She remembered reading her pa’s report where he’d transcribed Harry Stork’s final words. Something about being set up, being a patsy. How realistic did that scenario come out when Leah played it through in her mind? Sure, the gun could have been planted, which would explain the Ruger Harry had when Leah’s pa shot him. But why hadn’t Harry dropped the gun? Especially knowing it had no ammunition in the magazine. Maybe Harry was too scared of all the evidence being planted against him. Maybe he thought the possibility of shooting back might be the only thing between him and an escape route that night.
Her door creaked open. It was Dan. She was glad to see he hadn’t brought his glass with him. “I saw the light under the door,” he said quietly, gesturing to the lamp. “Why are you still awake?”
“Just thinkin’.”
“You do that much too much.”
Leah smiled.
“You gotta stop thinkin’ and get some sleep.”
“I know.”
“I have an idea, if it helps,” Dan said. “One of the victims of the Strangler who got away. She had a pretty good look at the guy. We got our best composite from her. I was thinking maybe we should go see her and show her your photo lineup. See if Tommy sets off any alarms.”
“That was years ago.” Leah crossed her arms. The list of thirty-nine suspects lay on the bedsheets above her legs. “What happened to your stance on witnesses becoming less useful over time?”
Dan shrugged. “I don’t know. And you’re right—she never mentioned a scar running up the Strangler’s face. I showed you the composite, remember?”
“Yeah, it did have a bit of a resemblance to Tommy, I suppose.”
“Only without the scar. Think maybe he covered it up, I dunno, with makeup or something?”
We don’t cover our scars very well, she thought. “I don’t know. Why would he, unless he figured on his victims getting away?”
“Interesting thought.”
“Anyway, all I have tonight is interesting thoughts and questions.” She yawned. “I really need to get to sleep. I guess we’ll go into the station later tomorrow again. I have to wait until after six for my forensics guy in Mobile to get back to me.”
Dan looked up. “Sounds good. I have a bit more stuff to get through tonight. You should go to sleep.” He crouched by the side of the bed. She rolled in and they shared a quick kiss.
“I don’t suppose you have room in there for one more, do you?” Dan said.
Leah let out a sigh. “I told you, I really don’t want to have the kids—”
Dan stood up, his knees popping. “I was just kiddin’. Geez. You could’ve at least pretended you wanted me.” He smiled sheepishly.
“I don’t need to pretend,” Leah said. “I want you. Maybe the kids’ll both go out again. Actually, next time Jonathon and Carry have a date somewhere, I’ll do my best to get Abe to sleep over at Dewey’s. That would give us most of the night.”
“I like the way you think. Now, stop thinkin’ and go to sleep.”
“Yes, sir.” Leah gave him a salute. “And don’t drink too much.”
Dan smiled at her as he gently clicked the door closed.
Leah turned over for what seemed like the hundredth time and hugged one of her pillows. She was getting overly tired. Finally, she felt herself nodding off, but when she did sleep, it wasn’t a sleep full of pleasant dreams. It was a sleep of nightmares. Of stakes being thrust through chests. Of Stickmen. Of Harry Stork. Of Tommy Stork.
And also of Leah’s pa.
When she awoke the next morning, she felt as though she hadn’t slept a wink. The parts of her dreams she remembered left a queasy, uneasy feeling in her stomach. She got up and put on some coffee, her blue bathrobe wrapped tightly around her. After Dan had left her room and she’d decided they would go into the office later, she’d turned off her alarm clock. Yet another beautiful day presented itself outside.
She walked into the living room and picked up the empty bottle of Jim Beam from where it lay beside the sofa. She brought it into the kitchen and opened the closet, hearing it clink against all the other bottles as she put it in the black plastic bag.
The clock on the stove told her it was already eleven o’clock. Pretty soon, even Ethan would be getting in.
Not that she cared. She worked far more hours than she ever got paid for. Besides, so many more important things pressed. Things that did matter.
Like catching the son of a bitch who was killing people in her goddamn backyard.
CHAPTER 52
Leah left Dan at home, with him complaining of a headache. He never used the word hangover, and the way he tippy-toed around it made Leah strangely angry. She wished he’d just call it what it was. She had started thinking that her hidden spite at his drinking wasn’t faring her well. She either had to drop it or confront it. But, like most things in her mind, it didn’t drop too well. So she decided to concentrate on something else.
Dan would be in around four, he said. It was currently two. Forensics would be calling her after six, so she had some time. After that, depending on the result, she and Dan might be bringing Tommy Stork in for questioning. She decided that, if they did, she’d do the interrogation. It was her turn. She felt like she’d learned a lot through watching Dan.
She decided to kill the time between now and Dan showing up by going and visiting Noah Stork again. She had a few questions, and she could probably just call him for the answers, but she always felt there was a lot to be gained by talking to people face-to-face.
Once again, the image of Thomas Kennedy Bradshaw came into her mind. Would she ever have gotten the creepy-killer vibe over the phone that she got in real life? She doubted it.
