The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  “If you keep that up,” Jane said, “you’ll dehydrate. Do you know dehydration kills?”

  Petra sprayed words instead of saliva. “Who do you think you are, bitch? What gives you a right to judge me? If there’s a worn-out stinking skank sitting here, you’re it.”

  “He’s never going to marry you, girl.”

  “Shows what you know. He’s getting me a ring. He says he’s not the marrying kind, never has been, but I’ve melted him, melted his heart. So shut your ignorant, filthy mouth and just go away.”

  “As for his not being the marrying kind,” Jane said, “I’m sure his four wives would agree with him.”

  More martinis than were prudent now required Petra to process any fresh bit of important data through a brain that effortlessly produced obscenities and lies and self-deceit but that needed to explore a new fact in the manner that a lifelong blind woman, by touch alone, might feel her way to an understanding of the purpose of a mysterious artifact. She moved her tongue around her mouth as though searching for words and finally found a few. “What a load of crap, four wives, you think I’m stupid?”

  “He marries rich women and takes them for most of what they have, breaks them psychologically if he can, and throws them away.”

  Although Petra interrupted with expressions of disbelief, Jane told her about Sara Holdsteck, the ice-water baths, the contempt of the men urinating in the tub, the Tasering, and the rest of it. “Other wives were gang-raped by his associates. To break them, make them relent. He didn’t really need their money. He’s rich himself. It’s some kind of sick sport to him.”

  “There aren’t four ex-wives,” Petra insisted. “There aren’t four or forty or even one. You’re a liar, that’s all.”

  “One of them is agoraphobic, so afraid of the world, she can’t leave her little house. Two of the others were eventually murdered, maybe because they started to regain their self-esteem, work up the courage to confront him about what he’d done.”

  Petra closed her eyes and sagged in the office chair. “You’re such a rotten liar. Just a lying liar is all you are. I’m not gonna listen anymore. Not letting you in my head. I’m deaf. Stone deaf. Go away.”

  “Your life depends on listening, girl. I’m using Simon to get at his half brother, a very bad guy with powerful allies.”

  “He doesn’t have a brother, half or whole.”

  “A miracle—she hears. His brother is named Booth Hendrickson. They don’t advertise it, because Booth and his pals push government business to Simon’s enterprises. The limo company is the least of it, but he has a fat contract to drive Justice Department officials and other D.C. muckety-mucks when they’re in Southern California.”

  Eyes tight shut, lips pressed together, Petra Quist pretended deafness, twenty-six years old going on thirteen.

  “You think you won’t tell me what I want to know about Simon, but you will. One way or the other, you will.”

  Petra’s pout and a tremor at one corner of her mouth suggested less fear than self-pity.

  Jane said, “When, through Simon, I get at Booth, which I will, and when I get from Booth what I need to know, which I will, these people are going to be in a desperate cover-their-ass mode. Simon’s going to think you didn’t do enough to resist me. More important, he’s going to realize, because of me, you know too much. If he doesn’t slit your throat, kid, he’ll pay the guy who does.”

  “Things are so damn good, the best ever, ever-ever, and then you come along. It’s not right. It’s not fair. What is it with you, you’re so hateful?”

  “My husband was a fine man. Nick. My Nick was the best. These power-crazy people killed him.”

  Although Petra clung to denial, the weight of detail in Jane’s story seemed to have loosened the knot of her disbelief. Eyes still closed, she shook her head. “I don’t want to know. What good does knowing do me?”

  “My little boy’s in hiding. They’ll kill him if they find him.”

  “Unless you’re as crazy as you sound and none of this is true.”

  “It’s true. Open your eyes and look at me. It’s true.”

  Petra opened her eyes. If there was anything to be read in them other than self-pity and hatred and anger, Jane couldn’t see it.

  “Whoever you are, you’re a liar. And if you aren’t, which you are, but if you aren’t, shit, then whether I spill to you or don’t, I’m dead.”

  In other words, she had just said, Show me a way out, give me hope, and maybe I’ll help you.

  “Simon keeps big money in the house, in a safe somewhere,” Jane said. “His kind always do.”

  “I don’t know about any big-money safe.”

  Jane waited a beat and let a note of tenderness into her voice. “There’ve been times I’ve been lost, there seemed no obvious road ahead. But a lost girl, any lost girl, she doesn’t need to be lost forever. I’ll make him tell me where the money is. I don’t need it. After I’m done here, you take the money and go.”

  “Go where? I got nowhere to go.”

  “A couple hundred thousand, maybe more. With that, you can go anywhere you want, somewhere you’ve never been and nobody knows you. Stop being Petra Quist. You changed your name before. Change it again. And stay the hell away from men like him. Find a new way.”

  “What new way?”

  Jane leaned forward on the padded bench and put her left hand over one of the child-woman’s zip-tied hands. “A new way to be. The way you are, even if I’d never shown up, chances are you’d be dead by thirty. You said Simon’s good to you, gives you everything, he’s sweet. But you’ve had moments—haven’t you?—moments when you sensed real evil in him, violence.”

