Fog of Dead Souls

by Jill Kelly

  Even more worrisome were the dreams. Few nights went by that Joel didn’t appear. Some were nightmares and in them she’d wrestle with the gold cords and the hotel sheets and Joel’s staring eyes or she’d feel the weight on her body of a man she didn’t know, his breath hot and sour on her face. Other dreams were more benign: sitting in a restaurant across from Joel, him pushing a glass of sparkling water her way or standing in the cold fog on a hillock overlooking the battlefield, Arlen and Joel pushing and shoving each other. She even dreamed of Hansen, his eyes smiling at her, but fatigue and worry etched on his face. She knew that Joel could not hurt her, but the second man … the second man could be anybody. He could be the barista at the Starbucks, the man behind the counter at the dry cleaners, the guy who took her money at the gas station. She saw him everywhere though she had no way to know his face. She couldn’t live like this much longer, and she couldn’t start a life with Al with this between them.

  She knew she needed to talk to somebody, but she didn’t know how to find someone. She didn’t see how she could ask Al to recommend a therapist without telling him everything . And she couldn’t do that, not yet. Finally she resorted to the Internet. There were mostly family therapists in town, many specializing in marriage counseling, none of them specializing in trauma that she could see. However, there was a woman with the unlikely name of Desdemona Feldstein-Two Horses who not only had degrees, but who also advertised alternative therapies.

  Mona was about forty, pretty and dark, a slight East Coast overlay on her speech. Her office on the third floor of an old bank building was warm and welcoming with Navajo rugs and watercolors of the high desert and a ceramic mug for tea. She surprised Ellie by not asking questions, by just waiting until Ellie was ready to start. Ellie wondered if she would have waited the whole hour.

  In the end, it took Ellie ten minutes to start telling the story, and thirty minutes to tell it, from Joel to Al—thirty minutes during which she surprised herself by not crying, not choking on the words. Maybe this was progress, she thought. She looked out the window or down at her hands while she talked. She didn’t want to see the reaction on Mona’s face. After she finished, Ellie took a deep drink of the tea, which tasted of mint and lemon and something cool and green, tarragon maybe. Then she sat back and realized that she’d been stiff and tense the whole time. She willed herself to relax.

  Finally she looked up. Mona sat quietly across from her, her pen and paper still, her face serious and concerned. “What an ordeal you’ve been through,” she said at last.

  Ellie nodded.

  “Do you feel safe here in Farmington?” Her voice was low and cool.

  Ellie looked her in the eye. “Yes,” she said, “and no. Yes, because I’m far away from Pittsburgh and no one except you knows who I am or what happened to me. But that man is out there, that other man, the one whom Joel paid, and I worry that he will find me, and that he will do something terrible to me again.”

  “That seems a very reasonable fear.”

  Ellie looked at her in surprise. The twenty-something rape counselor in Pittsburgh had tried to convince her how unlikely it was that this paid thug would come after her since he knew she wouldn’t remember him and Joel wouldn’t be paying him again. Now, she was relieved to feel understood.

  “Have you spent time in therapy around this already?” The concern stayed on Mona’s face.

  “Yes, I saw a rape counselor the police recommended right after the event. Then I saw a trauma counselor for a few weeks. It helped some but I couldn’t figure out what either of them wanted from me. The trauma counselor wanted to hypnotize me but I didn’t want to know what had happened and I don’t want to know. I don’t need the details. I just want to stop having the dreams. I want some peace from this.”

  Mona nodded and wrote something on her steno pad. “I can offer you a chance to talk about it, Ellie. The nightmares, the fear, your body’s and spirit’s ways of dealing with this. And I’m glad to do that, but it will just be talk. Are you open to something else … to other kinds of healing?”

  When Ellie nodded, Mona got up and went around to her desk and retrieved a card from a small box. She handed it to Ellie.

