Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  Pointing to a third document on her desk, Roy said, "And this request from the first deputy attorney general?"

  "Yes, I called him."

  "I understand you've actually met Mr. Summerton."

  "Yes, at a conference on the insanity plea and its effect on the health of the judicial system. About six months ago."

  "I trust Mr. Summerton was persuasive."

  "Quite. Look, Mr. Cotter, I have a call in to the governor's office, and if we can just wait until—"

  "I'm afraid we've no time to wait. As I've told you, the life of the President of the United States is at stake."

  "This is a prisoner of exceptional—"

  "Dr. Palma," Roy said. His voice now had a steely edge, though he continued to smile. "You do not have to worry about losing your golden goose. I swear to you that he will be back in your care within twenty-four hours."

  Her green eyes fixed him with an angry stare, but she did not respond.

  "I hadn't heard that Steven Ackblom has continued to paint since his incarceration," Roy said.

  Dr. Palma's gaze flicked to the two men at the door, who were in convincingly rigid Secret Service postures, then returned to Roy. "He produces a little work, yes. Not much. Two or three pieces a year."

  "Worth millions at the current rate."

  'There is nothing unethical going on here, Mr. Cotter."

  "I didn't imagine there was," Roy said innocently.

  "Of his own free will, without coercion of any sort, Mr. Ackblom assigns all rights to each of his new paintings to this institution—after he tires of it hanging in his cell. The proceeds from their sale are used entirely to supplement the funds that are budgeted to us by the State of Colorado. And these days, in this economy, the state generally underfunds prison operations of all kinds, as if the institutionalized don't deserve adequate care."

  Roy slid one hand lightly, appreciatively, lovingly along the glass-smooth, radius edge of the forty-thousand-dollar desk. "Yes, I'm sure that without the lagniappe of Ackblom's art, things here would be grim indeed."

  She was silent again.

  "Tell me, Doctor, in addition to the two or three major pieces that Ackblom produces each year, as he just sort of dabbles in his art to pass his entombed days, are there perhaps sketches, pencil studies, scraps of scrawlings that aren't worth the bother for him to assign to this institution? You know what I mean: insignificant doodlings, preliminaries, worth hardly ten or twenty thousand each, which one might take home to hang on one's bathroom walls? Or even simply incinerate along with the rest of the garbage?"

  Her hatred for him was so intense that he would not have been surprised if the blush that rose in her face had been hot enough to make her cotton-white skin explode into flames, as if it were not skin at all but magicians' flashpaper.

  "I adore your watch," he said, indicating the Piaget on her slender wrist. The rim of the face was enhanced by alternating diamonds and emeralds.

  The fourth document on the desk was a transferral order that acknowledged Roy's legal authority—by direction of the Colorado Supreme Court—to receive Ackblom into his temporary custody. Roy had already signed it in the limousine. Now Dr. Palma signed it too.

  Delighted, Roy said, "Is Ackblom on any medications, any antipsychotics, that we should continue to give him?"

  She met his eyes again, and her anger was watered down with concern. "No antipsychotics. He doesn't need them. He isn't psychotic by any current psychological definition of the term. Mr. Cotter, I'm trying my best to make you understand this man exhibits none of the classic signs of psychosis. He is that most imprecisely defined creature—a sociopath, yes. But a sociopath by his actions only, by what we know him to have done, not by anything that he says or can be shown to believe. Administer any psychological test you want, and he comes through with flying colors, a perfectly normal guy, well adjusted, balanced, not even markedly neurotic—"

  "I understand he's been a model prisoner these sixteen years."

  "That means nothing. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Look, I'm a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. But over the years, from observation and experience, I've lost all faith in psychiatry. Freud and Jung—they were both full of shit." That crude word had shocking power, coming from a woman as elegant as she. "Their theories of how the human mind works are worthless, exercises in self-justification, philosophies devised only to excuse their own desires. No one knows how the mind works. Even when we can administer a drag and correct a mental condition, we only know that the drug is effective, not why. And in Ackblom's case, his behavior isn't based in a physiological problem any more than it is in a psychological problem."

