by Neil Mcmahon
For the first time in his life, he wanted to kill.
He picked up the phone and called Stover Larrabee.
The weight of consciousness was returning to Alison, a reluctant awakening from a long dream that could not be recalled. At some point she realized that her eyes were open, but trying to move was too much effort. Her mind absorbed what she saw, without supplying emotions or logic, She was lying in a semidark room. There were several stuffed animals on the bed with her. The walls were papered in a pastel blue pattern, with a shelf of dolls and another of old LP records.
“Are we awake?” a familiar high-pitched voice said. It was soft now, soothing. A hand stroked her hair. “We’ll have to let this grow out, like it used to be.”
Then the hand tightened, vanking a fistful of hair, making her inhale sharply with pain.
“What got into you? This was all going so beautifully.”
The grip tightened further, making her gasp again, then let go. The bed shifted, releasing the weight of the person who had been sitting by her head.
“Let’s get you dressed properly,” the voice said. “There’s someone coming to see you. Someone who’s going to make you feel very different.”
The hands pulled her bathrobe away, off her arms, out from under her. Then a nightgown came to replace it, pulled down over her head and neck. It was fine white linen trimmed with pink, with a little girl’s bow at the bosom.
When it reached her hips, there was a pause. One of the hands touched her hesitantly between the thighs, a timid gesture that was not even a caress. It rested there, unmoving, for several seconds. She was aware of slow, controlled breathing. Then the hand withdrew, and pulled the gown on down to her ankles.
“Now,” the voice whispered. “Tell me all about the games you like to play.”
Chapter 14
Monks waited for Larrabee in a shopping center parking lot in Orinda, sipping bad convenience store coffee. The gray morning had dawned, and the sky was heavy with rolling clouds that threatened more rain. On the seat beside him rested a Clevinger Hospital directory that he had taken from Alison’s desk, with Francis Jephson’s unlisted address. He had circled the location on a map. It was about a mile away.
A few minutes after eight A.M., an older van, dented and long unwashed, pulled in. It carried lengths of copper and PVC pipe on the rack, and bore the logo: “ON THE SPOT” PLUMBING. Larrabee walked to the Bronco, wearing a brown duck jacket, baseball cap, and coveralls. Like Monks, he needed a shave.
Larrabee leaned against the Bronco and folded his arms.
“A fucking cobra?”
“It would have gotten me for sure, except for the cats.”
“Carroll. This has changed. You’re out of your league, way out.”
“I know that, Stover. But I’m afraid to make the wrong phone call. And I have no idea which call that is. If Naia gets wind the police are after her, my family might have to stay in hiding.”
Larrabee was watching him, a look Monks had seen before, grim and disconcerting, and he knew Larrabee was thinking the same thing: How long could you hide from someone like Naia?
“That’s not exactly what I’m getting at,” Larrabee said. “She’s gone to a lot of trouble to let you know that isn’t about harming Dr. Chapley, right?”
“She half-asphyxiated Alison, making sure I heard.”
“I don’t doubt she’s capable of it. But it’s not what she wants.”
“Meaning?”
“Stealing your daughter’s doll, having that all set up,” Larrabee said. “You realize it means Naia’s known who you were at least since yesterday, maybe longer. Before she grabbed Dr. Chapley. How do you figure that?”
Monks had been thinking about it.
“There are several possibilities. That kid in Mendocino could still have been in touch with Naia. Given her my license number.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’re risking yourself and your family for somebody who hasn’t been straight with you. Maybe Dr. Chapley and Naia have something going on their own. If you want to let them work it out, I never heard of it.”
Monks had been thinking about that too.
He said, “Maybe they do. Let’s see what we turn up with Jephson.”
He handed Larrabee a photograph of Alison that he had found in her house. It apparently had been taken on a hiking trip or picnic. She was smiling, fresh, with windblown hair.
Larrabee examined it. “Not bad.”
