Fear the Darkness: A Thriller

by Becky Masterman

  I hadn’t brought my earphones to muffle the fire for a reason. I wanted to blast the sound of Gemma-Kate’s voice out of my head.

  The cold range light stopped flashing as I sighted the target. “Hot range,” the loudspeaker said. I clenched my jaw and loosened my grip that fought against the trembling. I fired at the target, and fired again and again. I was hitting it pretty good but didn’t really care. Mostly what I was going for was the feel of the angry power in my hands and the shout of the rounds as they exited the muzzle. The ping of the bullet as it hit the metal plate was an added satisfaction. I imagined the plate was Gemma-Kate.

  You want death drive? Blam.

  I’ll give you fuckin’ death drive. Blam.

  I did no one harm thinking that way.

  I kept reloading, and shooting, and used up all the shells in the box. When they were gone, along with my hearing, which I trusted was a temporary condition, I waited for the cold range light, pulled in the target for the next person, loaded my gun into its wooden case, and left, calmer than when I’d arrived.

  Along with the calm, the shooting also provided a little clarity of mind that I had been lacking. I went over my options apart from killing Gemma-Kate. Shipping her back home wasn’t one of them; Todd was stubborn and would probably just ship her back. And what would I tell him, you spawned an evil child? Given the Quinn reluctance to accept constructive criticism I knew he wouldn’t take well to that.

  I could put her in a motel until it was time to move into the dorm. That was it, I could put her in a motel close to a McDonald’s and give her a little money every day so she wouldn’t starve. It would be expensive, but worth it to bring the peace back into our home. Then I could bring the other Pug home without worrying. Wait a second, I’d left the Pug in the house. No, that was okay, Gemma-Kate was off hiking with Carlo, so the Pug was safe at home. Carlo. Putting Gemma-Kate in a motel. Carlo would back me on that, wouldn’t he? Would he?

  Then, what would happen when she moved into the dorm?

  My cell phone rang. Thinking it might be Carlo worried about me, wondering too late what kind of spin Gemma-Kate might put on things, I pulled over and rooted around in my tote. It was too late to catch it, but I noticed it was Mallory’s number. I decided to drive home first and call her from there, partly because I was still feeling kind of pissed that she’d told Carlo my secret when I told her not to. That made me think of Mallory, and her unhappy situation.

  I kept trying to get her to come out to the firing range with me, thought it would be good for her, but she always said she hated guns. Hated guns. How do I get mixed up with people who are so not me?

  When I got home I put the gun back into my nightstand without cleaning it immediately as I usually did, and though it was empty and there were no more shells in the house, I still covered the box with some provocative underwear.

  I washed my hands. Rather than pick up messages I figured it would be faster if I just called Mallory back, so I went into my office to call her. I started to, but then I saw the prescription for the movement disorder specialist on the desk next to my computer. Funny, the things you never dream will take more courage that you ever needed in the past.

  Trying to avoid thinking about it turned all the calmness I’d achieved at the gun range into full-on gerbil brain. I thought about everything that had happened since Gemma-Kate arrived, how she had single-handedly fucked up my contented life in Arizona.

  Then I thought again that maybe that was the whole Quinn family, that all of us had more than our share of evil inside. There was that time when I watched a man slowly die and was happy except that it went too fast. Okay, he was bad, he was very bad, but in extremis shouldn’t the impending oblivion of even a bad man make you feel regret? Maybe I, too, lacked that gene or whatever it was that created empathy, that discouraged what Gemma-Kate had called the death drive. Maybe Gemma-Kate was only the culmination of generations of bad-seed evolution. Did it come through Mom’s or Dad’s side? Dad’s probably. You could sort of see it in him.

  Then I thought about something Mom had said once, Mom whose whole philosophy of life was based on other people’s platitudes, a stitch in time saves nine, you work as fast as you eat. Better the devil known than the devil unknown. She knew things about our family.

