“I do remember this,” said Mia. “He would let them loose in the house and chase them around with weird things, right? Like he killed that one girl with the pickle jar?”
“Yeah,” said Lorelei. “First he bashed her over the head with it, and then the jar broke, and then he used the shards of the jar to torture her, carving up her breasts and her thighs before he finally slit her throat.”
Mia shuddered. “Augh. That’s just awful.”
“More?” said Lorelei. “I got five more victims to go through if you want more details.”
Mia wrinkled up her nose. “The pickle jar’s enough, thanks.”
Lorelei chuckled darkly. She took a big gulp of her wine.
* * *
“You’re up early,” Simon said in a dull voice. He was standing outside his bedroom door in his pajamas. He stretched, yawning. When he did, the bottom pajama shirt rode up a little over his stomach. There was hair on his stomach.
The sight of it was jarring to Lorelei. The signs of Simon maturing were always a little jarring. Whenever she looked at him, she kept expecting to see a little boy. But he was growing into a man right before her eyes. Typically, the thought made her feel proud. But today, it was a little unsettling, she had to admit. She couldn’t help but wonder which of them was stronger, if it came down to a struggle.
She pushed the thought aside. There was no point in having thoughts like that.
It been an effort to get up early that morning, but she’d done it. She was going to face this head on. “Just thought you might like a hot breakfast cooked by someone besides you.”
Simon smiled. “It looks good.”
She smiled back. She went back to the eggs. “I meant when I said that we really need to talk.”
Simon sat down at the table. He gave her a funny look. “About what?”
“Tell me everything about Brittany Lewis. And about those girls that went missing. Did you know those girls?”
“What are you talking about?” But a look of alarm seemed to have crossed his face.
She was imagining things. She scraped the egg onto her plate. She sat down in front of him. “Did you know them?”
Simon shrugged. “Not really.”
“Not really? Or not at all?”
Simon shrugged again. “Maybe I saw them before.”
“Where? How did you see those girls? They’re not in your chess club. They’re two years older than you. What were you doing when you saw them?”
Simon didn’t say anything.
She reached across the table to set her hand on his arm. “You understand I’m your mother, and that I’m going to be on your side, no matter what. But if you don’t tell me the complete truth, then I won’t be able to help you.”
“Help me how?” said Simon. “What’s going on? Is there more stuff happening with the police?”
“Are you worried about that?”
“Kind of. You said you were going to take care of it. I guess you didn’t take care of it?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Jeremy thinks he knows something. You seem to be hiding things from me. I need to know the truth.”
“Well, there’s nothing to tell, mom. I mean, you know everything there is to know. I’m not hiding anything.”
She sat back in her chair, feeling disappointed. So, he was intent on lying to her. That wasn’t a good sign.
* * *
After he went to school, Lorelei went into his bedroom and hunted around for the camera again. He hadn’t left it out this time, like he had before. He’d put it away, high on a shelf over his bed. She had to climb up on the bed to get to it.
When she had it, she almost didn’t want to look again. She remembered the photos, and she didn’t know if she wanted to see them again.
But she had to look, because she had to evaluate them. Once, long ago, she’d had to work up a profile on a killer who had an elaborate lair. Police had found one of his victims—still alive—and they had found the place where he’d kept her, along with several other bodies. It was a run-down apartment building. He’d kept the girls in different ramshackle rooms, chained up with a length of chain long enough to use the bathroom or move around, but not long enough to get free. The police had been hunting down a kidnapped victim, who they had reason to believe might still be alive, and so they’d gone in hot and heavy, with sirens shrieking and bullhorns blaring, and it had all paid off in the sense that they’d recovered the girl alive.
But they’d spooked the killer, and he’d gotten away. They had no idea who he was. With the discovery of the other bodies, it became a serial killer case, and thus she was brought in to do the profile.
The killer had taken photos of his victims, and they were disturbingly similar to the kinds of pictures Simon had taken. The killer had one room in his lair which was devoted entirely to the photographs. He’d wallpapered the room with pictures. They all followed a time line. At first, he took candids of the girl in her life. He would hide and follow her around, snapping photos of her at work, at school, or out on the town. But after he captured her, he kept taking photographs, and some of these photographs were simply pieces of the girl. He’d photograph just her torso from the neck down or just her feet from the ankles.
Body parts. Like Simon’s photos.
She had learned in her training that this was a sign of dehumanization. To the killer, a woman became just a jumble of pieces. The pieces were interesting to look at, primarily because he saw them as his possessions. He had captured the girls, and he now owned all of these various parts. He liked looking at them, and he like documenting his possession. The killer kept the girls for a long time. Over time, the pictures of the girls’ faces decreased until the pictures were now just of body parts. Gaunt body parts, because the girls were now starving. He barely fed his captives.
At some point, he killed them.