“I looked for the things Naia had given her. That death mask and cap. They’re hidden or gone. The phone machine tape was blank.”
Larrabee checked his watch. “Let’s start by finding out if Jephson’s at work.”
Monks locked the Bronco and got into the plumbing van. Larrabee set the radio-phone on speaker and punched the number. A middle-aged woman answered: “Dr. Jephson’s office.”
“Good morning. This is Kenneth Hahn, from Mother Lode Realty in Concord. May I speak to—” Larrabee paused, as if reading the name “—Dr. Francis Jepson, please?”
“Dr. Jephson is not available.” Her voice was cool, defensive, pointedly correcting the pronunciation. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“I’m calling to make an inquiry, ma’am. A client—I suppose I should say, a potential client, a very wealthy one—has approached us with an aggressive interest in purchasing Dr. Jephson’s house. Now, we realize it’s not formally for sale, but the terms would be extremely advantageous to him. Can you tell me when you expect him back?”
She hesitated. “He called in last night to say he had a family emergency. He’s likely to be gone for several days.”
Larrabee’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a humorless grin.
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll try him next week.”
He switched off the phone and said, “All right, let’s cruise the house. You stay out of sight.”
Monks crouched in the back of the van, peering out the rear windows. Jephson’s house was on a sedate street, with spacious yards and hedges. Larrabee drove past at moderate speed. A newspaper lay on the doorstep. There were no visible lights on inside. It did not look like anyone had spent the night there.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Larrabee said. “Naia’s got to have a place where she can do whatever she’s doing to those guys, break bones, make them crawl. Messy and noisy. This looks like it’s built on a slab. Not even a basement.”
An image rose in Monks’s mind of Alison, locked in some dank warehouse or deserted farm building. Waiting.
“You want to go in?” Larrabee said. “If we get busted, I might or might not be able to talk us out of it. Either way, the cops are in it from there.”
Monks said, “I can’t not.”
Larrabee swung the van in a U-turn, then pulled into Jephson’s driveway.
“I’m going back to see if there’s an alarm system. If anybody comes by, Jephson called us to ream out the sewer line. You hang here and rummage with the tools. Let people see you.”
He pointed at another pair of overalls, hanging from a hook. Monks put them on and spent the next minutes leaning into the van’s sliding doors, pretending to arrange tools, keeping a tense watch for an approaching squad car. The neighborhood stayed quiet.
Larrabee returned. “The bad news is, it’s a microprocessor. I can’t just nick a wire. The good is, it’s an old Radionics system. I might be able to get into the panel.”
He opened a greasy toolbox and handed Monks a locator wand, then opened another box himself. In it was a laptop computer with attached phone.
Monks prowled the yard, wand in hand, as if searching for the buried sewer pipe, while Larrabee punched numbers and listened. Three cars passed during the minutes, but none slowed.
Larrabee closed the box. “I think I got it. We’re going to stay right here in front. If I fucked up, we’ve got maybe sixty seconds before it goes off, and then it’ll probably only sound at the security company. We leave like nothing’s happened.”
/> He walked to the door holding what looked like a small pistol. He fit the barrel onto the deadbolt and paused.
“You know what I was going to do today? Meet a guy who’s got a ’66 BSA Victor to sell. I had one when I was eighteen.”
There came a quiet thud that Monks felt more than heard.
Larrabee moved the barrel to cover the main lock. The thud came again. The door swung silently open. He stepped to a wall-mounted panel with a keypad and nodded.
“We’re clear. Welcome to the wonderful world of tampering with evidence.” He took a packet of surgical gloves from his pocket and handed a pair to Monks.
They walked quickly through the house. It was furnished with carefully selected antiques: tasteful, fussy. The bed was made, with no sign of hasty exit or disturbance. Larrabee was right: there was no basement. They pulled open closets as they walked. There were no obvious signs of women’s clothing.
