by Greg Iles
“Nothing.” I motion for him to put the gun away.
He doesn’t. “Bathtub’s full of hot water,” he says to Angie. “Why?”
“I was about to take a bath.”
He points at the cigarette burning in the ashtray by the recliner. “Looks like you were watching TV to me.”
“I was waiting to buy some earrings.”
He studies her for a few moments, then holsters his gun and takes his seat in the La-Z-Boy. “What did I miss?” he asks, glancing at the hall.
“Angie was about to tell me who’s helping her punish those men.”
“What will happen to me if I talk to you?” she asks Sean.
He gives me a pointed look that I have no trouble reading: It’s time to Mirandize this girl and put her in front of a video camera. “That depends on what you tell us,” he says.
“Angie,” I say softly, “I know it’s hard for you to trust people. It’s hard for me, too. That’s one of the problems women like us have. But you need to listen to me now. Because I don’t want to put you in jail. Okay? I am the best friend you’re ever going to have.”
The guarded look doesn’t lessen in vigilance, but there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s wavering.
“Take a deep breath, Angie. Take a deep breath and get it off your chest.”
Slowly, Angie Pitre sits back down on the sofa.
“Whose idea was it?” I ask. “Who first said, ‘We can’t just sit around and bitch about this. We have to do something’?”
Her eyes flick back and forth like those of a crack addict. Then she says, “That’s hard to say, you know? It wasn’t really like that.”
My heart thuds in my chest. I force myself not to look at Sean. “Was it Dr. Malik?”
She draws up her shoulders and hugs herself like a sullen child. “Sort of. I mean, he was always talking about how the men who do it never stop. You know? How none of the treatments work, except maybe castration. He said only death or prison ever really stop them from doing it.”
“By ‘it,’ you mean sexually abusing children?”
“Yeah. Dr. Malik didn’t think any of the old ways worked for victims either. They didn’t make you well. It was all a lot of feel-good talk, he said. When you got back out in the world, it couldn’t stop you from doing the bad things caused by what happened when you were a kid. You know? Sleeping around, or dope, or cutting yourself…whatever. Numbing behavior, he called it.”
I nod understanding. “I’ve been an alcoholic since I was a teenager.”
“There you go. So, that’s why Dr. Malik started Group X. To try something new. It was like exploring a new world, he said. The dark world inside our heads.”
“How many women were in the group?”
She shakes her head, the survivor’s eyes glinting again.
“But all the members of Group X were repressed-memory cases.”
“Yeah. Our lives were all fucked-up, and we didn’t know why. I only got in because I was seeing this lady down at the mental health center, and she referred me. I don’t have no money or nothing.”
“I understand. So…Group X?”
“Yeah. What was different was that Dr. Malik did the delayed-memory work right there with all of us in the same room. And it was intense, man. If we weren’t reliving what had happened to us, we were hearing somebody else relive what happened to them. And the way Dr. Malik did it, you couldn’t hardly stand to hear it. When you’re the patient, he makes you, like, become the kid you were when it happened to you. You talk in a little girl’s voice and everything. It’s scary to hear. I mean, some of the stuff I heard was really sick. Some people couldn’t take it. Two or three times, people peed in their chairs. Seriously, man. And I think what happened came out of that.”
“The decision to kill an abuser?”
She nods with sudden solemnity. “See, even though the bad stuff had happened to most of us years ago, in Group X it was like it was happening right then. All the terror and rage you couldn’t express back then comes blasting out of you like an explosion or something. And it makes you mad. All of us felt that way. Even Dr. Malik. You could see it in his face. He wanted to hurt those men the way they’d hurt us.”
“Did he suggest that you do that?”
Angie shakes her head. “No. See, as intense as all that was, it wasn’t what started the…you know. It was that we got to talking afterward. We got to be friends, see? All of us. We weren’t supposed to, but we started meeting outside Dr. Malik’s office after group on Wednesdays. We’d go to somebody’s apartment or whatever and drink Cokes and stuff. And talk. And it was there that we figured out the really scary thing.”
