I didn’t think so. Even when she was younger, Dulcie had never been the kind of child who wanted me to fight her battles for her. She’d never relied on me to handle her confrontations, nor had she been afraid of them. If anything, like my ex-husband, she seemed to get stronger when faced with adversity.
“Raul thinks I’m an idiot. An idiotic baby who had the worst stage fright than anyone ever had in the whole world.”
I felt like a warrior who wanted to slay this dragon that had threatened my loved one. “He called you an idiotic baby?”
She shook her head.
“What did he say to you?”
“He told me …” She didn’t finish.
“Dulcie, it’s okay. I won’t embarrass you with him. Just tell me what he said to you. I need to know.”
Still, she hesitated.
“He told me …” she whispered.
I took her hand and held it between mine. Our fingers were almost the same length. I remembered a diminutive hand that used to grab onto mine with fierce strength. “What did he say, sweetie?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, tell me.”
She burst into tears. I didn’t think she could have that many tears in her. I scooted my chair closer to hers, gathered her into my arms and stroked her back.
“I … let … him … down … Oh, Mom … He won’t want me to work with him anymore.…”
Finally, I saw the first glimmer of what was really going on. How could I have been so dense?
“Dulcie, all these weeks you’ve been asking me to pick you up from the studio ten or fifteen minutes late. Was it really because you didn’t want me walking in on a rehearsal or was it something else?”
She looked up at me from under her thick lashes that sparkled with tears. “I just didn’t want you to see me making mistakes.”
“I believe that was one reason. What I am asking, and you know it, is, was that the only reason?”
She didn’t have to say a word. I could see the answer in the way she looked away from me.
So many times during the last two months, I’d arrived at the studio to find Dulcie working with Raul on her part. They weren’t alone—there were always other cast and crew around getting ready to leave and talking to one another—but she clearly was spending more time with him than the other kids were. I knew that was because she had the lead. But did she realize that was the only reason? Was she seeking him out because she needed help or because she wanted the attention he gave her?
“He never minded that I hung around after rehearsals to talk about my part.” She was still in my arms and spoke her words into my neck. I could feel her breath, hot and moist, on my skin.
“I’m sure he didn’t mind,” I told her.
Dulcie didn’t say anything else.
She wasn’t eight or nine years old. She was thirteen. And now I knew she had a crush on Raul Seeger. Which was why my daughter was devastated that she hadn’t lived up to her director’s expectations.
“You have to call him for me, Mom, and tell him I’m quitting.” Her words were still muffled.
“Dulcie, Dad told me that the review also said you showed incredible range in your singing and you had serious star potential.”
“They were just saying that.”
“If they were just saying that about the good part, then why weren’t they just saying that about the bad part?”
“I … don’t … know.”
All I had wanted from the beginning was for Dulcie to stay in school and put off having an acting career until after college. Now I was about to convince her not to give up the play, because this wasn’t about her stage fright anymore. It wasn’t about the play being too much pressure for her.
It was a conflict of heart. Her first. And I was not going to let my thirteen-year-old daughter give up her dream because she was embarrassed in front of the man she had a crush on—her director.
She was sitting up again. The tears had stopped but her face was stained.
“Can’t Raul work with you on the stage fright? I’m sure he’s had lots of experience with other kids.”
“He said he could. All I had to do was ask.”
“But?”
“If I asked him to help me Mom, he’d know how weak I was. He’d know I wasn’t good at it and that I couldn’t do it without him.”
She was looking at me when she said it. And the way the light was shining on her face, I could see myself at the table reflected in her eyes.
“Well, that’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay to ask him for help. For him to know that you need him. He won’t think any less of you.”
I was hearing my own words. Knowing that I wouldn’t think about them now, but that they had their own resonance for me, too.
“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly.
“Did you like being in the play—once you got past that first scene?”
She nodded, now almost ashamed to tell me, some part of her realizing that she had not been quite honest with me about the crisis.
“The problem was in the show on Saturday night, right?”
She nodded.
“What happened during the matinee on Sunday? Was it as scary?”
“Well, part of the time I worried about screwing up.”
“What about the other part of the time?”
She got up and went to the fridge and pulled out a soda. “I guess it was okay,” she said with her back to me.
“Okay? That doesn’t tell me much. What was it like?”
She popped the top and turned around. “I wasn’t really there. Mary Lennox was. I was sort of seeing what she was seeing. It was like the play was real, and what was real disappeared.” She’d forgotten the embarrassment and was reliving the exhilaration of having slipped into another being’s soul and inhabiting it for a while.
