Yardley stood still for a second before walking to her car in the dark night.
20
Yardley wasn’t able to sleep.
Every ounce of strength felt like it had been sapped from her. Like someone had stuck a spigot into her and extracted the last drop she had.
She checked on Tara and saw her asleep in her room, music still coming from her earbuds. Yardley gently took them out and turned her phone off. As quietly as she could, she bent down and softly kissed her daughter’s forehead before leaving the room.
Yardley had grown accustomed to not having anyone in her life other than her daughter. She didn’t live with Wesley Paul that long, and before that, she was alone for years after Cal’s arrest, and before Eddie Cal, she was alone for almost a decade after the death of her mother when Yardley was eighteen. And she was alone now and thought there was a chance she always would be.
A shattered heart.
Loneliness could be adapted to. It could get so she wouldn’t even notice it anymore and being around others would just feel like a special occasion. But these moments, the middle of the night when the rest of the world slept, were the loneliest of the day. The time when she most felt isolated from the world.
She changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt and went to the fridge. Her phone vibrated. It was a text from River asking if she was still up. Yardley said she was, and a moment later her phone rang.
“This is Jessica,” Yardley said.
“Do you always answer the phone like that?”
“Like what?”
“Saying your name. You knew it was me, right? Why not just say Hi, Angie, or something like that?”
Yardley took out some cream cheese and bread and got down a plate from the cupboard. “Hi, Angie.”
She chuckled. “Okay, smart-ass. But seriously, I like to give people the best greeting I can. Like if I know their name, I say, Hi, Dean, or whatever. It costs me nothing and perks up their day a little, ya know?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about how to greet people.”
“You should. It helps to make others happy, even if it’s just something small. Gets your mind off your own problems.”
Yardley put her bread in the toaster and set the timer.
“What’re you making?” River asked.
“Toast and cream cheese, and I’ll put some lox on it from yesterday.”
“Ugh. There’s some gambling. Old fish is scary. When I was, like, twenty, this roommate I lived with made tilapia, and I swear I’ve never had food poisoning so bad in my life. Had to sleep in the bathtub if you know what I mean.”
“Ew, Angie.”
“Don’t do it, have some Cap’n Crunch.”
“I don’t have any cereal.”
“Pour a glass of wine with me, then. I’m sitting on my porch with pinot grigio. You got any pinot?”
“Let me check . . . I do.”
“Pour a glass and sit on your balcony.”
Yardley poured the wine and went out onto the balcony. The sky was a deep black, painted with sparkling jewels of stars and planets. She had never seen skies this clear anywhere but the deserts of the Southwest on moonless nights.
“What are you doing now?” River asked.
“Lying on my deck chair staring at the sky.”
“You see that really bright one to the west? That’s Venus.”
“Wait . . . yeah, I think I see it.”
“It’s the brightest thing in the sky next to the moon. I used to lay around and stare at it and pretend I would make it there one day. That if I could concentrate hard enough, I would just appear there. Zachary, always the scientist of course, reminded me that it’s hot enough to melt steel on the surface and everything’s orange. He said it’s similar to what we think of as hell, or the valley in LA.”
Yardley chuckled as she sipped her wine. “That’s a creative way to describe it.”
“It’s a boring way. I pictured oceans of jewels and a bright-purple sky. My version is way better. Why picture hell when you can picture paradise, right?” She sighed. “That’s the difference between me and Zachary, I guess. He likes to live in the real world, and I think the real world is boring.” Yardley heard River take a drink. “What about you? Where do you fall on the Angela-Zachary spectrum?”
“Between spacey dreamer and scientist?”
“Hey, I’m not spacey. I’m an optimist.”
“I’m kidding.”
“Oh. It’s hard to tell. You can keep a straight face unlike anyone I’ve ever seen. So where?”
Yardley leaned her head back, watching the sparkling glow of Venus. “I’ve never given Venus a second thought. I figured I would never see it, so there was no point in conjecture. I only care about things within my control.”
River laughed. “Honey, nothing is within our control.” She inhaled deeply, and they both sat in silence a moment. Yardley took another sip of wine that warmed her belly.
“Do you miss him sometimes?” River said.
“Who? Eddie?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Jess, it’s just us. Do you miss him?”
Yardley hesitated. She wasn’t used to opening up, and letting her guard down to do so was not something she was comfortable with. But there was something disarming about River. She was the type of person Yardley wanted to open up to, for a reason she couldn’t actually name. “Sometimes, maybe. The person he was before I found out who he really was.”
“What do you miss about him?”
Yardley curled her legs up. “He could always make me laugh. More than any person I’ve ever met. No matter where we were, whether it was starving in a two-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment or at one of his five-thousand-dollar-a-plate art functions, he always made me laugh.” She looked down at the glass in her hand and the way the starlight reflected off it in a soft pale glow.
“How was he in the sack?”
“Ew, Angie.”
