by Scott Pratt
“We don’t have any solid evidence against her. Not yet, anyway.”
“She was there.”
“How do you know? I realize this must be difficult for you, but you have to explain how you knew about the murders.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find it hard to believe.”
“Try me.”
“It’s been this way with Natasha ever since I can remember. When something extreme happens where she’s involved, especially something violent that springs from rage, I can see it in my mind. It’s like watching a movie on a screen, but the images appear in flashes, like black-and-white photographs.”
I was struck again by the tone of her voice. It was a mellow soprano, almost melodic.
“And that’s how you knew about Boyer and Barnett?” I said. “You saw them in a telepathic flash?”
My mind began to churn. I pictured myself questioning her during the hearing, her sitting on the witness stand in a shawl and hat with her eye patch and telling the court she was telepathic. Judge Glass would disallow her testimony, dismiss the case against Boyer and Barnett, and I’d be lynched by sundown. Unless, of course, I could find an expert witness who would agree to come to court and testify by Monday. But even if I could find one, Beaumont would stand up and object, because if I was going to employ an expert, the rules required that I notify him and send him a report. Then again, I could argue that parapsychology was not recognized as a bona fide science, so the witness was not technically testifying as an expert, but merely as a witness who could illuminate the issues for the court. It might work. After all, everything Alisha had told us had turned out to be true. What other explanation could there be for her knowing what happened?
She was there, you idiot! Either that or she’s wearing a goddamned contact lens over her “bad” eye and she’s really Natasha playing some kind of sick game with you. Nah, there’s no way. The juvenile records. Her mother. They confirmed that Alisha exists. So was she there? Maybe she’s crazy too and she has a grudge against Natasha.
I glanced over at her, wondering whether I was sitting in the presence of yet another crazed murderer who intended to pull out a gun and blow my brains out as soon as we got out of town. But as we reached the city limits of Jonesborough, Alisha began to recount the night the Brockwells were murdered. She was awakened by what she thought was a nightmare sometime after midnight.
“I saw a woman’s back,” she said. “I didn’t know who she was. It was dark, but I could see she was wearing a nightgown. I saw a hand on her shoulder, holding her. And the next image I saw was the ice pick in her back. I saw it over and over, and I knew. I knew it had to be Natasha.”
“You’re absolutely sure it was Natasha?”
“I see what she sees,” she said softly. “At first, I kept telling myself it was just a nightmare. Mrs. Hamilton heard me screaming and came into my room. She held my hand and rubbed a cool washcloth on my face. I think I went back to sleep for a while, but then …”
She became silent. I didn’t want to press her, but I had to know. She had to tell me everything.
“Then you saw the image of Mr. Brockwell?”
She nodded, sniffling. “That was when I saw Sam and Levi. They shot Mr. Brockwell. I’m so sorry.”
She began to sob, and I found myself thinking that she was either telling the truth or she was one of the best liars I’d ever met. She seemed such a gentle creature. I leaned over and popped the glove compartment open, took out a napkin, and handed it to her.
“Does Natasha know you can see these things?” I said.
She nodded her head.
“So that’s why you left your foster parents?”
“I was afraid she might come there and hurt them.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Alisha. If it hadn’t been for you, they’d still be out there killing people.”
“I saw an image of Mr. Beck the day he was killed,” she said through her tears. “He was standing next to a brick wall in the sunlight, holding his son in his arms. Then I saw his picture in the paper the next day. Natasha must not have been there when the Becks were killed, because I would have seen something. But she at least saw Mr. Beck; I’m sure of it. And if I’d come to you sooner, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Brockwell would still be alive.”
I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “None of this is your fault.”
As we drove south on Highway 81 towards the mountains, she sat quietly in the darkness. I asked her about Natasha, and she shook her head slowly and began to tell me about their lives. She said she and Natasha were born in Mountain City. Her father owned a Chevrolet dealership there, and the family was comfortable until she was eight years old. Then one day her father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. The dealership was broke, she said, and her father had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. There was an intense search, but he disappeared without a trace, taking his embezzled money with him.
Natasha was her identical twin, but she said she never felt the kinship, the closeness that she’d read about among other twins. Alisha remembered Natasha as being surly and reclusive, almost paranoid, from the beginning.
“We both got kittens for our seventh birthday,” she said. “Natasha’s bit her on the finger. It bled and she cried. A little while later, I saw her take the kitten outside. It was the first time I saw the images. I was sitting on the couch with my kitten when this awful scene flashed in my mind. It was a kitten, tied down on its back, spreadeagled, and it was bleeding from the mouth. I went outside to find Natasha. She was behind the garage. She’d taken stakes from our tent and some string and tied the kitten down, just like I pictured it. She was pulling its teeth with a pair of pliers.”