I glance at Sean. He’s hypnotized by Pitre’s story. “What was that, Angie? What was the really scary thing?”
“That the guys who had done this to us were probably still doing it.” She bites her bottom lip and nods as though talking silently to herself. “Not to us, but to other kids. You know? So we started watching them, trying to figure out what to do. But it’s hard to tell, right? Unless you live in the house with them…and most of us had jobs or whatever.”
“Of course.”
“But I knew, okay? There’s this kid on my dad’s block, he’s home alone all day—” Angie shakes her head with sudden violence. “Anyway, that’s what it came out of. It wasn’t just to punish them. I mean, that was part of it—to make them admit what they did. Because none of them will, you know? You get up your nerve for this big blowout, and then they just deny it. All of it. Dr. Malik had seen it a million times. They look at you like you’re the crazy one, and then they tell you how much they love you and shit. It’s sick. It makes you think maybe you are crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, Angie. I know that.”
Sean is staring at me again, trying to get my attention. He’s ready to make this official right now. But I’m not ready to call Kaiser yet. “So basically, you all agreed about what you were going to do?”
Angie nods slowly at me. She’s transferred her allegiance away from Sean.
“How many of you were there, Angie?”
“Six.”
“And now six men are dead.”
She nods again.
“So you’re finished?”
“Yep.” She gives me a little smile.
“Did all of you help commit the crimes?”
She doesn’t respond.
“‘My work is never done,’” I quote, recalling the letters boldly drawn in blood. “Who came up with that?”
She gives me a conspiratorial smile, then shakes her head. “I can’t tell on anybody else.”
“But your work is done. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Yep. All done.”
Somehow, I knew this before I ever got here. That’s why I didn’t let Sean call in the task force. “Who killed Dr. Malik, Angie?”
Her smile vanishes, replaced by a profound fear. “I don’t know. Nobody knows what to do now.”
Is she lying? “This is very important, Angie. Who decided to make the crimes look like serial murders? Why didn’t you just kill the men with one shot and make their deaths look like muggings or something? Something simple?”
“That was cool, huh?”
Sean clears his throat loudly, but I don’t look at him. A strange light has come into Angie’s eyes.
“You want to see one?” she asks.
“One what?”
“You know. What we did.”
My pulse begins to race. “A murder, you mean?”
“We didn’t call it that. We called it a sentence. Carrying out a sentence.”
Now I glance at Sean. He looks like he’s about to have a stroke. “Do you have a videotape here, Angie?”
She points into the corner near the television, where a cardboard box stands under a small round table.
“Jesus,” Sean intones.
“Is that Dr Malik’s box?” I ask, feeling sweat in my palms. “The one with the stuff for the film in it?”
Angie nods, then goes to the box and pulls out a videotape. “This is one of the only ones on VHS. Most of them are on those little tapes. Those digital things. Mini-DVs or whatever.”
“Cat,” Sean whispers.
I feel a familiar buzzing in the back of my head. The tapes in that box could put my grandfather in jail for the rest of his life.
“Put it in the player, Angie. I want to see.”
Chapter
65
Like a child about to show me a tape of her ballet recital, Angie Pitre pushes the tape into the VCR and waits expectantly.
Sean motions for me to walk over to him, his face taut with anxiety. By any legal standard, it’s time to arrest Evangeline Pitre. But I’m not here as an agent of the law. I’m here to understand. Only then will I know what to do. It can only be my threat to tell Sean’s wife about our affair that’s keeping him from calling John Kaiser.
The TV screen goes blue. Then some numbers start turning quickly in the bottom left corner of the screen. I go to the box in the corner of the room and look down. Three rows of mini-DV tapes lie at the bottom of the box. The tapes are labeled with women’s names in red Magic Marker. One reads, Ann Hilgard. I reach down and pluck it from the box, then slip it into my pocket.
