Lauren approached the female dispatcher seated at a makeshift front desk. After explaining who she was, Lauren was waved to a wooden bench and told to wait. “Sorry about the zoo,” the woman said as a buzz saw screamed from the next room. Lauren just nodded, too preoccupied to be concerned with the disorderliness of the police station.
A few minutes later, Steve Conway emerged from an inner office. He also apologized for the untidiness, and for keeping her waiting, but he told her it would be at least another hour before he would be able to speak with her. “We’re in the middle of taking Phipps’ statement,” Steve said. “It could be quite awhile.”
“Did he confess?”
Steve moved closer and lowered his voice. “He’s just at the beginning of his story, but let’s just say that, although your ability to follow directions isn’t top-notch, your intuition sure is.”
Lauren smiled sheepishly until the full impact of his statement hit her and she once again heard Gabe talking to Nat. “You know me,” Gabe had told his editor, “I always get what I want in the end.” She felt an odd clutch of fear in her stomach and was glad she was sitting down. “My intuition on everything?”
“Later,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Is there anyone else you can think of who I should talk to? Anyone, with additional information who could help me get a better grip on this mess?”
She explained a bit more about Deborah and Gabe’s relationship and reminded him how much Dan Ling knew.
“I’ve got Ling working on it right now. Looks like I owe that boy one hell of an apology—you too, I guess.”
Lauren waved her hand. “Who could’ve known?”
“Why don’t you take a walk?” he suggested. “Get some air. A bite to eat. Come back in about an hour.”
Lauren found a pay phone in a drugstore on the next block and called Todd. She reached him at his darkroom. “It looks like they’ve caught the kidnapper,” she said. “And maybe Jackie’s murderer too.” Feeding the phone change as she went along, she told him the whole story. When she finished, there was silence on the other end of the line.
“Please deposit twenty-five cents for an additional three minutes,” ordered a whiny recorded voice.
Todd waited for the ding of the coin before he spoke. “How are you doing?”
“A little shaky at the moment, but I’ll be fine.”
“It’s just so incredible. Gabe Phipps. You never really know people, do you?”
Lauren barked a laugh without humor. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“Oh, Lauren, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all right,” she interrupted. “I deserved it.”
“You want me to come down there?” he offered. “I can call Aunt Beatrice and see if she can take Drew for a couple of hours.”
“No, I’m okay. Really. You spend some time with Drew—he had another tough time last night.”
“Well, he apparently had a better morning.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just got a call from Dr. Berg. Remember she told us Drew’s behavior in the next few weeks would be crucial in determining whether his inability to control his anger was serious?”
“Who could forget the threat of McLean?”
“Well, apparently Drew became very frustrated this morning in school—something about a girl in his group not letting him do the part of the project he thought he was supposed to do. Anyway, instead of lashing out at the girl, Drew stormed out of the classroom and went down to Dr. Berg’s office. He marched up to her desk and demanded, ‘Okay, now what am I supposed to do?’”
“And this is a good thing?” Lauren asked slowly.
“According to Dr. Berg, it’s great progress. She thinks it’s a pretty strong indication that the intervention is working. That our boy is headed in the right direction.”
“Well,” Lauren said, her mood beginning to lift for the first time all day. “That’s really great. Terrific even.”
“Do you think I should tell Drew about Gabe?” Todd asked. “Maybe it would make him feel safer if he knew the kidnapper was caught.”
Lauren’s spirits sagged again, and she stared around her at the old-fashioned drugstore; it actually had a scuffed hardwood floor, but the pharmacy counter was staffed by a tall woman with reddish purple hair and black fingernails. “Let’s wait until I’ve talked with Steve Conway. Things aren’t always what they seem.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Todd repeated her words with a laugh. “You know,” he added, “this really is terrific news.”
“I guess.” Lauren flipped the coin return slot on the phone. “It just hasn’t sunk in yet.”
