Fog of Dead Souls

by Jill Kelly

Now he was deep asleep and she was alone again. She thought, not for the first time, about Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, about having sex with the Devil. Joel had come to seem that to her, an evil force who had tricked her into trusting him and having sex with him, and then had done unspeakable things without her knowledge or permission.

  She had not thought of Joel while Hansen made love to her. She had been spared that. But she had not been able to relax, to open herself up and trust, even though her mind believed that she was safe with Hansen, that he wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t see how she could ever do that again and maybe not just because of Joel.

  If she told herself the truth, sex hadn’t been all that good with Joel either. Once she got sober, she realized that in all the relationships and with all the lovers—and there had been quite a few, especially in her thirties—alcohol had been there. Except for a couple of fumbling attempts in college, her sexual self and her alcoholic self were one. She realized now that Joel’s indifference to sex had been a relief. He didn’t expect much and she found a lot of ways to avoid it.

  Now with Hansen, she had alcohol again as a lubricant, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. She felt timid in bed, timid and scared, and what kind of man wanted a woman like that? Especially a woman with an aging and mutilated body.

  37

  Hansen stayed with Ellie in Paris for ten days. He got up early most days and went out by himself. He felt it important to give her space in that little apartment. Early on, he offered to get a hotel room, but she wouldn’t have it, and they settled into routines that seemed to work for them both.

  On the third day, he found a message from Capriano on his cell phone, so he took himself down to the Seine and called him back. Again, Capriano bypassed the pleasantries, not even saying hello. “The credit card in Richardson’s name is new. Applied for a month after his death. It’s linked to his bank account, which remains open and active. Richardson isn’t getting his salary anymore, of course, but he has investments and they dump in a tidy sum every month.”

  “Why is his bank account still open? The guy’s dead.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no next of kin to close it, no one handling any of those details. And someone—I assume it’s our killer—is withdrawing money from ATMs from that account on Richardson’s debit card. Because all the records are electronic, the bank doesn’t really pay attention.”

  Hansen thought about this for a minute. “The second man has his computer.”

  “Yes, like we thought before. That would give him access to the bank account, especially if Richardson had given him passwords or had an obvious password to someone who knew him.”

  “What about the ATM security tapes?” asked Hansen.

  “He’s using homeless guys and women to stand in front of the camera and put in the code and take the cash. We found a couple of them and talked to them, but the descriptions didn’t match. One guy said he was hired by a blonde woman in a pantsuit, another said it was an overweight deliveryman in a uniform with Bud on the pocket. Maybe he uses disguises, maybe he uses his friends or pays somebody. Anyway, the tapes are no help.”

  Capriano paused, too, then said, “Have you connected with Ellie McKay?”

  “Yes, she doesn’t know Amanda Carlyle.”

  “Did the death freak her out?”

  “I didn’t tell her that. Just asked if she knew her.”

  “Has she remembered anything more?”

  “Nothing she mentioned.” Hansen stepped off the path to let two joggers go by. “What did the coroner find with Carlyle?”

  “Asphyxiation through regurgitation. It also appeared she’d been strangled and revived a couple of times hours before.”

  Hansen gave a deep sigh. “A piece of work, this guy.”

  “Yeah,” said Capriano.

  “Same drugs?”

  “Yes on the rohypnol but there was also Ambien in her system and a ton of booze. Coroner thinks he may have left her tied up the way he did McKay and she died on her own, choking in her sleep.”

  “Same kind of marks on the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Larry, is there anything else we can see as a signature? Anything this guy left behind?”

  “Only the use of Joel Richardson’s name. That’s the only thing I can see so far.”

  Hansen waited a moment, then said, “I don’t think he got careless, do you?”

  “With the name, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He’s screwing with us, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Capriano. “Yes, indeed… . Hey, before I forget, I’ll be by that way day after tomorrow. Shall I stop if I have any news?”

  “No,” said Hansen. “I won’t be in the office. I’m headed out on vacation. Going to the shore for a few days with my girls. I’ll call you when I get back.” He hated lying, especially to a friend.

  Hansen hung up then. He strolled on back to the Rue des Ciseaux, stopping to buy the little apple tarts Ellie liked and a chocolate croissant for himself. The food here was just too damn good.

  She wasn’t there when he got back to the apartment. She also took off for hours during the day, but he didn’t know what she did. And he didn’t feel comfortable asking. There was a lot of her, in fact, that was a mystery to him. The drinking for one thing. He could have sworn she’d said she didn’t drink any more, but they had wine for lunch and dinner most days and a whiskey before bedtime. He wasn’t sure how much they were drinking, as she kept the refrigerator and cupboards stocked with food and drink.

  Then there were the pills in the cabinet in the bathroom. Two big bottles of Valium and a variety of samples, from Arlen Gerstead no doubt. He wanted to ask her if her doctor knew about all of them. He was concerned that she’d have some kind of reaction to mixing them or that maybe she was planning something with them.