  Aside from Gemma-Kate, one unknown I had been trying to avoid was Parkinson’s disease. But this was something that was in my power to know. The words of the guy we called Black Ops Baxter, who had trained me to fight, flashed through my skull. It was in the early days when I was afraid of being hurt.

  Don’t be a pussy, Quinn.

  I googled Parkinson’s disease and chose Wikipedia because that was the easiest. I took a deep breath and started to read, feeling ice crawl up my legs as my hands trembled over the keyboard.

  I read through symptoms, prognosis, treatment. Jerky hands, odd gait, cramped handwriting, sensation of freezing, and on through memory loss, anxiety, depression.

  So instead of incontinence, as I sometimes joked, this was what was going to carry me off.

  I’d almost gotten kind of soft about God, thinking he was going to leave me alone for a few years, maybe shitting on easier targets for a while. I thought going to church would placate him. No such luck, Quinn, you’re in the divine crosshairs now. Life with Carlo was just a way of showing you everything you’re going to miss.

  And to hell with my self-pity. What about Carlo? Carlo married a woman who could best him at arm wrestling. Now he was going to find himself married to a woman with a disease so debilitating he would have to push her around in a wheelchair. I thought of Owen with poor Mallory. Poor Carlo, people would say. Seven years ago he lost his first wife to cancer. Now he’d lose his second wife to some slow wasting neurological disease. He hadn’t signed up for this gig.

  Would Carlo take care of me the way Mallory took care of Owen? Would I want him to?

  I thought about how only a few hours ago I had been angry with Mallory for telling Carlo that I was afraid I had Parkinson’s. She had her own problems, and she had done what she did out of love. So get over it, Quinn.

  It’s funny how I now had both a husband and a friend, and yet until now I had never felt quite so lonely. I wanted Carlo and Gemma-Kate to come home. At the same time I was cheered by imagining her fallen off a cliff, her skull crushed against the rocks below. Maybe there was something to it, that death drive.

  I thought about the fury that she had inspired in me, the chaos she had brought into my world, with seeming purpose. I thought about looking into those eyes and seeing nothing, or worse.

  But I had no evidence. I needed evidence. Evidence. I sat there repeating the word again and again, my fingers still resting on the keyboard. And then I almost laughed because it was right there in front of me. Looking through her room and all the cupboards in the kitchen was a waste of time. Gemma-Kate had been using my computer. All I had to do was look at the browsing history to find the evidence. When I did, I saw all the words she had searched on.

  Bufotenine. The toad poison. Of course.

  Some random selections, sibutramine, chloral hydrate, sodium disulfide. Ketamine.

  Neurotoxins.

  Ah, ethylene glycol. Antifreeze.

  I thought again about the pile of books I’d seen in Gemma-Kate’s room. Now I exited from the browsing history I’d found and went back in there, knelt before the pile that she hadn’t bothered to hide. Sure, there was Carlo’s Man and Superman. I’d never read it, but I could see from the author’s name that Gemma-Kate had quoted it. Yeah, Gemma-Kate would think she’s superman, all right, and the rest of us were some inferior race. I brushed that book and a couple other philosophy titles aside, and hit the good stuff.

  Karch, Pathology of Drug Abuse

  Dean and Powers, Forensic Toxicology

  Jain, Drug-Induced Neurological Disorders

  Caligiuri and Mohammed, The Neuroscience of Handwriting

  What was I, another home experiment like the Pug?
Or had I inadvertently done something to make her angry? Was I on my way to becoming another victim? She might have slowed me down, but she hadn’t stopped me yet. It was time to call Sigmund.

  Forty–three

  Sigmund isn’t his real name. It’s David, David Weiss. But like all of us in law enforcement he had a nickname that said something about him. In his case, he was a psychologist, a behavioral profiler who helped start the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the eighties. We had been chums for as long as I could remember, part of the same training class. I think once or twice we had had sex, which tells you something about how memorable it was, and what was the true nature of our relationship. I loved him, and I love him still. Feelings are not all neat and compartmentalized that way. I wouldn’t like to think about Carlo having the feelings for another woman that I have for this man.

