1990 - Mine v4

by Robert McCammon

  She didn't answer, and Newsome kept pushing the chair. Though she'd lost David's weight, she'd never felt so burdened down. Cameras whirred, driven by electric motors. "Mrs. Clayborne, look up!" to her left. On her right, the hot focus of a minicam in her face. "Get back, I said!" Newsome demanded. Laura looked at the floor. She had been instructed by both Newsome and her own lawyer not to answer any questions, but they flew about her like squawking birds nipping at her ears. "What about the baby box?" a reporter shouted over the din. "Did you know about the burned dolls?"

  The burned dolls? she thought. What was that about burned dolls? She looked up into Newsome's face. It was closed, like a piece of stone, and he kept guiding her onward through the human sea.

  "Did you know she cut an old man's throat before she took your baby?"

  "What're you feeling right now, Laura?"

  "Is it true she's a member of a satanic cult?"

  "Mrs. Clayborne, did you hear that she's insane?"

  "Back off!" Newsome growled, and then they'd reached the hospital's front doors and Doug's Mercedes was waiting beyond. Doug was striding toward her, his face drawn from lack of sleep, and her mother and father were in the car. More reporters were waiting outside, converging on her with a glee that was almost wolfish. Doug reached out to help her from the chair, but Laura ignored him. She got into the backseat with her mother, and Doug slid behind the wheel. He accelerated so quickly, a news team from the ABC station had to scatter to keep from being run down, and one of the men lost his toupee in the Mercedes' backblast.

  "They're at the house, too," Doug said, racing away from the hospital. "Bastards are crawling out of the woodwork."

  Laura saw that her mother wore a black dress and pearls. Was she in mourning? Laura wondered. Or dressed up for the cameras? She closed her eyes, but she saw David behind them and so she lifted the lids again. She felt as if she were bleeding internally, growing weaker and weaker. The engine drone lulled her, and sleep was a sweet refuge: her only refuge.

  "The FBI's bringing over some pictures in an hour or so," Doug told her. "They took the police sketch you helped them with and put it into a computer that matches photos from their files. Maybe you can identify the woman."

  "She might not be in their files," Miriam Beale said. "She might be a lunatic escaped from an asylum."

  "Hush!" Laura's father said. Good for him, Laura thought. Then he added, "Sugarplum, let's don't upset Laura anymore."

  "Don't upset her? Laura's half crazy with worry! How can it be helped?"

  Talking about me like I'm not even here, she thought. I'm invisible, gone bye-bye.

  "Don't bite my head off, hon."

  "Well, don't sit up there telling me what to do and what not to do! My God, this is a crisis!"

  Dark things stirred in Laura's head, like beasts pulling themselves free of swamp mud' "What about the burned dolls?" she asked, her voice as raw as a wound.

  No one answered.

  It's bad, Laura knew. Oh Jesus oh God oh it's bad very bad. "I want to know. Please."

  Still, no one would rise to the challenge. Pretending I don't know what I'm saying, she thought. "Doug?" she said. "Tell me about the burned dolls. If you don't, I'll find out from a reporter at the house."

  "It's nothing." Her mother spoke up. "They found a doll or two at the woman's apartment."

  "Oh, Christ!" Doug slammed a fist against the wheel, and the Mercedes briefly swerved from its lane. "They found a box of dolls in a closet! They were all torn up, some of them burned and others… crushed and stuff. There! You wanted to know! All right?"

  "So…" Her mind was starting to shut down again, guarding itself. "So… the police… think she might… hurt my baby?"

  "Our baby!" Doug corrected her fiercely. "David is our child! I've got a stake in this, too, don't I?"

  "The end," she said.

  "What?" He looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  "The end of Doug and Laura," she said, and she uttered not another word.

  Her mother clasped her hand with cold fingers. Laura pulled away.

  The reporters were at the house, waiting. The vans were out in full force, but the police were there, too, to keep order. Doug put his hand on the horn and bellowed his way into the garage; the garage door slithered down and they were home.

  As Miriam took Laura back to the bedroom to get her settled, Doug checked the answering machine. The voices he'd expected were there: NBC, CBS, ABC, People magazine, Newsweek, and other magazines and newspapers. All of them were hooked to the tape recorder left by the police to monitor a possible ransom call. But there was one voice Doug hadn't expected. Two quick words: "Call me." Cheryl's voice had gone into the tape recorder, too.