  Ellie had been through a lot. Being with her, he realized he hadn’t ever given much thought to the victims of violence and what they went through. The violence made him sick, it made him mad, it made him want to get the guys who had done it. But he had never thought about the moment-to-moment life of the victim after the mugging, after the rape, after the attempted murder. He wondered if Ellie wished she was dead, wished that Joel had killed her.

  The truth was he didn’t know how to help her, didn’t know how to knit the contradictions together into a woman he could fall in love with. During the day, she was affectionate with him, touching him when she passed by, kissing him often, holding his hand as they walked down the street. But when he wanted more, wanted to make love to her, she turned cool, went somewhere else when they were in bed together. She didn’t push him away, didn’t say no. He could have dealt with that. But this cool acquiescence he didn’t understand.

  Then as the days passed, she seemed to soften. They spent more time together. She took him to the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, to the home of Victor Hugo and the Holocaust museum. She had a wealth of information and she told him stories that made him wish he’d paid attention in his history classes. He saw that there were two Ellies—the vulnerable woman who had been brutalized by a sick man and his even sicker companion and then this competent, often funny college professor. And although he found himself a little intimidated by her intellect, she made no big deal about this disparity between them.

  “Everybody has their own kind of smart,” she said when he mentioned how much she knew. “I may be book-smart, but you are definitely street-smart. What’s more, you’re heart-smart, and that means a lot to me.”

  Heart-smart. No one had ever called him that before. His wife would have scoffed. His brand of romance had never appealed to Claire and that had hurt him deeply. He knew himself to be a sensitive guy, an understanding man. He felt glad that Ellie could see it.

  “I’m going back tomorrow.”

  Ellie looked up at him from her journal. She wrote each morning at the table in the living room while Hansen showered and shaved. A
strange cloud seemed to pass over her face, but she just nodded and turned back to her writing.

  He stood there a moment longer. He was too unsure of his feelings to make some kind of promise to her. A possibility was definitely there, for him anyway. He liked her, he desired her, but was that enough? Although he hated to admit it, Richardson was there with them, too. He didn’t think he could erase Richardson for her and, until that happened, wasn’t this some kind of weird rebound relationship?

  They had sex again that night. The last several nights, Ellie had initiated it and the potential for something good seemed to increase. But the moment he entered her, she went away. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her breath. He was glad she didn’t pretend, that would have broken his heart, but he couldn’t satisfy her and he didn’t know what to do.

  This time, when he had come and they had parted, he could feel her wound-up beside him. Before, the holding back had eased after. This time it didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m sure this is disappointing to you.”

  “No,” he lied. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. But I can’t do anything else right now. I don’t know if this will make any sense, but I need it to be ordinary, what happens between us, dull and ordinary. I couldn’t handle the earth moving or rockets going off. When we do this, I’m supposed to be in my body, but I just can’t be. I wish I could. You can’t know how much I wish I could. How much I wish I’d never met Joel.”

  He felt a hot flash of anger at Richardson, at fate. Then he kissed her hand, which he had taken in his. “I wouldn’t know you then.”

  She laughed, a short, bitter sound. But when she spoke, her voice was softer. “I am glad to know you, Doug. I’m so glad you came to Paris. I will treasure these days. But it isn’t enough. I wish I could say that it is, but it isn’t.”

  “You could come back with me, spend your sabbatical in Gettysburg.” He hadn’t meant to say this.

  “I’m not sure I can ever go back to Gettysburg.”

  The anger flashed in him again. Here was Richardson manipulating his life from beyond the grave.

  “When will you come back to Pittsburgh?” He made his voice neutral this time.

  “In the spring,” she said. “March or April. I’ve been working a little. Getting some ideas for some writing I could do. I’ll go back to that after you leave.”

  “Can we stay in touch?”

  “Yes, of course. You can call me anytime or email. I care about you. I wish I could care more.”

  He pulled her close and they lay like that a long time. But when he woke in the night, her place in the bed was cold and the lamp glowed from the living room.

  She wouldn’t let him take a cab to the airport. Instead they took a long route on buses and trains. He hadn’t wanted her to come with him that far. It was a waste of time and he wasn’t sure how they would part. But it felt right somehow to have her company for a couple more hours.

  They checked in his bags and got coffee and one of the best chocolate croissants he’d had. “Can you ship these to me?” he said.

  Her face, which had been closed all morning, cleared and she laughed. “There are excellent French bakeries in the States. I’ll bet you can find a good croissant in Philadelphia.”

  They talked a while about her research. He didn’t understand much of it. Something about photography and the novel of the nineteenth century. There were original documents she wanted to look at that were only available at the National Library. He smiled at her enthusiasm and the reverence with which she spoke of handling these newspapers and books that were 150 years old. Yet that didn’t seem enough to him as “something to do.” He was glad to be going back to his job. He needed the structure, the purpose. This was the longest vacation he had taken since his daughters were in grade school and it was beginning to wear on him. He wanted to meet with Capriano and find the second man.

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes until boarding. The butterflies were beginning to circle in his stomach. He didn’t like flying, didn’t like being cooped up in a big metal can for hours. He finished the cappuccino and finger-licked the crumbs from his plate.

