More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

by Jeffery Deaver

  “She had some jewelry on her.”

  “That’s a question?”

  “Did you rob her? And kill her when she wouldn’t give you her wedding and engagement rings?”

  “If she was getting divorced why wouldn’t she give me her rings?”

  Phelan meant this only rhetorically. To point out the flaw in Boyle’s logic.

  Homicide had discounted robbery as a motive immediately. Anna Devereaux’s purse, eight feet from her body, had contained eleven credit cards and $180 cash.

  Boyle picked up the manila folder, read some more, dropped it on the tabletop.

  Why?.…

  It seemed appropriate that the operative word when it came to James Kit Phelan’s life would be a question. Why had he killed Anna Devereaux? Why had he committed the other crimes he’d been arrested for? Many of them gratuitous. Never murder, but dozens of assaults. Drunk and disorderlies. A kidnapping that got knocked down to an aggravated assault. And who exactly was James Kit Phelan? He’d never talked much about his past. Even the Current Affair story had managed to track down only two former cellmates of Phelan for on-camera interviews. No relatives, no friends, no ex-wives, no high school teacher or bosses.

  Boyle asked, “James, what I hear you saying is, you yourself don’t have the faintest idea why you killed her.”

  Phelan pressed his wrists together and swung the chain so that it rang against the table again. “Maybe it’s something in my mind,” he said after some reflection.

  They’d given him the standard battery of tests and found nothing particularly illuminating and the department shrinks concluded that “the prisoner presents with a fairly strong tendency to act out what are classic antisocial proclivities” — a diagnosis Boyle had responded to by saying, “Thanks, Doc, his rap sheet says the same thing. Only in English.”

  “You know,” Phelan continued slowly, “I sometimes feel something gets outta control in me.” His pale lids closed over the blue eyes and Boyle imagined for a moment that the crescents of flesh were translucent and that the eyes continued to peer out into the small room.

  “How do you mean, James?” The captain felt his heart rate increase. Wondered: Are we really closing in on the key to the county’s perp of the decade?

  “Some of it might have to do with my family. There was a lotta crap when I was growing up.”

  “How bad?”

  “Really bad. My father did time. Theft, domestics, drunk and disorderlies. Things like that. He’d beat me a lot. He and my mother were supposedly this great couple at first. Really in love. That’s what I heard but that’s not what it looked like to me. You married, Captain?” Phelan glanced at his left hand. There was no band. He never wore one; as a rule Boyle tried to keep his personal life separate from the office. “I am, yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Man,” Phelan laughed. “Long time.”

  “I met Judith when I was in the academy.”

  “You been a cop all your life. I read that profile of you.” He laughed. “In that newspaper issue with the headline, after you caught me. ‘Checkmate.’ That was funny.” Then the smile faded. “See, after my mother was gone, my father never had anybody in his life for more’n a year. Part of it was he couldn’t never keep a job. We moved all the time. I mean, we lived in twenty states, easy. The article said you’d lived ’round here most of your life.”

  He’s opening up, Boyle thought excitedly. Keep him going.

  “Lived three miles from here, in Marymount, going on twenty-one years.”

  “I’ve been through there. Pretty place. I lived in plenty of small towns. It was tough. School was the worst. New kid in class. I always got the crap beat out of me. Hey, that’d be one advantage, having a cop for a dad. Nobody’d pick on you.”

  Boyle said, “That may be true but there’s another problem. I’ve got my share of enemies, you can imagine. So we keep moving the kids from one school to another. Try to keep ’em out of public schools.”

  “You send ’em to private?”

  “We’re Catholic. They’re in a parochial school.”

  “That one in Granville? That place looks like a college campus. Must set you back some. Man.”

  “No, they’re up in Edgemont. It’s smaller but it still costs a bundle. You ever have kids?”

  Phelan put on a tough face. They were getting close to something, Boyle could sense.

  “In a way.”

  Encourage him. Gentle, gentle.

  “How’s that?”

  “My mama died when I was ten.”

  “I’m sorry, James.”