The answering machine light was blinking in Jephson’s home office. Larrabee punched the PLAY button.
“Dr. Jephson, this is Mrs. Brill, at Clevinger Hospital. The night nursing supervisor? We know you’re out of town, Doctor, but we’ve been unable to reach you at the number you left. We hope you’ll pick up this message. I’m calling to issue you a Tarasoff warning.”
Monks knew the term; a state-mandated warning to mental institution personnel, when an inmate who had threatened them was at large.
“John James Garlick escaped sometime last night. He’s considered very dangerous, especially because he was involved in a violent incident earlier that afternoon. Police are alerted and the area is being searched, but we urge you to take precautions for your personal safety.
“Please call us at your earliest opportunity. The police are anxious to talk to you.”
The machine clicked. A digital voice said: “Friday, 7:14 A.M. You have no more messages.”
Monks said, “The violent incident was with Alison. Garlick attacked her.”
“And it sounds like Jephson left a bogus phone number.”
Larrabee yanked open a file drawer. It was packed with manila folders.
“It’d take for fucking ever to get through all this,” he said. “Let’s do the desk. Look for an address book, personal letters, anything like that.”
Monks scanned a desktop basket of correspondence. It was all professional. The drawers held office supplies and stationery, all impersonal items.
“He’s not keeping anything important here,” Larrabee said. “The whole thing, even the alarm system, is set up to make him look like a model citizen.”
On their way out, Larrabee stepped to the television and slipped a finger into the VCR’s door. He stopped and ejected a cassette. It was unlabeled.
“Let’s just see what kind of home movies the doc’s been watching.” He rewound the tape several seconds. Monks stepped to a window and twitched the curtain aside. The street was still quiet.
The TV screen lit. Larrabee started the tape.
They stared at the image that appeared:
A powerfully built man, his back to the camera, hanging upside down by one roped foot like a swordfish or a deer. The other thigh jutted out horizontally, but from the knee down the leg dangled so as to suggest that it had been partially severed. The torso bore several long slashes. Both pants and shin were soaked with blood. On the room’s stone floor lay a crumpled baseball cap. The body was twisting very slowly, and Monks did not think he was imagining that it was still jerking in final, futile attempts to escape.
Larrabee shoved the tape in his pocket. They strode for the door.
Back in the parking lot, Larrabee slumped in the driver’s seat, fingers drumming on the dash. “This will put Jephson in jail.”
Monks was trying to erase mental images: the slowly twisting body with its flopping hamstrung leg, hung upside down, like the searcher Caymas Schulte had caught in a snare and almost beaten to death.
The blood-soaked crotch of a child rapist.
Monks said, “We’ve still got to find him.”
“He’s more scared than he wants you to think. Leaving that tape was a big mistake.”
Monks had brought the retrieval code from Alison’s answering machine. He said, “Let’s see if she got one of those Tarasoff warnings.”
She had, along with one more message. The voice was a man’s: not young, probably black, definitely uneasy.
“Alison, it’s Harold. The hospital says you haven’t checked in. I need to know you’re all right. Please call me, I’m at home.” The phone number he left belonged to one Harold Henley, 3718 Cambridge, Richmond.
Larrabee said, “I’ll get this tape home and see what else is on it.”
Monks trotted to the Bronco.
Cambridge turned out to be a side street in Richmond, several blocks west of San Pablo. The neighborhood was residential, mostly fifties-vintage homes of aging pastel stucco, with an occasional two-or three-story apartment building. There was a small grocery-liquor store on one corner, with wire-grilled windows and two men out front who seemed pointedly unaware of Monks’s passage.
He found the address two blocks farther down: one of the apartment buildings, well-kept and recently painted. Through the driveway into the courtyard parking lot, he caught a glimpse of stacked lumber, rolls of insulation, other building materials. A door on the ground floor just off the main entry had a MANAGER sign and a glass peephole. It was 8:52 A.M. Monks rang the bell.
