“How are you feeling?” he said.
She could only stare a moment, unable to speak. “What time is it?” Her throat was dry, voice scratchy.
“You’ve been out of it for a little bit. Sorry I had to do that — throw water on you. But you need to get up now.”
“Where is Chief Broward?”
Payton came closer. He held the phone out, facing her. Her vision remained a little fuzzy but it looked like a call was connected. “He wants to talk to you,” Payton said.
She was confused. Broward wanted to talk to her?
Payton came closer, set the glass on the bedside table and scowled as he tapped the phone screen. “There. I put it on speaker. Okay?” He laid the phone beside her head and stepped back. “Go ahead and say something.”
“This is Agent Roth.”
Nothing. She looked to Payton for an answer. He just stood with his hands clasped.
Kelly raised her voice for the benefit of the speaker phone. “Broward? Rob, are you there?”
“It’s nice to finally speak to you,” came the reply. A male voice, not Broward’s, but vaguely familiar.
She didn’t respond.
“You better talk to him,” Payton said.
“I’m here,” Kelly said at last. “What should I—”
“Do you ever forget?”
She hesitated. Best to play along, see where it led. “Everyone forgets.”
“Something just blips out of your mind, right? You’re in the middle of a conversation — has this ever happened to you? You’re in the middle of a conversation and you have something to say, it’s right there in your thoughts and then poof, it’s gone.”
“Is this what you talk about? To the men you call?” The pounding of her heart made her own voice sound strange.
“Then it just shows up on its own. You’re sitting there ten minutes later or an hour or a day later and go, ‘oh there it is — that’s what I wanted to say.’”
The more he spoke the more she put a face to the voice. She saw him sitting on the couch in his living room, the books on the inlaid shelves behind him. She remembered him on the video tape, the checked racing shirt he wore, the way he seemed shocked and numb.
“Sounds like something Grumett talks about in his book,” she said. “I haven’t been able to read the whole thing.”
“That book turned out to be pretty good. Not the best, but you know it when something speaks the truth. A truth you’d forgotten. Thoughts just happen, memories come and go, and you’re not in control. We’re slaves of our minds.”
“Why don’t we get together?” She’d finally been able to form a few coherent ideas despite the pain in her head. Blanchett had her phone tracked and Dixon would be expecting a check in. Any minute now the state troopers would be alerted and bust into the cabin. “I’d like to talk about it. Did Tammy have a copy she got from Grumett’s class? Or did you order one yourself?”
“She had one. I leafed through it a little, thought it was pretty rudimentary at first, honestly. But then later, you know, I went back to it,” he said softly.
“After you killed her? Or did you need a little more justification first?”
“You know, I thought, he’s right. We don’t have any sort of control at all. Not even a little bit. It’s predetermined.”
“You thought your wife and Grumett were sleeping together.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said after a moment. “Not now.”
“Because after Tammy, you got a taste for it.”
“Yeah — you’d like that. You’d like me to fit into your neat little personality box.”
“There’s no box. You come in all shapes and sizes.” She grunted and shifted her position, feeling aches and bruises from Payton’s attack regardless of the adrenaline now surging through her. Payton watched from the doorway, looking like he’d sobered up a bit. She wanted to know how much time had passed. The windows were still dark. It had to be later the same night. But she was so thirsty, even hungry, and her muscles felt stiff, like more time could have passed. Where was Broward?
Blake Haig’s disembodied voice rasped from the phone. “We don’t have any control over what we forget — or what we remember. Like what happened to you.”
He knew about her past — big deal — he could’ve gotten the information from anywhere. “So you call up the men whose wives and children you’ve killed, and you try to — what? Enlighten them? That exaggerated sense of purpose puts you right in the narcissist category you’re trying to wriggle out of.”
“You couldn’t stop it when that happened to you. When those guys came after you, when they got on top of you. You hadn’t done anything wrong and yet there it was. And everything you’ve done since that moment has shaped your life. See? We’re all just reacting.”
“And you’re reacting to what happened with Tammy. But I’ve got to tell you, with all respect to her, that’s exactly the type of woman you’d attract, isn’t it? You knew she’d do this.”
Haig laughed. “Everything you’ve done since you got here was entirely predictable.”
She felt the fear and fought against it, talking over it. “You’re a big man, huh?”
“You want to call me the bad guy. That makes you the good guy, or girl. Have you been listening to a word I’ve said? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we continue to think we’re writing our own stories, that we have a choice. That’s pathology. That’s sickness.”
“How about this — I don’t give a shit what you think. And probably most people don’t, either.”
“I give people the chance to awaken.”
“They only listen to you so they can capture and kill you. And you’re only doing this because your wife cheated on you. Everything else is a justification and I don’t think you even really understand the shit you’re talking.”
“Oh, I understand it. We actually think the same things, you and I. The difference is, you’re trapped in the illusion because it’s nicer to think we mean something. It feels better to think we’re in control.” He fell silent a moment. “Look at poor Roger. Look at him standing there — I assume he’s still standing there. Roger? You there?”
