by Kyle Mills
Mark Beamon stopped in the doorway and surveyed the half-full restaurant/bar. The light was dim, but he was still able to pick Carrie out of the crowd. She seemed completely absorbed by the television bolted to the wall across from her, and Beamon followed her gaze to the glowing image of Robert Taylor. He was speaking to a small group of elderly people, wearing a tasteful sweater and no tie. The sound was off, but he was undoubtedly trying to convince them that he had the power to turn America’s culture back into that of a black-and-white sitcom. It was Carrie’s one quirk—she actually followed and bought into all this political bullshit. The woman dressed up to vote.
Fortunately, the circus that had been this year’s presidential election was starting to die down at this point. The press was already treating Taylor like the new chief executive, and even hard-core liberals seemed to be okay with the selection, though they were trying not to be too obvious. In the end, they were just grateful that David Hallorin hadn’t been able to get his campaign out of the cellar.
Beamon wandered to the bar, keeping out of Carrie’s line of sight. “Light beer,” he said to the bartender. “Whatever you’ve got.”
The man dug a Budweiser out of the cooler and twisted the top off. “Do you have a table? I can have a waitress bring this over and put it on your bill.”
Beamon answered by digging a live out of his pocket and slapping it on the bar. He wasn’t quite ready for Carrie yet. The phone conversation he’d had with her earlier that day had been filled with unusual and uncomfortable silences that he’d expected but hadn’t been prepared for. It seemed as if almost overnight the casual ease of their relationship had been replaced by tension and awkwardness. He asked himself for the thousandth time if he’d done the right thing. And for the thousandth time, the answer was that he didn’t know.
Beamon took a few sips of his beer and watched Taylor shake the wrinkled hands of his audience with the exaggerated warmth achieved only by the most accomplished politicians. When the scene cut to a commercial and Carrie’s attention turned back to the glass of wine in front of her, Beamon started slowly weaving his way through the tightly packed tables toward her.
“Carrie,” he said putting a hand on her shoulder and then quickly slipping into the chair across from her. He hoped that he had made the maneuver look effortless, but in actuality he had carefully designed it to put enough physical distance between them to solve the “to kiss or not to kiss” conundrum. “How are you?”
“Fine,” Carrie said with a hesitant smile. “The question is, how are you?”
“Good. I’m good.”
Another one of those silences.
“What’s going on with the FBI?”
He shook his head. “I still have some time to think about it. Until I make a decision, I don’t think they’re very interested in talking to me.”
She nodded, then they stared at each other for a while. Finally, she moved her hand across the table to a stapled stack of papers bristling with sticky notes. Darby Moore’s diary.
“What did you make of it?” Beamon said, more anxious to end the excruciating lull in their conversation than to actually hear her analysis.
“I take it that this was written by the girl you’re looking for?”
Beamon grabbed a menu and buried his face in it. “Darby Moore. What do you think about pizza?”
She ignored the question. “You think this girl killed her ex-boyfriend Tristan Newberry?”
The fact was, he was beginning to wonder. There were too many unlikely players and non sequiturs in this case. He was here hoping that Carrie could convince him again that this was just a simple case of love gone wrong. “You tell me.”
“I’m a psychiatrist, Mark. Not a profiler. You must know twenty people who could have done a better job on this than me.”
Beamon dropped the menu and spread his hands in an innocent gesture. “This is my private sector debut, Carrie. No more FBI to back me up. You have a bunch of letters after your name, so you came to mind….”
That, of course, was a complete lie—and there was part of him that hoped she knew it was. Besides, the profilers he knew didn’t have any advantage over her in brainpower that he could see.
“Okay,” Carrie said, centering the copied diary in front of her. “I’ve got sections marked in here if you want to read them later—they’re categorized as Miscellaneous, Tristan, Power, and Death. Stuff I figured you’d be interested in.”
He nodded vigorously as he tried to flag down a waitress.
“There’s a very unusual dichotomy, here….” The way she dragged out the word unusual seemed to indicate that it was a euphemism for bananas. Carrie was about to tell him precisely what he wanted to still believe but couldn’t: the girl was a little wacky and just snapped. Happened every day. To normal people—ones with homes, spouses, kids, jobs. People who wore watches and knew what day it was. Right?
“At times, her writing can be very lyrical,” Carrie started. “She describes amazing adventures and seems very positive even in the face of hardships that would probably kill you or me. What she has to say about the places she goes and the people she meets is very insightful and sometimes kind of… beautiful.”
“I saw a bunch of her photographs from Borneo,” Beamon said. “They were spectacular. People, landscapes, architecture. Really amazing.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Carrie turned to one of the many marked pages in the diary and read a brief but touching passage about the sound and smell of the rain in the jungle. When she was finished, she turned the entire document around so that Beamon could see the water smudges in the blocky handwriting.
“She was actually sitting in the rain while she wrote?” Beamon said.
“No, that’s the interesting part. She was looking out the window of a hut in the middle of nowhere. The smudges are from sweat—she’d been horribly ill with some kind of jungle fever. Despite that, though, she sat up and wrote this passage.”
