Facade

by Susan Cory

  “No, I assumed they were spam or some sick joke. I had told the police the night before that nothing appeared to be missing after the break-in.”

  Farrington cleared his throat and held up a hand, ticking off points with his fingers one by one. “In addition to the preteen porn on your computer, the police found a witness who directed the girl to your office days before she disappeared. The keys to the kidnapper's van were found in your kitchen drawer, despite your story about having no access to a vehicle. Lara's necklace was in that same van. They have Lara's blood—enough to strongly suggest her death—on a bedspread found in a barn near a place you visited the week before, a barn where an imprint of your boot was found that, with Lara's blood on one sole, was retrieved from your house. Then there's the business of your trying to leave the country while out on bail. A skilled prosecutor can weave these pieces together to construct a convincing case.” He stopped and looked at his companion. “Martin, have I forgotten anything?”

  “The crossing of state lines,” Martin said. “The fact that Lara's blood was found in New Hampshire suggests that she may have been killed there, which would make this a federal crime instead of a Massachusetts crime.”

  “What is the significance of that?” Xander asked, feeling a cold dread in the pit of his stomach.

  Martin broke eye contact. “Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty, but the D.A. can request it for a federal crime.”

  Xander felt the room go blurry. He tried to grip the edge of the cold metal table to steady himself but sensed himself slipping off his chair before everything went dark.

  CHAPTER 60

  His new cell at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, an hour south of Boston, made the holding cell in Cambridge look like the Ritz. The main structure was a Brutalist concrete bunker—the 1960's were a disastrous time for prison architecture—surrounded by twenty foot high walls with guard towers. They had strip-searched him before giving him itchy gray scrubs to wear and canvas shoes that kept slipping off his elegant narrow feet.

  His first meal, lunch, had filled him with horror at what lay ahead. He couldn't even identify the meat in the sandwiches, much less the other offerings. In any case, he felt too nauseated to eat. Maybe he should go on a hunger strike. Would that get him out of this place any sooner?

  In Cambridge he had had a cell to himself. Here, he had a large, disreputable-looking roommate called The Ram who was presently out in the trampled dirt area they called “the yard,” lifting weights or doing something equally macho. He would have to figure out a way to handle The Ram, to convince the lug to act as his protector in this place.

  Xander tried not to blame himself for the fiasco the day before. He might have escaped if that crazy Iris Reid hadn't barreled into him like an S-class Mercedes hitting a smart car on the Autobahn.

  Plus, his idiot solicitors didn't seem to believe him. He would have to use his own superior intellect and charisma to spring himself from this Kafkaesque nightmare. Didn't prisons have libraries? He'd brush up on the law and use some clever argument to win his case. Then maybe he'd write a book about his ordeal.

  No question that someone was framing him, but why? He might have stepped on toes in his climb toward the top of his profession. Someone might have resented his meteoric rise. Or maybe it was because he was, well, different.

  If only he could have felt genuine lust at the sight of a grown woman's breast, maybe none of this would have happened. It had taken him many years to understand what he really needed. Reading Nietszche's Man and Superman as a teenager had reassured him that he was special, somehow above the others, an outlier. When he developed a fascination for a friend's younger sister, it became clear that he was drawn to the purity of innocence. For some reason that girl hadn't responded to his overtures, but he knew there would be other chances with other girls.

  In college, he had focused on his studies. There had been no one there he could really talk to. They were all like children, and hadn't developed yet. He rose to the top of his class, even giving a rousing graduation speech featuring expansive references to, of course, Nietszche.

  He followed his inspiration's path by entering military service next and liked the regimentation involved. He chose to join the UN peacekeeping forces and was sent to Bosnia, utterly unprepared for the savagery he witnessed there: Serbs and Croats butchering each other, then both turning on the Muslim Bosnians. It was a place without morals. The peacekeepers were in constant danger from snipers who would as soon pick them off as kill their sworn enemies.