Natasha, she said, was unable to control her rage even in day care. She attacked other children without hesitation, forcing her mother to remove her from the day care and keep her at home. Not even her father, who was a strict disciplinarian, could control her. When their father left, the family moved back to Johnson City to be near Marie Davis’s family. Marie took a series of menial jobs, leaving Natasha’s care and schooling to Marie’s mother. Natasha’s behavior continued to worsen until one day, when the twins were thirteen, she set fire to her grandmother’s home. Marie finally took her to a psychologist, who recommended that Natasha be committed to an institution.
“She was gone for two years,” Alisha said. “They were the best two years of my life. When she came back, they said she’d be okay as long as she took her medication, but she stopped. By that time, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and she wasn’t working anymore. She took lots of pills.”
A little over a month after Natasha returned, Alisha awoke one night to find Natasha standing over her with an ice pick.
“I thought I was dreaming. I saw an image of myself lying in bed,” she said. “As soon as I opened my eyes, she stabbed me.”
“Why? Why would she do something like that?”
“Who can explain madness? Who can explain evil? Natasha is both, Mr. Dillard. She’ll kill again if you don’t stop her soon. Now that she’s crossed that line, she’ll never go back.”
Doctors who treated Alisha at the hospital the night Natasha stabbed her called the police, who in turn called social services. Alisha was moved into a foster home for her own protection.
“Natasha told Mother that if she tried to send her back to the institution, she’d kill her,” Alisha said. “Mother talked them into letting her stay. She promised she’d make sure Natasha took her medication. I think she did for a while after that, but Mother can barely take care of herself, let alone someone like Natasha.”
“Isn’t your mother afraid of her?”
“She’s afraid of her, but she says Natasha needs her. They live off of Mother’s social security checks. And if something happened to Mother, Natasha knows she’d be right back in the mental institution.”
She talked for a while longer as I wound through the back roads of the county. The snowfall had e
ased; there were only occasional flakes rushing past the headlights like tiny shooting stars. Eventually, I brought the conversation back around to the hearing on Monday.
“Do you know Boyer and Barnett?” I said.
“They both grew up in our neighborhood. I went to school with Sam Boyer until Mr. Brockwell finally kicked him out for good. Levi’s a few years younger than me, but I knew him.”
“How would you describe them? What kind of people are they?”
“Poor, angry, neglected. Like a lot of kids in that neighborhood. Levi was especially mean. I saw him beat up Kerry Jameson one day. It was a long time ago; Natasha was in the mental institution. It was summertime, and a bunch of us were playing stickball in a field not far from my house. All Kerry did was call Levi a sissy. Kerry was older and bigger than Levi, but Levi picked up a stick and beat him so badly they had to take him to the hospital.”
“Why would they kill for Natasha?”
“I don’t know for sure, but Natasha started studying Satanism as soon as she got back from the institution. She liked the rituals and the philosophy. She tried to get me involved, but I didn’t want any part of it.”
“What is the philosophy?” I said.
“Do whatever you want. Please yourself. There are no consequences to your actions. If you feel like having sex, you have sex. If you feel like taking drugs, you take drugs. If you feel like killing someone, you kill them. They don’t believe they’re subject to the laws of man. If Natasha was controlling them, she was probably using a combination of sex, drugs, and Satanic propaganda.”
“Have you seen Boyer or Barnett lately?”
“I went over to Mother’s on her birthday. I called first to see if Natasha was around, but she said Natasha had been out all night and was asleep. When I got there, Sam and Levi were just coming out the front door.They got in Sam’s car and left. Mother said they spent the night in Natasha’s room. She said they’d been hanging around a lot.”
“When was that?”
“August ninth.”
“Doesn’t Natasha have the same kind of telepathic connection with you that you have with her?”
“No, but she can do something that I can’t. She can interfere with electricity somehow. She does something with her mind, something that somehow overloads electrical circuits. I’ve seen her do it. It’s very frightening.”
I thought about what Fraley had told me the morning after Natasha was arrested. He said he was in the middle of interrogating Sam Boyer when the power seemed to surge and some of the lights in the building exploded.
“Alisha, can I trust you to show up on Monday morning?”
All I had to do was hand her a subpoena, and then if she failed to appear, I could get a brief continuance and have her arrested and held as a material witness. But I couldn’t do it. Part of me hoped she would stay away and let me take my chances with the judge. After listening to her and observing her for an hour, I no longer suspected that she might be involved in the murders in any way. She was so beautiful, so serene, so seemingly pure. I was genuinely concerned for her safety, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if something happened to her.
“Do you know what ‘Alisha’ means, Mr. Dillard?” she said.
I shook my head.
“It means truth. I’ll be there.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what Natasha might do?”
“I have something much more powerful than Natasha.”
“Really? What is it?”
“I have faith.”
I thought about the photographs of the six murder victims, the wild look in Natasha’s eyes in the courtroom, the message on my bathroom mirror.
“I’m afraid you’ll need more than faith if Natasha decides to come after you.”
She turned and looked out the window for a few minutes. When she turned back, she was smiling warmly.
“I’m not worried,” she said. “I have faith in God, and I have faith in you.”
