Twice Dying

by Neil Mcmahon

  Roman turned to the second page. It began with the heading EXTERNAL EXAMINATION: The body is that of a white male, appearing approximately the stated age. Tissue decomposition and skin slipping are extremely advanced, and skeletal disarray has occurred from fish and animal predation.

  Roman’s finger moved down the page. Small amounts of a nonlocal substance identified as diatomaceous earth were found imbedded in the tissue of the right shin and knee …

  Monks said, “That DE again. I’d say our margins for suicide are getting slimmer.”

  “There’s more yet.”

  Roman remained silent for another half minute, as if still considering stepping back. Then he turned the page and his forefinger moved to the beginning of a paragraph: The right arm shows severe animal damage, with distress evident in the wrist joint and a spiral fracture in the upper humerus.

  “There are a lot of possibilities,” Roman said. “Maybe he jumped from a cliff or bridge, and hit something. Maybe got chewed up by a coyote or cougar.

  “Except animal jaws or impact don’t typically produce spiral fractures. They come from torsion. Something twisting the arm until it breaks.”

  Alison answered her office phone. It was Monks, calling from Mercy Hospital.

  “I had our pathologist find autopsy reports on two more of your NGIs, Prokura and Kurlin,” he said. “The first was made to look like a suicide, the other an accident. They may have been disabled someplace first, then dumped.”

  She closed her eyes. “Disabled?”

  “Possibly hamstrung. Tendons behind the knee severed. Both had a substance known as diatomaceous earth imbedded in tissue. As if they’d been at the same place and fallen hard, or crawled.”

  What will we do about him?

  I’ll just tell him nothing more has happened. He’ll go away.

  This is just between us now. Yes?

  Yes.

  She said, “Look. I’ve gotten you into something that’s none of your doing.”

  “That’s not an issue, Alison. Your safety is.”

  “Rasp, there’s no reason to think she’s going to come after me. I’m not even sure I want to stop her.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Look who she’s killing.”

  Monks said, “So now you’re judge and jury?”

  “I don’t know what I am. There’s something you could do that might help. If you still want to.”

  “You know I do.”

  “There’s an NGI file missing from Records. It’s the only one out of sixty-eight, and he overlapped with Robby Vandenard. Can you check him out?”

  “Give me the name.”

  “Thomas David Springkell.” She spelled it aloud. “Try to find out what he looks like. His size. If he could be the one Tanager saw.”

  Monks said, “When can I meet you?”

  “I could stop in Berkeley on my way home,” she said, “Sproul Plaza, call it five.”

  She hung up and sat another minute, looking inward, trying to get a glimpse of what direction to take.

  You’re a little quail, mincing around the dens entrance. You peek in at the cobras to get your dreary, timid thrills. You tease them with a stick you hold in your little beak. But you’ve been oh, so careful.

  What happens then? When you walk into that den?

  Oh, darling. Everything changes. You become a cobra hunter.

  Mrs. R answered the phone in Jephson’s office.

  Alison said, “Paula, I really need to talk to Dr. Jephson. Could he find a couple of minutes for me?”

  “If you’ll just hold on, I’ll ask.” Mrs. R’s tone was cool and brisk. Clearly, she had not forgotten their last exchange.

  Thirty seconds later she came back on. “I’m sorry, Alison. He’s very busy these next couple of days. Why don’t you try again next week?”

  Alison unlocked a desk drawer filled with weapons confiscated from patients over the years: penknives, Afro combs, taped razor blades. She touched several with her forefinger, prodding them as if they could move.

  Yes, it was toying with a deadly snake. An attempt to flush it out of its den, by using another snake: John James Garlick.

  It came to her that this was what a killer felt, the unreality of each irreversible step toward a line that could never be uncrossed. The model that experts agreed on: a thrill greater than any other, absolute power over a victim. The need growing to have it again and again, each time more refined and controlled, more fully savored.