  He looked up, and saw Laura's father staring at him.

  Laura stood in the nursery. Miriam said, "Come on, let's get you to bed. Come on now."

  The nursery was a haunted place. Laura heard the ghost-sounds of a baby, and she touched the brightly colored mobile over the crib and sent it gently twirling. She was crying again, the tears stinging on her chapped cheeks. She heard David crying, too, his voice waxing and falling in the little room. Stuffed animals grinned from the crib. Laura picked up a teddy bear and held it against herself, and she sobbed quietly onto its brown fur.

  "Laura!" her mother said right behind her. "Come to bed this minute!"

  That voice, that voice. Do what I say when I say it. Jump, Laura! Jump! Be successful, Laura! Marry someone with money and social standing! Stop wearing those awful tie-dyed blouses and bluejeans! Fix your hair like a lady! Grow up. Laura! For God's sake, grow up!

  She knew she was stretched to her limit. One more small stretch and she would snap. David was with an insane woman named Ginger Coles, who'd slashed an old man's throat on Saturday morning and killed an FBI agent on Saturday evening. Between those two events, Laura had given her baby to murderous hands. She remembered the red crust under a fingernail. Blood, of course. The old man's blood. That thought alone was enough to rip her off her hinges and send her shambling to a madhouse. Hang on! she thought. Dear God, hang on!

  "Did you hear me?" Miriam prodded.

  Laura's crying stopped. She wiped her tears on the teddy bear, and she turned to face her mother. "This is… my house," she said. "My house. You're a guest here. In my house, I'll do what I please when I please."

  "This isn't the time to act fool —"

  "LISTEN TO ME!" she screamed, and Miriam was knocked backward by the power of her daughter's voice as surely as if she'd been punched. "Give me some room to breathe! I can't breathe with you on my neck!"

  The older woman, a scrapper, regained her cool composure. "You're out of control," she said. "I understand that." Doug and Franklin were coming along the corridor. "I think you need a sedative."

  "I NEED MY BABY! THAT'S WHAT I NEED!"

  "She's losing her mind," Miriam said matter-of-factly to her husband.

  "Get out! Get out!" Laura shoved her mother, who gasped with horror at the touch, and then Laura slammed the nursery door in their three stunned faces and turned the latch.

  "Want me to call the doctor?" she heard Doug ask as she leaned against the door.

  "I think you'd better." Franklin speaking.

  "No, let her alone. She wants to be alone, we'll let her be alone. Good God, I always knew she had an unstable temper! Yes, we'll let her be alone!" Her voice was raised for her daughter's benefit. "Franklin, call the Hyatt and get us a room! We won't stay here and breathe down her neck!"

  She almost unlocked the door. Almost. But no, it was quiet in here. It was calm. Let them go to the Hyatt, and let them sulk. She needed space, even if it had to be within these four haunted walls.

  Laura sat on the floor with the teddy bear, dim light drifting through the window blinds. She had given David to a murderess. She had put her child into bloodstained hands. She closed her eyes and shrieked inside, where no one but herself could hear.

  An hour or so later, there was a tenta
tive knock at the door.

  "Laura?" It was Doug. "The FBI's here with the pictures."

  She got up, her legs in need of blood, and unlocked the nursery. The teddy bear remained clamped under her arm as she went out. In the den, she found a middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit, his hair sandy brown and cut to a stubble on the sides. He had warm brown eyes and a good smile, and Laura saw him glance quickly at the teddy bear and then pretend he hadn't seen it. Her father had remained at the house, but her mother had retreated to the Hyatt; the battle of wills had begun.

  The FBI agent's name was Neil Kastle, "with a K," he told her as she sat down in a chair. He had some photographs, both color and black and white, he wanted her to look at. He opened a manila envelope with large fingers not used to small tasks, and he spread a half-dozen pictures out on the coffee table next to a book on Matisse. They were all pictures of women, some of them face-on — mug shots — and others at an angle. There was one picture of a big, heavyset woman aiming a rifle at a bank clerk. Another showed a husky woman glancing back over her shoulder as she was getting into a black Camaro; light glinted off a pistol in her hand.