“It’s all over,” Todd said. “The creepy packages, the looking over your shoulder, the worrying about Drew—and about you. You can even go back to Rebeka Hibbens. Finish your book and get your degree like you planned.”
“I can, can’t I?” Lauren asked as the enormity of what had occurred began to dawn on her. She might have lost a potential job, a lover, and a good deal of her innocence, but she had gotten her safety and security back—as well as her dissertation. With a start she realized that the Immortalis was tonight—and that there was now nothing to keep her from going. “I hadn’t even thought …”
“Something else is over too.”
Lauren caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Oh?” she asked, her heart pounding.
“I broke it off with Kara.”
“Todd, I can’t even begin to think about—”
“Can you think about little baby girls?”
When the recording started demanding money again, Lauren said, “Let me run. I’ll talk to you after I’ve had some sleep and some time to think. Give Drew a kiss for me and tell him I’ll pick him up at school tomorrow.”
“And the baby girl?” Todd asked, a teasing tone to his voice.
Lauren laughed. “I’ll give her some thought too.” The phone clicked dead in her ear before Todd could answer.
Lauren bought a sandwich and a soda from a mom-and-pop deli across the street. It was too cold for the walk Steve had suggested, so she returned to the police station. Reclaiming her seat on the hard bench, she tried to eat but ended up throwing the sandwich in the trash. She drank the soda, wondering what was happening to Gabe.
Before she got far into her speculations, a hand gripped her shoulder. She looked up into Deborah’s white-brown eyes.
“They told me a little bit about what happened over the phone,” Deborah said. “That man’s even worse than I’d thought.”
Lauren motioned for Deborah to join her on the bench, and they sat in uncomfortable silence until Lauren finally said, “I guess you were right and I had it all backward. The evil wasn’t supernatural at all—it was all too natural: self-interest and greed.”
“The human ego is a powerful thing to behold,” Deborah said. “And not to be underestimated.”
“If you hadn’t given me those pages from the chronicle …” Lauren let her sentence trail off and shrugged her shoulders, still unable to meet Deborah’s eyes. “We might never have known. He might have gotten away with it all.”
“These things tend to work out in one fashion or another,” Deborah assured her. “The sages have a way of keeping the balance.”
Lauren finally looked directly at Deborah. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“Sometimes the most difficult part of belief is letting go of what we hold to be true,” Deborah said.
Lauren nodded. “I wish I could make amends to you all. To you. To Cassandra and Bram—”
She was interrupted by Steve Conway. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Lauren.” He looked at Deborah. “Officer Ling will be with you in a few minutes.”
As Lauren stood, Deborah held onto her hand. “There are no amends to make,” she said. “But if you want to extend them anyway, you’re welcome to join us tonight at White Horse Beach.”
Lauren smiled warmly at Deborah. “I might just do that.” Then she turned and
followed Steve down a hallway and up a flight of stairs.
Steve had the largest desk in a narrow room with Detective Bureau stenciled on the door. He sat down and motioned her to the chair next to his. He leaned toward her and touched her knee. “You okay?” he asked.
Lauren was surprised when her eyes filled with tears. As the tears spilled over onto her cheeks, she began to laugh. “I’m usually a pretty tough person,” she said, her voice quivering. “But you seem to catch me at my weak moments.”
“From what I witnessed today,” he said with a smile, “weak is not the word I’d use to describe you. It’s not easy to stand up to a man like Gabe Phipps.”
“Thanks.” Lauren wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “So tell me what’s happened,” she demanded. “You said my intuition was right. Do you mean about everything?”
Steve leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Gabe has requested a chance to tell you about it himself. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to—and I’d actually recommend against it—but he says it’s important you hear it from him. That it’s the only way you’ll get the whole story.”
Lauren hesitated, not at all sure how she felt about this turn of events. One part of her wanted to confront Gabe, while another part wanted to stay as far away as possible. “Has he been arrested?” she asked.
“His statement is still incomplete.” Steve’s tone left little doubt that Gabe’s arrest was imminent.