Payton came out of his stupor when his name was called. “Uh-huh. I’m here.”
“Roger, tell her how you thought you never measured up. How you worried all the time about what Dani thought of you, what her family thought. That’s all we do, run around worrying about what other people think. So Roger there, he just overcompensated with everything. Travel, expensive gifts; he was devoted to her. After I followed them from the mall and dropped by The Post, I saw it with my own eyes. What a sad thing — this man lavishing attention on a wife who didn’t care. Controlled by this idea he had to be somebody. He had to be someone he wasn’t.”
“You thought she was the unfaithful type.”
Haig didn’t respond. Images from the various crime scenes flashed through her mind: Danica Payton sprawled out in the golden broomsedge. Colton Archer’s pale dead face staring up at the sky. Haig’s own wife in a creek. Jessica Carter-Spence shot in the head and still breathing — still alive as he drove away.
“At least I take ownership of my true nature,” he said. “I’m awake, not in denial like Roger, or like you, fighting against who you are. But I can change that. I’m going to help you, too.”
She felt her blood run cold and was momentarily at a loss for words, dreading what he might be talking about. Who he might be talking about.
“Agent Roth, I’ve called you for one reason, and one reason only. I’ve been watching a family. Husband, wife, three kids. They seem like very nice people.”
The words erupted from her in a torrent at the same time her mind screamed that she not admit to anything. “You don’t have to hurt anyone else, you don’t have to, you’ve made your point, just leave them—”
“Rick and Uschi and the kids — they’re nice people.”
Heart pounding, thoughts scattered, just a blind ne
ed to protect her family. Her blood.
“We’re just caught up in this thing,” Haig said. “This is fate — me and you. You know, you could say — this is destiny.”
“You don’t have to do it. You can change.”
“You have a playbook to go by and I have to finish what I started.”
“I’ll stop you first.” Emotions continued to flood her, recent memories — the smell of maple syrup in her brother’s home. The toys in the living room. The hopefulness in Rick’s eyes.
“Jane Goodall studied chimps,” Haig said when she thought he’d already hung up. “I read about that, too. And when she was studying them, she’d watch as the chimps patrolling the edge of their territory would kill any other chimps that wandered in. Just rip them to shreds, violent and bloody. No mercy in it. So there goes the whole ‘noble savage’ idea. We forget that we’re animals.”
There was only one word that surfaced in the roiling chaos of her mind: “Don’t.”
“I’m hoping this is the one. You’re smart. Can you let go of your brother? Or his wife and kids, do you think? Can you step up? Become a new sort of person?”
She could only breathe. Don’t acknowledge anything.
“Or will you implode, like Ted Archer? Will you turn into a blubbering mess, like Brad Spence? Or a pliable drunk, like Roger Payton. What do you think?”
She felt grimy, weak. “What do you want?”
“I want you to do exactly what you’re programmed to do. I’m so confident that you’re a machine, that you’re so limited by all your procedures and rules, I’m just gonna let you go, Kelly. As soon as we’re done talking, you’re free.” He added, “So to speak.”
She looked at Payton, still watching her from the doorway. “I’ll arrest Roger,” she said.
“He’s fine with that. Aren’t you Roger?”
Payton nodded. “Yes.”
“This isn’t going to work out for you,” she said to Haig. But she didn’t sound convincing even to herself.
“Yes it is. I know every move you’re going to make.”
He hung up.
As soon as Payton finished freeing her hands, she shoved him aside and untied her own legs, got to her feet too fast and felt dizzy. She steadied herself at the bedpost and dipped her head to get the blood flow back. When it passed, she glanced up, expecting Payton to have left the room. He stood there, looking concerned. “Can I get you some water? You gotta be thirsty.”
She was parched. “Why are you doing this?”
“I’ve got bottled water or you can just drink it right from the tap, like Chief Broward. There’s good water up here.”
“Where’s my gun?”
“It’s in the other room.” He picked up the cell phone from the bed and stuck it in his pocket.
“Show me.”
“All right.”
He walked out, banging against the doorway with his shoulder like he was still drunk after all. She let go of the bedpost and followed him.
Her gun and holster were sitting on the kitchen table. She grabbed her piece and popped the magazine and checked it and slapped it back home and checked the chamber and, seeing that everything was in order, pointed it at Payton who stood at the sink, filling a glass with water. She wanted to go check the back rooms and see if Broward was okay, if he was even alive, but she didn’t want to let Payton out of her sight.
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone.” He turned around and held out the glass of water. When she didn’t take it, he set it on the table.
Carefully, she walked over and pointing the gun at him with one hand she picked up the glass with the other and drank, not taking her eyes off him. She set the empty glass back down and gripped the firearm with both hands again.
“I’m really sorry,” Payton said. “I mean I really am. I had to get drunk just in order to do it. He wasn’t even supposed to be here.”
Her legs were shaking. She needed her phone and she needed to call someone. Everyone.