  After a hesitation, Petra broke eye contact. She tipped her head back and gazed up at the trompe l’oeil cloud forms, through which a colorful dawn broke perpetually.

  Even in an interrogation more intense than this one, even when physical threats and worse were involved, the objective was always to persuade the subject rather than to force submission by fear of brute force. In nearly every inquest of this nature, there came a point when the examinee was ready to cooperate but hadn’t said so, when in fact the decision to provide the information remained as yet more subconscious than fully realized. The interrogator needed to be able to recognize such a moment and not step on it with additional questions or, worst of all, with intimidation, because until the subject had come all the way into the light, she could so easily change her mind and stay on the dark side.

  Still searching the faux clouds, Petra said, “Sometimes he hurts me, but he doesn’t mean to.”

  35

  The candle flames twisted and unfurled and fluttered in the cheap glassware, the soft amber light ceaselessly ebbing and flowing in waveforms across the table in the church kitchen, their pale reflections quivering in the brushed stainless steel of the nearby refrigerator, like a trio of spirits writhing in some visible but inaccessible dimension parallel to the one in which Tanuja and Sanjay lived.

  The twins sat catercorner to each other as they ate ham-and-cheese sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise—two each, for they were ravenous—and potato chips. Their flight from a nightmare posse had been bizarre and terrifying as they’d raced from the eastern canyons into the heavily populated cities of mid-county and the coast. But now that they had found sanctuary, however temporary, the experience seemed less terrifying than fairy-tale spooky, less bizarre than fantastic, like some adventure concocted by a modern equivalent of the Brothers Grimm—or at least so it seemed to Tanuja. As in all such tales of fantasy, they had come to that moment of respite in which the most humble circumstances seemed all the warmer for being unpretentious and in contrast to the extraordinary drama that had preceded it, when homely food seemed to be the most delicious meal ever put before them because it had been earned by their cleverness and bravery.

  During th
e first sandwich, such was their extreme hunger and their desire to steep in the coziness of this haven that they barely talked. As they ate the second sandwiches more slowly, they could hardly stop talking. Rehashing what they’d been through. Speculating on the meaning of it. Considering their options.

  Throughout their conversation, on the table lay the two ampules that Tanuja had scooped up after she had felled Linc Crossley and his two henchmen with insecticide. Within those glass containers, in the candlelight, the cloudy amber fluid glimmered like some magical elixir that would grant them extramundane powers.

  The pulsing candle flames created an illusion of shifting currents within that elixir, but there was real movement as well. The tiny particles clouding the fluid were falling out of suspension and adhering to one another in tangled threadlike formations that kept slowly dissolving and re-forming in new configurations. Here and there along the threads were what at first appeared to be knots but that, on closer inspection, almost seemed to resemble elements on a silicon microchip. These, too, dissolved even as others similar to them began to accrete elsewhere in the web of threads.

  Sanjay pondered the ampules. “Maybe this stuff was stored in that container of dry ice to keep it stable. When it warms up, it starts doing this.”

  Leaning into the candle glow, Tanuja said, “Yeah, but what exactly is it doing? Turning putrid or something?”

  “It kind of looks like all the tiny particles are trying to come together to form something. Though how could they do that undirected?”

  “Form what?”

  Sanjay frowned. “They were going to inject me with this.”

  “Form what?” Tanuja repeated.

  “Something. I don’t know. Nothing good.”

  While making the sandwiches, they had found a bar of dark chocolate and had at once determined to save some of the champagne to have with it.

  When Tanuja had eaten her share of the candy, as her brother poured the last of the champagne in her glass, the aromatic bubbles fizzing, she said, “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  He pushed his chair back from the table to accompany her.

  “No, no,” she said. “Not unless you need the men’s. I remember the way. Enjoy your chocolate, chotti bhai.” She rose from her chair and picked up one of the tumblers that contained a candle. “When I get back, we absolutely have to decide what we do in the morning. I won’t sleep tonight if we don’t have a plan.”

  “We could have the plan of all plans,” Sanjay said, “and I doubt I’d sleep, anyway.”

  At the doorway to the hall, she glanced back and saw her brother leaning over the ampules, peering intently at the contents. By some trick of candlelight, the tangled threads within the amber fluid appeared to cast the faintest web of trembling shadows across his sweet brown face.

  36

  “Hurts you?” Jane said. “How does he hurt you?”

  With her head still tipped back, face turned to the coffered vault of the theater lobby, Petra Quist closed her eyes, and behind the lids they moved as if following events in a disturbing dream.

  “He doesn’t mean to. He just, like, you know, he gets too excited. He’s like a boy sometimes, the way he gets so excited.”

  “How does he hurt you?” Jane persisted.

  “I’m a little drunk. I’m dead tired. I want to sleep.”

  “How does he hurt you?”

  “It’s not like he really hurts me.”

  “You said he did. Sometimes.”

  “Yeah, but I mean…not bad, not so it marks me.”

  “How? Come on, girl. You want to tell me.”

