“Bob and Alison, you mean?”
“You know them?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never met them. But I heard they were like that.”
“Kinda mean too. Drew had some pretty bad stories.”
“Such as?”
“Like one time? They had this ol’ dog and it got out of the yard one time and came back and had puppies under their back porch. And her dad found ’em and got mad. And while he was gone, her mom tried to drown the puppies. She put ’em in a pillowcase and threw ’em into the pond behind their trailer. Drew swam out there and got ’em. She got all but one, I think she said. She was real good with animals.” He smiled. “She took a beating for that, she said. But it was worth it. She didn’t mind a beating if it was worth it.”
“You never hit her, did you?”
He looked up, startled. “I’d never hit Drew. I’d never hit no one. I’m not like that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insulting. It’s just that—”
“No offense, but I’d never do anything like that. The police asked me the same thing and I told them too. I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re asking next. They got the guy that did it.”
“I know,” I said.
I looked at him, with his weak, watery eyes, his skinny white arms. He had a tattoo that wrapped around his wrist like a bracelet. He was nerdy and odd, but strangely likeable. I could see what Sharlotta meant. A boy and not a man. And not much of a boyfriend. He didn’t seem like the sort of date who would exactly take charge of an evening or remember your birthday. But he seemed completely harmless.
I’d come over here thinking he’d done it. That he’d panicked about becoming a father and had killed her on impulse and then tried to cover it up. He just made so much more sense as a suspect to me than Gordon Pryne did. I figured meeting him would clear it up for me. One way or another.
“Did she ever mention any nightmares to you? Anything recent?”
“Drew had a lot of nightmares. When she ever slept. She wasn’t a real good sleeper.”
“Anything about a scary-looking bald guy, all white and bony?”
“You mean Peter Terry?”
The words slammed into my ears and just about knocked me over. I’d never heard anyone else mention Peter Terry by name. Not without hearing it from me first.
“What did she tell you about Peter Terry?”
“I never knew if she made him up or not. She had such a good imagination. She was real creative.”
“I know.”
“She dreamed about him a lot, though. She told me about it a couple of times.”
“What did she say?”
“Just that she always woke up real scared.”
“Did she mention a lake?”
He shook his head. “It was always the same thing. He was standing in the middle of the road at night. And then she’d hear tires squealing and somebody would start screaming and then she’d wake up.”
I felt my skin go cold suddenly. “Who was in the car?”
“She never said.”
I paused as the image sank in.
“How was Drew in the weeks before she died?” I asked. “Did she seem worried about anything?”
“She was always worried about something. She worked real hard in school.” He paused. “She worked nights. That was one reason she didn’t sleep too much, I think.”
“You know where she worked.”
“That dance place?” He shook his head. “I never liked it, but she said it was pretty good money. She was gonna stop after Christmas. She was saving up for a car.”
“What kind?”
“Anything with tires.”
I didn’t ask about the baby. I had a pretty strong sense he didn’t know. I figured the police would tell him soon enough.
I stood up. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll let you get to your Ramen noodles.”
“Where’d you say you teach?” He stood and extended his hand.
“SMU,” I said, without thinking. I’d meant to leave him with the impression I’d met Drew at El Centro.
“What do you teach?”
I picked up my bag and keys and started for the door. No sense lying now. “Psychology,” I said.
His face lit up. “You know Dr. Mulvaney?”
“John Mulvaney?”
He nodded. “He’s kinda weird, isn’t he? He’s not that bad, though, if you don’t expect too much.”
“How do you know Dr. Mulvaney?” I asked, noting that it didn’t seem to bother me to use the title when he wasn’t around to hear it.
“I supply his lab.”
“Pardon?”
“His lab.”
“I don’t understand.”
“C’m’ere, I’ll show you.” I followed him through the kitchen and into the back yard. The house sat on a double lot, one in front of the other. The back lot was rimmed by a ten-foot privacy fence that concealed a double-wide trailer. I followed him up the steps.