“Look,” says Sean.
A dark, jerky image has filled the TV screen: an exterior door. Someone is breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. A hand inside a clear plastic sleeve reaches out and inserts a key into the knob, turns it.
“What’s that plastic?” I whisper.
“A hazmat suit,” Angie says, her eyes locked on the screen. “Weird, huh?”
The door opens, and light floods into the lens.
The camera moves so quickly through the house that I feel like I’m watching an episode of Cops. A drug raid, maybe. But there’s something familiar about it. I’ve seen this house before. It’s one of the NOMURS crime scenes. The second one.
“Holy shit,” says Sean. “Holy shit.”
“Is that the Riviere house?” I ask in a stunned voice.
“Yeah,” says Angie.
The camera stops at an open bedroom door. A paunchy, gray-haired man wearing white boxer shorts looks over from his dresser. Andrus Riviere, retired pharmacist, age sixty-six. Whatever he sees in the door terrifies him.
“Turn around!” orders a muffled voice. It sounds female.
“They can’t hear you good in the suit,” Angie says. “But it keeps you from leaving hair and stuff in the house.”
“Cat?” says Sean. “Cat, we—”
“Face the wall!” shouts the voice. “Put up your hands!”
Andrus Riviere turns his back to the camera and lifts his flabby arms into the air. “Take whatever you want,” he says in a shaky voice. “Money…you want money?”
A bright red flower blooms in the back of his undershirt.
“Shit!” cries Sean.
Riviere crumples to the floor like a spine-shot deer.
My heart pounds as the camera moves jerkily across the bedroom. For a moment I see only the ceiling. Then I see Riviere again. He’s lying on his back, his face almost bloodless from fear. He tries to move, screams in agony.
“What did you do to Carol?” asks the muffled voice.
“I can’t move my legs!” Riviere wails. “Oh, God…”
“Say what you did to Carol!”
“What?”
“Your daughter! Carol Lantana! Did you have sex with Carol when she was a little girl?”
Riviere’s eyes bulge until I fear they’ll burst from their sockets. For Andrus Riviere, the women in the hazmat suits are hell incarnate. “Carol?” he echoes. “No! No…no.”
“Did you rape Carol?” insists the voice.
“No! That’s crazy! I never did anything like that.”
The camera backs off. Then a plastic-encased hand holds the barrel of a revolver to Riviere’s forehead. “Make peace with God. Admit what you did.”
The old pharmacist is blubbering, saliva running down his chin. “Carol? Is that you in there?”
“Admit what you did!” screams the voice. Definitely female.
Riviere shakes his head violently.
On the screen, a second figure wearing a hazmat kneels beside Riviere and opens the jaws of the skull I found in Dr. Malik’s lap at the motel. The hand presses the open mouth to Riviere’s chest and clamps the teeth down on pale flesh.
Riviere shrieks in pain.
“Jesus,” breathes Sean.
The figure is obviously using all its strength to drive the teeth together. Riviere screams again, and then the skull is withdrawn.
Riviere’s weeping now, and panting as if he can’t breathe.
“Bite him again!” shouts the voice.
“No! All right…all right! I couldn’t help it…couldn’t stop. You already know that, don’t you?” Riviere’s face contorts in pain. “I need a doctor! Please!”
“How old was Carol when you did it?”
Riviere closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I don’t know…don’t know.”
The gun barrel cracks the bridge of his nose.
“Three?” he wails. “Four? I don’t know!”
“Do you repent?”
The eyes bulge again, the fear in them absolute.
The muffled voice is relentless. “Do—you—re—pent?”
Riviere nods with sudden penitence, a desperate sinner seeing a way to redemption. “Yes! I repent…I do. I know it was wrong. I need help! Please help me!”
“I’m here to help you.”
The hand presses the gun barrel flush against Andrus Riviere’s forehead and blows his brains out the back of his head.
