Her Every Fear

by Peter Swanson

  Corbin Dell was strapped to a gurney and taken to a separate ambulance. The EMTs managed to stop the bleeding, but he’d already lost too much blood. He was pronounced dead en route to Mass General.

  Alan Cherney, his interrogation interrupted when Agent Tan was told what was happening at Bury Street, sat for several hours in the interrogation room, eventually putting his head down on the table and going to sleep. His interrogation was completed early the next morning, then all charges were dropped and he was released.

  The first face Kate Priddy saw upon opening her eyes at midday on Wednesday was Detective James’s.

  “I’m alive,” Kate said.

  “You are.”

  James put her hand on Kate’s shoulder and watched the young woman close her eyes and go back to sleep.

  When Kate woke again, a nurse was checking her vitals. “Hi, there,” Vicky Wilson said, when she saw Kate’s half-opened eyes. Vicky was secretly thrilled to be in charge of the celebrity patient, but tried to conceal it as she asked: “How are we doing this afternoon?”

  “Thirsty.”

  “I can probably get you some ice chips, sweetheart. What else can I get for you?”

  “The detective.” Kate’s voice was a faint croak.

  “A detective?”

  “No. Detective James. Roberta.” Kate had to swallow after saying the words. Her throat ached.

  “When I’m done here, sweetheart, I’ll go find Detective James, okay?”

  Kate closed her eyes again.

  When she opened them, Roberta James was there, and Kate said: “Tell me everything.”

  James smiled. “I’ll tell you what we know, okay?”

  “Is Corbin dead?”

  “Yes, Corbin Dell is dead.”

  “What about Jack Ludovico?”

  James paused, enough so that Kate had one awful moment where she thought he’d somehow gotten away. “The man you knew as Jack Ludovico is dead as well. He went by a lot of names, and we’re still trying to figure out what the real one is. Does the name Henry Wood mean anything to you?”

  Kate shook her head, causing small detonations of pain in her neck and shoulder. She must have grimaced, because Detective James said, “We’ll talk more about this later. You’ll be glad to know your parents are en route from England.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “And there’s a man, Alan Cherney, who very much wants to see you. He’s here, now, in the hospital.”

  “Not right now, okay,” Kate said, closing her eyes.

  “Of course. I’ll let you sleep.”

  James was standing up when Kate opened her eyes again and asked, “How did Corbin Dell get back into America? I thought you said—”

  “That we were monitoring his passport. We were. He used someone else’s, a Dutch passport.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know everything yet, Kate. We think that the man you knew as Jack Ludovico, who also went by Henry Wood, had been targeting Corbin Dell, maybe trying to set him up, frame him for a murder.”

  “So Corbin’s not a killer?”

  “There’s a lot for us to unravel, Kate. We just don’t know the whole situation.”

  “They were both in the apartment. How did . . . ?”

  “How did they get in? Corbin had a key, and we found lockpicks on Jack. We think he was coming in and out of Bury Street through a back entrance that led to the basement.”

  “How long had he been coming into the apartment?” Kate’s mouth was getting drier the more she talked.

  “We don’t know that, but there’s evidence—forensic evidence—that he’d been all over the apartment. I’m going to tell you everything as we learn it, Kate, but right now, I think you need some more rest.”

  “Okay,” Kate said, and let her lids close. There was pain in her upper back and at the base of her skull, and that pain was spreading and joining, and becoming stronger. She heard the detective’s chair scrape along the linoleum floor, then she knew she was alone. She tried to open her eyes, found she couldn’t, and was asleep again.

  James returned to the waiting area where Alan Cherney sat, an unread book on his lap, a hopeful expression on his face.

  “She’s not ready to see you yet,” she said to him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait a little longer.”

  “She didn’t recoil in horror when I mentioned your name,” James said, wanting to reassure him for some reason. She supposed she liked him, and not just because he had probably saved Kate Priddy’s life by convincing James to return to Bury Street. He’d been right about the scratch on Henry’s arm; the coroner said it had come from a cat.

  Alan smiled. “That’s something.”

  James moved out of earshot of Alan and called in to the station. The Bureau had descended in force, Abigail Tan replaced by a senior agent named Colin Unger, who looked like a model from a military recruitment catalog. James got through to her captain and reported on Kate’s condition.

  “I’ll let them know she’s awake and ready to be questioned.”

  “Let them know in a little while. She’s going to be overwhelmed.”

  “You think she knows anything?”

  “About what? Henry Wood? No, nothing. She knows what happened the night she was nearly killed, but that’s it. She told us all about it while she still had a knife stuck in her back. Oh, she wanted to know if Corbin was innocent.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Told her we’d talk later. She’s still pretty fragile.”

  After hanging up with her captain, she thought of the Polaroid picture they’d found in the apartment that belonged to Henry Wood. It was of Corbin Dell, standing in the rain, above an open grave that contained the body of what looked to be a brunette woman. There was an old gravestone in one corner of the picture, suggesting that he was in a cemetery. Corbin, to James’s eye, looked about eighteen years old. It was hard to read the expression on his face; his eyes were maybe a little shocked, but he looked relaxed, his mouth parted slightly. It was that image that had been haunting James for the past thirty-six hours, even more than what she’d seen in Kate’s apartment, the bloodbath that was stopped when James took a man’s life with a single bullet. It hadn’t saved Corbin Dell, but her being there had probably saved Kate Priddy.