Lorelei believed that it was because the body parts had ceased to be as aesthetically pleasing at that point. The starving, dirty girls bore little resemblance to the girls they had been in the first photos, alive and beautiful and free. Lorelei figured that the killer saw it all as a sort of balancing act. The girls were the prettiest before he took them, but they weren’t his at that point. So, he had to kidnap them and take them to his lair. He had to own them. Once he did, it was all perfect for a while. But then the strain of keeping them alive began to weigh against the pleasure of having them. When they finally weren’t even nice to look at, he disposed of them.
The way they found the bodies bore this out as well. There was no elaborate ritual to killing them. He bashed them over the head with a baseball bat and threw their bodies in a room in the basement. From the looks of it, he never went back there until he had to drop off another body.
For that killer, the actual act of murder wasn’t the part thing that he fetishized. Murder, instead, was an unpleasant necessity to keep his other obsession going. He lived for the capture, for the possession. Lorelei had even written in her report that he probably lied to himself about what he did. Every time he set his sights on a new girl, he told himself that this time would be different. This time, he thought, it would all work out and he wouldn’t have to kill her.
Lorelei had been able to ascertain almost all of that information from the photos he’d taken and from photographs of the victims and the lair. If she could look at the pictures that Simon had taken, and she could distance herself from the subject matter, she could determine the same sorts of things about her son.
So, taking a deep breath, she looked at the pictures on the camera.
But scrolling through them again didn’t lend any new insights. They were good photographs. The composition was arresting, and they drew the eye. She was struck again by the juxtaposition of life and beauty with ruin and decay. But she didn’t get a real sense of how the photographer felt about the girls themselves.
She scrolled through them again, halting and studying closely the pictures of the body parts, like the picture of Calico’s
hand (she knew now that it was Calico and not Darla.)
But it was as if… as if the girls were simply not the important part of the pictures. As if they were simply props used in service of the overall impression of the image. The girls were in the pictures, but the pictures weren’t about the girls.
And that made sense to what she knew about her son. Near as she knew, he wasn’t much interested in girls, except Jordan, and she could swear that relationship was nearly platonic. (Of course, there was the fact he’d supposedly fallen asleep at Jordan’s house…. Maybe he was sexually active? No, she couldn’t even wrap her head around that, and she didn’t want to.) But taking the best photographs he could take, that he was interested in. And if the girls were part of his vision for perfection, then he might very well find some way to get them to be in his photos.
She didn’t think he was obsessed with the girls themselves. She didn’t think this was about them.
However…
She couldn’t really escape her own bias.
At any rate, she couldn’t bear the thought of these photos existing any longer, especially some of the ones of Calico which were rather disturbingly seductive, as if Calico hadn’t quite understood what sort of picture it was she was supposed to be posing for. She found that thought unsettled her even more. What had happened to those girls?
The facts were these. Her son had pictures of all three of these girls on this camera, and none of them were at home now with their families. None were following their normal routine. Whatever her feelings about what the pictures said, any police officer worth his salt would see the photos as evidence.
And she couldn’t let someone like Jeremy discover them. Surely, he didn’t have enough for a warrant now, but she wasn’t sure what kind of favors he could call in with the local authorities.
So, she deleted the photos. Every. Single. Last. One.
And she stuffed the camera in the back of the closet in her bedroom, under a pile of blankets.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Mom?” Simon was yelling from the depths of his room.
She pretended not to hear him.
He appeared in the doorway to her bedroom. She was lying face down on the bed with her eyes closed. She’d been that way for hours. She was having an internal debate about drinking. Her mind said no, but her emotions said yes. So far, it was mind over emotion, but she wasn’t sure how much longer she was going to last.
She lifted her head to look at him. “What?”
“You haven’t seen my camera anywhere, have you?”
“Nope,” she said, laying her head back down. “Sorry, sweetie.”
“Man,” said Simon. “I could swear I left it on the shelf in my room, but it’s not there.”
“Maybe we have ghosts,” she said, but her voice was muffled by her pillow.
“What?” said Simon.
She turned to look at him. “Nothing.” Sighing, she sat up and stretched. “Listen, Simon, are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me about those missing girls?”
He pressed his lips together in a line. “You found the camera, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You saw the pictures?”
She got up off the bed and went over to the closet. She got the camera down and handed it to him. “I deleted them.”
“Mom!” He was dismayed. “How could you? I can’t retake those pictures. They were location shoots with models.”
“Yes, I saw that. Models that are dead.”
“No,” he said. “I mean, yes, Brittany’s dead, but the other girls—”
“Still alive?” she said. “Do you know that for sure?”
He let the hand holding the camera drop so that it hung at his side. “I guess I don’t.”