  BROWN BEAR WOMAN

  SHAMANIC JOURNEYS, VISION QUESTS, TRADITIONAL HEALINGS

  Ellie looked up at Mona, who smiled. “Sofia has been known to work magic on soul sickness. You’d have to go to Chama to see her and you might have to wait a few days once you get there. She takes her time, figures out what all is needed for your healing. Do you have time that you can take to do this?”

  “Yes, I can figure that out. I have some, well, I guess you’d say, things to sort out, but I could go, I could go right away.”

  Mona nodded. “Ellie, I know you don’t know me. We haven’t built up a relationship of trust and maybe you want to explore some other options or come back and see me again before deciding to do this. I just don’t honestly think that more talk is what you need. I think some spiritual healing is called for, and Sofia is gifted at this kind of post-traumatic work. She works with a lot of the vets coming back from Afghanistan—and she works with rape victims.”

  It struck Ellie as odd that she might have something in common with war veterans. Then she realized that of course she did. She, too, was a victim of power and violence.

  “Actually, not talking about it anymore is appealing to me,” she said finally. “I want my power back and I can’t talk it into happening. Maybe this Brown Bear Woman can help.”

  “Shall I call her now?”

  Ellie felt the familiar fear of the possibility of knowing what really happened, of going crazy from the pain. Mona must have noticed, she said, “Sofia won’t let anything bad happen to you. She will protect you from evil, and you’ll be safe with her.”

  Ellie took a deep breath. “Okay, please call her. I can go any time.”

  28

  A week after he had talked to Capriano on the phone, Hansen headed east again. He was working another case, an arsonist who had ties to Pittsburgh, and he told his partner he’d drive up and do some research and then spend time with a woman he was dating.

  Capriano had convinced his lieutenant to give him a few hours of the profiler’s time and he would have the results by now. Hansen didn’t want to take the information over the phone. He wanted to sit and talk with Capriano about what the profile would mean and where they could go from there, although “they” was probably stretching it a bit.

  When Hansen walked into the bar at noon, Capriano waved to him from the booth in the back.

  “This your booth?” Hansen sat down across from him.

  Capriano smiled. “Let’s just say I’m a regular.”

  Hansen grinned in return. “Fair enough.”

  They ordered the same burgers and beers and they talked NBA until they were finished. Then Capriano slid a manila envelope across the table. “The profiler’s report,” he said.

  Hansen pulled out two sheets of small, dense type. He looked up at Capriano. “Can you give me the gist?”

  Capriano shrugged. “It’s pretty much what we’ve been thinking. Richardson was most likely a narcissist. Surgeons, particularly trauma surgeons, tend to be. A kind of God complex. They have the power of life and death over their patients. They are also exacting and careful. The sterile condo he lived in, the lack of a paper trail. You know we found no bank records—he banked electronically—no papers of any kind in his apartment. So little evidence of his life.”

  “PTSD?” Hansen asked.

  “You mean, from ’Nam? No, not according to the profiler. As a narcissist, Richardson would have gotten off on the hospital work: the life-and-death drama of the wounded, the long hours. And as a sadist, he’d have gotten off on the gore.”

  Hansen looked over at Capriano with more interest and the other man nodded. “That was the second diagnosis from the profiler. Sadist. You can’t be surprised.”

  Hansen shook his head. “I’m not but I guess I’d been hoping t
hat it was a party that went awry rather than a calculated setup.” He saw Capriano frown with confusion. He went on. “Easier for Ellie … for Dr. McKay to be the victim of something spur of the moment than something well thought out.”

  “Haven’t we assumed that it was well thought out from the get-go?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we have. This just sort of nails it.”

  “You got something going with the vic’?”

  Hansen shook his head again. “No, not at all. Just don’t like to see people suffer more than they need to.” He drained the rest of the beer in his glass and poured himself another half. “Anything else in the report?”

  “The profiler thinks that Richardson was homosexual and …”

  “… and the second man was his lover.” Hansen paused. “Okay, I can see that, but then why the relationship with Ellie? According to her, they had a normal sexual relationship.”

