Body of Lies

by Deirdre Savoy

  Zach and Alex reached the front door just as Bates began to rap on the door. “Ms. Thorpe,” he called. “You’ve got visitors.”

  The door slid open a way with the force of Bates’s knock. “Ms. Thorpe,” he called again. “You in here?” Bates pushed the door open farther. “Ms. Thorpe?”

  Bates glanced back at him. “Folks around here don’t have much use for locks, but they don’t leave their doors open.” Bates said that almost to himself, as if it were an excuse for what he was about to do. He eased inside the house, looking around. The expression in his eyes showed more curiosity about this woman who lived on the outskirts of town and had no use for the people in it, than concern for her welfare. For all they knew, the woman was out back and couldn’t hear them. Bates turned into a room on the right. “Well, I’ll be.”

  There was more wonderment than alarm in Bates’s voice. Zach pulled Alex behind him. “Stay close to me,” he said, though he doubted such a warning was necessary. He eased in behind Bates, who stood at the center of the room, craning his neck around.

  The only way Zach could describe what he found was a shrine. Photo after photo, all elaborately framed, hung from the walls, sat on every surface in the room. There must have been hundreds of them. Each one featured the same pair of children, a boy and a girl, depicting their passage from infancy to eight or nine. Thorpe and his sister, no doubt. Zach’s first thought was, who could have taken so many pictures? His second thought was to wonder why anyone would keep so many of them preserved in this way.

  He gazed at Alex for her take on this. She was staring at one picture in particular. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  She turned to look at him, but before she could say a word a crash sounded at the back of the property. Zach looked at Bates, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to find out the source of the noise. “Stay put,” Zach said to Alex. He went to the back of the house and looked outside the kitchen window to the building out back. The door was open when it hadn’t been when they drove out. He eased his weapon from its holster and let himself out the back door.

  How could she not have seen it before? Now that the answer was crystal clear in her mind she wondered why it hadn’t come to her before. She remembered the conversation with Thorpe’s “sister.” She’d told her to look elsewhere for who killed the girls, to someone who hated him. That hadn’t been an attempt to clear Walter’s name, but a clue. She’d known it the moment she saw a picture of that girl standing behind her brother, a rock in her hand, poised to throw it at the back of her brother’s head. Alex wondered what had stopped her—perhaps the act of someone catching it on film. It was the kind of thing a little girl might explain away saying she hadn’t really intended to do it, but there was a blackness in that child’s eyes that couldn’t be explained that easily.

  And there was something else. If Ginnie Thorpe were older, that difference must be able to be measured in minutes. These children were the same age. Ginnie had said it herself. My mother died when we were ten years old. They were twins who shared every feature. Identical. Which meant Ginnie Thorpe couldn’t be a woman at all.

  She was so engrossed in the pictures that when she heard a sound behind her, she jumped. She caught a glimpse of Sheriff Bates sliding to the floor before a pair of hands closed around her, one around her waist, trapping her arms against her body, the other hand clamped painfully around her mouth. She could feel his face next to hers, his breath, smelling of whiskey, fanning her skin. “Hello, Alex,” he whispered against her ear.

  She knew that voice. It wasn’t the breathy voice of Ginnie Thorpe but one identical to Walter’s. Panic rose in her, making her heartbeat treble and her stomach cramp into a tight knot. If he was here, where was Zach? She hadn’t heard a gunshot or any sounds of struggle to indicate he’d met up with Zach at all, but she feared for him anyway. She struggled against his hold, but the fingers at her waist dug into the flesh at her side.

  “Keep still,” he warned. “I don’t have much time. I see you figured it out. Finally. I thought you were smarter than that, Doctor.”

  She managed to jab her elbow into his solar plexus, but not with enough force to do much damage.

  His hold on her tightened painfully. “Quiet, Doctor. I have a little secret to share with you. You know all those naughty rapes my brother was convicted of? That was me, too. I just thought about what the little bastard would do if he ever got up the nerve to stick his dick into a woman. The semen in the last victim was a nice touch, don’t you think? Nobody knew about me so they went after him.”

  “Why?” She managed to get that one word out.

  “He was going to tell you everything. Even when he got out of prison he called you. He just couldn’t get up the nerve to talk to you. I had to shut him up. But none of that matters anymore. See you around, Doctor.”

  He pushed her forward toward the wall with such force that she cracked her head on one of the pictures. She fell to the floor, dazed, landing on her purse. She grabbed it, searching inside for the .22. She found it, slid onto her stomach, and turned to aim, but Thorpe was already gone.

  Outside, a car engine roared to life. Thorpe planned on getting away. “Zach,” she screamed. She scrambled to her feet. If she made it to the doorway, she’d at least be able to tell in the direction he’d left. He pulled out the opposite way they’d come, traveling toward a grove of bare trees in the distance.

  “Alex.”

  She jumped before she realized the soft voice calling to her belonged to Zach. She turned and buried her face against his chest. She couldn’t seem to stop trembling. If he’d wanted her dead she would have been gone by now. Or he would have taken her with him if he could.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Zach said against her ear. He eased the gun from her fingers and tucked it in his waistband.