“Do you know where they are, Simon? You tell me, and I promise that I’ll—”
“I don’t know.” He raised his gaze to hers. “Look, I took the pictures and then I left. The girls stayed there. I think they were drunk. They had these flasks with them. They were drinking out of them.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t hurt them. Why would I want to hurt them?”
She put her hands on his shoulders. “Simon, oh, Simon.”
“You believe me, right?”
She moved her hands to cup his cheeks. She thought of how he used to be so small, and it was easy then to kiss him on the forehead, but now he was too tall, and she couldn’t reach.
“Mom,” he muttered, extricating himself from her. He didn’t like being touched so much.
She let her hands drop, and she felt so helpless.
“You believe me?” he said. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”
She forced herself to nod. “Of course I believe you.” If he was actually a killer, it was vital he thought that she was on his side. And if he wasn’t, it was even more important. So, she believed him. That was that. “But you did hide it from me. Why not tell me you knew the girls?”
Simon shifted on his feet. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “I guess I just got scared. Plus… Jordan…”
“What about Jordan?”
“Nothing,” he said.
She cocked her head. “Are you worried that Jordan wouldn’t understand why you were taking pictures of girls that weren’t her?”
He shook his head, dismissing this as obviously ridiculous. “No, Mom. You don’t understand anything. It’s not like that. The pictures aren’t like that anyway.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Can I have the camera back?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Why not?”
“We’re not done talking, Simon.”
He let out an annoyed sigh.
She took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to put the next thing. “Taking these pictures is, um, a little bit out of character for you, though, sweetie. I can’t picture you asking girls to be models for you. You’re usually a little… shy.”
“Sometimes they ask me.” He shrugged. “I can be different if I need to be, anyway.”
“Different? What do you mean?” she said.
“There are ways to be,” said Simon. “You pick the right way to be for certain situations. If you want people to be comfortable around you, you have to act a certain way.”
She swallowed. “You do?”
“Yeah, like you have to smile and stuff. I watch people. I know. I can do it if I want. I usually don’t, though, because there’s no point in it. I think people exhaust themselves trying to make other people happy, and you can’t make other people happy most of the time. But if it serves a purpose, then I do it.”
She was choking. “You manipulate people?”
He considered. “I guess.”
She felt a little sick. But she tried to reassure herself. This wasn’t the suave, glibness of a psychopath. This was the typical cluelessness of Simon’s Asperger’s. He was observing social cues and aping them, but he didn’t truly understand them.
“It is… kind of creepy, though.” He lifted the camera and studied it. “I mean, Brittany disappeared that same night after I took pictures of her too.”
“What?” she breathed. “You were taking pictures of Brittany that night? I thought you were with Jordan.”
He parted his lips.
“Jordan is lying for you? She lied for you to the police?”
“No,” Simon said. “No.”
“So, what? Jordan was there too?”
“Basically,” said Simon.
“Basically? What the hell does that mean?”
“You know what? Forget it, Mom. Leave Jordan out of it, okay?” And there was a note of real anger in his voice, not just adolescent frustration. Not a whine, but a rumble.
She pointed at him. “Listen to me, buddy, you are grounded.”
“What?” Now his voice had a high-pitched overtone. “What for?”
“For lying to me ab
out where you were going. You said you and Jordan were going out for a date, and you went out and took pictures of girls who were drinking. That’s a breach of trust.”
“I never said I was going on any date.”
She balled her hands into fists. “Whatever. Not the point. Go to your room.”
He glowered at her. “You are being so unfair.” And then he stalked to his room and slammed the door.
* * *
She was too shaken up to make dinner that night, so she called in for pizza.
When it was delivered, she tried to offer it to Simon as a peace offering. “Sweetie, there’s pepperoni, your favorite,” she crooned.
He threw open the door to his room. “Tonight’s chess club.”
She sighed. “Simon—”
“You can’t ground me from chess club,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “They need me. If you keep me from chess club, you’ll be punishing the whole club and they didn’t do anything wrong.”
She rubbed her forehead. “Listen—”
“I didn’t do anything wrong either for that matter.” He was talking in his sulky voice, which was just a hair less monotone than his regular voice. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Simon, you are a suspect in a murder investigation, and you don’t have an alibi.”
“I do so,” he said. “Jordan.”
“Yes, well, you explained that to me so well, didn’t you?”
He made a face. “Okay, maybe… maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t really have like an alibi that I could tell people. But it’s not my fault. I shouldn’t be grounded. I didn’t do anything wrong. I need to go to chess club.”
They stared each other down for several minutes, neither speaking.
“Fine,” she said abruptly. “But if you’re going to chess club, you’re going to have to take the bus. You can’t take the car.”
He gave her an even more annoyed look. “Seriously? But the bus leaves five minutes before the end of chess club. Whenever I take the bus, I have to leave early.”
Child of Mine: a psychological thriller Page 8