He frowned. “You should use the bathroom. Maybe put something on that — it’s mostly dried up but you’re still bleeding a little.”
“Where’s my phone?”
“I got rid of it.”
Everything was quiet, only the crackling of the fire in the other room. “Give me the one in your pocket. The one he just called you on.”
“It won’t help you.”
“Give it to me.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“If it won’t help me, why not? He used a burner and blocked the caller ID, right?”
Payton leaned back against the sink and sighed and looked away. “You’ll try to call your backup. Call an ambulance and all that. And it’s not part of the deal.”
“Roger. He killed Dani and now you’re helping him. Why?”
His heavy eyes found hers. “This is the only thing. This is it. All of it. I’m done.”
“If you hurt Chief Broward, we can deal with that. We can keep you safe. If you help me, if you work with me, I can help you.”
He formed a sad smile. “Never gonna happen.”
“He’s talking about killing my family. That’s my brother! That’s his wife, that’s their three little children. That’s who he’s talking about, Roger. That’s who’s next.” She was shouting.
Payton just looked at her as her words sunk into the walls. He walked around the other end of the table toward the living room.
“Stop, Roger. I’ll put a bullet in your leg.”
“That’s fine.” He kept walking.
She fired. Payton tensed but then kept going. She had aimed wide, giving him a warning. He opened the door to the woodstove.
“Next one goes in your leg!”
She’d never shot anyone. It was harder than she’d imagined. She’d been trained at the academy like every other agent, shooting at pop-out targets in Hogan’s Alley. The hesitation cost her — Payton threw the phone on the fire. She ran to the woodstove and reached for it, ready to burn her hand if it meant getting word out that Haig was targeting her family, but Payton blocked her way and slammed the door shut. She glimpsed the phone amid a red-hot glow of embers and flames and then it was gone.
She backed away, cursing, aiming the weapon at Payton’s center of mass, her finger on the trigger.
He stuck his arms out, turned his hands over, palms up, exposing his wrists. “This way you don’t have to call an ambulance. It’s better, you can just call a hearse.” He wore that sad expression again. The thing was, she thought the remorse was genuine, and it made her even angrier. She couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t understand him helping a sadistic killer. Maybe to endure his pseudo-psychological bullshit for the promise of revenge, but this wasn’t that. Roger Payton just wanted to die. That was his end game. Suicide by cop.
“Keep your hands where I can see them and sit down in that chair while I call this in.” She moved the gun to her right hand again while she glanced around for the landline phone.
“I disconnected the house phone,” Payton said. He nodded to the woodstove. “Threw Broward’s in there, too. Been cooking for about an hour.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “So. Here we are. There’s no way you’re getting me out of here. No way you’re going to bring me in. I’ve aided a murderer. Someone who killed a pregnant woman. What are you going to do?”
Shaking all over, trying to control it, keeping the gun on him. “Did you know that his wife was pregnant?”
Roger’s brow knitted together in confusion. “His wife?”
“His wife. Tammy Haig. Roger — do you know who you’ve been talking to?”
“He never said his name. He told me he would. He said I would know who he was after you came.” Payton shrugged again and looked at her with his colorless face. “Now you have to kill me.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
Payton wiped away the tears as his eyes narrowed to points. He started across the room toward her.
“I heard
Jessica Carter-Spence was still alive for a little while,” he said. “He couldn’t get her alone with the kids, he was hurrying to get to your family, but he’d already put in so much time. That’s got to really eat away at her husband — that she lived for a while. That she lay there all alone and breathed with a bullet in her head and she died slow.”
Kelly fired.
* * *
There was blood in the bathroom, in the sink, on the floor leading away, and a smear of it on the hallway wall. She followed the trail to the front door and went outside. The Mazda was still there, but no chief, and no radio to call for help in a rental. Where the hell were the state troopers? It had been an hour since she and Broward arrived, and she hadn’t checked in, and Blanchett was supposed to be monitoring. Maybe something happened that was holding them up or maybe she was putting too much stock in getting backup and was on her own.
Back inside, she rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found a flashlight. Standing back beside the driveway she played the beam over the lightless houses in the area, just a few of them, and then ran and knocked on the one next door but no one was answering and everything was locked up. These were summer camps, only Roger Payton was up here in early December. She used the butt of her gun to smash in a window, hoping for an alarm. When none sounded, she cleared away the glass and used the flashlight to hunt for a landline. Nothing. She left and ran along the road until she came to another cabin, feeling the night stretch out, time going too fast, like a dream she couldn’t wake up from.
After crawling through another window and cutting her hand she found a phone and felt a jolt of hope, but realized it was a cordless, it’s charging battery removed.
She hurried back to Payton’s, her hand dripping blood, found plastic zip-ties in another kitchen drawer. She holstered her gun and rolled him over on the floor in front of the woodstove and, straddling him and linking the ties end to end, encircled his wrist and cinched them tight, then repeated the process three more times. She got off of Payton and pulled her weapon back out. There was blood everywhere from his wound and hers, but he was alive.
The Husbands Page 23
