by Gary Braver
What you call your basic déjà vu, Bunky. Just a little neurological glitch. Nothing more. Happens to everybody.
(And not surprising given the kind of buggage you’ve got in your wiring.)
Someplace he had read that there was no real mystery to déjà vu—nothing metaphysical, no ESP or romantic intimations of past lives. In the time it took for one side of the brain to inform the other side of the experience being recorded, it seemed like two different events, though separated by mere nanoseconds. Kind of bad news for the full-mooners of the world.
Electrochemistry, not déjà voodoo.
He shook away the sensation, got out of the car, and headed toward the building. The place was still, the windows of the second-floor apartment were dark. The pink and white geraniums in boxes on the upper porch looked out of place.
He walked around back. Mrs. Sabo was apparently out since the garage was empty. Terry’s navy blue Ford Escort had been confiscated for examination by forensics techs. He returned to the front, and with a duplicate house key from Mrs. Sabo he let himself inside. The door locked automatically behind him and, according to Mrs. Sabo, it always remained locked—a requirement spelled out in contracts to tenants.
Steve looked up the twelve blue carpeted stairs to the second landing. In a moment of vague anticipation he waited, but felt nothing. And the moment passed.
To his right on the wall was a two-button switch plate, still showing fingerprint powder. One turned on the interior light above the top of the stairs. He opened the front door again and flicked the other switch. The porch light above the front door went on. He then pressed the second-floor doorbell and heard the chimes upstairs. Unless Terry had left it unlocked, the killer had to have rung and waited until she came down. Through the peephole Steve could see the houses across the street. With or without the porch light she would have recognized her visitor as someone safe to bring upstairs.
He climbed to the landing. A strip of police tape still hung from the frame like an old party streamer. Dusting powder was on the door and doorknob. With another key he let himself into the apartment and closed the door behind him.
The place looked exactly as it had the day before except emptied of police and personnel. He moved to the center of the living room where Neil had stood talking baseball with the others. Their voices had yielded to a sucking silence.
On Sunday, he had inspected every inch of the place, shot photos, collected samples, dusted surfaces, scoured for hairs and fibers. Then, maybe a dozen people moved about with technical kits and collection bags. The place was a crime scene, and he had clicked into cop mode and had done his work as at any crime scene. But now the place was dim and as lifeless as a tomb. And like a tomb the space had a near-sacred feel about it. All around lay the affects of the woman Terry Farina had been—furniture, lamps, glass paperweights, seashells, watercolors, books on psychology and Italian art, wall hangings, photos of her with her brother and sister, their children, their parents. Things once important to her. Now artifacts of a dead woman.
His eyes fixed on a photo of her posed alone, a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. He picked it up, feeling a strange resonance that he could not locate. He put it back.
As he moved through the living room toward the bedroom, he became aware that his heart was racing. In fact, his whole body was throbbing with the kind of adrenaline surge that came when poised with a SWAT team outside a door they were about to ram through, not knowing if they’d open up to blasts from the barrel of some badass felon.
He passed the bathroom—a space in white and chrome. A shelf was lined with hair products and skin lotions, aerosol cans of feminine deodorant and hairspray. Hanging over the sink was a large mirror framed with frosted lights. Nothing. Nobody in the shower stall.
As he moved down the hall toward the bedroom, the thudding got stronger. In reflex, his hand slid to his weapon, half-expecting someone to spring on him from a closet.
That was nuts, of course. Nobody else was here. His reaction was purely irrational, he told himself. And the reason was that this was the first of hundreds of homicides where he knew the victim. This was not a stranger’s place. And that’s where the jitters arose from. Terry Farina’s presence filled the place, leaving him with an ineffable sense of guilt. Guilt that he was going through her now dead world. Guilt for being a cop and not preventing her death. That was it, he told himself. Some variation of survivor’s guilt.
He stopped at the threshold to the bedroom.
Because the shades were still drawn and the sun was behind the trees, the interior was dark. As he stepped inside, his innards made a fist. An almost palpable sense of evil lingered in the space. He glanced at the now stripped-down bed, and like a flash card his mind lit up with the image of her noosed against the headboard, her dead, purple head gawking at him like a gargoyle.
He flicked on the lights.
Traces of dusting powder were everywhere. All the topical surfaces that a killer might have made contact with—headboard, nightstand, television, air conditioner, switch plate—had a white veneer, latent prints being cross-checked with anyone known to have visited the apartment. No matches so far had been made with anyone in the IAFIS, a fingerprint database. The killer had been careful to touch very little and wiped clean what he had.
He clicked off the lights and moved into the room, the sound of his shoes against the polished hardwood floor startling the gloom. He stepped across the Berber rug between the bed and the small sofa to the rear of the room then put his back against the window. Everything was in place except for the bedding, which was now at the lab. The bare block of mattress looked sacrificial.
He closed his eyes and held them shut for a full minute and gathered himself to a pinpoint of concentration. He cleared his mind, aware of nothing but the thump of his heart.