Beamon finally captured a waitress and pointed to the vegetarian pizza. Their normal compromise. “I don’t know, Carrie,” he said as the waitress hurried off. “You should have seen this kid, Tristan. He was killed with an ice axe—looked like he’d been run over by a rototiller. Doesn’t sound like the work of a twenty-seven-year-old girl who likes to write about the sound of the rain.”
“I’m going through the positive stuff first. You never let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“There are a few mentions of Tristan in here, but not really that many. She writes about him only in contexts—by that I mean, she’ll write about a trip that he was on or something they did together. She felt very close to him and there was a real affection between them. They definitely slept together and he was apparently quite gifted in that area, but no real passion comes through. It’s like they knew that their lives would never mesh, and so they never really let themselves sink too deeply in their feelings for each other.”
“Uh huh,” Beamon said, and finished his beer with a final gulp.
“As far as her lifestyle goes,” Carrie continued, “she seems to have only one true passion: climbing. I’ll tell you, after reading everything she wrote about it, I’m dying to try it.”
Beamon rolled his eyes.
“Money, a home, long-term relationships—they don’t seem to be a priority for her. It’s interesting, a lot of her friends are a little dishonest in the way they support themselves without working—not stealing per se, but scamming. She’ll have none of it. You know why?”
Beamon shook his head.
“Because she feels sorry for us. People who work their lives away and never have a chance to really pursue the things they love. She thinks that it would be unconscionable for her to take things from a group of people who have only things.”
This was all very educational, but he was more interested in the lurid details—they were his last hope. “I haven’t really looked at that thing, Carrie, but the sheriff who found it read me a bunch of stuff
about a weird inferiority complex she had.”
Carrie flipped a few pages and read aloud. “‘Sometimes I think men never grow up but are in a perpetual stage of preadolescence. Speed on the playground and accuracy with a ball gets replaced with contests of power that they wrap everything they are up in and try to drag me into.’” She looked up at him. “This is what I’m talking about with the dichotomy—it’s almost schizophrenic. On one hand you have this girl who just seems to float along through life pursuing what she loves and ignoring everything else, and on the other hand, you have a woman who has this unhealthy relationship to men in general. The diary doesn’t go back very far, so I don’t have anything on her childhood. I’d be very interested to meet her father.”
“Dead,” Beamon said. “No living relatives at all to speak of.”
“Well, maybe there’s something there. Her ideas on death are kind of unusual. There’s no mention of God or religion, more a philosophy of death being a part of the cycle of life.”
Beamon shrugged. “People love writing philosophical crap about death. But we all react the same when we’re faced with it.”
She flipped to another page and slid the diary over to Beamon. The writing was almost illegible. The letters were large and imprecise, consisting of shaky lines and large streaks of ink. “She’s in a tent here, Mark. Somewhere in Asia. Her friend is dead, and it’s her expectation that she’s not far behind. I’d say that she was being faced with it.”
Beamon read what he could in the dim light. Carrie was right. It was a farewell. The overall theme was simple. No regrets. He wondered how many people could say that same thing sitting alone in the frozen darkness waiting for the Grim Reaper to ski up to them.
“So what we’re seeing here,” Carrie said, “is the part of Darby Moore that could have committed this crime. There may even be a clue as to what drove her over the edge.”
“Really?” Beamon said, a little too enthusiastically. “That’d be great.”
Carrie looked at him strangely for a moment, then flipped to a page toward the end. “She goes on a trip with two men and suffers from a horrible feeling of powerlessness. It’s here that the earlier passages come together in a picture of a woman who is obsessed with dominance.”
Beamon skimmed the section of the page that had been highlighted. Carrie was right—Darby seemed to write about her feelings in a casual, good-natured tone, but they were clearly there and definitely strong. He flipped back a page and skimmed it.
Chris and Fred have completely dominated me this entire trip and there’s just nothing I can do about it.
Chris and Fred. Beamon scrunched up his face and slid the diary back onto the table. Chris and Fred …
“Is something wrong, Mark?”
“No. I’m okay, go on.”
“The indifference—no, that’s the wrong word—acceptance of death I don’t think is important in and of itself. Just because you’ve faced death before doesn’t mean you’d find it easier to kill someone. But when you combine it with her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, you may have someone capable of something like this….”
Beamon closed his eyes and let out a low moan. When he opened them again, he said, “What if none of that powerlessness stuff was there? What then?”
“I don’t think you can just ignore the entire side of her personality that would—”
“Humor me.”
She was silent for a moment. “Okay. I would say it was very unlikely that she could do something like this. She loves life, has no violent fantasies that she expresses in writing, and most importantly, had never allowed her feelings for Tristan Newberry to progress. If anything, I think she’d have been happy for him if he found another woman.”
Beamon’s beer bottle was empty, so he reached across the table and started in on her glass of wine. “I was reading about this climbing route that just got done. It overhangs like fifty degrees. The crux—the hardest move—is one where you have half of the first digit of two fingers in a tiny hole, your feet are on two things the size of nickels stuck to the rock and you have to jump for a hole that will only fit one finger.”