  "You have no compassion for him?"

  She leaned across her desk, focusing intently on him. "I tell you, Mr. Cotter, there is evil in the world. Evil that exists without cause, without rationalization. Evil that doesn't arise from trauma or abuse or deprivation. Steven Ackblom is, in my judgment, a prime example of evil. He is sane, utterly sane. He clearly knows the difference between right and wrong. He chose to do monstrous things, knowing they were monstrous, and even though he felt no psychological compulsion to do them."

  "You have no compassion for your patient?" Roy asked again.

  "He isn't my patient, Mr. Cotter. He's my prisoner."

  "However you choose to look at him, doesn't he deserve some compassion—a man who's fallen from such heights?"

  "He deserves to be shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave," she said bluntly. She was not attractive anymore. She looked like a witch, raven-haired and pale, with eyes as green as those of certain cats. "But because Mr. Ackblom entered a guilty plea, and because it was easiest to commit him to this facility, the state supported the fiction that he was a sick man."

  Of all the people Roy had met in his busy life, he had disliked few and had hated fewer still. For nearly everyone that he had ever met, he had found compassion in his heart, regardless of their shortcomings or personalities. But he flatly despised Dr. Sabrina Palma.

  When he found time in his busy schedule, he would give her a comeuppance that would make what he'd done to Harris Descoteaux seem merciful.

  "Even if you can't find some compassion for the Steven Ackblom who killed those people," Roy said, rising from his chair, "I would think you could find some for the Steven Ackblom who has been so generous to you."

  "He is evil." She was unrelenting. "He deserves no compassion. Just use him however you must, then return him."

  "Well, maybe you do know a thing or two about evil, Doctor."

  "The advantage I've taken of the arrangement here," she said coolly, "is a sin, Mr. Cotter. I know dial. And one way or another, I'll pay for the sin. But there's a difference between a sinful act, which springs from weakness, and one that's pure evil. I am able to recognize that difference."

  "How handy for you," he said, and began to gather up the papers from her desk.

  * * *

  They sat on the motel bed, chowing down on Burger King burgers, french fries, and chocolate-chip cookies. Rocky ate off a torn paper bag on the floor.

  That morning in the desert, now hardly twelve hours behind them, seemed to be an eternity in the past. Ellie and Spencer had learned so much about each other that they could eat in silence, enjoying the food, without feeling the least awkward together.

  He surprised her, however, when, toward the end of their hurried meal, he expressed the desire to stop at the ranch outside Vail, on their way to Denver. And "surprised" was not the word for it when he told her that he still owned the place.

  "Maybe I've always known that I'd have to go back eventually," he said, unable to look at her.

  He put the last of his dinner aside, appetite lost. Sitting lotus-fashion on the bed, he folded his hands on his right knee and stared at them as if they were more mysterious than artifacts from lost Atlantis.

  "In the beginning," he continued, "my grandparents held on to the place because they didn't want anyone to buy it and ma
ybe make some god-awful tourist attraction out of it. Or let the news media into those underground rooms for more morbid stories. The bodies had been removed, everything cleaned out, but it was still the place, could still attract media interest. After I went into therapy, which I stayed with for about a year, the therapist felt we should keep the property until I was ready to go back."

  "Why?" Ellie wondered. "Why ever go back?"

  He hesitated. Then: "Because part of that night is a blank to me. I've never been able to remember what happened toward the end, after I shot him. . . ."

  "What do you mean? You shot him, and you ran for help, and that was the end of it."

  "No."

  "What?"

  He shook his head. Still staring at his hands. Very still hands. Like hands of carved marble, resting on his knee.

  Finally he said, "That's what I've got to find out. I've got to go back there, back down there, and find out. Because if I don't, I'm never going to be ... right with myself . . . or any good for you."

