I held it up when Laura returned to the room, but she ignored me and went into the kitchen. I followed her and got another glass out of the cupboard for myself, poured a little more vodka. For her part, Laura reached over the fridge to that little cupboard that no one uses. Pushed to the side, just close enough for her fingers to wiggle it forward, was a bottle of port. She used a towel to wipe off the cake of dust that had formed on the sealed cap and neck. She removed the cap and left it off, though I don’t think she had its breathing in mind.
In another cupboard, the one with glasses, she again reached high up and took a red wine glass, the kind with a monstrous bowl, from a set of four on the top shelf. She had to dust that off as well, and then poured half the bottle into the glass. The thought of drinking that much port made even me a little sick to my stomach. She reached into the freezer, threw a few ice cubes into the glass, and swished it.
“You should eat a little something with that,” I said.
She opened the pizza box, took out a slice, and finished it in half a dozen bites. With her mouth still full she said, “Happy now?” At least that’s what I think she said.
Pizza only works so fast. By the time we returned to her desk the port was half gone, and the effects of that on a brain that had no alcohol resistance, plus not having eaten anything for at least a day, could already be seen. She could have made a Guinness record for time to inebriation. Laura swiveled her chair out from her desk and sat down while I remained standing, the envelope in my outstretched hand. “Might as well get it over with in one fell swoop,” I said.
Laura took it listlessly and opened it, assuming as I did that it was the letter Marcus had written to her the night before his execution. So she looked understandably puzzled when she saw the letter was typed, and then she looked terribly hurt, and then angry. “It’s from Alison Samuels,” she said. She scanned it. “It looks like this was her first contact with Marcus, introducing herself.”
She read it aloud.
Dear Mr. Creighton,
My name is Alison Samuels. I work for an organization called the Haven. Because of my affiliation with that organization, though I wasn’t working for them at the time of your conviction for the murder of your wife and children, the case was so sensational that it was still being talked about when I joined them three years ago. I had the opportunity to view photographs of your children that were used to search for them. Others gave up the search, but there was something about your case that would not allow me to give up. I am obsessive by nature, and do not easily give up on any of the children I seek.
I never forgot the faces of your children. While I’m sure you’ve spent all these years regretting your actions, carried out under who knows what circumstances at that time, I feel you must have arrived at the conclusion that you deserve your penalty. Whether you actually killed the children, or whether you abandoned them to someone, their souls still died, even if their bodies are alive today.
As for the purpose of my writing: In the course of my job I’ve come into the possession of a photograph that may be one of your children. It is a photograph of a boy I found recently while doing internet searches on child pornography websites. The child appears to be fifteen years old in the photograph which would have been taken seven years after his disappearance in 1999. I obtained the photograph on record of your son and aged it to fifteen. The photograph I have appears to be your son.
I would like to show you this photograph and get your opinion. With your execution pending I would suppose you willing to speak with me and perhaps shed some light on what happened to the children. Perhaps this information would help me to trace the location of the boy in the photograph.
Her voice cracked here, and I took the letter out of her hand and continued.
Again, perhaps you did not kill your children, or at least not your son. Perhaps some horror at what you were doing made you stop at him. Perhaps you paid someone to do the deed for you, and they profited from this child instead of murdering him. His name, you’ll recall, was Devon. Please think of him. It is a sad circumstance to imagine him being given up and degraded in the way this photograph suggests, for at least seven years, and maybe even now.
I think he was a sweet boy at eight, according to the photograph I have. At fifteen he is handsome, though thin and stooped. I can see the despair only in his dead eyes. Was his life cut short by bondage or by death? If he is still alive he would be twenty-four now, but he is still your child. How can this boy tear my heart apart, but leave yours intact?
You’ll find my card enclosed with this letter should you agree to meet me and look at the photographs. I would bring them with me.
Sincerely,
Alison Samuels
The Haven
I picked up the envelope from where Laura had dropped it on the desk and found three photographs inside. Marcus must have agreed to meet her that first time, and she left the photos with him. The first was one of Devon as a child, taken standing next to what might have been his first two-wheeler. He had that dopey fakey grin that kids give you when you say smile.
The second photograph showed the boy in the first, only aged to somewhere in his teens.
The third photograph in the envelope was a closer-up shot of a boy. This one seemed to have come from an Internet site. That third photograph I won’t describe. There’s no purpose in it. I’ll only say that it could very well have been the same boy, except that he wasn’t smiling anymore.
Laura had slipped down into her chair, head on the back, legs stuck out under the coffee table so her body was in a straight line at a forty-five-degree angle, eyes staring up at the ceiling, blinking. I put the photos on the desk, lining them up in order, youngest, then aged with bicycle, then the one from the porn site. This business seemed to go on and on. Big mistake, giving her that letter.
“She was mistaken, Coleman. We know the boy is dead now. It’s all done.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.” The words came out slowly, carefully chosen, as if she was thinking them for the first time and hardly believing them. “Maybe Samuels knew that kid wasn’t Devon. It was as if she wanted to twist the knife, as if she took out all of her hate for men who hurt children on him.”
