidnapped her.
Unaware of what he’d implied or even that Alice was there, Macon continued his story. “She wouldn’t stop screaming. I had to shut her up. I pressed my thumb on her windpipe until she stopped making noise. I came while I watched her die. I’d never experienced anything like that explosive, purely sexual feeling.” He laughed, then said, “Fucked up, I know.”
Alice gasped louder, but she kept quiet. Both of them ignored her.
“He guessed, that devil who called himself my stepfather. I never confessed. The day he killed the last girl—the one you found, the one I went to jail for murdering—he’d borrowed my truck. He picked me up from school. She was walking home. I knew her. She was a couple of grades behind, but we sat together in the library a few times. I liked her, nothing sexual like the girls who would do anything I asked. This girl was nice. I didn’t want to see her hurt. He asked if she wanted a ride, and seeing me she thought she’d be safe.” Macon snorted. “I tried to warn her off, but she got in. He drove down the road where you found her and pulled her out. I begged him to let her go. She was screaming, and he hit her to keep her quiet. I tried pulling him off, but he fought me to the ground and hit me hard. I guess I lost consciousness for a minute. When I came to, he was in her.”