A replay of last night’s questions swung around her mind as Leah drove her car through the winding roadways of Blue Jay Maples. Once again, she managed to get lost before finding Woodpecker Wind. She came to the small break in the woods that denoted Noah Stork’s property and parked on the side of the road, just in front of his driveway, which was flanked on either side by the same cavernous ditches that ran along every road in the Maples. The same white Hyundai Excel sat in the drive, where it had been the last time she was there. She wondered if it had even been moved.
Once again, she got out of her car and approached the porch wrapping around the left half of the baby blue house. Just like last time, she marveled at the grounds keeping. The lawn had once again been recently mowed.
Leah figured Noah Stork was a man who knew the value of details.
Before she even made it across the porch, the front door pulled open. “You’re back,” Noah Stork said, smiling.
“I am. I had some further questions for you if you have fifteen minutes?” She noticed he had his shoes on. “Or . . . are you busy? You look like you’re on your way out.”
After pushing his eyeglasses up his nose, he glanced at his watch, a sparkly gold timepiece. “Got nothin’ but time,” he said, and flashed that same welcoming smile Leah had seen the last time she was there.
“Not expectin’ anyone?”
“No, I don’t get a lot of company. One of the joys or . . . quirks, I guess, of living way out here. I was just taking a little break. Was going to do some weeding in my back vegetable garden, but you are a much more welcome interruption. Please”—he made a sweeping gesture to his open door—“come in. Would you like another sweet tea?”
Stepping inside, Leah shook her head. “No, thank you, I’m fine.” This time she didn’t wait for him to tell her to leave her boots on. She just did.
“Suit yourself.” Stork led her back into the living room, and he sat on the davenport just like before, his right arm going up along the back. She took the same chair she had last time, and, just like before, her eyes went to that wall of books.
Then she noticed something different about the room. On the coffee table sat a silver and black typewriter with a piece of paper rolled halfway through it. There was a pile on either side of the machine. The one on the rig
ht was about two inches thick and upside down. She could see typewritten letters through the paper.
“You’re writing?” she asked.
“I am,” Stork said and, taking his arm off the back of the davenport, used it to lift the translucent red cup from where it stood in front of the stack of—Leah assumed—blank pages on the left of the typewriter. He took a big drink from the cup and put it back down. “You sure you don’t want any of this tea? It might be the best batch I’ve made.”
She smiled. “I’m sure. Thank you, though. So, what’re you writing?”
Stork’s arm went back to the top of the davenport. “Oh, I’ve been working on that off and on a couple of years now. It’s a ‘work in progress’ type of thing. I don’t know if it will ever be done.” He laughed.
“Is it a book?”
He pushed his glasses back up his nose before returning his right arm to the back of the davenport. “Yeah. It’s . . . I don’t really know what it is at this point, I’ve been at it for so long. I think my original premise has changed a dozen times.”
“Can I see?”
Leaning forward, Stork’s arm once again left the davenport to grab the upside-down two-inch stack of paper. He handed it across the table to Leah. “It’s still a first draft. Don’t expect too much.” He chuckled.
Leah admired the thickness. “It’s impressive without even readin’ it. I guess being around all these”—she gestured to the wall of bookshelves—“all day is an inspiration?”
“Well, maybe that’s it. I just feel you should do something on this planet during your life that will maybe outlive you. You know, leave some sort of legacy.”
Leah nodded. She looked down at the title page.
JOSHUA JUDGES
A View into the Split and Fractured Psychoanalytical Mind by Noah Stork
“I’m guessing with a title like this, it’s not a mystery or anything like that?”
Another laugh from Noah. “No, nothing like that. It’s really rather dry, to be honest. It’s sort of a portrait of my relationship with my son.”
“I see,” Leah said, still looking at the top page. “Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“‘Joshua Judges’?” She looked over at Stork. “Why ‘Joshua Judges’?”
“Well, as you undoubtedly know, the term on one level refers to the two books that appear in sequence in the Old Testament, but that’s only a small part of why I chose the title—the cleverness of turning the book of Judges into a verb.” He smiled. “Something you may not be aware of is how much debate there’s been about those two particular works. Especially by historians and theologians.”
“No, I had no idea.” Leah flipped over the top page and started reading the first page of the manuscript, which happened to be the beginning of the book’s introduction. It explained how the book was a “. . . tightly written scientific treatise on the treatment, causes, and effects of mental conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and other spectrum disorders, focusing also on how these disorders manifest from infancy through to adulthood. . .”
Leah tried scanning the text quickly, but found it too difficult to grasp unless she slowed down and read it word by word. Obviously, the man she was interviewing got well-educated somewhere. It looked in places like the typewriter ribbon needed changing. Every second or third character was printed much lighter than the rest, giving the work a very arduous feel to it, almost as though the letters were straining to stay on the page. That was when she realized the typewriter wasn’t even electric.
“You typed all this with a manual typewriter?” she asked, looking up.
“Yes. I have a fascination with old mechanical devices.”
“It must have taken you forever.”
“Like I said, you’re looking at around two years’ worth of work. But let me just get back to the title for a moment. Both books in the Bible recall the tale of Israel settling in the land of Canaan and what happened during their first two centuries there,” he said. “If you divide Joshua in half, the first half describes the Israelites’ arrival and early battles, and the second details how the land was divided among Israel’s tribes. Joshua concludes with the people committing themselves into a covenant with God.”