  “I had two little sisters. Twins. They were four years younger’n me. I pretty much had to take care of them. My father, he ran around a lot, like I was saying. I sorta learned what it was like to be a father by the time I was twelve.”

  Boyle nodded. He’d been thirty-six when Jon was born. He still wasn’t sure he knew what it was like to be a father. When he told Phelan this the prisoner laughed. “How old’re your kids?”

  “Jonathon, he’s ten. Alice is nine.” Boyle resisted a ridiculous urge to flash his wallet pictures.

  Phelan suddenly grew somber. The chains clinked.

  “See, the twins were always wanting something from me. Toys, my time, my attention, help ’em read this, what does this mean?… Jesus.”

  Boyle noted the anger on the face. Keep going, he urged silently. He didn’t write any notes, afraid that he might break the stream of thought. That could lead to the magic why.

  “Man, it damn near drove me nuts. And I had to do it all by myself. My father was always on a date — well, he called ’em dates — or was passed out drunk.” He looked up quickly. “Hell, you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Boyle was stung by the sudden coldness in the prisoner’s voice.

  “I sure do,” the captain said sincerely. “Judith works. A lotta times I end up with the kids. I love them and everything — just like you loved your sisters, I’m sure — but, man, it takes a lot out of you.”

  Phelan drifted away for a moment. Eyes as glazed as Anna Devereaux’s. “Your wife works, does she? My mama wanted to work too. My father wouldn’t let her.”

  He calls his mother “Mama,” but his father by the more formal name. What do I make of that?

  “They fought about it all the time. Once, he broke her jaw when he found her looking through the want ads.”

  And when she passed me I hit her hard in the neck and she fell down.

  “What’s your wife do?” Phelan asked.

  “She’s a nurse. At St. Mary’s.”

  “That’s a good job,” Phelan said. “My mother liked people, liked to help them. She’da been a good nurse.” His face grew dark again. “I think about all those times my father hit her…. That’s what started her taking pills and stuff. And she never stopped taking ’em. Until she died.” He leaned forward and whispered, “But you know the terrible thing.” Avoiding Boyle’s eyes.

  “What, James? Tell me.”

  “See, sometimes I get this feeling… I sorta blame it all on my mother. If she hadn’t whined so much about getting a job, if she’d just been happy staying home…. Stayed home with me and the girls, then Dad wouldn’t’ve had to hit her.”

  Then I sat on her and grabbed this scarf she was wearing and pulled it real tight and I squeezed until she stopped moving, then I still kept squeezing.

  “And she wouldn’t’ve started drinking and taking those pills and she’d still be here.” He choked. “I sometimes feel good thinking about him hitting her.”

  The cloth felt good on my wrists.

  He blew a long stream of air from his lungs. “Ain’t a pretty thing to say, is it?”

  “Life ain’t pretty sometimes, James.”

  Phelan looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be counting acoustical tiles. “Hell, I don’t even know why I’m bringing all this up. It just kinda… was there. What was going through my mi
nd.” He began to say something else but fell silent and Boyle didn’t dare interrupt his train of thought. When the prisoner spoke again he was more cheerful. “You do things with your family, Captain? That’s something I think was the hardest of all. We never did a single damn thing together. Never took a vacation, never went to a ball game.”

  “If I wasn’t talking to you here right now, I’d be with them all on a picnic.”

  “Yeah?”

  Boyle worried for a moment that Phelan would be jealous of Boyle’s family life. But the prisoner’s eyes lit up. “That’s nice, Captain. I always pictured us — my mama and my father, when he wasn’t drinking, and the twins. We’d be out, doing just what you’re talking about. Having a picnic in some town square, a park, sitting in front of the bandshell, you know.”

  I kept hearing this music when I cut back the throttle. And I followed it to this park in the middle of town.

  “That what you and your family were going to do?”

  “Well, we’re the unsocial types,” Boyle said, laughing. “We stay away from crowds. My parents’ve got a little place upstate.”

  “A family house?” Phelan asked slowly, maybe picturing it.