I jerk in shock, unable to comprehend that I’m witnessing the actual events I tried to reconstruct from evidence at the crime scene. No reconstruction could ever capture the brutality of this execution. And I know, suddenly and beyond doubt, that my idea of forcing these women to stop but not giving their names to the FBI was a fantasy born of my own pain and naïveté. It’s true that Andrus Riviere will never molest another child. But what guarantee do I have that the woman who pulled that trigger won’t decide tomorrow that someone less guilty than Riviere deserves a death sentence? Margaret Lavigne’s stepfather already became an innocent victim.
“Cat, it’s time to make some calls,” Sean says quietly.
He’s right.
“Cat? I have to—”
A muted thud cuts off Sean in midsentence.
When I turn, I see a naked woman with blonde hair holding a green plastic barbell in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Half an hour ago, I was studying her picture on my kitchen table. She’s Stacey Lorio, age thirty-six, registered nurse and the daughter of Colonel Frank Moreland, our first victim. She’s knocked Sean unconscious with a single blow from a barbell. As I stare in shock, she kneels and yanks his Glock from his shoulder holster, then points it at my chest.
“I hid under the dirty clothes in the closet,” she says to Angie, panting from excitement. “For a minute, I thought he saw me.”
“Why did you hit him?” I ask, trying not to glance at my purse beside the love seat.
“Shut up!” Lorio snaps, straightening up. She’s not much taller than Angie Pitre, but her rawboned body is mostly muscle. She has stretch marks and sagging breasts, but beyond that, she looks as hard as a frozen ham.
“We didn’t come here to arrest anybody, Stacey.”
She laughs, then glances at Angie. “I know better than that, you rich cunt.”
Her face is bright red, her chest blotchy with scarlet marks. “Do you know me, Stacey?”
“What do you think? Your aunt was the bitch who screwed up my life.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she came along with her perfect teeth, her thousand-dollar shoes, and her Southern belle voice, and he didn’t know which way was up anymore.”
“Who?”
“Christ. Who do you think?”
Suddenly everything is clear. This woman was romantically involved with Nathan Malik until my aunt took him away from her. Why should I be surprised? Ann had been seduced by one of her shrinks before. And when I spoke to her on the telephone about paying Malik’s bail, she’d acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“You killed Dr. Malik,” I think aloud. “You’re the one who knocked me out in the motel.”
“He left me no choice,” she says. “He was going to give us up to the police.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To save himself from going to jail,” says Angie Pitre.
“Dr. Malik wasn’t in any danger of being convicted for murder.”
“You don’t know that,” says Lorio. “But all he really cared about was his personal crusade. His master plan. He wanted us to go to trial. He wanted the world to see what sexual abuse had driven us to do.”
“I don’t care who knows,” Angie says, suddenly upset. “We did what we had to do. God only knows how many kids we saved.”
Lorio looks at Angie like a protective older sister. “That’s right, Ang. But there’s no need for you to waste your life in jail. Not to make old Nathan famous. The world’s not going to understand what we did. And a lot of men would try to make sure we got the death penalty.”
“I think you’re wrong, Stacey,” I say in the most submissive voice I can muster. “I think a lot of people would understand.”
She laughs. “That’s easy to say. But I’m not spending my life in prison just to be the flavor of the week on Oprah. We accomplished what we set out to do. It’s over now.”
“Is it? What about me?” I look down at Sean, who hasn’t moved once. “What about him?”
“You two stuck your noses in where they didn’t belong. I can’t help that.”
“Are you going to kill me? I’m just like you, Stacey. I was molested, just like you.”
“You’re like me?” Her eyes are cold. “You’re nothing like me.”
“Are you that blind, Stacey? You think being raised with money can protect you from your own father? Or your grandfather?”
Angie Pitre is wringing her hands. “Stacey, this isn’t what we said, you know? Nobody else would go along with this.”