  In her notebook she made a rough sketch of Jephson’s face, then drew it twice more with increasing accuracy. On the last one, she darkened his glasses to sunglasses and fluffed the hair out into a wig, accentuating the fine bone structure of his cheeks and jaw. The result was feminine, attractive.

  She put away the notebook and went on-ward, to finish out the next hours as if nothing was amiss.

  Chapter 12

  Monks got out of the Bronco and joined Larrabee on the sidewalk in front of Thomas Springkell’s last known address: his parents’ home, near Crockett, on the south shore of Carquinez Straits. The street was wistfully named Linda Vista. The view was of the great muddy mouth of the Sacramento River, with a long-disused derrick anchored offshore and several retired ships of the navy’s mothball fleet waiting for orders to the scrap yard.

  Larrabee held up his PI license to the woman who half-opened the door.

  “Is this about Tommy?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Larrabee added quickly, “He’s not in any trouble.”

  “He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “We’re not police, Mrs. Springkell,” Larrabee said, and repeated emphatically, “Tommy’s not in any trouble.”

  She pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped back. The living room was small, the ceiling low, with the kind of heavy texture found in motels. The smell of cigarette smoke was strong. Phyllis Springkell was in her mid-fifties, with olive skin, dyed black hair, and a patient air that Monks was starting to recognize, of people who were familiar with visits from authorities.

  She said, “I haven’t heard from him in nine years. That’s the truth.”

  “Any idea where he is?”

  “No, but I know what he is. He’s dead.”

  Monks turned away, folding his arms.

  Larrabee said, “Do you have a reason for thinking that?”

  “I’m his mother,” she said, as if that explained everything, and perhaps, Monks thought, it did.

  A criminal history of Thomas Springkell had showed him to be, in Larrabee’s words, a punk. By his early twenties, he had accumulated almost thirty arrests, with numerous periods of confinement in youth facilities, jails, and mental institutions. His crimes mainly involved drug use and larceny that had evolved from petty theft to armed robbery. But offenses had turned up that were dated after his release from Clevinger in March 1988.

  Presumably, another success for Francis Jephson.

  “Mrs. Springkell, I realize this is painful, and I’m very sorry to put you through it,” Larrabee said.

  “You going to tell me what it’s about?”

  “All right, I’ll be very straight with you. I’ve been hired by the defense in a drug case. A fairly major dealer. Your son’s name came up. It’s my job, it’s standard practice, to find out if his testimony might be damaging to my client.”

  “He’s dead,” she said again. “He’d never go this long without being in touch.” She sat heavily on the couch and reached for a pack of cigarettes.

  Larrabee said, “You last saw him nine years ago?”

  “Here. He’d moved back home, was living in his old room.”

  “This was after he got out of Clevinger Hospital?”

  She nodded. “One afternoon he said he was going to see somebody about a job. His father’d been after him about it, trying to keep him busy. Build up his self-respect. He’d had a bunch of loser friends. Doing cocaine, freebase. We were afraid, if he started up with them again, he’d be go
ne for good.

  “Tommy walked up to the shopping center, over the hill.” She gestured the direction with her head. “He never came home.”

  “You don’t feel there’s any chance he might have just taken off? Be out there somewhere, too shy, or whatever, to call his mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “Any chance Tommy would have been in contact with Mr. Springkell?”

  “You can ask him, if you want to go to Kuwait.”

  “Kuwait?”

  “He’s over there helping them rebuild. He worked in the shipyards at Mare Island until they closed.”

  “How long’s he been in Kuwait?”

  “Him and his new wife? Just about five years.”

  “How about Tommy’s brothers and sisters?”

  “If they heard anything about him, they’d tell me.”

  Monks saw a chance to express kinship, perhaps ease the tension.

  “I spent a long year at Mare Island,” he said.

  “No kidding. In the yards?”

  “In the navy.”

  “You a private eye too?”

  “A physician,” Monks said.

  “No kidding. How are you in on this?”