“Really? That doesn’t sound possible, does it?” Carrie said slowly, obviously wondering where this sudden change in subject was going.
“Darby’s friends Chris and Fred were the ones who finally did it. They’re considered two of the most powerful climbers in the world. Either one of them could do multiple pull-ups off a single pinky.”
Carrie stared at him for a moment. “Physical power. Are you saying that Darby is writing about physical power?”
Beamon put his head in his hands and stared down at the table. “There are entire books written on it. Magazine articles. Studies. Climbers are obsessed with it. Getting strong enough to make it to the next level.”
Carrie flipped through some of the marked pages in the diary, quickly scanning each one and finally stopping at the last sticky note. “‘Men have no respect for a woman’s power. They have to be shown over and over again and then still make excuses and deny it. What’s wrong with them?’” she read and then dropped the copied diary on the table. “I feel really stupid.”
“You feel stupid? I’ve been thinking about this thing twenty-four hours a day for the last week. Shit.”
“If she didn’t do it, then who did? And where is she? Do you think someone might have her?”
“I know for a fact no one does,” Beamon said. “Or at least no one did as of a few days ago.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” he said through a mouthful of thumbnail. “Maybe she and Tristan were attacked and she got away. Then she found out she was a suspect and just kept on running.” That theory didn’t work on an impressive number of levels. “Or maybe the person I’m working for killed him and he’s got to get to her to keep her quiet.”
“What would make you say that?”
“I’m being paid too goddamn well. Good guys are notoriously cheap. Shit.” He leaned back and forced a smile, despite the growing feeling that this situation was going to get his ass shot off. “Never a dull moment, huh? How’s Emory?”
twenty-six
Mark Beamon climbed the stairs as quietly as he could without actually looking suspicious. The building was silent around him, as he’d expected. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and the apartment complex he was in screamed low-income working class. Anyone who was making enough for mom to stay home with the kids was living a few blocks north, and the temporarily or terminally unemployed were spread out to the south.
At the top of the stairs, Beamon turned right and quickly found the door to Tristan Newberry’s apartment. There was no police tape—again, as he’d expected. Bonnie Rile in Fayetteville had warned Tristan’s parents and the landlord about entering the apartment, but had taken the perfectly reasonable position that there was no reason to rush out and search it.
Beamon looked around him at the empty hall and reached into his trench coat for the half-sized crowbar propped under his arm. He shoved one end between the door and jamb and leaned his body weight into it. The old wood gave easily but not without a protest that echoed through the hallway. He slipped through the half-open door and forced it closed behind him, cursing his lack of skill with locks. If he was going to keep doing this kind of thing, he was going to have to find someone to teach him a little finesse. Perhaps that was the bright side to his impending imprisonment—a chance to learn from the pros.
The apartment was pleasantly messy and just a bit dirty, with worn, mismatched furniture strategically placed to make the most of the limited space. The living room and kitchen were more or less combined into one open area with only two doors in it, the one he’d just come through and one at the back through which he could see the edge of an unmade bed.
The question now was what the hell was he here to find?
He’d started this case calculating an eighty percent chance that Darby had just gotten plain pissed off and killed
her boyfriend. God knew that statistics supported the fact that if you were going to be hacked to pieces, it was going to be done by someone who loved you.
He’d given half of the remaining twenty percent to the possibility that Darby was currently the love slave of two guys named Clem and was residing in a shack somewhere deep in the woods of West Virginia. Her visit to Wyoming seemed to debunk that theory.
The last ten percent, as it always was, had been reserved for the “something else” category: papal conspiracy, spontaneous combustion, or whatever.
But now where was he? There were at least two private investigations into this incident that he knew of, he had mysterious out-of-state cops sniffing around for Darby, he had a diary that suggested Darby’s relationship with Tristan Newberry was more warm than hot, and a murder weapon that may or may not have been hers. His “something else” category had ballooned to a healthy seventy percent.
The shaky theory that this was about Tristan and not Darby was about all he had left. As it turned out, finding a girl with tentative human relationships and the ability to live for six months on thirty-eight cents and a couple of fruit roll-ups wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped.
Beamon decided to start his search with the refrigerator. As he’d suspected, it contained the remnants of a six-pack. He doubted Tristan would miss one little beer, so he took one and tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the top.
Setting the beer down on the counter next to two breadcrumb-covered dishes, Beamon slipped on a pair of brand- new latex gloves. It took less than a minute to find a combination corkscrew/bottle opener in the bottom of one of the kitchen drawers. He carefully wiped off any prints he might have left on the bottle and opened it. The beer smelled bitter—one of those goddamn microbrews—but it was better than nothing.
He noted the empty wine bottles next to the two plates and the similarly crumb-covered cutting board, and tried to reconstruct Darby and Tristan’s second-to-last evening together.
Darby had probably just popped in unannounced. That fit with what little he knew of her personality. Besides, an anticipated visit from an old girlfriend would have rated a better dinner and at least a partial tidying of the apartment. So she’d showed up and they’d cracked open a couple of bottles and gotten fairly drunk, based on the fact that they were both as skinny as rails.