Terry Farina had been dressed in a black summer dress with spaghetti straps, black stockings, with black low-heeled sandals, her auburn hair giving her an incandescent blush. According to Katie Beals, she had no boyfriend. And given that they were leaving early the next morning, she had no plans for a night on the town. She had dressed for romance with her guest.
Ottoman had given a twelve-hour time-of-death window—from three P.M. on Saturday to three A.M. Sunday. The later hours didn’t count since she was leaving at eight. Plus her telephone records showed that she took the last call at 2:14 Saturday afternoon. After forty-six interviews, they had no witnesses to anybody entering or leaving her apartment at any time on Saturday, June 2.
Mrs. Sabo said she had spent the day at her sister’s place in Woburn and returned a little after seven. The first thing she’d done was turn on the TV and change into her bed clothes. In bed she had watched Dateline then Law & Order, which ended at ten when she clicked off the set. That meant for the few minutes before nodding off she would probably have heard movement or voices directly above her. So, most likely Terry Farina was already dead, and the killer gone. That put her murder between 2:14 and 10:00 P.M.
As if he were watching a video inside his skull, Steve heard the doorbell chime and saw Terry with her thick red hair and black satiny dress pass through the living-room door and down the stairs to let in her guest. Either Mrs. Sabo was not home yet or her television drowned out any sounds as Terry and visitor moved into the apartment, exchanged preliminary chitchat, probably in the living room. Maybe there was some kissing and fondling on the upholstered couch since matching fibers were found on her dress. Because the killer’s time window was small, the preliminaries were probably short-lived. In a consensual decision, she led them to the bedroom, Terry in her sandals hard against the floor, the killer most likely wearing something softer—sneakers—and clothes that left no fibers, like Gortex. Mrs. Sabo claimed that she could hear Terry walk in heels. But not that night.
His heart was racing in strange anticipation.
He opened his eyes and they fell on the white love seat. Her dress had been draped neatly over the back, not tosse
d on the floor as if in haste. Her underwear, including the stocking mate, sat beside the dress. She had disrobed while standing up—like a stripper—and was careful about the garment as opposed to letting her lover tear it off in the heat of the moment. The techs had confirmed no rips or tears. And the M.E. noted negligible alcohol in her system and no drugs.
Yet she had died in a moment of fury with no time to scream. According to Ottoman, for ten brutal seconds Terry Farina knew that she was being murdered. When she blacked out, the killer continued the choke hold until her brain died. He then set up the autoerotica charade.
It all seemed so clear.
The stockings. Something about the stockings was not right. He rested his head against the window and stared into the darkness. He tried to see her standing there in the dress and stockings. But it wasn’t coming to him. Something didn’t jibe.
He pulled out his PDA communicator and clicked Dana’s number. She answered on the fourth ring. He explained he was working on a case. “Would you wear black stockings with a small black spaghetti-strap dress with black shoes?”
“Not unless I was going to a funeral. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Especially not in June. In fact, most women don’t wear stockings this time of year.”
When he clicked off he stared at the bureau. The next moment he snapped on a pair of latex gloves and began to go through the drawers. In the second drawer down, he found several pairs of stockings in different colors and textures, including a few black pairs with elastic stay-up tops. Also other undergarments, including bras, garter belts, thongs, and panties.
Going through the belongings of a victim always made him feel a little grubby because he was violating a domain intimate to the identity of a stranger. But clawing through the underwear of Terry Farina was worse because it created an uninvited titillation. It wasn’t so much the sexy underwear. It was her sexy underwear—and he could almost detect the warmth of her body, the scent of her flesh. And he could recall the intimate thoughts that had flickered across his mind while on coffee break.
He punched a second call on his PDA, this one to Nelson Wu, a friend in the crime lab. “Nelson, I need a reading on the Farina stockings.”
“Okay, but give me a minute.” And he put Steve on hold while he got the sheet of specs. A minute later he clicked back on. “What do you want to know?”
“If they’re new or used.”
“From the look under the scope they look brand-new. The fibers showed no microfraying from wear or washing. Also, the mate still has its packing fold visible, which means it was never worn.”
Steve’s eye slid to the nightstand and the framed photograph of Terry and her sister. In the photo a pair of sunglasses was perched on top of Terry’s head. “What’s the brand?”
“Wolford and the model is…and are you ready? Satin Touch Evening Thigh High. It’s the kind that stay up without a garter belt.”
“Elastic tops.”
“Yeah. And in case you’re interested, they’re top of the line—forty-eight bucks a pair.”
“So we’re not talking your basic L’eggs off the rack at CVS.”
“Nope. They’re a specialty item found in fancy lingerie shops or online. And in case you’re interested, they’re a patented chemical combination from DuPont Chemical, 87 percent nylon, 13 percent elastane.”
Steve went back through her dresser and the smaller chest of drawers in her closet. He found no other Wolfords. He pulled out his PDA again and called Nelson Wu back. “One more question. In her trash was there any packaging for the stockings?”
“I’ll have to call you back.”
While he waited, Steve checked the rest of the apartment, then went down to the garage and rechecked the trash barrels. The contents had been collected by C.S.S. He headed back up.