  “Come on, Doug. There are a lot of homosexual men with wives and girlfriends. Guys who haven’t come out or guys who want to be seen as straight for professional reasons. Maybe Richardson was bisexual. Anyway, you know how some men get off on seeing their wife with another woman. Well, the profiler, Karen, thinks that Richardson got off seeing not McKay with a man, but his lover with McKay.”

  Hansen exhaled in disgust. “Yeah, but it was about violence, not sex.”

  “For Richardson—and for the second man—they’re the same.”

  “I know,” said Hansen, “but I don’t get it.”

  “Yeah, well …” Capriano slid out of the booth and moved toward the back, to the restrooms.

  Hansen paid the bill while he was gone, then sat reading the report. The idea that the second man was Richardson’s lover made sense, but it didn’t bring them any closer to finding him. And nothing in the report could help him figure out the nagging mystery of Arlen Gerstead’s part in any of this.

  He brought up Gerstead when Capriano came back.

  “I agree there’s something off with that guy,” said Capriano. “He’s a suck-up. I know there’s a fancier, psychological word for that.”

  “Sycophant.”

  Capriano shrugged. “That’s it. But there’s no evidence that he’s the second guy. And he’s not smart enough or cool enough to lie that well. Not after how quickly he told me stuff in the interview. He’s not good at keeping secrets, and Richardson would have needed someone as secretive and devious as himself.”

  “I know. That makes sense. But there’s something Gerstead isn’t telling us.”

  “Do you think he knows who the second man is?”

  Hansen frowned. “Probably not as such. Like you said, he doesn’t keep secrets well. But if he hung out with Richardson more than he’s telling us, he may have met Richardson’s lover.”

  “Let’s interview him again then.”

  “Yeah, let’s.”

  The Gersteads’ phone went straight to voicemail and a call to his wife at the college told them that Arlen was in Akron but headed back that afternoon. She gave them his cell number. Again Capriano got voicemail, but he asked Arlen to stop by police headquarters on his way home. He was sure that Gerstead would be too curious to pass up a chance to find out what they knew.

  Hansen took off then and spent a part of the afternoon checking out garage and tool shed arson cases in the small towns around Pittsburgh, looking for connections. At four-thirty, he found himself in Greensburg, across the street from Ellie’s apartment. Her red Honda was parked half-way down the block and he started to get out, but then he noticed the silver Mazda in the driveway with the trunk up. He suddenly felt unsure, so he sat back into his car.

  About ten minutes later, Ellie’s door opened and a young man came down the stairs and went over to the Mazda. It was a kid, Hansen saw, in his mid-twenties maybe. He had trouble telling the ages of the young anymore. Despite the cool weather, the guy was dressed only in a blue t-shirt and jeans, some kind of fancy trainers on his feet. His dark hair was longer than fashionable and pulled back into a ponytail. Diamond studs glinted from both ears.

  The kid stacked two cartons together and then grabbed a full black trash bag and took them up the stairs. Hansen could feel his envy for the younger man’s light step and his ease with the weight of his packages. The boy made two more trips to the car. The second trip involved a suitcase and another carton. The third time he carried two paper grocery bags up the stairs. On the last trip, the long-haired orange cat slipped out. The kid came back out and tried coaxing the cat in but the cat was having none of it. The cat padded down the stairs, leapt off the last step, and headed around to the back of the house.

  Hansen got out of the car then and headed to the stairs. He knew he had no business there. He should just call Ellie and check in with her. But he was curious and somehow uneasy, whether for her or for himself, he couldn’t tell.

  Hansen had to knock twice to get an answer. Finally he heard a muffled voice saying “Coming. I’m coming.” And the young man opened the door.

  Hansen had his badge ready, but the young man barely glanced at it. “Hi,” he said with a friendly smile. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Dr. McKay here?”

  The kid smiled again. “No, she left for France this morning. She’s going to be away several months.”

  “France, huh?”

  “Well, yeah. She teaches French.”

  “That’s right.” Hansen put out his hand. “Detective Hansen with the Gettysburg Police.”

  The kid’s hand was warm, his grip firm. “Roger Gerstead,” he said. “I think you know my dad, Arlen Gerstead.”