“Oh, come on, Coleman. You can’t just make up stories and call them true,” I said.
“Or maybe I know.” She crossed her arms tightly the way I remembered crossing mine at a time when it felt like all of my bones were trying to jump out of my body. “Ever think of that, Brigid? Maybe I know Alison Samuels better than anyone.”
I let her keep drinking her port while I paged through the rest of the photograph album once more. It told a story like any other book. Except that this story was only happy, no sadness, no conflict. It was Christmas trees and birthday wrapping paper and playing with plastic toys in the tub and learning how to ride a bike and swim with flippers in the pool and fishing, just like the Quinn family album. And like any other book, it simply stopped in time like a freeze-frame of life.
Then Laura started voicing her thoughts again, without looking at me. “Did you ever want to kill someone, Brigid? Did you ever get so fucking furious at injustice that the thought of taking a shotgun and blam exploding someone’s face is the only thing that keeps you from actually doing it? I don’t mean that you’re so horrified by your thoughts that you turn away from them. It’s more like the violence comforts your mind, you know what I mean? Imagining it all. When you feel this impotent rage, imagining it feels almost as good as doing it. It feels good.”
I couldn’t decide what was healthier for her, depression or rage. Laura closed her eyes and looked a little dreamy as if she was watching a scene play on the inside of her eyelids. If it was for her own benefit, her thoughts might be heinous. But this way she could call it justice. Sometimes when you’re angry at the whole world, you pick out one piece of it for your reckoning.
* * *
Laura opened her eyes and sat up. Using her hands as much as her sight she searched
around the desk, then got up to do the same on the kitchen counter, and the coffee table that had nothing on it.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Keys. Car,” she said.
Laura always kept her keys in her purse. This was how I knew she was pretty drunk. I wondered if she would go into the desk drawer where I knew she kept her weapons, but she did not. I picked up the box cutter and discreetly moved it under a couch cushion. I was about to grab her purse, which lay in precisely the same spot it always did, on a small table in her front hall. But she remembered and got to it before I could. I wondered what was in the purse besides her keys.
“Where are you going? Let me drive,” I said, but she was already out the front door and into the parking lot of the apartment building before I could grab my own tote, thrust less neatly on the dining room table.
By the time I grabbed it and followed her, Laura had gotten into her own car and was pulling out of her parking space.
I don’t know where she intended to go, but halfway out of the parking lot she passed out in the car and rolled to a stop against the curb. I managed to wake her up long enough to extract her from the driver’s seat, and got her to a patch of grass.
“Nobody cared enough to do something,” she slurred.
“You cared,” I said. “Come on, sit up.”
“Not enough. Not enough to make everyone else care.”
Then she passed out again. I’m pretty strong, but after twenty-four hours without sleep, lifting one hundred and thirty pounds of dead weight was beyond me. It was either bring her a pillow or get some help. By this time the lights were off around the complex, and I risked the supposition that Laura wasn’t chummy with her neighbors. So I called Todd.
He was asleep rather than screwing Madeline, thank goodness; otherwise he might have been crankier. As it was, he answered the phone with a sleepy, “What?”
“I’ve got Laura Coleman passed out in her front yard. Can you come help?”
“Throw some water on her.”
“I tried that,” I lied.
He agreed to come, and, leaving her safely on the lawn, I pulled her car back in to its parking space. Then I sat beside her. The sky was typically cloudy in June, and I couldn’t even imagine where the constellations would be that Carlo had taught me to see in the desert this time of year. The only thing I could spot for sure was Venus. But even a few miles in from the coast the offshore breeze cooled off the night, and there weren’t more than a few mosquitos to swat before Todd arrived.
Between the two of us we got Laura into her bed, took off her shoes, and drew a sheet over her. “Poor kid. She’s not used to drinking, and she hasn’t had water. She’s going to feel like hell in the morning.”
“Sometimes that’s not a bad thing,” Todd said. “It takes the edge off the real hurting.” He was wide-awake now and asked if there was anything to drink in the house. I poured him a vodka over ice in a blue plastic tumbler, which was the only other glass Laura had.
I picked up the bigger pieces from the glass Laura had thrown at the wall. Then I nosed around in Laura’s laundry room and found a whisk broom and dustpan. While Todd and I talked, I cleaned up the broken glass that had sprayed out from the wall where it hit.
“So, Todd,” I started, “this Madeline Stanley. What does she see in you?”
“Come on, Brigid, don’t give me trouble.”
“I’m not. Not really. You seem less angry to me than you used to be. And we all know you did your time.”
I whisked the smaller pieces of glass into the dustpan and tossed them in the garbage pail under the sink. Then I got a wad of paper towels and dampened them.
“I still love Marylin,” he said. “For me it wasn’t doing time.” That’s as cozy as Todd would get, and he changed the subject. He indicated the bedroom with his chin. “What’s the story with that woman?”
“She’s bent out of shape over Marcus Creighton being executed.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, why do Greenpeace activists risk their lives for a porpoise? The thing is, when I met Laura she was a passionate righter of wrongs, and she’s just being herself.” What I didn’t bother to tell Todd was how this passion was intensified if you happened to fall in love.