  “There are some medical aspects. Technical points.”

  She leaned back, crossed her legs, blew smoke in their direction. Her gaze had gone appraising.

  Larrabee cleared his throat. “Mrs. Springkell, how did Tommy get chosen for the Clevinger program? My understanding is, it’s usually for very violent men.”

  “After his last arrest, they did a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “Who did?” Monks said. “Dr. Jephson?”

  She tilted her head toward Monks. “You know him?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “He’s a great man,” she said fervently. “He figured out what nobody had before. Tommy was bipolar, what they used to call manic-depressive. Now they’ve got names for all that, ways to treat it. Back then, he was just a kid who got in trouble. He got branded at school, he couldn’t do anything right. So of course, he didn’t want to go.”

  “Did Tommy ever commit any violent crimes?”

  “Never,” she said, eyes and voice gone hard. “A few robberies.”

  Quire a few, Monks thought, some of them armed.

  He said, “So Dr. Jephson chose Tommy, personally?”

  “He even arranged the funding. We could never have afforded it.”

  “Did Dr. Jephson ever contact Tommy after he was released?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about Robert Vandenard, Mrs. Springkell? Did Tommy ever talk about him?”

  “Richie Rich?” She stubbed out the cigarette.

  Monks said, “Were they friends?”

  “That’s what Tommy thought. Robby told him they were going to live together after they got out. Be bachelor pals. Of course it didn’t happen. Tommy’d try to call him, but they’d always say he was out. Tommy got very depressed.”

  Monks said, “Do you have a photo of Tommy?”

  They followed her down a narrow, dim hallway to a small room, a kid’s room, a room it was hard to imagine could hold enough self-respect to help a twenty-seven-year-old man, back from half a dozen jails and mental hospitals. A cheap acoustic guitar leaned in one corner. The walls were hung with clashing posters: Joe Montana fading back to pass, Jerry Garcia in vivid psychedelic coloring. With abrupt, bittersweet shock he recalled the rooms of Tanager Schulte and of his own children, similarly decorated, with icons of their heroes.

  “This is Tommy,” Mrs. Springkell said. “With his brothers.” Her finger touched a photo on the dresser, a wiry dark-haired boy in his early teens, who appeared to be the youngest of three. She touched another, a portrait. He was older, nice looking, with carefully combed hair and awkward smile. “High school. He didn’t finish.”

  Monks said, “About how tall was, is, he, Mrs. Springkell?”

  She glanced at him. “Five nine. Why?”

  “Slender? I mean, he didn’t gaina lot of weight when he got older.” She was looking at him steadily now. It was a very direct gaze. “The way some people do,” Monks finished lamely.

  “No,” she said. “He came home from the hospital way thin. I was feeding him all he’d eat. You trying to match him up to something?”

  “I’m just trying to form a picture of him. I’ve got kids myself.”

  “Yeah?” she said, her tone caustic. “Do doctors’ kids get in troubler”

  Monks said, “One has.”

  Larrabee said. “I hate to ask you this, Mrs. Springkell, hut did Tommy ever exhibit any, uh, gay behavior? Anything like that?”

  “What the hell has that got to do with a drug bust?”

  Larrabee’s hand went to his hair, brushing several times in boyish chagrin. “It’s complicated.”

  “No. He liked girls but he never had much luck. That was another way the Vandenard kid let him down. He told Tommy he’d get them both girlfriends, then they could trade off with each other’s in the dark, the girls would never know. Tommy took him seriously.”

  They followed her back to the living room. She went into the kitchen and opened a cabinet above a counter, displaying a selection of grocery store liquor in plastic bottles.

  “The sun just went over the yardarm. That’s what they say in the navy, isn’t it?”

  Monks said, “On certain occasions. Yes.”

  “You boys care to join me?” She looked directly at Monks. “We could talk about trouble.”

  Larrabee said, “We’d love to, but this case is coming up fast. We’ve still got calls to make. Mrs. Springkell, you’ve been a terrific help. We may be back.”