  “I do,” said Hansen. “I do. So you’re house-sitting for Dr. McKay.”

  “That’s right. She needed somebody to take care of the cats and watch her place and I needed a place for a while, so it works out well.” Sadness came over his face. “My wife and I just split.”

  “That’s tough.” Hansen paused.

  “Hey, where are my manners? Do you want to come in?”

  Hansen followed the boy inside but remained on the landing. “Did Dr. McKay leave an address?”

  The younger Gerstead shook his head. “Her mail is going to school and my stepmom—do you know Sandy?”

  Hansen nodded.

  “She’s paying the bills and stuff.”

  “That’s fine,” Hansen said, turning to leave. “I have her email. I didn’t know she would leave so soon.”

  The kid shrugged. “I’m just glad to have a place.”

  “Hey, where are those beers?” The voice was male and came from the stairs and to the left.

  “Hold your horses,” the kid said. “The detective is just leaving.”

  “Just be sure he doesn’t arrest you, bro,” said the voice with a laugh.

  “Such a kidder.” Roger Gerstead looked embarrassed and held the door for Hansen.

  As Hansen pulled away from the curb, Capriano called. Arlen was at the downtown station and they would wait until he arrived for the interview.

  29

  Gerstead and Capriano were laughing and sharing mugs of coffee when Hansen walked into the interview room. Gerstead had obviously told the joke and Hansen was glad to see he was relaxed. They’d get more out of him.

  “Coffee, Doug?” said Capriano.

  Hansen smiled and shook his head. “Too late in the day for me.” He pulled up a chair and sat off a little to the side. This was Capriano’s show.

  “Arlen was telling me more about his job. He’s a pharmaceutical rep, remember? What’s your territory again?”

  “Eastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia.” Gerstead looked pleased and relaxed.

  “What does a drug rep do exactly?” said Hansen.

  “I visit doctors’ offices, try to interest them in prescribing our products. We give them literature on the research, benefits, side effects, that sort of thing. The big Merck Manual can’t keep up with all the new products so we educate doctors about what’s out there.”

  �
�And you give out samples,” said Capriano.

  “Yeah, but probably not the way you think. It’s all pretty regulated. We have to account for all our samples, checking them out, signing for the amounts, and getting signatures from the doctors who accept them. We have to show what we took and where it went and what’s left over. These are controlled substances after all.”

  “Sounds like a lot of paper work,” said Capriano.

  Gerstead looked annoyed. “Tell me about it. Twenty years ago, it was a lot easier. They trusted us. We took what we needed, gave the stuff away. The company was just mostly interested in upping the numbers of prescriptions and the doctors who wrote them. And we had a system of perqs that really enhanced our sales. Then the FDA tightened up. Now it’s all business. And everything has to be signed for and counted. It’s really hurt sales.”

  “What do you mean?” Capriano said. “Aren’t there more and more drugs out there?”

  “Well, in the old days, we used to do a lot of wining and dining in some pretty nice places. I had doctors who were really good friends of mine. Now we aren’t supposed to socialize.”

  “Like with Joel Richardson.” Capriano’s face showed nothing.

  “Well, Joel wasn’t my customer. I met him through another surgeon I’d been repping to for years, a guy Joel had worked with years before, after Vietnam.”

  Hansen spoke up, his voice casual, calm. “I thought you said you met Joel through Dr. McKay.” He sensed the increased interest in the tension of Capriano’s body although the other man kept his demeanor cool, too.

  “Did I? I don’t think I said that. Actually Ellie met Joel through me. Well, it was Sandy’s idea. Sandy’s my wife.”

  “I remember,” said Hansen.

  “How long did you know Joel before you introduced him to Dr. McKay?” Capriano was back in the conversation.

  “Oh, a good while, most of a year probably. Joel seemed lonely. He liked to eat well, good wine and good food. He was looking for a buddy and I was happy to do that.”

  “He ever come on to you?” Capriano tossed out the question as if he was talking about the weather.