  “On Taconic Lake. We go up there usually.”

  The prisoner fell silent for some moments then finally said, “You know, Captain, I’ve got this weird idea.” His eyes counted cinderblocks. “We have all this knowledge in our heads. Everything people ever knew. Or’ll know in the future. Like how to kill a mastodon or how to make a nuclear spaceship or how to talk in a different language. It’s all there in everybody’s mind. Only they have to find it.”

  What’s he saying? Boyle wondered. That I know why he did it?

  “And how you find all this stuff is you sit real quiet and then the thought comes into your head. Just bang, there it is. Does that ever happen to you?”

  Boyle didn’t know what to say. But Phelan didn’t seem to expect an answer.

  Outside, in the corridor, footsteps approached then receded.

  Anyway, what it is, I killed her. I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands….

  Phelan sighed. “It’s not that I was trying to keep anything from you all. I just can’t really give you the kinda answer you want.”

  Boyle closed the notebook. “That’s all right, James. You’ve told me plenty. I appreciate it.”

  I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands and killed her with it. And there’s nothing else I have to say.

  * * *

  “Got it,” Boyle announced into the pay phone. He stood in the dim corridor outside the cafeteria in the courthouse, where he’d just had a celebratory lunch with some of the other cops on the Phelan team.

  “All right!” the district attorney’s enthusiastic voice came through the phone. Most of the senior prosecutors had known that Boyle was going to conduct the final interrogation of James Phelan and were waiting anxiously to find out why he’d killed Anna Devereaux. It had become the question in the county prosecutor’s department. Boyle had even heard rumors that some guys were running a macabre pool, laying serious money on the answer.

  “It’s complicated,” Boyle continued. “I think what happened was we didn’t do enough psychological testing. It’s got to do with his mother’s death.”

  “Phelan’s mother?”

  “Yeah. He’s got a thing about families. He’s mad because his mother abandoned him by dying when he was ten and he had to raise his sisters.”

  “What?”

  “I know, it sounds like psychobabble. But it all fits. Call Dr. Hirschorn. Have him—”

  “Boyle, Phelan’s parents are still alive. Both of ’em.”

  Silence.

  “Boyle? You there?”

  After a moment: “Keep going.”

  “And he was an only child. He didn’t have any sisters.”

  Boyle absently pressed his thumb on the chrome number plate of the phone, leaving a pattern of fat fingerprints on the cold metal.

  “And his parents… they ran up big debts getting him doctors and counselors to try to help ’im. They were saints…. Captain? You there?”

  Why would Phelan lie? Was this all just a big joke? He replayed the events in his mind. I ask a dozen times to see him. He refuses until just before he’s sentenced. He finally agrees. But why?

  Why?…

  Boyle bolted upright, his solid shoulder slamming into the side of the phone kiosk.

  In despair he lifted his left hand to his face and closed his eyes. He realized he’d just given Phelan the name of every member of his family. Where Judith worked, where the kids went to school.

  Hell, he’d told them where they were right now! Alone, at Taconic Lake.

  The captain stared at his distorted reflection in the phone’s chrome number pad, realizing the enormity of what he’d done. Phelan had been planning this for months. It was why he’d held out saying anything about the motive: to draw Boyle in close, to make the captain himself desperate to talk, to get information out of him, and to deliver the message that his family was in danger.

  Wait, calm down. He’s locked up. He can’t do anything to anybody. He’s not getting out—

  Oh, no…

  Boyle’s gut ran cold.

  Phelan’s friend, the biker! Assuming he lived nearby, he could be at Taconic Lake in thirty minutes.

  “Hey, Boyle, what the hell’s going on?”

  The answer to the query about James Phelan’s motive for killing Anna Devereaux meant nothing. The question itself was the murderer’s last weapon — and he was using it on the cop who’d become obsessed with bringing him down.

  Why, why, why…

  Boyle dropped the phone and raced up the hall to the prisoner lockup. “Where’s Phelan?” he screamed.