River laughed. “I picture you guys having sex with your clothes on. And only missionary and only to procreate. Am I right?”
“Angie, stop,” she said, with a flush in her cheeks.
“What? If he’s as buttoned down as you, how else would it happen?”
Yardley was silent a moment. “I wasn’t always this way. You wouldn’t have recognized me before . . . before him.”
“Yeah, hey, I’m sorry I brought this up. I was just joking. We can talk about something else.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just . . . I’ve never told anyone else these things. Not even my therapist.”
“Well, no wonder. Talk about a rip-off. Pay one-fifty an hour and just have someone stare at you and say, And how did that make you feel? It’s bullshit.”
“You’ve been?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“What for?”
“I went through some things as a teenager that I needed to work through. Everyone thought therapy would help. I thought it made it worse. The therapist kept telling me to forgive, forgive and let go. I was like, ‘You forgive. Let’s see you go through this shit and see how you let go.’ It was all bullshit. People giving you advice they would never follow themselves.” She blew out a long breath. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. I’ve found it to be helpful, though. To have someone that you can say anything to and not have them judge you.”
“That’s why we have friends.” River inhaled deeply, as though clearing her lungs, and said, “So . . . on to something more important: I saw a picture of Eddie online. He was seriously hot. I got a young–Marlon Brando vibe.”
“That’s how he got the moniker Dark Casanova. Some reporter said he looked like what James Dean would’ve looked like if he was older.”
“Shit, I’ll tell ya, for a guy who looks like that, I’d put up with a little serial murder here and there.”
A long silence.
“Sorry, bad joke,” River said. “I told you, I have a big mouth tha
t works faster than my brain sometimes.”
“It’s okay. I’m not used to talking about this with anybody, but I’m certainly not used to laughing about it.”
“You gotta laugh about it, babe. You can laugh about it or have it break you; those are the choices.”
Yardley sipped her wine and changed the subject. They spoke of old boyfriends, of what high school was like, of which types of girls bullied them. Then they spent half an hour on Facebook looking up girls they’d disliked in high school and seeing what they were up to and whether they were on their second or third marriages.
By the time Yardley said good night and hung up, the sun was almost up. She hadn’t talked to someone on the phone, really talked, since . . . Eddie Cal. It filled her with both excitement and a sense of dread. People she let in had a tendency to hurt her.
21
In the morning, Yardley drank down a cup of coffee and a bottle of water. She had a headache and took ibuprofen and changed into jeans. She didn’t feel like driving today, so she called an Uber and waited by the curb.
The sun boiled the city. She checked the temperature on her phone: 110.
The office felt like a cave, and instead of staying, she called another car and went to a public park. They had picnic tables set up near a playground, and she sat and watched children playing, their parents standing around making small talk.
Her phone rang. A Boston number.
“How are you, Daniel?” she answered.
She had put in a request with Dr. Daniel Sarte, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and consultant with the FBI, for anything he could dig up about The Night Things.
“I’m doing well. Have a bit of a cold, so not teaching today. I’ve been studying your mystery man over there. Fascinating case.”
“Unless you’re the Pharr or River family.”
“Of course. I apologize. I didn’t mean to be flippant.”
“No, it’s fine. I just have a headache right now and didn’t sleep much. What did you find out?”
He sighed, and she could hear the cellophane wrapper of what was probably some over-the-counter medication. “I spoke to my colleague here at the art history department who specializes in twentieth-century African art. He actually met Sarpong once. Anyway, apparently Sarpong was a biologist or at least had a biology degree from the University of Khartoum in Sudan. Sarpong was obsessed with human evolution. He believed that humans were inherently good, but that evolution gave us the ability to turn our morality off. Like a switch. This was so that, in survival situations where our self-interest was at stake, we could do what we needed to do. But Sarpong believed that evolution had also done something far more devastating than Freud could have imagined: it hides when our morality is shut off.”
She watched one of the children run off from the playground and her mother chase her, stopping her just before she got to the parking lot.
“What does that mean?” Yardley said.
“Sarpong thought that every evil action humans commit is because of this evolutionary adaptation and our inability to recognize that our morality’s been turned off. That’s why seemingly good people can rape and murder in times of war and not feel guilt, or why prison guards can murder and torture and still believe themselves moral people. Evolution gave us the ability to trick ourselves. The Night Things is Sarpong exploring that. All four paintings are victims of someone who has turned their morality off but doesn’t know that it’s off. They think they’re creating art. This colleague believes that whoever is recreating these paintings with living people isn’t an artist, which is what I’m guessing law enforcement believes, but is someone obsessed with human evolution. Perhaps an anthropologist or a biologist of some kind. A physician. The paintings are about biology, not art.”
“A physician?”
“Yes. Sarpong wanted initially to go into medicine, and who studies the human body and mind more than physicians?”
Yardley considered this a moment. “I’d like to speak with your colleague.”
“I’ll text you her phone number.”
“I appreciate this, Daniel. Thank you.”