  After a silence, shaped by tension yet as still as kiln-fired porcelain, Petra spoke softly, though she didn’t whisper. Her voice grew quieter than before and somehow distant, as if the essence of her retreated from the outer regions of her body, from the world of ceaseless sensations assaulting her five senses. “He slaps me.”

  “Your face?”

  “It stings but never marks. He never marks me. He never would.”

  “What else?”

  “Sometimes…one hand around my throat. Holding me down.”

  “Choking you?”

  “No. A little. But I can breathe. It’s scary, is all. But I can breathe a little. He never marks me. Never would. He’s good to me.”

  Thunders of silence suggested an inner storm, and the blank upturned face served as a mask behind which anguish hid. She was drunk, and she might be tired, but in spite of what she said, she didn’t want to sleep. Her silence was not a final statement, but instead a pause for gathering.

  “Sometimes he calls me names and, like, says things he doesn’t mean, and he’s so…rough. But only, you know, because he gets so excited, is all. He never marks me.”

  Jane said, “All this, holding you down by the throat, slapping you, being rough…you mean it’s during sex.”

  “Yeah. Not every time. But sometimes. He doesn’t mean it. He’s always sorry afterward. He buys me Tiffany to apologize. He can be so sweet, like a little boy.”

  This troubled child in a woman’s body had made revelations that Jane could use to push some of Simon’s buttons in an interrogation, although nothing yet with which she could effectively whipsaw him.

  Bound by more than zip-ties, by ligatures of times past, trapped between the idea of a thrilling libertine life and the grim reality as she lived it, head tipped back and slender throat exposed to Jane, Petra now disclosed a fact that might be used to break her cruel lover, though she didn’t understand the importance of it.

  From the internal distance into which she had retreated, her voice came colored by melancholy. “Funny how things are. You figure nobody can really hurt you anymore, you’ve been hit with it all. And then some stupid thing that shouldn’t matter does. Like, it’s not when he’s rough that hurts me, you know, not hurts me so it matters. What hurts me is the weird thing, when sometimes he forgets my name and calls me by hers, and she’s just a damn machine.”

  37

  Into darkness Tanuja carried light, the glass tumbler warm in her hand, luminous candle-cast shapes without form pulsing on the hallway walls, ahead of her absolute blackness beyond the reach of the humble lamp.

  This building drew into it the hush of the church to which it stood connected, the quiet of those empty pews and that shadowed altar. The only sounds were the faint squeak of her sneakers on the waxed-vinyl floor and the occasional sputter as the candle flame found impurities in the wick.

  The restroom doors did not feature automatic closures. The one at the women’s lavatory stood half-open. She pushed it wider and did not close it after she crossed the threshold.

  In this smaller space, with reflective glossy-white laminate walls and mirrors, more light seemed to swell from the candle, and the shadows largely retreated. There were two sinks in a cove on the left side of the room, two on the right, and four enclosed stalls against the back wall.

  She went to the cove on the right and set the candle on the counter between those two sinks. In addition to the back wall, the side walls of the cove were also lined with mirrors, each reflecting the reflection in the other, flickering candles ordered to infinity.

  Tanuja went into the nearest stall. Just enough candlelight bounced off the low ceiling to provide guidance. She tended to business and flushed the toilet.

  She returned to one of the sinks and cranked on the water and pumped liquid soap from the bottle. The water was hot, and from her lathered hands rose the rich orange fragrance of the soap.

  When she turned off the water and pulled a couple paper towels from the dispenser, she looked at her face in the back mirror, half expecting the stresses of the night to have visibly aged her. Food and drink had done their job, however, so that she didn’t even appear tired.

  The candle before her and its legions of reflections re
ndered her eyes less dark adapted than they had been in the hallway. When movement in the back mirror suggested a presence behind her, she thought at first it must be illusory, nothing more than shadow and light dancing to the soundless rhythm of the throbbing candle flame.

  But her confusion lasted only a moment. Whether he had entered through the open door to the hall while the water rushing into the sink masked his arrival or whether he had been in one of the other stalls, he was there and he was real. A youngish man. Blond hair that looked almost white in the spectral light. He loomed less than an arm’s length away, and though she wanted to believe that he was an innocent parishioner who, for whatever reason, had remained behind after the play, she knew that he was no one that benign.

  She started to turn but felt the poles of a handheld Taser pressed hard into the small of her back. Although the cold steel pins failed to pierce her T-shirt, the garment didn’t provide enough insulation to protect her, and she received a shock that disrupted nerve-path messaging throughout her body.

  The sound that escaped her was like the faint lament of some small night creature seized in the talons of an owl. She seemed not to collapse so much as shiver to the floor, as if unraveling from her bones, there to shudder uncontrollably and gasp for breath that her lungs would not expand to receive.

  The attacker pressed the Taser to her abdomen and shocked her again, and pressed it to her neck for a third blast, which was when she passed out.

  38

  Turning her face to Jane and opening her eyes, Petra Quist said, “Anabel. Sometimes in the sack, he calls me Anabel, just like the house computer. Weird, huh?”