  I was always called Stinger. Some may surmise it’s because I’m small but hurt like hell, but it’s less clever than that. When we graduated from the academy we all got drunk, I on that drink popular at the time, made of crème de menthe and brandy. The thought of them still makes me queasy. They were called Stingers, and Stinger stuck.

  So that’s how the conversation always started.

  “Sig.”

  “Stinger.”

  No how are you; Sigmund is practically one hundred percent cerebral, like talking to Mr. Spock on a boring day.

  Sigmund said, “Skype me.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something in your voice I can’t quite read. I want to see what you look like.”

  And all I had said was his name. The guy knows me. I touched my face and felt the roughness of the scabs peppering the bridge of my nose and forehead. “I can just tell you, I’m not looking too good,” I said.

  There was stubborn silence on his end of the line, so with a “You asked for it,” I clicked on the icon and then the little green phone to call him. As I did so, I noted that Peter Salazar’s number was already on the contact list, but I didn’t think much on it because Sig’s face popped onto my screen.

  He was a heavy, bearded man whose aging face had shocked me when last year I saw him for the first time in a while. I had grown accustomed to this older version then, and saw that the smaller inset of my own face on the screen was faring much worse than his if you took into account the black and blue patches and scabs.

  He said, “That’s better. I’ve never liked phones. There’s always a piece of the other person missing.” He took a few moments to examine my face. “You’re right, you look like hell.”

  I felt the first smile of the day tug at the corners of my bruised lips and didn’t mind that it reopened a little cut on the bottom one. Sig could do that to me at the worst of times, and if you told him he was funny he would deny it. I gave him a brief description of the accident so he wouldn’t worry.

  “Why did you call?” he asked.

  “To hear the voice of sanity,” I admitted.

  He stared at me without response, looking like a cross between Freud and Winnie-the-Pooh, waiting until I was ready to talk.

  “I need to talk to you about psychopathy,” I said.

  “Have you been worried again about where you fall on the empathy scale? I told you if you stopped working you’d start to brood.”

  “It’s my niece, Gemma-Kate. Todd and Marylin’s girl. She’s come to stay with us.”

  “And how is the bad seed?” Sig knew all about my family from many talks over the years.

  “I don’t think we were joking. I think she’s really a psychopath,” I said.

  “They’re calling it Antisocial Personality Disorder now.”

  “When are they going to get the name right and call it Piece of Shit Syndrome?”

  “I admit the term takes away all the mustache-twirling sadism. You have to excuse the psychologists who write the diagnostic manual. They make up these terms because ‘crazy’ lacks elegance. Why, have you been reading again?”

  “Don’t fuckin’ patronize me, Sig.”

  “It’s just that this business comes in and out of fashion. A couple of years ago every novel had a psychopathic character.”

  “Look, I haven’t forgiven you for not trusting my instincts when I told you that agent was abducted. And I was right, wasn’t I? I’m making connections here, Sig, so when I tell you this kid creeps me, pay attention.”

  “What has she done?” he asked.

  I wasn’t ready to share my suspicions about the dead guy at church, but I told him about my symptoms, and about finding the browsing history on my computer for all kinds of substances I myself hadn’t searched for.

  “And you’re certain there’s a link between the browsing and your symptoms?”

  “Yes. Because she definitely poisoned one of the Pugs. And the poisons she searched? The substance she used on the Pug was one of them.”

  He hitched around in his chair some, a huge reaction for Sigmund. “Well, that is significant. Give me the details.”

  “That’s much better, thanks.” I told him how it happened, how I discovered where she had buried the toad, and how she denied it.

  “Unmotivated cruelty.” He nodded. “How old is she now?”

  “Going on eighteen.”

  “It may have taken a longer time than one would assume, but of course this may only be the incident we know of.”

  “And then when she was forced to admit it she tried to turn it so that all the trouble was my fault, for what she called overreacting.”