Lauren stared at Steve. Gabe had done it. He really had. He had killed Jackie because she had discovered his plagiarism, then he had seduced her so she wouldn’t discover the same thing. He had made love to her, then lied to her; then, knowing full well what it would do to her, he had kidnapped Drew. She felt a fury building within her unlike any anger she had ever known. It started at the core of her being and pushed outward until she felt it in the tips of her fingers. How dare he? How dare he?
“I want to hear it,” Lauren said. “I want to hear it from the scumbag myself.”
Steve stood. “Follow me.” He led her to a room that looked as if it might have been the waiting room of a small hospital—except that it was unlocked for them by a uniformed policeman. The policeman locked the bolt behind them after they entered, then returned to his position next to the door.
Gabe sat slouched in a yellow vinyl chair. His suit was wrinkled and his tie askew, but aside from that he looked remarkably intact. A woman holding a flip phone and balancing a pad on her knee sat to his left; she was clearly his lawyer. Most likely the hotshot from Hubbard and Hobbs he had bragged about.
Gabe bolted upright when he saw Lauren. She stepped back and bumped into Steve, who grabbed hold of her arm and held it.
“Lauren,” Gabe cried. “I want to explain.”
Lauren stared at the handsome man before her. The man who had been on “The Today Show” this morning. The man with whom she had made love yesterday afternoon. The man who had terrified her child, who had murdered her best friend. Lauren clutched her fists into tight balls at her side.
Steve Conway touched her shoulder and nodded to the door, then to the policeman guarding it. Lauren nodded in return, and Steve slipped out of the room.
“Once you’ve heard how it all happened,” Gabe was saying, “I know you’ll understand that it wasn’t my fault. I know you’ll find it in your heart to forgive—”
“This is a very bad idea,” snapped the woman sitting next to Gabe. “As your attorney, it’s my duty to instruct you not—”
“Lauren deserves to hear the truth, Allysa,” Gabe interrupted. “And I’m going to tell it to her. I’m sick of all the lies.”
“Then do it some other time and place,” Allysa ordered. “This is suicide. The policeman is right here—”
“I don’t care where the policeman is,” Gabe interrupted her again. “I’m going to explain it to Lauren now, after which I’m going to finish explaining it to the police.”
“Then you’ll have to do it without me.” Allysa dropped the phone into her briefcase and capped her pen. “It’s impossible for me to represent you if you refuse to take my advice.”
“Fine,” Gabe said calmly. “You may go.”
Allysa stood. “You’re a foolish man, Dr. Phipps.”
“That is quite evident, Ms. St. Gelais,” Gabe said, a self-deprecating smile creasing his face. “Quite evident.”
As the lawyer left, Lauren sat down in a beat-up chair across from Gabe, thinking that despite it all, even in his darkest hour, Gabe could still be charming. “Don’t be fooled by his power and charisma,” Deborah had told her. “The man is evil.”
But Lauren had been fooled.
“Lauren,” Gabe said softly, charmingly, utterly sincere. “I need you to know that this isn’t what it seems. I’m a victim too—a victim of a series of accidents. Horrible, terrible, ghastly accidents, true, but accidents just the same. Will you listen? Will you hear me out?”
Gripping the arms of the muddy brown chair, soiled fuzz poking between her fingers, she said, “Talk.”
Gabe nodded. “As you’ve surmised,” he began, “I did borrow some of Deborah’s materials for A New Social History.”
“Borrowed some of Deborah’s materials?” Lauren was incredulous. “I saw what you ‘borrowed’—and it sure looked like plagiarism to me.”
“But it wasn’t intentional, nor was it just for myself,” Gabe explained. “You saw her work. You’re an historian, you can understand. It was brilliant, extraordinary—bordered on genius. I tried to rewrite it using my own words, I really did. But I just couldn’t put it as simply and as elegantly as Deborah.”