  It was something.

  Four hours later, Agents Unger and Tan arrived at the hospital to question Kate.

  “You want me in there, as well?” James asked.

  “We do,” Unger said. He had a slight southern accent. North Carolina was James’s guess.

  “Okay. Happy to. We can’t wake her, but we can wait till she wakes up on her own.”

  They didn’t have to wait too long. In half an hour a nurse came to tell them that Kate had woken and that she’d asked for Detective James again. In that half an hour, Abigail Tan filled James in on what they’d learned. Corbin Dell and Henry Wood had studied at the same program in London fifteen years earlier. Not only that, but there was an unsolved homicide from the time, an English student at the same business school they’d both attended by the name of Claire Brennan. She’d gone missing at the time when Corbin and Henry had both been in London, and her body had eventually been found, buried in an old graveyard in North London. No one had ever been arrested for the crime.

  “Was she mutilated postmortem?” James asked.

  “She wasn’t, no,” Tan said.

  “Still.”

  “Right, still.”

  “What are you thinking right now? They killed women together?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Tan said. “Henry and Corbin meet in London and kill Claire Brennan together. They take pictures, then maybe do it again here in America. First Linda Alcheri, and then Rachael Chess.”

  “Corbin Dell was out of the country when Rachael Chess was killed,” James said.

  “Corbin Dell is supposed to be out of the country at this very moment, according to flight records.”

  �
�Okay. Point taken. Then what? They kill Audrey Marshall together, and then Corbin Dell returns here so that they can kill his cousin? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “No, I know. It doesn’t,” Tan said. “We’re hoping Kate Priddy can help out.”

  “She told me what happened on that night. According to her, Corbin was suddenly in her apartment. He woke her up and told her to hide in a closet, that a bad man was there. Those were his words. When she came out, Corbin was bleeding out on the floor and she was attacked from behind.”

  “Then you showed up,” Tan said.

  “Yes, then I showed up.”

  After Kate woke, Agent Unger, with some assistance from Agent Tan, questioned Kate Priddy for about twenty-five minutes. She told them exactly what she’d told James before. Nothing more, nothing less. At the end of the conversation, when Kate’s eyes were starting to close, she said: “It’s me, I guess.”

  “What’s you?” Agent Unger said.

  “It’s my fault. They come to me, psychopaths. I’m like a magnet.”

  “I don’t know everything right now, Kate, but I do know that none of this is your fault. None of this.” James decided that she liked Agent Unger, despite the flat-top haircut and what had to be a pretty serious gym addiction.

  Back outside in the hall, Unger asked James what Kate had been talking about.

  “She was attacked about five years ago by an ex-boyfriend. This was in England. He locked her in a closet and committed suicide, leaving her there.”

  “Goodness.” Unger drew the word out, made it sound like a curse.

  “Yeah.”

  “But there’s no connection?”

  “Not that we could find,” James said. “I think it’s just random, or maybe she is a psycho magnet, like she said.”

  She’d said it as a joke, but Unger frowned, as though he was considering it. “Either way, poor thing,” he said, then added: “Are you going to tell her that it looks like Henry Wood had been hiding in her apartment for at least two days?”

  James had already thought about this. The crime scene officers had found fingerprint evidence from Henry Wood all over the apartment: on food in the kitchen, in most of the rooms, on Kate’s possessions. They’d also found hair and DNA evidence that suggested he’d been sleeping underneath one of the beds in a guest room.

  James, remembering Kate’s request that she be told everything, said, “Yeah, I’ll tell her.”

  When Kate’s parents finally reached the hospital, it was just past visiting hours, but James escorted them past a uniformed officer into a private room, where Kate lay sleeping.

  They watched her sleep for half an hour, not willing to wake her. “Let’s go check into the hotel, then come back,” Patrick Priddy said in a whisper to his wife.

  “You check us in, darling, and I’ll stay here.”

  But before Kate’s father had left, Kate opened her eyes, saw both her parents, and for the first time since she’d been admitted to the hospital, began to cry.

  Corbin Dell was officially identified by his brother, Philip Dell, who had driven down from New Essex to make the identification. Detective James hadn’t met him, but she heard from the grief counselor who’d been present that he displayed no emotion whatsoever and kept insisting that he needed to return to his mother, who was not used to being left alone.

  Philip Dell was questioned by the FBI. Abigail Tan told James that he’d never heard of a Henry Wood. When asked about his brother’s semester abroad in London, Philip Dell said that he hadn’t remembered his brother going to London at all. When asked about Rachael Chess, and Corbin Dell’s relationship with her, Philip said that Corbin’s sex life was no concern of his.