  The guard blinked at the frantic detective. “He’s right there. In the lockup, Captain. You can see him.”

  Boyle glanced through the double glass at the prisoner sitting calmly on a bench.

  “What’s he been doing since I left?”

  “Reading. That’s all. Oh, and he made a few phone calls.”

  Boyle lunged across the desk and grabbed the guard’s phone.

  “Hey!”

  He punched in the number of the lake house. It began to ring. Three times, four…

  It was then that Phelan looked at Boyle and smiled. He mouthed something. The captain couldn’t hear through the bulletproof glass, of course, but he knew without a doubt that the man had just uttered the word “Checkmate.”

  Boyle lowered his head to the receiver and, like a prayer, whispered, “Answer, please answer,” as the phone rang again and again and again.

  AFRAID

  “Where are we going?” the woman asked as the black Audi sped away from Florence’s Piazza della Stazione, where her train had just arrived from Milan.

  Antonio shifted gears smoothly and replied, “It’s a surprise.”

  Marissa clicked on her seat belt as the car plunged down the narrow, winding streets. She was soon hopelessly lost. A Milan resident for all of her thirty-four years, she knew only the city center of Florence. Antonio, on the other hand, was a native Florentine and sped assuredly along an unfathomable route of streets and alleys.

  A surprise? she wondered. Well, he’d wanted to pick the location for their long weekend together and she’d agreed. So, she told herself, sit back and enjoy the ride…. Her job had been particularly stressful in the past month; it was time to let someone else make the decisions.

  Slim and blonde, with features of the north, Marissa Carrefiglio had been a runway model in her early twenties but then took up fashion design, which she loved. But three years ago her brother had quit the family business and she’d been forced to take over management of the arts and antiques operation. She wasn’t happy about it but her stern father wasn’t a man you could say no to.

  Another series of sharp turns. Marissa gave an uneasy laugh at Antonio’s aggressive driving and looked away from the streets as she told him a
bout the train ride from Milan, about news from her brother in America, about recent acquisitions at her family’s store in the Brera.

  He, in turn, described a new car he was thinking of buying, a problem with the tenant in one of his properties and a gastronomic coup he’d pulled off yesterday: some white truffles he’d found at a farmers’ market near his home and had bought right out from under the nose of an obnoxious chef.

  Another sharp turn and a fast change of gears. Only the low setting sun, in her eyes, gave her a clue of the direction they were traveling.

  She hadn’t known Antonio very long. They’d met in Florence a month ago at a gallery off the Via Maggio, where Marissa’s company occasionally consigned art and antiques. She had just delivered several works: eighteenth-century tapestries from the famed Gobelins Manufactory in France. After they were hung, she was drawn to a dark medieval tapestry taking up a whole wall in the gallery. Woven by an anonymous artist, it depicted beautiful angels descending from heaven to fight beasts roaming the countryside, attacking the innocent.

  As she stood transfixed by the gruesome scene a voice had whispered, “A nice work but there’s an obvious problem with it.”

  She blinked in surprise and turned to the handsome man standing close. Marissa frowned. “Problem?”

  His eyes remained fixed on the tapestry as he said, “Yes. The most beautiful angel has escaped from the scene.” He turned and smiled. “And landed on the floor beside me.”

  She’d scoffed laughingly at the obvious come-on line. But he’d delivered it with such self-effacing charm that her initial reaction — to walk away — faded quickly. They struck up a conversation about art and, a half hour later, were sharing prosecco, cheese and conversation.

  Antonio was muscular and trim, with thick, dark hair and brown eyes, a ready smile. He was in the computer field. She couldn’t quite understand exactly what he did — something about networks — but he must’ve been successful. He was wealthy and seemed to have a lot of free time.

  They had much in common, it turned out. They’d both gone to college in Piemonte, had traveled extensively in France and shared an interest in fashion (though while she liked to design, he preferred to wear). A year younger than she, he’d never been married (she was divorced), and, like her, he only had one living parent; her mother had passed away ten years ago, and Antonio’s father, five.