The trailer had no walls inside—just rows of tables and a sink at one end. Lights were strung from the ceiling to shine into the aquariums that sat atop the tables. I recognized the smell of cedar shavings, and the tinny squeak of little exercise wheels. I peered into one of the aquariums. Rats.
I looked up at Finn. “You raise rats?”
He nodded. “And mice. Any kind of rodent, really. They’re all pretty much the same.”
A light went on in my head. “You gave Drew a rabbit.”
He nodded. “Melissa. Here’s her litter-mate.” He walked me over to another row. Inside the hutch was a little red bunny. “I kept this one. She didn’t want me to sell it.”
“What do you sell them for?”
He shrugged. “Oh, for research. Like Dr. Mulvaney does. It’s real important for science and stuff like that. Or maybe to pet stores. Sometimes people buy them for their snakes.”
“You’d feed that sweet bunny to a snake?”
He grinned. “Drew wouldn’t let me sell it. She didn’t want Melissa’s sister getting eaten. I can’t really blame her. She’s a pretty nice rabbit. Sharlotta’s got Melissa now. I might go over there and get her. This one’s a little lonesome.”
“Sharlotta gave her to me,” I said, a little alarmed at the thought of losing her. “I sort of adopted her.”
He smiled. “You did?”
“Do you mind if I keep her? I’m kind of attached to her already.”
“Sure, you can keep her. I bet Drew would like that. She got real attached sometimes.”
“Did John—Dr. Mulvaney ever meet Drew?” I asked.
He nodded. “Couple of weeks ago. She was over when he came to get a couple of breeders.”
“Ozzie and Harriet.”
He lit up. “Yeah! That’s a real old TV show. I’d never heard of it before. Drew liked to name ’em all. She got too attached.”
I extended my hand. “Thanks for your time, Finn. It was really nice to meet you. I’m glad you and Drew were friends.”
“I miss her.” He walked me to the front door. “Tell Dr. Mulvaney hi for me.”
I shook his hand again. “I sure will.”
33
I was pretty sure I’d figured out how to short sheet the devil. I could smell the truth. And it smelled just like cedar shavings. The truth’s location, however, posed a particularly vexing problem. It was on the SMU campus. Inside the clinic building. Just on the other side of John Mulvaney’s locked office door.
I’d let myself into the clinic against Helene’s orders once before. And I’d enjoyed a few unauthorized visits into the archived case files over the years. But snooping around uninvited in a colleague’s office—that was another matter entirely. I’d claim shooting rights if anyone did that to me. More than that, it was just the sort of activity that would not only enrage my review committee, but could get me and my milkmaid thighs hauled off to the Dean’s office quicker than you can say “mandatory suspension without pay.”
I
suppose I should have called Jackson and McKnight and let them handle it. Or maybe Martinez. But honestly, the thought didn’t even occur to me. Sometimes my impatience blinds me to simple, commonsense realities. It’s another one of my Top Ten Terrible Traits. One I intended to start working on real soon. Right after I finished breaking into John Mulvaney’s office.
The clinic building was dark, locked up for the night. I let myself in with my key, turned off the alarm system, and then locked the door and reset the alarm behind me. Marci is (quite appropriately) paranoid about people snooping through her desk, so she locks it up before she leaves at night and takes the only set of keys with her. Inside her desk, though, was the master key to the office. I had to get in there or I was a duck out of luck.
I looked through the stuff on her desk, eyeing the kitty-cat pencils and Garfield sticky notes, trying to remember what I’d seen in movies about jimmying locks. I tried a couple of paper clips first. That trick doesn’t work, just so you know. I tried a nail file. I thought about trying a bobby pin I found on the floor, like in that movie Misery, but of course, I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. The thought of touching, even vicariously, Marci’s nest of greasy grey hair was too much for me. I finally scored with a letter opener. It was just the right shape and size to slide into the keyhole, and with a gentle turn, achieved the click I was waiting for. The drawer slid open. I grabbed the key, shut the drawer and locked it, replaced the letter opener, and walked down the hall to John’s office.