“Are you trying to justify what you did based on the fact that Deborah’s a genius? That she writes elegantly?”
“No, no.” Gabe shook his head. “I’m not trying to justify anything—I’m just explaining my thought process. You see, I figured that, since no one was ever going to read her chronicle, I was actually doing the historical community a favor by sharing her ideas with them.”
“That’s bullshit!” Lauren exploded. “Complete and utter bullshit. I don’t care about your convoluted excuses for what you did to Deborah, I want to know about what you did to Jackie—and to Drew.” Her eyes filled with tears and she angrily blinked them away.
“It was all an accident,” Gabe said. “I never meant for her to die. I just wanted her to keep quiet.”
Lauren sucked in her breath. Gabe had killed Jackie. Then he had stood staring sadly out Simon’s window, pretending a grief he didn’t feel. The bile of hatred soured Lauren’s stomach. The man was disgusting, despicable. As Deborah had said: He was even worse than she had thought.
“After Jackie called to tell me she had read the chronicle,” Gabe continued as if unaware of Lauren’s reaction, “I went to her house to try to reason with her. But she resisted my appeals to our friendship, to the university, to the prestige of the department. She insisted she was going to the dean first thing the next morning.”
Gabe’s eyes glowed with self-righteousness. “I became so angry at her stubbornness, I reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders. I shook her. I probably shouldn’t have, but I was so upset that she refused to see it from my perspective. And I needed to make her understand.
“She caught me by surprise and kneed me in the groin. I had to let go, and when I did, she fell and hit her head on the leg of the dining room table. I didn’t kill her. She fell. She fell. You’ve got to believe that.”
“Is that when I arrived on the scene?” Lauren asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “When you ran out the back door and left Jackie to die?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Gabe said. “I was confused. Disoriented. So I just grabbed the chronicle and got the hell out of there.”
“Was it fun playing the angry sorcerer? Sending Jackie and me poppets and Bellarmine urns?” Lauren clenched her fists to keep from hitting him. “Breaking into my house. Lighting candles. You stole Herman. You killed him. And th
en, and then …” She couldn’t even say the words.
“I never meant to hurt you—or Drew. I just wanted to scare you away from the coven so you wouldn’t read the chronicle. I was forced into more and more drastic actions because you refused to take my threats seriously.”
“So you’re telling me it was my fault?” Lauren spat. The great Dr. Ego, Deborah had called him. “Never underestimate the power of a man with limitless ambition,” Deborah had said. But, once again, Lauren had failed to heed Deborah’s warning.
“No, no, of course not.” Gabe ran his hands through his hair. “You know, I’m starting to believe there really is a curse on that damn chronicle. Because all this is so bizarre. So capricious. So unlike me. Why else would I have returned the chronicle to Deborah? Why would I have done something so stupid unless there was a powerful force making me do it?” he demanded, his eyes begging Lauren to agree with him. “There has to be some powerful, awful, evil force.”
Lauren just shook her head.
“A couple of nights after Jackie’s death, I dreamed a raven ordered me to bring the chronicle back to Deborah. So, like some idiot in a sleepwalking limbo, I got up in the middle of the night, got dressed, and did what the bird said. Now why would I do what some dumb bird told me to do?” Gabe dropped his head to his hands. “I haven’t slept in weeks,” he said. “It’s been so awful for me. Hiding so much. Hurting you. Deceiving you.”
“It hasn’t exactly been a picnic for me,” Lauren snapped. “Or for Drew.”
“I was desperate.” Gabe lifted his head, and for the first time that day, Lauren saw a flicker of remorse in his eyes. “When you told me Deborah had offered to let you read the chronicle, I was beside myself. I knew once you read it, the whole thing would blow wide open. So I came up with the kidnapping idea—but I was never going to hurt Drew, I swear I wasn’t.”
“Well, you did hurt him, you hurt him plenty,” Lauren said. “And you hurt me too.” How could she have been so stupid? she wondered. So blind?
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