  "You can't go back there, not with the agency after you."

  "They wouldn't look for us there. They can't have found out who I was. Who I really am. Michael. They can't know that."

  "They might," she said.

  She went to the duffel bag and got the envelope of photographs that she had found on the deck of the JetRanger, half under her seat. She presented them to him.

  "They found these in a shoe box in my cabin," he said. "They probably just took them for reference. You wouldn't recognize . . . my father. No one would. Not from this shot."

  "You can't be sure."

  "Anyway, I don't own the property under any identity they would associate with me, even if somehow they got into sealed court records and found out I'd changed my name from Ackblom. I hold it through an offshore corporation."

  "The agency is damned resourceful, Spencer."

  Looking up from his hands, he met her eyes. "All right, I'm willing to believe they're resourceful enough to uncover all of it—given enough time. But surely not this quickly. That just means I've got more reason than ever to go there tonight. When am I going to have a chance again, after we go to Denver and to wherever we'll go after that? By the time I can return to Vail again, maybe they will have discovered I still own the ranch. Then I'll never be able to go back and finish this. We pass right by Vail on the way to Denver. It's off Interstate Seventy."

  "I know," she said shakily, remembering that moment in the helicopter, somewhere over Utah, when she had sensed that he might not live through the night to share the morning with her.

  He said, "If you don't want to go there with me, we can work that out too. But . . . even if I could be sure the agency would never learn about the place, I'd have to go back tonight. Ellie, if I don't go back now, when I have the guts to face it, I might never work up the courage later. It's taken sixteen years this time."

  She sat for a while, staring at her own hands. Then she got up and went to the laptop, which was still plugged in and connected to the modem. She switched it on.

  He followed her to the desk. "What're you doing?"

  "What's the address of the ranch?" she asked.

  It was a rural address, rather than a street number. He gave it to her, then again after she asked him to repeat it. "But why? What's this about?"

  "What's the name of the offshore company?"

  "Vanishment International."

  "You're kidding."

  "No."

  "And that's the name on the deed now—Vanishment International? That's how it would show on the tax records?"

  "Yeah." Spencer pulled up another chair beside hers and sat on it as Rocky came sniffing around to see if they had more food. "Ellie, will you open up?"

  "I'm going to try to crack into public land records out there," she said. "I need to call up a parcel map if I can get one. I've got to figure out the exact geographic coordinates of the place."

  "Is all that supposed to mean something?"

  "By God, if we're going in there, if we're taking a risk like that, then we're going to be as heavily armed as possible." She was talking to herself more than to him. "We're going to be ready to defend ourselves against anything."

  "What're you talking about?"

  'Too complicated. Later. Now I need some silence."

  Her quick hands worked magic on the keyboard. Spencer watched the screen as Ellie moved from Grand Junction to the courthouse computer in Vail. Then she peeled the county's data-system onion one layer at a time.

  * * *

  Wearing a slightly large suit of clothes provided by the agency and a top-coat identical to those of his three companions, in shackles and handcuffs, the famous and infamous Steven Ackblom sat beside Roy in the back of the limousine.

  The artist was fifty-three but appeared to be only a few years older than when he had been on the front pages of newspapers, where the sensation mongers had variously dubbed him the Vampire of Vail, the Madman of the Mountains, and the Psycho Michelangelo. Although a trace of gray had appeared at his temples, his hair was otherwise black and glossy and not in the least receding. His handsome face was remarkably smooth and youthful, and his brow was unmarked. A soft smile line curved downward from the outer flare of each nostril, and fans of fine crinkles spread at the outer corners of his eyes: None of that aged him whatsoever; in fact, it gave the impression that he suffered few troubles but enjoyed many sources of amusement.