“Where was she going tonight?” he asked.
I concentrated on running the wet paper towels over the tile floor to make sure I captured any small shards that had missed the whisk broom. I knew to do this from experience in my youth.
“I’m not sure where she was going,” I said. “She was all about wanting to kill someone, and then she passed out.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Alison Samuels maybe. It was that kind of mood where anybody would do.”
The wall would have to wait for some Spackle to fill the crater made by the medicine ball. I didn’t know if Laura had any. We always had some on hand on a shelf in the garage, to patch up the holes that Dad made when he put his fist into a door.
Finished with the cleanup, I got a little drink for myself and settled back down on the couch. “You ever witness an execution, Todd?”
“No,” he said. “Not that many death penalty cases for me at all.”
I said, “I’m starting to rethink the death penalty thing.”
He took a sip of his drink and still didn’t comment.
“Come on, talk to me,” I said.
Todd gave an impatient grunt. “It’s understood that you’re ready to deal out death as soon as you strap on a gun. The ultimate penalty, that’s just paperwork.”
“You ever doubt a case?”
“I play my position,” Todd said.
“You’re hedging. I asked, do you have any doubts about any of the guys who are still in prison because of you?”
“The word they use is reasonable doubt, isn’t it? Not any doubt.”
“I know, I know. But the science is moving so fast. In half the cases where there’s DNA to test, the people are exonerated.”
“I told you, that’s not my position to play. I investigate, I arrest. It’s not my job to decide who lives and who dies.”
“But.”
“Stop pushing me.”
“But.”
Todd’s face hardened with the effort of not remembering something. I could tell because he finally said, “You want a but? Okay. But, there have been a few times I testified when I was damn glad I wasn’t the judge.” He thought some more. “Like God. I’m damn glad I’m not God.”
Thirty
I slept on the couch that night with the help of the vodka and, around six A.M., with Laura still sleeping, I called the intensive care unit at the hospital for Dad’s status. They must have gotten instructions about me, because they were very polite and told me he was still alive and still breathing on his own. I told them I’d be there in the afternoon. They said thank you, as if I was warning them.
Then I turned on the shower in Laura’s bathroom to get it hot, dragged her out of bed, and pushed her through the door.
“I hate you,” she mumbled.
“Good, we can use that. Don’t come out till you’ve showered and put on some workout clothes,” I said, shutting the door. While I checked in with Mom at the hospital (Dad maybe a little better, good, I’d be there in the early afternoon) I nosed around a bit, pocketing just one picture of the three kids, and an extra set of house keys that Laura had in her top desk drawer. I took those in case I needed to get back into her apartment fast at some point, in case for some reason she decided not to answer the door the next time. Not that I thought she was suicidal or anything.
“How did I get an anchovy in my hair?” she asked when she was dressed. “And why are my car keys in the bed?”
“I think you were going to kill Alison Samuels, but I could be wrong,” I said. “Come on, we’re going.”
Laura groaned, but was still in too weakened a condition to protest. I got a couple of water bottles from the fridge and a handful of protein bars from
her pantry, loaded her into the car, and let her direct me to her neighborhood gym. On the way she tried to talk.
“That was really stupid last—”
“No talking. Not yet.” I unwrapped one of the protein bars and handed it to her. “Here, eat this.”
She took a few bites, chewed listlessly, and said, “Oh jeez, I’m gonna throw up.”
“Well, let me know if I should stop. Hertz frowns on vomit in their cars.”
We got to the gym without incident, where I steered Laura gently toward the ellipticals. Nothing rough, just twenty minutes level seven. I did it, too, on the machine next to hers, where I could monitor her progress. “Keep your rpms over a hundred,” I said when she started to lag. “Those tendons doing okay?”
She didn’t speak, didn’t even look in my direction, just nodded, her whole focus on the circles her feet made on the pedals. The perspiration was coming now, even in the cold temperature of the gym. I could smell the soured port wine from four feet away. After a while a stray endorphin even made her smile. “I take it you have some experience with hangovers,” she said.
“Some. Okay, enough warmup. Let’s see what you got.”
We moved out of the area with the cardio equipment, bypassed the fancy machines, and ended in the free-weight room. There were a couple of guys in there, one of them displaying his loud grunting technique more than his strength.
I walked past the rack of weights to the corner where the boxing gloves were thrown in a box and picked up a set that would fit Laura’s hands. I didn’t intend to spar with her. She was in such a mood that I thought even with a hangover she could actually hurt me. So I picked out the pads for myself and held my palms out to receive her punches.
“I get your point,” Laura said. “We don’t have to do this.”
“Humor me,” I said. “Come on. Cross. One-two-one-two-one-two.” She couldn’t resist giving it her all; she was disciplined to the point of obsessiveness, remember? After a couple of dozen crosses I did a variation with uppercut, a dozen more. Good thing I had myself firmly planted or she would have knocked me over. She was sweating profusely now. The wine aroma had grown fainter. We took off the gloves.
A Twist of the Knife Page 19