“Your grandmother used to tell me that,” I said. A pang of loss, like a minor chord, reverberated inside me. You don’t ever stop missing someone you have loved, you simply learn how to make the longing for them a piece of you. You learn that missing them is the part of loving them that never leaves, but that doesn’t mean that every once in a while it doesn’t catch you unawares and shock you with its potency. “So I guess you are going to have to stay in the play,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because actresses have to act, honey. That’s what makes them feel alive and fulfills them. And Raul can help you. I bet he’ll even like helping you.”
“Will I have to ask him for help?” She frowned.
“Here’s the thing, Dulcie. Even though you aren’t going to like admitting that you need help, the person whom you are asking to help you—if he cares about you—will be very pleased. It will mean so much to him that you need him that he will never even notice that you feel uncomfortable about it.”
Forty-Seven
The long living room wall was covered with newspaper clippings. There must have been a good twenty-five stories cut out and taped up. Each one telling the story in a slightly different way.
Once in Italy, he had gone into a church. Was it in Siena? The whole back wall had been covered with slips of paper, different sizes and colors, each covered with handwriting. Every note had been a prayer. Some old and yellowed. Others with the ink still black and fresh. He had taken a picture of the wall of prayers.
This then was his wall of answered prayers. The men who had taunted him were getting what they deserved. One by one by one. The only thing he was sorry about was that, although they described the other photographs of the dead bodies, they weren’t showing them. The silly small shots of their bare feet, with the numbers, were disturbing and gruesome, for sure. Graphic, too. In fact, if he were doing a cover for a book about these serial murders, he’d use this image of the insignificant filthy feet, so vulnerable with the bold bright red numbers printed on them.
His glance traveled from the number 1 on Philip Maur’s feet to the number 2 on Timothy Wheaton’s feet to the number 3 on
Grant Firth’s feet. And now the number 4 on the bottom of Bruce Levin’s feet.
Number 5 would be up on the wall next. But he could be patient. Today was for luxuriating in Bruce Levin’s demise. He had been one of the worst of them. Laughing at his cock, flaunting his own erection. Stud. Fucking stupid stud.
He smiled.
Not anymore, he wasn’t.
Paul Lessor wished there were someone he could tell. Because it was so satisfying that he needed to share it.
They had laughed at him and now they were dying.
And no one had any idea why.
On the news and in the papers, reporters kept asking: What connects these men? Why these four? What is their bond to each other? And the longer they searched and the more they looked and the more bodies that showed up, the more baffled they became.
Paul knew. The thing that bound them together was the deepest darkest secret each of these men carried. Secrets they each had gone to great lengths to hide so that no one could find out about their nocturnal wanderings, their willingness to subjugate themselves to the powerful women who had them lie down or stand up and kiss them or lick them or fuck them or massage them or bathe them, or the one who had even been so bold as to ask him to wipe her pussy after she had gone to the bathroom.
No. None of these powerful men—who ran companies and made money and ordered other people around—wanted anyone to know that they belonged to a secret society where they were as powerless as ants under a gardener’s shoe. And so they had hidden their secret so well that neither their families nor the police or the reporters could find the connection between them.
It was late. After two on Sunday night. He should go to sleep. He would pay the price for this tomorrow when he went to work. But he wasn’t tired yet.
He picked up the red magic marker on his desk and walked over to the wall of answered prayers and began to underline his favorite parts in the articles that had appeared in the weekend papers. And he wondered how much longer it would take until the secret leaked out. Until everyone who had laughed at him was being laughed at. That would be rich.
Forty-Eight
“It’s too bright in here. Can’t you shut off some of the lights?” Anne asked.
“I’d like that, too,” Ellen said.
The lights were not that bright. My desk lamp was on. The recessed lighting was at the same level it always was. I thought about the request, got up, and turned the rheostat down just enough to make a difference. Then I sat back down.
The group had assembled. Everyone was present except for Betsy, and I wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t shown up.
“Let’s get started. If—” I had to remind myself not to call her Betsy. “If Liz comes we’ll be able to fill her in.”
“I think we should wait for her. She’s the only one who isn’t here,” Davina said. “And this is the first time we’ve all been together since the last two articles appeared. This is the only place we can be together and talk about this.”
“I understand that you’d like everyone to be here. But she may not be coming. And there is a lot for us to talk about. Is it all right with everyone if we proceed?”
I got a few lukewarm nods. Only Shelby spoke. “I think you’re right, Dr. Snow. We really need to get started so we can talk about what’s happened.”
Over the last three weeks, the stress these women were feeling had become more profound. They were in shock. Disturbed. Confused. And flat-out frightened.
The conversation quickly turned to the four men who had been chosen and conjecture about why, out of the many dozens who were participants in the society, they were being targeted. No one could come up with a reasonable suggestion. It seemed random.
The group was also sincerely worried about several men who hadn’t been seen at the society in the past two weeks. Were any of them missing?
“Maybe they just aren’t coming to your evenings. Perhaps the news has scared them away. Have you tried to contact them?”