  She lifted her head. “We should go after him.”

  Zach shook his head. “Look at the tires.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the police car. Both tires on the passenger side had been slashed.

  When she turned back, Zach tilted her head up with a hand under her chin. “What happened there?”

  She touched her fingertips to the spot at her temple. “He pushed me and I cracked my head on one of the pictures. What about the sheriff?”

  Keeping an arm around her waist he led her back into the room. Bates was just coming to. He lifted himself into a sitting position and shook his head, then groaned. “What the hell happened?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Zach said. “He was in here. Weren’t you watching her?”

  Alex could feel the anger radiating off Zach. If she guessed correctly, he was more angry with himself for leaving her alone than with anything the sheriff had done. She tightened her grasp on him. The last thing they needed was for these two men to go at each other.

  “How’s your head?” she asked.

  Bates touched his head to the back of his neck and his fingertips came back bloody. He shook his head again and rose to his feet with Zach’s help. “I better get my people out here, plus somebody to take a look at that. How are you doing, young lady?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Bates nodded. He used the radio at his belt to call into his office.

  “In the meantime,” Zach said, “you should see what’s out back.”

  The smaller building was an art studio. One side was dedicated to the sort of landscapes that sold well to casual art buyers, which was probably how Thorpe’s twin supported himself. It was the type of occupation that afforded great mobility and didn’t tie him down to one place of business.

  But along one wall was another type of painting, comprising deep purples, blacks, and stark crimsons, depictions of death and dismemberment so graphically painted bile rose in her throat. There was one painting left on an easel, the acrylic used so fresh that its scent filled the air. In it, a young woman with long dark hair rested underground with her arms crossed over her chest. Aboveground was a headstone with
the words REST IN PEACE spelled out. Beside the grave was the figure of a blond man whose grotesque features mocked the handsomeness the Thorpe twins had shared.

  This is how he saw himself, as some sort of monster. Whoever this girl was, he regretted killing her in his own fashion. It hadn’t stopped him though. She wondered if he’d felt the same thing when he’d killed his brother. The paintings might tell her that, but she wouldn’t get a chance to look for that now. In the distance, the sound of sirens rose. She only hoped someone on Bates’s force was a little quicker on the uptake than he appeared to be.

  Once Bates’s men arrived, Zach took Alex aside. “How are you doing, really?”

  “I’m fine.” She touched her fingers to the cut at her temple. “Believe me, I’ve gotten worse scrapes.”

  That wasn’t what he meant, and she had to know that. He remembered how fiercely she’d trembled in his arms. Considering how little emotion she showed on a regular basis, her fear had to be extraordinary. “What did he want?”

  “Primarily, I think he wanted to gloat about how clever he was. He had everybody fooled. He created this life as a woman, which left him free to do whatever he wanted as a man. He also told me that Walter hadn’t committed those rapes, he had.”

  Although their fingerprints would be different, their DNA would be the same. He’d seen criminals get off before after they gleefully reported they had a twin, thereby introducing reasonable doubt without having to give another piece of evidence. In this case, it worked in reverse, since everyone assumed Thorpe had a sister. There was no one to blame but him. Damn.

  He wondered how that made Alex feel, knowing that she had been right all along. Thorpe had been innocent, at least the Thorpe they’d convicted had been. But that didn’t seem to be on her mind.

  “I want to go back to the house,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Between the studio and the room inside, it seems to be a testament to the twins’ lives. The answers have to be inside.”

  He would have asked her what answers she sought, but he thought he knew. Who were these people, really? How had Walter’s twin assumed a female identity? He couldn’t conceive that any hospital would have falsified birth records that needed to be sent on to the state, even in a backwater town like this. But he had to admit, whatever had been done had been accomplished a long time ago for the ruse to work, long before computerization had taken over the record keeping of the world.

  He led her back to the house with an arm around her waist. He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to her. He didn’t want to disturb any physical evidence, but he wanted to see what she’d find.

  Once inside, she circled the room, not focusing on the pictures but seeming to look for something else. She settled on a photo album that rested on a plastic book holder. The cover had a quilted green and yellow pattern covered in plastic. There was nothing on the first page, but the first spread showed two old-style sepia birth certificates that like negatives had white writing. One was for Homer Williams, the other for Virgil. The birthday didn’t match Thorpe’s. This would make him a year younger than they believed. The birthplace listed was Rockford, New York.

  Good God. When he’d looked into that town, he’d been trying to find a Thorpe family that had lived there. No wonder he’d come back empty. He’d been looking for the wrong name.

  Alex turned the page and found copies of two more birth certificates, the ones for Walter and Virginia Thorpe. These were more modern certificates garnered from a town in Louisiana. The birthday they had for Thorpe was on there. Virginia was listed as a year older. He’d bet anything the original owners of the birth certificates had died a long time ago and Thorpe’s mother had used their identities to fashion new ones for her children.

  He’d already called Craig to let him know what was going on. He and some of the others were on their way up. Now that she’d found what they needed, he wanted to get her out of there, first to have her head looked at and then somewhere quiet where he could really assess the toll seeing one of the Williams brothers had taken on her.