  “Is this really about a drug case?”

  Larrabee said, “No.”

  “You’ll let me know if you find out anything about Tommy?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we surely will.”

  Monks drove behind Larrabee down the switchback road toward the river. They pulled over at a vacant patch of ground and leaned on the Bronco’s hood, partly shielded from the wet cutting wind off the water.

  “You’re the pro,” Monks said. “Was she telling the truth?”

  “Mostly. It doesn’t mean Tommy was straight with her. Even that he’s not still alive.”

  “There’s nothing to suggest him as anything like Naia. He’d have to have undergone a complete personality change.”

  Larrabee grunted. “Not to mention smartening up. What I’m starting to wonder is, could Naia be two people? Say Jephson got his hooks into Tommy. Brainwashed him. He calls the shots, Tommy does the legwork.”

  “I think that’s mostly in the movies, Stover,” Monks said, but found himself reconsidering. Jephson was a specialist in behavior modification. There was no telling how far an already unstable mind could be pushed by a skilled practitioner, especially one with access to a wide variety of psychotropic drugs and no scruples about using them.

  “It is a hell of a coincidence, Tommy and Robby Vandenard being in there together, and then that file turning up missing,” he said. As if Jephson had known that it obtained something damaging to him, and destroyed it.

  “Why else would Jephson go to such trouble to get Tommy into the program, even pay his way?” Larrabee said. “No money in it. No prestige in rehabbing a punk. He had a use for him.”

  “Like getting rid of Robby?”

  “That’s running through my mind. Say he encouraged their friendship, knowing that Robby would break it off. Then worked on Tommy to get even with the pal who fucked him over.”

  “You think a Thomas Springkell could overpower a Caymas Schulte?” Monks said.

  “I think you could take out just about anybody if you got the drop on them. But to hamstring these guys, break their bones, dump them, without a whisper of suspicion. Christ knows how many times, over a period of years.”

  Larrabee turned his back to the wind and shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “I’m plenty impressed by Naia
. But I’m not real interested in getting to know her better.”

  Four P.M. was a quiet time on Three-Psych, meds at the peak of their effect, staff staying scarce and coasting. Alison stepped out of her office. In the pocket of her skirt she carried a flesh-pink toothbrush that had been sharpened to a point by rubbing against concrete.

  John James Garlick was in his usual place at the courtyard’s far end, hands in pockets, leaning against the fence. The pose was youthful, even appealing, and the thought came to her: a predator’s natural camouflage.

  Soon to be released.

  She stepped into sight in the doorway. The NGIs turned quickly, keen to notice entrances and exits. A few of them murmured greetings before turning away in disinterest or unease. Her gaze remained on Garlick until he looked again. She mouthed his name and gestured invitingly, by the book, as nonthreatening as possible. He approached slowly.

  “I wondered if we could talk a minute, John. About your post-release plans.” She could feel the eyes measuring her from behind the polite veil: the look of an experienced con, concerned only with what he stood to gain or lose. He was clear, controlled, and in that moment she was certain that he had not been taking his meds.

  She started to walk back into the building. “Dr. Jephson feels your therapy’s been a great success.”

  For a heartbeat longer, she felt the measuring intensify. Then he grinned, a quick flash of clean teeth that something even in her responded to, and she had to fight the urge to swallow. It was as if an evil secret had been revealed: this was how he had done it, the contrition and impish smile, the glib salesman’s tongue, the bad boy who mom would always forgive one more time. A pattern which might have continued lifelong, if he had not finally pushed past the point where even the most tearful remorse was of no avail.

  “I’ll never forget the people who straightened me out,” he said.

  “You’re going live at home? Work for your father?”

  “My move is to take things slow. Right?”

  “Exactly right,” she said. She stepped out into the garden, meagerly tended by patients, with not much remaining of the summer’s efforts but a few straggling rows of corn. It was never crowded and sure to be deserted at a time like this.