Saturday, November 8
I got hold of my forensic psychiatrist friend Tom Short early on Saturday morning. I thought he’d be skeptical of Alisha’s claim that she received telepathic signals from Natasha and was fully prepared to deal with a barrage of wry sarcasm. But instead, after listening to what Alisha had told me, Tom surprised me by saying there had been some interesting progress made in parapsychology in recent years and gave me the telephone number of a woman who lived in Sea Island, Georgia.
“Her name’s Martha King,” Tom said, “marvelous-looking woman. Probably forty or so, tall, shiny black hair, turquoise eyes, terrific body.”
“Is that how you described her to your wife?”
“I don’t think I mentioned her to my wife, wiseass. She has a doctorate in parapsychology, and she’s also what they call a seer.”
“A seer? What’s that?”
“A person who can see things others can’t see. A person who knows things he or she couldn’t or shouldn’t know. A psychic. I met her at a conference in Hilton Head five or six years ago. She convinced me.”
“So you think it’s really possible? I guess the better question is, do you think I can convince a judge that it’s possible?”
“Give her a call,” Tom said. “I promise it’ll be an experience you won’t forget.”
I dialed the number. After a couple of rings, a woman’s voice answered. Once I was sure I was talking to the right person, I told her who I was, that Tom had suggested I call, and gave her a brief outline of my situation with Alisha, Natasha, and the hearing on Monday morning.
“My biggest concern is that I’ll get kicked out of court because the traditional scientific community doesn’t recognize telepathy,” I said.
“They don’t recognize it officially,” Ms. King said. Her voice was pleasant, with an accent that told me she’d either been raised or educated in England. “But there are a great number of psychologists, physicists, and mathematicians who absolutely believe that telepathy is real. They simply haven’t proven it yet in a controlled, scientific setting, or if they have, they haven’t reported it.”
“That doesn’t do me much good,” I said. “I have to convince a judge that my witness is reliable.”
“Perhaps your judge will have an open mind about it,” she said. “It really isn’t that hard to accept. Thoughts are a type of electromagnetic energy, although we don’t yet understand precisely how the energy originates or is dispersed. Is the idea that a person can generate a wave of energy that can be received and interpreted by another person so ludicrous? Especially in the case of identical twins? You might want to gather some of the research that the British have done on identical twins and mental telepathy and present it to the court. I’m sure you’d find it fascinating.”
“What about telekinesis?” I said. “My witness says her twin sister doesn’t have the same telepathic connection, but she can interfere with electricity. Have you seen evidence of that?”
“I’ve seen things far beyond the ability to manipulate electrical fields. The human mind is a powerful, powerful tool when one knows how to use it.”
“What are the chances that you could catch a plane here tomorrow and testify for me on Monday morning?” I said. “The state of Tennessee will take care of all the expenses, and I’ll make the travel arrangements myself.”
There was a long silence.
“Oh, my,” she said. “Could you excuse me for a moment?” She sounded like something had upset her; then I heard the phone drop to the floor. I waited for at least three minutes, the line dead silent. Finally, she came back on.
“I apologize; I’ve just had a bit of a fright,” she said. “I’m trembling all over.”
“Is everything all right?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said, “and I’m afraid I’ll have to turn down your offer to testify on Monday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Can I ask you why?”
“I can’t tell you precisely, but I sense that something very evil is going on ar
ound you. There won’t be a hearing on Monday.”
Sunday, November 9
The house where Lee Mooney and his wife lived was tucked into a small grove of white oak trees just off the thirteenth hole at a country club halfway between Boone’s Creek and Jonesborough. As Leon Bates pulled his car into the driveway, he marveled at the sheer size of the place. The house was three stories, finished with brick and stone, and looked to be at least five thousand square feet. How could one man, one woman, and one child possibly use all of that space?
It had been a warm day, a welcome break from the unseasonably cold weather of the past couple of weeks. The sun was shining brightly, and Bates felt its warmth on his face as he walked towards the front door and rang the bell. He was greeted by a pink-faced Lee Mooney, fresh from the links, still wearing his blue sweater vest and his matching blue pants. Bates had called Mooney early in the morning to tell him he had something of grave importance he needed to talk about, but Mooney had put him off until after his Sunday golf game.
Mooney led Bates through an opulent foyer dominated by a crystal chandelier, across marble tile and cherry floors into a beautifully furnished study that looked out over the golf course.
“Drink?” Mooney said as Bates sat down in a plush, high-backed leather chair.
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t mind if I have one, do you?”
“Knock yourself out. It’s probably a good idea.”
“I see you wear your uniform even on Sunday,” Mooney said.
“I wear it when I’m working.”
“So you’re working today?”
“Sure am. That’s why I’m here.”
Bates watched as Mooney finished fixing a vodka martini. He dropped three olives from a jar into his glass and carried the glass to his desk. Rather than sit down in the seat next to Bates, Mooney slid in behind his desk.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Mooney said.
Bates leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and watched Mooney carefully.
“Ain’t no point in beating around the bush, Lee. I arrested Alexander Dunn this morning.”