  Even though it was the middle of the day, all she wanted was a shower and a bed, in that order. Zach had brought her to the one hotel the town boasted, which was little more than a bed-and-breakfast. She didn’t care. Without a word to him, she slipped into the bathroom, shed her clothes, and stepped into the shower. The first blast of water was icy cold, but she didn’t care about that either. She adjusted the temperature and, leaning her forehead against the cool tile, waited for the water to warm.

  Her head throbbed, not from the bruise, which didn’t require anything more than a Band-Aid. A migraine was building behind her eyes, in her sinuses, and it was going to be a doozy.

  She heard the bathroom door open and a second later Zach stepped into the shower behind her. She hadn’t anticipated that he would follow her. She hadn’t thought of anything other than washing that man’s touch from her body. Intellectually, she knew that couldn’t really be accomplished, but emotionally she needed the illusion.

  Zach pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her waist. He kissed her temple, her cheek, the side of her throat. “Are you okay, baby?”

  She turned in his arms, buried her face against his neck, and shook her head. She wouldn’t be okay until Williams, whichever one he was, was caught. Only then could she be sure he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. “He blames me,” she whispered against his neck. “He blames me for getting Walter to talk. He did call me after he got out of prison. His brother found out about it and killed him. I think that was the catalyst for everything else he’s done. As much as he hated Walter, he probably loved him as well.”

  “Shh.” Zach stroked her hair from her face. “You can tell me all this later.” He tilted her face up to his. “I’m sorry I left you alone. You’re not alone. I won’t let that happen again.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t blame him. He’d only done what Bates should have. Whatever sound they’d heard was probably engineered by Williams to draw at least one of the men from the house, leaving her less protected. Bates had gotten more than what he deserved for his inaction—a slight concussion that required an overnight in the hospital.

  But she knew Zach meant more than that by his words. He was making her a promise that had little to do with physical togetherness. He’d always told her that he was there for her, and for a long time he was. He wanted to be there again. He wanted more from her than whatever this thing was between them. So did she. She’d never really stopped loving him; that emotion had just gotten tangled in with so many others. Losing him once nearly killed her. The only question remaining was, could she chance that?

  Since she didn’t have an answer, she leaned up and pressed her mouth to his. He crushed her to him as his tongue slid into her mouth, probing, tasting. But she whimpered, not from the pleasure she felt but the gathering pain in her forehead.

  He pulled away and looked down at her, his hand cradling the side of her face. “What’s the matter, baby?”

  “Migraine. A big one.”

  He pulled her to him and turned off the water. He used one of the towels to blot her hair, and wrapped her in another. He slung a third around his waist and lifted her from the shower.

  At least the bed was soft and clean smelling when Zach laid her on it. She closed her eyes, but she could tell what he was doing as he moved around the room. He drew the curtains and shut off every source of light. Then he came back to her, settled them both under the covers, and pulled her to him.

  “Is that better?” he asked.

  She nodded and pain sliced through her.

  “Relax,” he whispered against her ear. He massaged the juncture between her right thumb and index finger, a pressure point that was supposed to alleviate headaches.

  She melted against him as he spoke to her in a soothing, monotone voice. His voice was so low that she had no idea what he was talking about. It didn’t matter. She felt herself growing drowsy and th
e pain of the migraine receding. She snuggled against him and let sleep overtake her. She’d worry about the rest of it later.

  Even after Alex had fallen asleep, Zach continued to hold her. He pressed his lips to her temple. He hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on it before now, but he could have lost her today. If Williams had been more interested in killing than proving his own worth, she might be gone now. His whole body trembled with the repercussions of that thought. He couldn’t lose her again, not in that way, not in any way. He’d tried to tell her that today. Heaven only knew if she’d gotten that message, but he’d tell her in every way he could think of until it sank in.

  A knock sounded at the door. He quickly disentangled himself from her, hoping to get to the door before whoever was on the other side woke her. He checked the peephole to see Smitty on the other side. The boys from New York must have driven like madmen to get here so soon.

  “Just a minute,” he told Smitty, went back to the bathroom, and pulled on his jeans. When he opened the door, Smitty gave him a once-over that left no doubt what he thought Zach had been up to.

  To Smitty’s unasked question, he said, “She’s sleeping. What’s going on?”

  “For one thing, we found the girl depicted in the painting in a shallow grave a few feet back on the property. She was still warm.”

  Damn. If he and Alex had come up last night, they probably would have walked in on her murder. But the smile on Smitty’s face told Zach he wasn’t finished. “What else?”

  “Way in the back in the corner in the dark of that shed there’s an old freezer. We think we know what happened to Mama.”

  Twenty-three

  It was nearly midnight when Alex started to stir. In the intervening hours, he’d gotten Smitty to buy them some clothes and other toiletries since he didn’t plan to take Alex back to the city until she was better. Bates’s deputies were guarding the entrances to this place, and since Williams would have to go through him to get to Alex, he wasn’t worried.