  On the day that Kate Priddy was released from the hospital, she agreed to see Alan Cherney, who’d shown up that morning at the hospital the way he’d shown up every morning since Kate had been admitted. He entered Kate’s room, pale and nervous and holding a bouquet of paperwhites. Kate was sitting up in bed, drawing in a new sketchbook that her parents had brought to her the day before. She’d already sketched four nurses and two doctors.

  “Thank you for the flowers,” Kate said as Alan handed them over. They were strong smelling, and Kate couldn’t stop herself from making a face as she placed the vase on her side table.

  “They smell terrible,” Alan said. “Sorry.”

  “No, they don’t. They smell better than this hospital room, anyway.”

  “I heard you were getting out today.”

  “That’s what they tell me, but I’ll believe it when it happens.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “My parents have a suite at a hotel around the corner, so I’ll stay there tonight, I guess. Then I’ll go home.”

  “You’re not going to stay and finish your courses?”

  Kate laughed. “No, I don’t think so. Where would I even stay?”

  “Well, you could stay with me, of course. It wouldn’t be a problem. I’d like it . . .”

  “Thanks, Alan, but I don’t—”

  “I totally understand. I just wanted you to know that there was an offer on the table. A real offer. I didn’t expect you to say yes.”

  “What’s it like there?”

  “Where? At Bury Street?”

  Kate nodded.

  “It’s insanity. For the first twenty-four hours they cordoned off the whole building because there were so many reporters. Now, it’s just your whole wing, but there have been nonstop police officers coming in and out, and news vans parked outside almost all the time. You know I was arrested, right?”

  “I know all about it. Roberta—Detective James—has told me everything. Or at least she’s told me that she’s told me everything. She said that after you were arrested she came back to the apartment because of you—because of what you said.”

  “Honestly, that whole night is pretty blurry for me. I remember going to your apartment—sorry, again, about that—but I don’t really remember what we talked about. Then I went home and fell asleep and next thing I knew the police were there, arresting me, and all I could think about was that you were in danger. I was sure of it.”

  “He’d been hiding in my apartment. When I was there.”

  “I know. That’s what the papers are saying. It’s terrifying.”

  “What else are the papers saying?”

  “You heard about the unsolved murder in London?”

  “Detective James told me about it. Was it them?”

  “It looks like it. There was preserved DNA evidence at the crime site, so if it was them, then I guess the police will find out for sure. This is a massive story, you know that? There’s bound to be a TV movie ramping up in production right now.”

  “I’m getting that feeling.”

  “Reporters have been contacting me with requests for exclusive interviews. I’ve been offered money.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kate said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. I don’t care about that. I’m worried about you.”

  “I think I’m going to be okay, honestly. Maybe I’m still in shock, but for some reason I’m not as traumatized or frightened as I should be. I should have died—I should have died twice, really—and here I am still alive. I know this sounds strange, but I feel lucky. Tell me more about what you’re reading in the papers.”

  They talked for a while more, Alan filling her in on everything that had happened since the night that Corbin Dell and Henry Wood had both died. He even told her how his ex-girlfriend Quinn had gotten in touch, wanting to know if he wanted to get a drink.

  “You think she wants to get back together with you, now that you’re famous?”

  “I think she just wants to hear the details.”

  “You should take advantage of your fame. It’s fleeting.” Kate smiled, weakly.

  The smile was enough to allow Alan to say what he wanted to say. He shifted forward a little on the molded plastic chair. “I have a speech,” he said. “I apologiz
e in advance.”

  “You don’t have to make a speech,” Kate said, but she was still smiling.

  “I’m only going to make it once, then I’m done. It’s short. I promise.”

  After the speech, Kate nodded and said she’d consider it. Alan thanked her and left the hospital room. At least he’d had his say. He’d told the truth, or close enough. Saying how much their night together had meant, how bad he felt about crashing into her apartment through the basement, and how he genuinely believed she should stay for a while in America and give their relationship a shot, was just a long way of saying what he really wanted to say. That even though they’d only just met, he knew he was in love with her.

  Jim and Lina Wood drove eight hours from Stark, in upstate New York, to help identify their son. They were both surprised that they weren’t brought into a basement morgue, Henry’s body under a sheet, his face revealed. It was the way they’d seen it done on countless television shows, and they assumed it was the way it was done in real life. Instead, they were brought to a sterile, well-lit office, where they were shown photographs of Henry’s face, surrounded by what looked like a blue sheet. It was their son, of course. Neither was surprised.

  Jim had wanted to turn around and drive all the way back to Stark, but Lina talked her husband into spending the night. They found a Super 8 just west of the city. It was across the street from a diner that looked like it might be okay for dinner. Jim wouldn’t admit it, but his driving skills, especially at night, were not what they used to be.

  After dinner, they returned to the motel. Jim found a baseball game on the television. They hadn’t talked about Henry. They’d talked about him plenty when he’d been younger. They’d prayed about him, too. That it had ended as it did was neither a shock nor a comfort to either of them. It was just a fact. Something had been wrong with him, and now he was in God’s hands. It was terrible that they were saying he had killed those women, but at least now he couldn’t kill anyone else.