“Not a problem. I’m also sending the profile to you that Agent Baldwin requested. Please keep me updated on your progress and let me know if there’s anything else.”
“I will, thank you.”
“Oh, and Jessica?”
“Yes?”
“There is one more thing, if I may. My own two cents. I would wager this type of offender is rather proud of their work and wishes for recognition. If you were to rob them of this recognition as a tactic to draw them out, it may get them to do something drastic.”
“Drastic?”
“You are the prosecutor on this case, a female prosecutor, and both victims are female. He might see it as some sort of accomplishment to put you into his work. Please, be careful.”
An icy chill slid up her back. “I will.”
22
The office felt claustrophobic, and Yardley couldn’t concentrate. She sat at her desk staring at walls, thinking about what Dr. Sarte had said.
A physician.
One of the custodians for the building walked past the office and then came back around the other way, checking the name on the door.
“Ms. Yardley? I’m here to change the nameplate. I can come back later if it’s better.”
“No, it’s fine. Go ahead.”
She watched as he took her name down from the door and put up Jax’s name. He brought the nameplate over and handed it to her.
“Sometimes people like to hang on to these.”
Yardley took the nameplate and stared at it awhile. Then she put it in the trash and picked up her purse. There was someone she needed to speak with.
Redwood Regional Hospital was a small hospital not far from where River lived. Yardley had been here once before, though she couldn’t remember now what it was in connection to. Perhaps to see one of the countless victims she had to visit in hospitals. Sometimes she smelled the scent of antiseptic in her dreams.
The emergency room wasn’t busy, and the front desk staff sat behind a counter with a police officer behind them.
“Hi, I’d like to speak with Dr. Zachary, please. I’m a friend.”
“He went to get something to eat at the cafeteria. Down the hall to the right.”
The cafeteria looked out onto a garden that had a walkway connecting the two buildings of the hospital. Several staff and nurses were there with a few doctors. She saw Zachary sitting by himself at a table in the corner.
He looked surprised when he saw her. “Jessica?” He stood up and gave her a hug. “What are you doing here?”
“Some of our victims are brought here,” she said. “Not my favorite place to be, as you can guess.”
He nodded and looked down at his chicken and mashed potatoes. “Yeah, I see a lot of those. We see the same women over and over, beaten and burned, tied up . . . even when they cooperate with the police, it seems like no one really does anything.”
“Mind if I sit?”
“Not at all.”
She sat down and crossed her legs, putting on her friendliest grin. “We try to do the best we can, but our budgets are constantly cut. Police departments are the biggest part of the budget for most cities, so when they need to shrink costs, they cut police, and the prosecutor’s offices get cut as well. Same on the federal level. When the FBI gets cut, the US Attorney’s Office isn’t far behind.”
He took a bite of food. “I’m not judging, really, I’m not. I just wish I didn’t have to see the same victims over and over.”
She nodded. “Speaking of, how’s Angie doing?”
He chewed a second and wiped his lips with a napkin. “She’s tough. Keeps everything bottled up, so it’s hard to gauge sometimes.”
“How did you two meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“She came into the hospital for an injury to her hand. She was cutting vegetables, and the knife slipped and dug into her pa
lm.” He leaned back in the seat with a grin on his face as he chewed. “Love at first sight, I guess. I think we talked for three hours over dinner the next night. She moved in with me two months later.”
“Love at first sight. That’s rare these days.”
He nodded. “It was strange for me because she’s so different from other women I’ve dated. She’s very spiritual. Doesn’t have much faith in science.”
Yardley watched him take another bite. “That seems to be gaining momentum these days,” she said. “Losing faith in science. Evolution seems to be particularly battered.”
He shrugged. “I suppose it’s been like that since the publication of On the Origin of Species. That’s why Darwin was initially going to wait to have it published posthumously. He knew how people would react. Anything that challenges the notion that we’re the center of the universe rattles people, and they’ll fight against it.”
“It’s funny we’re talking about this, because I heard an interesting theory involving evolutionary psychology the other day. That evolution has given us the ability to turn our morality off in situations our brain believes involve self-preservation, but that it’s also given us the ability to mask when our morality is off. What do you think about that?”
He put his napkin on his plate before he pushed it away. “An interesting theory. But I wouldn’t give evolutionary psychology too much praise just yet. It’s still in its infancy.” He checked his watch. “It was good seeing you, but I gotta get back.”
“Of course. Sorry to keep you.”
“Don’t be, it was a pleasure. I’ll tell Angie you said hello.”
She watched as he threw his paper plate in the trash and headed back down the hall to the emergency room. He glanced back to her once before disappearing around a corner.
When Yardley went home that afternoon, she kept running one thing through her mind to the exclusion of all else: cause of death. How was it that the Clark County Office of the Coroner and Medical Examiner, consisting of some of the brightest pathologists in the world, couldn’t identify what caused the organ failure that had led to Kathy Pharr’s death?
Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains) Page 9