Just outside the kitchen door on the back landing sat a table stacked with newspapers and magazines that reminded him of something odd from yesterday. He went back into the kitchen and opened every drawer and cabinet. In a cabinet to the right of the sink, mail had been stacked up on dishes along with Saturday’s newspapers. The killer wouldn’t do that, which meant that that the victim was probably in a rush to straighten out the place for company—or for her last-minute guest.
The mail consisted of bills, a clothing catalogue, a copy of Entertainment Weekly, flyers, Psychology Today, Newsweek, and a UPS envelope with a return address on the label that said the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. The envelope was open, and inside was a letter congratulating Terry Farina for having received a five-thousand-dollar fellowship.
His phone rang. It was Wu. “Negative. No stocking packaging.”
Steve thanked him and clicked off. Maybe the killer had brought the stockings with him and left with the packaging. So, despite the explosive violence, he was cautious not to leave any trace of himself, then set up the autoerotica to look like an accident.
As Steve stood in the kitchen and processed that, he looked down at his PDA. As if on some weird autopilot, his finger pressed the button listing recent outgoing calls. Wu’s number was on top, then Dana’s. Then several others he had made over the last few days. He scrolled back to Sunday. Then Saturday the second.
For a moment he stared at a number that did not look familiar. A number he had called at 5:53 P.M. Without a thought, he pressed the recall button. Like a half-glimpsed premonition, from across the room Terry Farina’s telephone rang.
13
The phone was still ringing in his head as he drove to Carleton.
And slowly memory began to condense out of the fog. Terry Farina’s number was on his scroll of outgoing calls because he had telephoned about her sunglasses.
Yes. He had called to tell her that she had left them in the pub. Conor Larkins on Huntington Avenue Across from the NU quad. It’s where he had bumped into her.
That was it. And it came back to him with a shudder.
Last Saturday afternoon. He was off-duty and did his grades at home. Then he drove to campus to drop them off. Because it was the weekend, the night school office was closed, so he went to the grade sheet drop-box in the open lobby. It was late afternoon and he was hungry so he went to the pub for a sandwich. To his surprise, Terry was in a quiet booth in the corner doing a final on her laptop. She was just finishing but invited him to join her. She had already eaten and he didn’t want to eat alone, so he ordered a draft of Sam Adams and she had a glass of white wine. They chatted for a while until she had to leave to run off her exam in the library then slip it under her instructor’s door. Then she would head home because she was going out of town the next morning. They said goodbye, and he stayed behind and ordered a sandwich. Before he left, he noticed that she had forgotten her sunglasses. Because he didn’t have her home number, he called Information, then gave her a call to say he could drop them off.
As he turned off Route 2 into Carleton, all he could remember beyond that was parking across the street from Terry’s apartment building. Until Reardon’s call the next morning, everything else was a dead blank.
The good news was that there was no listing of his call in the subpoenaed records from her carrier. The only way the call was untraceable to his PDA phone was if he had first dialed *67 to block caller ID. The bad news was that he had.
And how do you explain that, pal?
The only thing that made sense was the old childhood guilt thing—the abnormal craving to eliminate any sign that he may have done something wrong even if he hadn’t. Out of an ancient impulse to eradicate possible bad-boy intentions, he had deleted the connection.
Okay, so what were your bad-boy intentions?
He pushed down the voice. He had also lost all recall.
But a fifteen-hour hole?
Maybe it was the beer. That and the medication the doctor had put him on. Sure! For a few years that had worked well, leveling off the symptoms to the point that he could take a milligram or two of Ativan as needed. But since his brea
kup with Dana, some of the anxieties and compulsive thoughts had returned. And with them, symptoms like the guilt clean-up rituals.
At least he was no longer a slave to the compulsive hand-washing and seven showers a day. Nor did he still go through his day plagued by the closed-looped tape playing in his head as when he was younger: “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”
But he wasn’t completely cured.
There was *67.
By the time he arrived at the house he felt better, although he made a mental note to check the online pharmacy sites when he got home.
It was a little after eight when he pulled behind Dana’s car, which sat in the middle of the garage, overlapping both slots. They had lived separately for six months, but whenever he stopped by he felt like an intruder on his own turf, his marriage house—the neat, white, central entrance colonial with green shutters and a hostas-lined redbrick front walk and detached garage—the place on which he still made monthly payments.
He had come this time to pick up a container of his summer clothes from the cellar as well as a few items for his apartment.
Dana was grading student papers at the kitchen island when he arrived. She had expected him and said a cool hello then went back to her papers. As he rummaged through the stuff they had collected over the years, his mind flooded with memories from when they were a young pretty couple making young pretty plans. But the sadness was crossed with eddies of resentment.
He loaded his car, making three trips up the stairs and across the kitchen to the outside, avoiding any exchanges or eye contact while she sat there with her papers, fortified in her determination to live the rest of her life without him. Once she looked up and flashed him a smile, but instead of feeling gratified it made him all the more irritated. When he returned on his last run, she removed her glasses and slid a glass of sparkling water toward him. “Suddenly we’re cordial,” he said, tasting the sourness of his words.