“Yes. But we can’t do any more than leave coded messages. And we haven’t heard back from them,” Shelby said.
“I’m surprised anyone is still coming,” Ginny said. “Why isn’t everyone staying away? Why aren’t I?”
“How do you feel about being there?” I asked.
“As if it’s more important than ever to show up …” She seemed embarrassed for a moment. “It makes me feel even more alive. Like we are saying ‘fuck you’ to whoever this madman is every time we get together.”
A few other women agreed.
“I think that is a very reasonable reaction. You want everything to go back to normal. It’s a way of defusing the reality of what’s happened.”
“When I’m at the society, I can pretend that nothing has changed,” Anne said.
“I don’t feel that way,” Davina said. “I don’t think I can do this anymore. It’s wrong. Like we are playing some kind of ghoulish sex game.”
Shelby shook her head. “This isn’t our fault, though. It’s not something that we did. We’re not responsible.” She spoke too loudly.
Anne started to cry. “I’m tired of being sad. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sad. It was bad enough when it was just Philip. And, after him, Tim. But now … four men … this is horrible. I think we should do something.”
Shelby turned quickly to look at her. “I thought you and I already resolved that.”
“Maybe it would be helpful to tell the group what you resolved,” I suggested.
Anne turned directly to me. “I told Shelby I thought we should talk to the police.”
I was glad that someone had brought it up again. If no one had, I was going to try and figure out how to suggest it myself.
There was only one connection between these men. It was the society that these women belonged to and participated in. Yes, now the police knew that each victim had a mark on his right foot that connected him to the others, but that wasn’t much of a lead without knowing what the mark was.
“No.” Shelby spoke sharply. “It’s just impossible. What could we say? No one knows about us. The very last thing we can do is expose our membership. That would be disastrous. We’d never recover!” She was almost shrieking.
It was the first time since we’d started the group that she exhibited this level of emotion. And I was glad.
“It doesn’t matter if it destroys the society,” Anne said. She was angry now, too. “If it means that even one man’s life will be saved, I don’t see how we have any choice. I don’t even understand how it can be a conversation.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ginny said. “Are you willing to have your husband find out? Your boss? Your kids? Your in-laws? Your friends? I’m not. I absolutely am not. Besides, what good will telling the police do? Aid them in warning all the men that they are targets? For God’s sake, there isn’t one man from the society who doesn’t know that by now.”
“Except it hasn’t helped,” Anne argued.
“This is not a discussion,” Shelby said. “We all took an oath. So did every man who joined us. We cannot tell anyone anything.”
“I think this is a discussion,” I said. “And an important one.”
Shelby turned on me. “You would. You talked to that reporter. Why did you do that? You told us that you would keep our secret with us. But you talked to the press.”
The attack was easier for everyone to focus on than the discussion of whether or not they should talk to the police. Ten sets of eyes—angry, hurt and accusatory—turned on me.
“No, Shelby. I didn’t go to the reporter. She came to me. And I didn’t discuss anything about the society with her. You can be sure of that. My comments were about what we can expect from a sexualized serial killer. Not about the men who have been killed or what might tie them together.”
“But you may still be talking to her. How can we know you aren’t?”
I wound up explaining privilege to them once again. I needed them to understand that it was up to one of the
m to go to the police and help them in figuring out who was behind these crimes. At the same time, they needed to trust me if I was going to help them work through their anger, shame and guilt over what had happened.
“The U.S. Supreme Court established the psychotherapist-patient privilege in the federal courts in its Jaffee v. Redmond decision in 1996. The psychiatric community had always operated on this premise but finally it went to the courts. For almost fifty years, lawyers and doctors had been trying to clearly establish that communication between patients and their psychotherapists was in need of a very high level of protection.”
They were listening. Intently. Only Shelby seemed to be ignoring what I was saying. She was looking out the window, staring into the tangled tree branches, lit by the street-lamp.
“There is another precedent—the Tarasoff case,” I continued, “which established just how far that privilege extended. In that court case, it was decided that psychiatrists do have an obligation to warn a third party when a patient has threatened that third party. But none of you has told me the name of the next person or persons at risk. And as far as I know, none of you knows. So I have no right to go to the police myself.”
“You are saying that as if you think we have the right to go,” Cara said.
“An obligation to go,” Anne said.
“No. No. That is just not going to happen,” Shelby yelled, her head swinging around to face the group again. “What are you going to tell them? What names are you even going to give them? We don’t know one another’s real names, for Christ’s sake. This is insane. We have a trust to uphold.”
“At what price?” Anne asked.
No one said anything.
“We don’t want you to talk to the press anymore,” Shelby said to me, obviously trying to change the subject.
“That’s not something that has anything to do with you, I’m sorry,” I said as kindly as I could.
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