  Then one day, his battalion unearthed one of the Serb's dumping pits. The Serbs had tried to disguise the stench by piling dog carcasses on top of the dead bodies of Bosnian males from ten to sixty, two dozen of them. On their way back to camp, Xander's batallion passed through a village and ran into an ambush. A sniper wounded his teammate, Nils, before Xander could drag him to safety. They put Nils on a medical truck, leaving Xander to patrol alone for the rest of that week.

  What followed next seemed like fate. He spotted a girl racing through the woods like a fawn. She was filthy, but still fresh with the innocence of youth. If she had stayed in the woods for long, the barbarian Serbs would have found her and defiled her. Xander couldn't let that happen. He had to show her some beauty amidst the ugliness of war.

  He plucked her up in his arms and found a rustic shed nearby. Here, he initiated her into the mysteries of sex. It had been a mystery for him too, but he had played his role well. Ungrateful, she had bit him hard on his hand. He still had an ugly scar. Still, the girl's bite had electrified him.

  He had kept her in the shed for several days, smuggling her food from the canteen. But it soon occurred to him that what he had done might be misconstrued. His attempt to lift himself and this wild child above the war zone might be labeled, by less sensitive souls, as something base, even criminal, if it were ever discovered. Also, the girl did not seem to appreciate the risks he was taking for her. He had needed to devise a way to get rid of her without having blood on his hands.

  Ever since that first time, he had tried to duplicate the adrenaline high he had experienced while being surrounded by so much danger. But even in Thailand, with willing participants, he had yet to recreate that spark.

  CHAPTER 61

  On exiting Starbucks, Iris mindlessly followed Broadway past the Fogg Museum, still shrouded under scaffolding, and drifted across Quincy Street to enter Harvard Yard. She needed to think. She eyed the imposing steps of Widener Library, then turned toward Memorial Church across an expansive green.

  She entered the sanctuary through the main porch and slipped into a velvet-cushioned pew. The elegant, barrel-vaulted space was empty.

  Iris bowed her head, closed her eyes, and thought about what it would take to kill someone. The typical reasons—jealousy, anger, and greed—wouldn't apply if the victim was a young girl, especially the type of utterly blameless girl that Lara appeared to have been. Maybe she could find out more about the girl from Jasna. Iris couldn't imagine the intensity of twisted hatred needed to stab, or shoot, or strangle the angelic Lara. So the motive must have been lust. Power or lust.

  Iris couldn't stand the thought of the perpetrator getting away with murder. But she still couldn't believe that the man with whom she had briefly shared her innermost thoughts was behind Lara's death. Perhaps she had no real sense of the man. It would have taken powerful emotions, passion and hatred, to do something so vicious. And her impression of Xander was that all of his passion went into his career.

  Maybe Martin was right that Xander's attempt to escape had come from panic at the possibility of being falsely accused and convicted, not a knowledge of actual guilt.

  Martin—she had barely been able to slug down her glass of wine before thinking of an excuse to get him to leave. Why had she invited the lawyer in? Watching Luc walk away had left her emotionally gutted.

  Before her time with Luc, Iris had been used to being on her own. She needed her independence and liked her lif
e clean. But the months she had spent with him had shifted that equilibrium. It hadn't hurt that he was incredible in bed. But then she had run into his lie, an important part of his life that he had kept from her. Why hadn't she sensed that he was holding something back? How could she trust her judgment about anyone anymore?

  CHAPTER 62

  Iris plodded back to her GSD office to see what Elvis had discovered. She found a note stuck to her laptop. It said: “Professor Reid, there was some serious spyware on here, routed through several dummy sites, but I tracked it down to Jasna Sidron's computer. I took it off your hard drive so you're safe now. E.”

  Iris pulled on a sweater from her desk drawer to ward off a sudden chill and sank into her desk chair. She stared out the window at the High Victorian spire of Memorial Hall. Jasna had intercepted all of her e-mails, sent and received. Why? What had she discussed in them? She'd have to reread them all.

  Forty minutes before, while sitting in the church pew, Iris had decided that she needed to question Jasna more about Lara's life. Now she had a second reason to track down her student. She needed to discover why Jasna was spying on her.