He could feel the vibration of heavy footsteps approaching the door. Fifteen seconds passed, while he felt himself scrutinized. Then came the sounds of locks turning, a chain being undone, and Monks found himself looking at a man so large he almost stepped back.
“Mr. Henley?”
Harold Henley’s chin lifted slightly. He was wearing a light blue nylon jogging suit with white stripes and bedroom slippers. His eyes were watchful.
“I’m here about Alison.”
A tremor passed across Harold’s face, but control returned instantly. “Alison who?”
“Alison who you just called half an hour ago.”
Harold moved as if to close the door.
Monks said forcefully, “Somebody’s got her. A killer.”
The tremor came again. Harold’s mouth opened. He made a sudden panting sound.
“I’m not police, I’m her friend,” Monks said. “You have to tell me what you know.”
“Oh, man.” The words came out like a sob. The huge body turned away, leaving the door open. Monks stepped in after him and closed it behind.
The air in the apartment was pervaded by the sweetish scent of fresheners, and the furnishings suggested an almost comic fantasy of a swinging bachelor life: eggshell-white shag carpet, black leather couch, portable bar displaying expensive liquors, and a Sony entertainment center with a screen three feet across. But the sense was broken by the room’s central feature, an overstuffed chair pulled up close to the TV, and scalloped deeply by a great lonely weight.
Harold said, “You haven’t told me your name.”
“Monks.”
“You her man?”
Monks hesitated. “No.”
Harold moved to a window and stood with his back to the room. Narrowly parted Levelor blinds showed the courtyard, where the comings and goings of tenants would be most visible. It was another place he seemed to spend a lot of time.
“World treats black people different than white people. Where you live, Monks? You got crackheads hanging on your street comers? You scared to open a window?”
Monks’s gaze flicked to the door, which bore several deadbolts and hasps.
“I sold TVs, cars,” Harold said. “Finally bought this place. It was trash. I been fixing it up. Another couple years, I’ll be able to buy me a house someplace I don’t have to worry about that shit.”
Monks waited. The air fresheners cloyed. His armpits were unpleasantly damp.
“Most white people treat black people different, too. You understand, Monks?”
“I don’t like it either, Harold. But Alison’s not that way. Is she?”
“Suppose I tell you something. How much you going to help me?”
“If we get her back safe, I never heard of you.”
“Ain’t going to help me with somebody that’s heard of me.”
Monks said, “Who?”
“Name that start with a N.”
Comprehension began in Monks’s mind.
“Tell me,” he said. “Say the name.”
Harold neither moved nor spoke. It was sinking in that he possessed a deliberateness that was as much a part of him as his huge bones.
A deliberateness compounded by fear.
Monks said, “Naia. That’s who’s got her, Harold. Did you know that too?”
Finally Harold half turned. His face was deeply creased.
“Patient escaped last night. Man named Garlick.”
“The one who attacked Alison?”
Nod. “Hospital found him missing early this morning. I took the day off to look after my personal safety. Called her to see if she’s all right. That’s what I could tell the police, Monks.”
Monks waited again, while Harold planned his words or simply decided enough time had passed to continue.
“Way it started out, I gave information. That’s all. Came out to my car after work one day. Be eight years now. Car was locked, but there was a envelope on the floor. Five thousand dollars cash and a note, that all it said was the location of a phone booth and a time.
“Phone rang right on the minute. A woman’s voice, except you could tell it wasn’t real. She told me the kind of thing she want to know. Who the NGIs were. What they’d done. When and where they were released. Another five thousand every time. You would of done it too, Monks.”
So: Harold Henley had not bought and remodeled an apartment building just on a security guard’s salary. He had been selling information to Naia.
Monks said, “Probably so.”
“Then Alison had to come sniffing round.”
Harold’s head drooped, and Monks’s scalp bristled with realization.
Harold had sold that information, too.
Monks said, “You son of a bitch.”