I knocked first, just to be sure, and then let myself in, shutting and locking the door behind me. I closed the blinds. No need to announce my criminal and unethical behavior to the whole campus. The place was lit with a bluish light, just enough to permit a thorough snoop.
The light came from a few aquariums that had been fitted with fluorescents. I guess John was subjecting those poor rats to sleep deprivation experiments or something. Funny how I’d developed so much empathy for them.
I started with John’s desk, which revealed far more about the man than I could tolerate without a fresh bottle of Mylanta and some club soda. It took a few tries to crack his computer password, but eventually I remembered the Wisconsin sticker on his Honda (I’d forgotten he drove a Honda) and came up with Bucky Badger, the Wisconsin mascot, which opened John’s sick inner world right up to me.
The desktop image on John’s computer was my first clue. It was one of those dance photos they take at school events. The ones you wish your parents would just throw away. It’s photos like this that remind most of us we should never run for office or become movie stars, to hedge against the off chance they’ll surface in a magazine someday.
High school John was pimply and lumpy, his pale blue tux tight and his expression tighter. His pants were too short. His socks were white and his shoes were brown. Thick glasses sat askew on his stubby nose, and he held his date’s hand awkwardly, smiling at the camera as though he’d just been caught pilfering his mother’s panty drawer.
His date was equally homely, with a greasy brown Dorothy Hamill hairdo, a long yellow dress that looked like it had come from the costume room on the Little House on the Prairie set, and the same thick glasses. Her stiff, crooked smile revealed a mouthful of braces. They were a sad pair. And they both knew it.
The fact that this shy, pseudo-event remained significant to John after all these years seemed pitiful to me. It was probably his one date ever. And I was guessing he still looked at this photograph as the single thin shred of evidence of his citizenship in a club whose doors remained, all these years later, stubbornly closed to him.
John’s computer screen faces the window and is angled away from the door. I’d never noticed before, but now that I thought about it, John always managed to stand between the screen and whoever was in his office, making sure no one could see what was on there. As I wound my way through his Internet files, I found out why.
John’s computer was infested with pornography, mostly photographs and short film clips of women in humiliating sexual situations and men enjoying their misery. They weren’t violent images, per se, just angry
The images suggested to me a psychology of isolation, which I knew mirrored John’s psyche with disturbing accuracy.
We’d had an entire seminar about pornography in graduate school. It was one of the more noxious courses in the long, rather unpleasant crucible of my graduate education, to be sure, but it had served to desensitize me to images like this. Though I found them disgusting, I muscled myself into a clinical mindset, stuck them in a mental file with John Mulvaney’s name on it, and moved on.
The rest of his computer files were interesting for one reason and one reason only. They became chaotic and disorganized the Monday after Drew’s murder. Up until that moment, John had kept immaculate records. That made sense, given his straight-line, scientific approach to life. John could turn an afternoon walk down the campus into a dizzying maze of procedural events without even realizing he was doing it. In fact, he was completely incapable of experiencing anything else about the journey—trees, sky, familiar faces. That his rigid, linear behavior had decompensated entirely after Drew’s murder was telling, I thought.
I poked around some more, going through desk drawers systematically, top to bottom. I found nothing of note until I got to the bottom right-hand drawer. The locked one.
His keys were hidden in a cup full of pens on his desk. I fished them out and opened it up. It was like Halloween in there. Sugar Babies, Milk Duds, Three Musketeers, Hershey’s chocolate in every possible permutation, Starburst, Sweet Tarts, Skittles. The drawer was a cyclone of disarray. Opened bags of candy were stored on top of dozens of empty wrappers, as though he were saving trophies or something. Some of the wrappers looked like they’d been licked clean.