  Iris settled her shoulders then descended the stairs to see if Jasna was working at her desk. As expected, on a day when design studio didn't meet, Jasna's pod was empty, so Iris trudged to her Jeep and headed over to Bay State Road where her student lived in one of the few West Cambridge neighborhoods not yet gentrified.

  Finding no empty visitor parking space, she backtracked to park on a side street in a Cambridge residents spot and walked back to the apartment building. She leaned on Jasna's buzzer and waited. As she watched, a curtain flickered in Jasna's second floor window but there was no response to the intercom.

  Iris was trying to decide on her next step, when the front door groaned open and a familiar-looking terrier leapt joyfully out at Iris, straining on its leash. Mr. Demopoulos eyed her through his thick lenses, yanking Sparky back, until recognition dawned. “You're that teacher Jasna brought by,” he announced.

  “That's right. I'm here to see her. Let me hold the door for you.”

  The old man, wearing a worn chenille bathrobe which exposed his white chest hair, shuffled out at the end of Sparky's leash, allowing Iris to slip in behind him. She climbed to the second floor and knocked on the front door of Jasna's apartment.

  As on Iris' previous visit, she could hear Jasna speaking, in French, through the flimsy hollowcore door. “Il me faut dire au revoir au moment, Cherie.” Her voice sounded happy—not her usual mood.

  Jasna opened the door looking wary. “Professor Reid—hi. I'm working on my project at home,” she blurted out, as if stumbling too fast down a hill.

  “I didn't come to check up on you,” Iris reassured her. “I was just wondering if you can tell me some things about Lara. May I come in?”

  Jasna stepped back from the doorway. “I saw you on TV Saturday night, what you did at the airport. It was awesome. I can't believe that bastard almost escaped.”

  “There are still a lot of parts missing in the story.” Iris surveyed the small, dark living room. It was a jumble. Two lumpy upholstered chairs faced each other across a coffee table strewn with books and magazines. Clothes were piled up in a corner, probably waiting for a trip to the laundromat.

  “Sorry about the mess. I never let anyone come over here.”

  “No, I'm sorry to intrude. I was hoping you might fill in some gaps in the story about Lara since you two were friends.” Iris winced at her use of the past tense.

  Jasna glanced nervously around the room, then said. “Have a seat. Would you like some tea?”

  “That would be great, thanks.”

  Jasna disappeared through an arched doorway and Iris heard cabinet doors banging.

  She tried to settle in one of the chairs but the sharp end of a broken spring pressed into her, so she stood up and paced slowly around the room instead. She glanced out a window that overlooked the parking lot, then noticed an open laptop on a nearby desk. She looked over quickly toward the arched opening and, hearing the rattle of metal on the stove, she approached and grazed her finger along the top of the touchpad. The background image on the screen stopped her cold. It was the face that had been plastered on posters all over Boston. Same hazel eyes with black lashes. But in this picture, Lara's hair had been cut short and dyed blond. The girl was smiling happily, as if she didn't have a care in the world.

  A loud crash made Iris look up. Jasna, standing in the doorway, held an empty tray with broken crockery and a spreading brown puddle of tea at her feet.

  They stared at each other in shocked silence.

  Iris finally said, “Why do you have this picture of Lara? When was it taken?”

  Jasna's eyes flitted around the room. “You have no right,” she cried out before sinking into a Director's chair. She was on the edge of hysteria and began to mutter in an unintelligable language, shaking her head and moaning. Finally, she switched to English. “You don't know what he did—what he took from me.”

  Iris took a deep breath and steadied herself. “Then tell me. Explain it to me. Because it looks to me like an innocent man is sitting in jail for a crime that maybe never happened.”

  Jasna leapt up from her seat, darted toward the desk, and grabbed a large pair of scissors. Iris was quickly on her feet and close behind her. Jasna twisted toward her with the scissors high in the air, hesitated, then collapsed into a chair, letting her weapon clatter to the wood floor. Iris kicked the scissors under a radiator then planted herself across from her student, her heart pounding faster than usual as she reached into her pocket for her cell phone.