  “Fascinating,” Sigmund said.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “The idea of your overreacting, I mean,” he said with a straight face. When I didn’t laugh he went on. “I remember your talking about Gemma-Kate from time to time. Her father was detached from her rearing, her mother too sick to give her much attention. Her grandparents would have been in denial or as a result of their own pathologies wouldn’t see anything wrong with her. And there’s nothing you nor I can do about it. It can be frightening. You say she’s functioning well?”

  “Apparently she got her GED early and was getting good enough grades at the community college in Florida so she didn’t have any trouble getting into the university here.”

  He nodded again. “Elevated IQ, but lacking empathy. As children, they slip under the radar because we aren’t born empathetic. You don’t expect a small child to feel from another’s point of view. We’re born thinking the whole universe revolves around us. One big lump of egocentricity in the crib. Then, hopefully, we grow and learn to realize it’s not so.”

  He went off into his own head again. I tapped on the screen as if it would get his attention back. “Gemma-Kate,” I reminded him.

  He was half back with me. “Ah yes. If Gemma-Kate has Antisocial Personality Disorder, and that is a very hesitant if—a psychologist doesn’t make this sort of judgment without even seeing the person suspected, let alone delivering a battery of tests—”

  “Just say it, Sigmund, we’re losing daylight.”

  “If Gemma-Kate is what you say, you have no more importance than a wet Kleenex. To her you are one of three things: an amusement, useful, or in the way.”

  “What are the stats on likely outcomes? Is there any hope for her?”

  “Chances are, you’re completely wrong. Or she’s so far on one end of the scale she’ll never go any further than putting back her seat in coach. Maybe she’ll just be annoying in a hundred different little ways that show she thinks the world is hers. You already know that it is the rare confluence of nature, nurture, intelligence, and opportunity that turns Jeffrey Dahmer into a cannibalistic serial killer. More often you get a Bernie Madoff. Or a politician.”

  “What should I do?”

  “If you’re convinced you’re being harmed, you already know. You do whatever it takes to get her out of the house as quickly as possible.”

  “What, thrust her on an unsuspecting world? Hasn’t anyone developed programs for treatment? Carlo would say we shou
ld help her, that we’re responsible.”

  “The lions count on that from us.”

  “What lions?”

  Sig sighed with the heaviness of the life we both had known. “Someone once said if a lion could talk we still could not understand him. There would be no words in our language he could use to express his lion-ness. Understanding a psychopath is like talking to a lion. They are untreatable because they’re unable to understand that they are different.

  “Stinger, there are creatures that not even your priest can redeem.”

  I agreed and made my decision.

  Forty–four

  Immediately after I disconnected from Sig, Jacquie called, as if she had been waiting in line. Cell phones have made confidential conversations so much easier. She was out of the house, wandering around Sears at the Tucson Mall, which sounded like a depressing thing for a rich woman to do. I told her I knew little more, only that Joe had apparently bragged to Mallory about playing the Choking Game.

  “When?” she demanded. It was definitely a demanding kind of “when.” “When did he tell Mallory?”

  “I don’t know. One day when he was over reading to Owen.”

  “I can’t believe Joe would have told Mallory something and not me.”

  “Oh, you know how Mallory is.”

  “No. I don’t. How is she?”

  “She has a way of eliciting information. I’m sure Joe couldn’t help himself. Besides,” and here I tried to say it so Jacquie wouldn’t get upset, “at a certain age, children tend to start keeping secrets from their parents.”

  “Not Joey. Not from me.” Her voice trembled like a woman who’d been cheated on, one part enraged and one part stricken. “I’ve been thinking. You said Joey had alcohol in his system when he died. Who do you think gave it to him?”

  “There’s no way to tell that.”

  “Do you think it was Mallory Hollinger?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m certain she did not.”

  “I’m going to go over there and ask her myself.” Something in her voice, something vengeful as that of a woman scorned, made me regret sharing the information with her.