  "These are women from our Most Wanted list," Kastle told her. "Six of them who match Ginger Coles in size, age, and build. We put the police sketch in our computer and assigned the variables, and that's what we came up with."

  One of the women, tall and blond-haired, wore bell bottoms, an American-flag belt, and a green paisley blouse. She was grinning broadly, and she held a hand grenade. "Some of them are old," Laura said.

  "Right. They go back… oh… twenty years or so."

  "You've been looking for some of these women for twenty years?" Franklin asked, peering over Laura's shoulder.

  "One of them, yes. One's from the late seventies, one's from 1983, and the other three are from 1985 to the present."

  "What crimes did they do?" Franklin persisted.

  "An assortment," Kastle said. "Look at those good and hard, Mrs. Clayborne."

  "They look alike to me. All of them: same size, same everything."

  "Their names and statistics are on the back."

  Laura turned over the picture of the bank robber. Margie Cummings, AKA Margie Grimes AKA Linda Kay Souther AKA Gwen Becker. Height 5 feet lO'A, hair brown, eyes blue-green, birthplace Orren, Kentucky. She looked at the back of the black Camaro picture: Sandra June McHenry, AKA Susan Foster, AKA June Foster. Height 5 feet 9, hair brown, eyes gray, birthplace Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

  "Why do you think it might be one of these women?" Franklin asked. "Couldn't it just be… like… a crazy woman or somebody you don't even know about?"

  "The city police are putting their own list of mug shots together. That'll include local fugitives. The reason we decided to go back into our Most Wanted file was because of the shotgun."

  "What about it?"

  "Ginger Coles knew we'd find her apartment. She set the trap to take out the first man through the door. That means she has a certain… shall we say… mindset. An aptitude for such things. She scrubbed her apartment down pretty well, too. All the doorknobs and drawer grips were wiped clean. Even her records were wiped. We did get some partial prints off a rifle we found in a closet, and a good thumbprint off the shower head."

  "So does that print match any of these women?" Doug asked.

  "I can't say," Kastle answered. "They haven't let me know yet."

  Laura turned over another photo. Debra Guesser, AKA Debbie Smith, AKA Debra Stark. Height 6 feet, hair reddish-brown, eyes blue. Birthplace New Orleans, Louisiana. She looked closely at that face: it was similar to the face of Ginger Coles, but there was a small scar on her upper lip that put a sneer in her smile. "This one… maybe," she said. "I don't remember the scar."

  "That's okay. Look hard and take your time." He didn't tell her that he was testing her. Three of the women, including Debra Guesser, had been convicted and were now in federal prisons. A fourth, Margie Cummings, had died in 1987.

  Laura turned over the picture of the bellbottomed girl. Mary Terrell, AKA Mary Terror. Height 6 feet, hair brown, eyes gray-blue, birthplace Richmond, Virginia. "This says she has brown hair, but her hair's blond in the picture."

  "Dyed blond," Kastle said. "The statistics are based on family records, so they might appear a little different in the photos."

  Laura stared at Mary Terrell's face. The woman — fresh-faced and innocent, in a way — wore a relaxed, toothy grin, and the grenade dangled from a finger. "This is the oldest one?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Ginger Coles is… harder looking. This woman's close, too, but… I don't know."

  "Put about twenty years of rough living on that woman's face," Kastle suggested.

  "I don't know. I can't see it."

  "How can a woman hide from the FBI for twenty years?" Franklin took the photo and Laura went on to the next. "It seems impossible!"

  "It's a mighty big country. Plus there's Canada and Mexico to consider. People change their hair and clothes, they create new identities, and they learn how to walk and talk differently. And you'd be amazed at what some of the fugitives get away with: we found one who'd been a park ranger at Yellowstone for about seven years. Another was the veep of a bank in Missouri. I know of a third who became a fishing boat captain in the Keys, and we got hold of him when he ran for mayor of Key West. See, people don't really look at other people." He sat down in a chair opposite Laura. "Folks are trusting. If somebody tells you something, you're likely to believe it. In every city there's somebody who'll take money, no questions asked, to forge you a new driver's license, birth certificate, anything you want. So you get yourself a job where they don't care to ask too many questions, and you burrow underground like a smart little mole." He folded his hands together as Laura started through the photos again. "These Most Wanted fugitives grow eyes in the backs of their heads. They learn to smell the wind and listen to the railroad tracks. They probably don't sleep too well at night, but they keep their smarts sharp. See, most people — law officers included — have a big failing: they forget. The FBI never forgets. We've got computers to keep our memories up-to-date."