  As in the photograph that Roy had found in the Malibu cabin and as in all the pictures that had appeared in newspapers and magazines sixteen years ago, Steven Ackblom's eyes were his most commanding feature. Nevertheless, the arrogance that Roy had perceived even in the shadowy publicity still was not there now, if it ever had been; in its place was a quiet self-confidence. Likewise, the menace that could be read into any photograph, when one knew the accomplishments of the man, was not in the least visible in person. His gaze was direct and clear, but not threatening. Roy had been surprised and not displeased to discover an uncommon gentleness in Ackblom's eyes, and a poignant empathy as well, from which it was easy to infer that he was a person of considerable wisdom, whose understanding of the human condition was deep, complete.

  Even in the limousine's odd and inadequate illumination, which came from the recessed lights under the heel-kicks of the car seats and from the low-wattage sconces in the doorposts, Ackblom was a presence to be reckoned with— although in no way that the press, in its sensation seeking, had begun to touch upon. He was quiet, but his taciturnity had no quality of inarticulateness or distraction. Quite the opposite: His silences spoke more than other men's most polished flights of oratory, and he was always and unmistakably observant and alert. He moved little, never fidgeted. Occasionally, when he accompanied a comment with a gesture, the movement of his cuffed hands was so economical that the chain between his wrists clinked softly if at all. His stillness was not rigid but relaxed, not limp but full of quiescent power. It was impossible to sit at his side and be unaware that he possessed tremendous intelligence: He all but hummed with it, as if his mind was a dynamic machine of such omnipotence that it could move worlds and alter the cosmos.

  In his entire thirty-three years, Roy Miro had met only two people whose mere physical presence had engendered in him an approximation of love. The first had been Eve Marie Jammer. The second was Steven Ackblom. Both in the same week. In this wondrous February, destiny had become, indeed, his cloak and his companion. He sat at Steven Ackblom's side, discreetly enthralled. He wanted desperately to make the artist aware that he, Roy Miro, was a person of profound insights and exceptional accomplishments.

  Rink and Fordyce (Tarkenton and Olmeyer had ceased to exist upon leaving Dr. Palma's office) seemed not to be as charmed by Ackblom as Roy was—or charmed at all. Sitting in the rear-facing seats, they appeared uninterested in what the artist had to say. Fordyce closed his eyes for long periods of time, as though meditating. Rink stared out the window, although he could have seen nothing whatsoever
of the night through the darkly tinted glass. On those rare occasions when a gesture of Ackblom's rang a soft clink from his cuffs, and on those even rarer occasions when he shifted his feet enough to rattle the shackles that connected his ankles, Fordyce's eyes popped open like the counterbalanced eyes of a doll, and Rink s head snapped from the unseen night to the artist. Otherwise they seemed to pay no attention to him.

  Depressingly, Rink and Fordyce clearly had formed their opinions of Ackblom based on what drivel they had gleaned from the media, not from what they could observe for themselves. Their denseness was no surprise, of course. Rink and Fordyce were men not of ideas but of action, not of passion but of crude desire. The agency had need of their type, although they were sadly without vision, pitiable creatures of woeful limitations who would one day inch the world closer to perfection by departing it.

  "At the time, I was quite young, only two years older than your son," Roy said, "but I understood what you were trying to achieve."

  "And what was that?" Ackblom asked. His voice was in the lower tenor range, mellow, with a timbre that suggested he might have had a career as a singer if he'd wished.

  Roy explained his theories about the artist's work: that those eerie and compelling portraits weren't about people's hateful desires building like boiler pressure beneath their beautiful surfaces, but were meant to be viewed with the still lifes and, together, were a statement about the human desire—and struggle—for perfection. "And if your work with living subjects resulted in their attainment of a perfect beauty, even for a brief time before they died, then your crimes weren't crimes at all but acts of charity, acts of profound compassion, because too few people in this world will ever know any moment of perfection in their entire lives. Through torture, you gave those forty-one—your wife as well, I assume—a transcendent experience. Had they lived, they might eventually have thanked you."