  “Explain to me now what that picture is doing on your laptop or I'll call the police and you can explain it to them,” she said.

  “Xander DeWitt is not an innocent man. He raped me,” Jasna gulped down tears. “When I was twelve. In Bosnia.”

  Iris hovered indecisively, then put away her phone and lowered herself to the edge of a chair. “I'm listening.”

  After a moment, the young woman collected herself enough to start speaking again. “It was thirteen years ago. I was in the woods with my older brother looking for clothing to take off the dead Muslims or anything else we could trade for food. We were starving. I had wandered away from Edvin thinking I saw a bush with berries we could eat.”

  “A man grabbed me from behind. A soldier. He wrapped his hand over my mouth so I couldn't scream, then dragged me into a shed. He kept me there for three days, leaving me tied up and gagged in the dark at night. I could hear my brother outside calling for me but I couldn't move or make a sound. The soldier would return to rape me again each afternoon. I bit his hand at one point and that drove him into a frenzy.” She shuddered. “What happened during those three days ended my childhood. But what DeWitt did to me next ended my belief in God.”

  “How do you know that this soldier was Xander DeWitt?”

  “He was wearing a UN uniform with a nameplate, DeWitt. Oh, and he had a tattoo on his shoulder.”

  “Where exactly was the tattoo? What did it look like?” Iris asked.

  “Here.” Jasna pointed to her right shoulder. “It was a butterfly. I would watch the different colors run together as I cried while he was raping me.”

  Iris covered her mouth with her hand.

  “They called themselves Peacekeepers,” Jasna went on, “but those so-called soldiers did nothing while the Serbs tried their best to exterminate us. DeWitt was as much a predator as the Serbs themselves. Maybe worse.”

  Jasna stared blankly at the floor. “On the third day, after he had taken his day's pleasure, he gave me back my clothes. I thought he would let me go then. Instead, he marched me through the woods toward a village where the Serbs had made a camp. He tied me to a tree, and left me there. It took the Serbs less than an hour to find me and to drag me off to one of their rape houses. Do you know what those are?”

  “Yes,” Iris whispered.

  “I was the youngest girl so I was
very popular. The older women tried to protect me, but that just earned them more beatings. The war ended several months later, but by that point, I just wanted to die. A woman from my village helped me get home. Home. It was never home after that. My parents could not look me in the eyes after they learned what had happened.” Jasna slowly got up and said, over her shoulder, “Let me show you something.”

  Iris followed close behind to make sure Jasna wasn't looking for another weapon.

  Jasna went to a bookshelf, selected a book and slid something out from between its pages. She handed Iris an old photograph, dog-eared from frequent handling. It showed a very young Jasna holding a baby. It looked like she was holding her younger sister.

  “Was it DeWitt's?”

  “How would I know?” Jasna's face had hardened into a mask of bitterness.

  Finally Iris asked, “How does all this tie in with the picture of Lara on your laptop?”

  Jasna's expression softened. “I named the baby Esmina after my grandmother. I tried to take care of her but, even after the war was over, there was no money, no food. Plus, I was just a child myself, a damaged child.”

  “My brother came up with an idea. Edvin is gay, and he wanted us to emigrate to a more tolerant country. He decided that we should go to Canada. There was only one problem. We would both need to work full time to earn the money to move us from country to country. I couldn't work while taking care of Esmina. My mother wouldn't take her. But I knew of a nice woman in the next village who couldn't have children of her own. She agreed to raise my baby. It broke my heart to part with Esmina, but I figured I could come back from Canada to visit her once I was settled there. She would have a better childhood with this woman to look out for her.”

  “It took Edvin and me two years to work our way to Montreal. By that time my mother had written to say that my baby's family had moved away—maybe to the United States, she wasn't sure. Edvin and I lived in a refugee shelter in Montreal for a few years, then were able to get our own apartment. He went to university on a scholarship and got certified as a paramedic.”