  “Go ahead,” Ellie said, laughing again. “You know you want another one.”

  He bought two, asked for a plastic bag to keep the butter smears out of his pocket. The girl looked at him as if he were crazy but handed him a grocery sack.

  Ellie had gathered up his book and his reading glasses and put them in the little cloth bag she’d given him. He went over to her, took the bag from her and put it on the table, then put his arms around her and kissed her. “Go now,” he said quietly. “It’ll be easier for us both.”

  He pulled back to look in her face and saw that her eyes were full of tears. “I don’t know what will become of …” she said but he stopped her words with his mouth, picked up the bag, and headed to the security gate. When he looked back, she had gone.

  38

  It will never last. You know that, don’t you?”

  The woman who slid in across from Ellie in the back booth at Muddy Waters the morning after her return from Chama Valley had amazing red hair. It was the kind of hair that didn’t look real but most certainly was. It was also thick and a little bit curly. Ellie had always envied women with hair like that.

  Jean jacket, black t-shirt, a large chunk of polished turquoise on a thick silver chain over her small breasts. The woman sat casually across from her, her arm slung over the back of the booth. Girlfriend to girlfriend. Except for the look on her face.

  Ellie said nothing. Almost no one knew her in Farmington. She could count those who did on ten fingers: Al, Mona, the desk clerks at the Residence Inn, the rancheros, the dean at the college. She certainly didn’t know this person. So she waited.

  The redhead waved away the approaching waitress, looked out the window, and then turned back to Ellie. “You think you can waltz in here and insinuate yourself in our lives. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t know anything about us and how we live here. We have history, and you, you’re not part of that.” The woman’s voice was low, threatening in a way that vibrated along Ellie’s spine.

  “Are you … have you been going through my things?” Ellie asked.

  “Yeah, right. As if I have time to follow you around.” Then the woman reached over and picked up Ellie’s tea. She looked her in the eye, spat in the cup, then put it back where it had been. “I feel sorry for you. I’ll bet you think he’s just a regular guy. A good man. Well, he’ll leave you, too.”

  She slid out of the booth and leaned down over Ellie’s shoulder. “Ask him what really happened to Annie.”

  39

  The woman who runs the sex parties has agreed to meet with us.” Capriano’s voice came clear and strong over the connection. “Any chance you can come this way?”

  Hansen sighed. Since his return from France two weeks before, he had put Ellie and the case in a back pocket of his mind. His disappointment with what had happened between them was profound. He thought he had gone to Paris open to something that could occur, but he knew now that he had planned to fall in love, to commit his future to Ellie, to come back with a woman in his life again. Instead he was more alone than ever.

  “You there, Doug?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. When were you thinking of seeing her?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon about three.”

  “Let me think a minute.” Hansen had been busy. The arsons were ongoing, and an old man had died in one of the fires. The chief was pressing for an arrest. “Yeah, I’ll be there. Meet you at the station at two-thirty.”

  Marilyn Tomei was a very handsome woman in her mid-forties. Hansen guessed she had been a model before she became a madam. She met them in the penthouse suite of Pittsburgh Towers. Even though the furnishings were elegant and expensive, it was clear she did not live there. It was clear from the five-star hotel furnishings that no one did.

  A linebacker bodyguard opened the door
to them. He stood back at the sign of the badges and the woman rose off the couch and extended her hand. Her smile was warm, welcoming, and all together professional. “Coffee?” she said. “Something cold?”

  The detectives declined. They all sat then around the glass-and-chrome coffee table. Hansen glanced at the one book on the table, a photo display of antique motorcycles.

  Capriano spoke first. “We appreciate your meeting with us. As my colleague told you, we’re investigating a rape and suicide of two Pittsburgh residents. We believe the suicide, Joel Richardson, was a client of yours.”

  “I have no clients, detective. I don’t need to work for a living. But I do entertain a great deal. Perhaps I met Mr. Richardson socially, although the name doesn’t ring a bell.” She smiled that same smile. Hansen wondered if it took a conscious effort to be so agreeable.

  He pulled out photos, a professional head shot of Joel Richardson that the hospital had given them and the mug shot of Arlen Gerstead. He handed the Richardson photo to the woman.

  “Yes, I have met this man several times. But the name he gave me was Chad, Joel Chad. He’s a doctor, I believe. And I haven’t seen him for a number of months.”

  “That’s Joel Richardson,” Capriano said.

  The woman smiled. “I don’t ask men for their identification when they introduce themselves.”

  “Why would you?” Capriano smiled as well. “Richardson killed himself last September after the rape and torture of his girlfriend by another man. We’re trying to find out information that will lead us to the second man.”

  Distaste crossed the woman’s face. “As I told you, I only meet men socially and I had only a passing acquaintance with Joel Chad. He came to a few parties I gave over the spring and summer.”

  “Did Richardson, or Chad, bring other men with him? Perhaps a younger man, a lover maybe?”

  “Not that I remember. I meet so many people in the course of a year. And I don’t often know their relationships with each other.”