“What does that have to do with mental disorders?” she asked.
“Well, it’s a metaphor, you see. Take schizophrenia, for example. Like the Israelites, schizophrenia settles in to the patient and almost literally divides the psyche up through a process that, once you’ve seen it, can only be described as war.”
“I see.”
“If one gives Joshua and Judges just a cursory reading, it is quite simple to take them as just a sequential discussion of Israel becoming a dominant force in Canaan.”
Leah felt slightly embarrassed that she didn’t know the Bible well enough to even have an opinion. She found Stork immensely fascinating, though. “And they aren’t?” she asked.
He laughed. “Hardly. Joshua dies and is buried at the end of the first book, then Judges goes on to describe a plethora of defeats and setbacks of the Israelites, implying that these trials occurred after Joshua’s death. Judges even opens with the phrase, ‘After the death of Joshua . . . ’ which reinforces this notion.”
“Okay,” Leah said, still staring into his eyes.
He took another sip of sweet tea. “Well, the second chapter of Judges surprises the careful reader,” Stork continued. “Joshua is not only back, but he’s leading the Israelites during these conflicts, only to later die, leaving many historians to wonder whether the stories actually overlap somehow.”
Leah narrowed her eyes, still wondering what this had to do with schizophrenia. She was amazed someone would even know these sort of things. Well, other than people like Reverend Matthew from First Baptist who got paid to know this stuff. “I see,” she said.
“Looking closer at the books reveals a more complex situation, actually, one that raises questions both historical and theological, not only about reliability as history, but also discerning the very essence of Israel’s entry into Palestine. Debates on the issue range from those who deny absolutely any historical validity to those insisting every detail is absolutely accurate. Some deny any possibility of anything miraculous happening, while others use the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture to assert complete accuracy.”
“Sounds confusing,” Leah said. She could not imagine reading even the introduction of Noah’s book and understanding it. She really wondered who would ever want to publish such a book, but she kept that question to herself.
“Oh, it is,” Noah said. “There is a lot more about those two books I could tell you, but that is enough that, if you understand even a bit of what I’ve said, you can relate schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder or any myriad spectrum disorders to the metaphor and understand a bit of what goes on when it activates in a person. Not only is something like schizophrenia akin to being privy to a circuitous argument of this sort, but it also causes the brain to be thrown into episodes where reliability of the senses and a solid knowledge of the essence of reality are thrown into question. In other words, much like Joshua and Judges, the mind contradicts itself. Also, as with the Scriptures, there is debate over whether schizophrenia is a single mental disorder or a number of separate syndromes. Hence the term spectrum disorder.”
“I see. It’s a rather complex metaphor.”
“It is. But the book isn’t an easy read, either.” He laughed. “And then there is also another context in that, by writing a book about mental disorders in the first place, I am automatically taking on one side of the argument. So, in essence, I am judging. So, yes, you could say the title is a sort of triple entendre.”
Leah nodded. “Dissociative identity disorder . . . That’s . . .”
Noah nodded, too, and finished her sentence. “Multiple personality disorder. Right. One just sounds more pretentious, so I use that.” Another laugh.
Leah remembered h
er thought yesterday concerning the Stickman and the Strangler being the same person but different personalities. “So,” she said, “as far as the metaphor goes, you’re Joshua. You’re the one judging.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling, light gleaming off his glasses. “Exactly.”
Leah stood and handed him back his manuscript pages before returning to her chair. Stork put them back facedown beside the typewriter.
“How do you know so much about mental disorders?” she asked.
“Mainly from living with Tommy,” he said.
“Tommy is diagnosed as . . . ?” Even though she already knew, it seemed like the right place to ask this question.
“Schizophrenia, but if you consider all the disorders to be on a spectrum, there isn’t a whole lot of difference—chemically—between schizophrenia and . . . dissociative identity disorder, for instance.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Few people do. That’s why I’m writing the book.”
She gestured to the manuscript. “You’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about Tommy’s condition. You’ve done a lot of research?”
He frowned. “Yes, I wish I didn’t know so much, to be honest. But when you live with someone suffering from a mental illness for as long as Tommy and I were under this roof, you can’t help but see all the different sides of the thing. And, of course, the more I saw, the more I wanted to learn, so I own many books on the subject.”
“What behavioral patterns do you think have resulted from his . . . disorder?”
Stork sat back on the davenport. “Well, Detective, that’s a complex question, and you really need to know my son to understand. Symptoms of schizophrenia are many. They can include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking, and unintelligible speech. Sometimes thought patterns can be broken before they complete, which results in many quick changes of behavior or strange shifting of topics while talking. Most people suffering from schizophrenia go through social withdrawal and lose motivation and judgment abilities. Their ability to read common social cues becomes hindered. Usually there is an emotional response to the disorder, or, at times, a complete lack of emotional response. Many, like my Tommy, refuse to accept they even have the illness, which complicates the issue because they often refuse treatment.”
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