I thought back to the day I’d run into him at the mall. I realized now that he had been on a massive food binge. It’s a pattern my eating disordered patients are painfully familiar with. Usually it begins with a triggering event of some kind, which leads to extreme emotional discomfort.
Whatever had triggered John that day, and whatever feelings had tripped him up, he’d apparently found them intolerable and had resorted to comforting himself with an absurd amount of food. He’d been working on a load of cookies, a milkshake, and a gargantuan soft drink when I saw him. And that might have been just the wind-up. I’ve known binge eaters who could pack in three times that amount in one sitting.
It’s an excruciating way to live, this secret life of self-immolation.
Standing there, sorting through the detritus of John’s sordid little world, I felt a surge of pity for him. And sadness. Plain, ordinary sadness. My sympathy didn’t, extend so far as to excuse what he’d done, of course, but now that I’d seen John in cross-section, the ugly middle actually humanized him for me. I could see the bars, so to speak, of the cage he’d been living in. Candy bars, certainly. And strip bars, I suspected. Both served to cushion the blow of his solitary, pathetic life.
I locked up his desk and put everything back the way I’d found it. I snuggled Eeyore the bunny on my way out. Then I locked the place up, put Marci’s key back in her desk, which I locked with the letter opener, and headed home. I called Detective McKnight on the way. He picked up immediately.
“Great news,” he said, before I got a chance to tell him mine.
“What?”
“Gordon Pryne confessed.”
“He what? That’s impossible!”
“Two hours ago. Broke down bawling and admitted everything.”
“That’s impossible,” I said again.
“Come again?”
“I don’t think he did it.”
“All due respect, Dr. Foster—”
“It’s impossible. It doesn’t fit. Pryne is a serial sexual offender, Detective. Why didn’t he rape her before he killed her? And why did he hide her body? He’s never that careful. Nothing about this crime fits Gordon Pryne’s personality.”
“Except the fact th
at he did it. Call me crazy, but that seems like a pretty good personality fit to me.”
I told him what I’d found out about John Mulvaney.
“You seriously want me to consider a guy with no record, no history of violence, a respectable job as a professional in the community, and a tie to the victim that is tenuous at best? On the basis of Internet porn and some messy files? When I have a suspect who just signed a confession? All due respect, Dr. Foster—”
“Pryne is innocent, Detective. I’m positive he didn’t do it.”
“Tell that to Gordon Pryne,” he said. “He seems to think he did.”
And he hung up.
34
Gordon Pryne himself had shouted the clue at me, amidst ugly invectives and proclamations of innocence—all of which I’d roundly dismissed at the time. Ask the rats, he’d yelled. Ask the rats. I’d let the remark pass, of course, without seeing it for what it was. But the rats had taken me straight to John Mulvaney’s office. I knew I’d been led there. By whom, I wasn’t sure. Peter Terry, perhaps. I was certain now that he’d been in on this thing from the beginning.
I tossed in my bed most of the night, listening to the rats behind my walls, thinking about John Mulvaney. John’s legendary social ineptitude had doomed him to a life without human companionship. He’d settled instead for a spurious form of stimulation that involved the humiliation of women—not uncommon for social misfits like him, who tend to blame women for their own stunning inability to relate to the opposite sex. I’d seen hints of that the year before when John had gotten so angry at me for having no interest in him socially.
If John’s frustration were ever to escalate to the point of violence, I was certain it would be quick but gory, just as Drew’s murder had been. A single blow to kill quickly and avoid the fight. And multiple blows following, indicating panic, rage—all sorts of complicated, powerful emotions, which he would be unable or unwilling to contain once the dam had broken.
Even the ax made sense. John would have chosen a weapon like that. They’re common as dirt. If Helene owns one, just about everyone does, I was betting. Maybe he’d left the ax on my porch in a panic—not to implicate me, but get rid of it while drawing me into his drama. Or maybe to frighten me. The stalker note I’d received was a taunt, obviously. A jab to remind me he was out there. Watching.
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