  "Who's this in the background?" Doug asked, looking at the photo of Mary Terrell.

  Kastle took it, and Laura looked, too. Mary Terrell was standing on dewy green grass, her feet in clunky sandals. A blue sky, somewhat faded, was overhead and the camera operator's slim shadow lay on the grass. But in the background atop a small green rise stood a blurred figure, one arm cocked to throw a yellow Frisbee.

  "I don't know. Looks like the picture was taken in a —"

  Laura took the photo from Kastle's hand. She had been looking at the woman's face, and she'd not noticed this before. Still, it was blurry and hard to make out. "I need a magnifying glass."

  Doug got up. Kastle leaned forward, squinting. "What're you looking at?"

  "There. The Frisbee. See it?"

  "Yeah. What about it?"

  "Right there. You can see the top of the Frisbee, the way it's angled. See?" Her heart was pounding. Doug brought her a magnifying glass, and she held it over the yellow Frisbee. She positioned the glass out to its highest magnification from the picture, just about to lose its focus altogether. "There," she said. "There it is. Look."

  Kastle did. "I see it," he said.

  Two black dots of eyes and a semicircle of a mouth had been painted on the Frisbee's lid. It was a Smiley Face, about to be spun to an unknown destination.

  Laura held the magnifying glass over Mary Terrell's face, studied it carefully.

  She knew her enemy.

  Time had changed this woman, yes. It had made her heavier and broken the smoothness of her skin; it had razored her prettiness down to the raw mean. But the real resemblance was in the eyes, those gray-blue soul mirrors. You had to have a magnifying glass, and even then you had to look hard and close. The eyes had a dead, hot hatred in them. They didn't go with the blond hippie locks or the Crest-white smile. The eyes were the same ones that h
ad looked down upon her as Laura had given up her baby to bloodstained hands. Yes. Yes. They were the same, but older. Yes. The same.

  "It's her," Laura said.

  At once Kastle was kneeling beside her, looking at the photo from Laura's perspective. "Are you sure?"

  "I…" No doubts. Those eyes. Big hands. The Smiley Face in the background. No doubts. "It's Ginger Coles," she said.

  "You're identifying Mary Terrell as the woman who took your infant?"

  "Yes." She nodded. "Yes. It's her. This is the woman." She felt a double shattering within her: relief and horror.

  "May I use your telephone?" Kastle took the photograph and went into the kitchen. In another moment, Laura heard him say, "We've got a positive ID. Hold on to your hat."

  When Kastle returned, Laura was sitting gray-faced, her arms huddled around herself and Franklin stroking her back. Doug stood at a window across the room, like an outcast. "All right." Kastle sat down again, and put the photo on the coffee table. "We're getting a file together on Mary Terrell. All available pictures, prints, family whereabouts, relatives, everything. But I guess there are things you ought to know that I can tell you right now."

  "Just find my baby. Please. That's all I want."

  "I understand that. I have to tell you, though, that Mary Terrell — Mary Terror — probably killed a ten-year-old boy in the woods around Mableton just recently. She took his rifle, and we matched the serial numbers with the seller. So that makes three people she's killed that we know about, not counting the others."

  "The others? What others?"

  "As I recall, six or seven police officers, a university professor and his wife, and a documentary filmmaker. All those murders took place in the late sixties and early seventies. Mary Terrell was a member of the Storm Front. Do you know what that was?"

  Laura had heard of it before, yes. A militant terrorist group like the Symbionese Liberation Army. Mark Treggs had talked about it in Burn This Book.

  "I was in the Miami bureau when it was going on, but I kept up with it," Kastle continued. "Mary Terrell was a political killer. She believed that she was an executioner for the masses. The whole bunch of them did. You know how that used to be: a group of hippies stoned all the time and listening to weird music, and sooner or later they started thinking about how much fun it might be to kill somebody."