“There’s a problem with her husband?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“He beats her,” Officer Davis said.
“I know she’s probably still there and he won’t let her go to the phone.” Riker sniffed and wiped her eyes dry with the heels of her hands. “She gets embarrassed sometimes, too. Maybe she just didn’t want to answer the phone.”
“You said your car, your tags?”
Connie nodded. “We’re neighbors. I left the keys under the mat for her.”
“Is there any way you can check to see if your car is still at your house?”
She looked thoughtful, then shook her head. “We’re out in the boonies. Our nearest neighbors, except for Marcia and Nicky, are two miles away and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to them in my life. My mom knows them. I told her about Marcia not showing up and she’s coming back down from Atlantic City tonight. We’ll head home in the morning to make sure she’s okay. I just thought maybe she’d broken down or something and you guys would have known about it.”
O’Shaughnessy looked at Davis, thinking about hospitals, but Davis shook her head. “I did the drill, Lieu.”
“Do you think her husband could have hurt her, Connie? Bad enough so she couldn’t come to the phone?”
She shrugged. “He usually knows just when to stop.”
“Mrs. Riker, we can have police from the jurisdiction where you live look in on her.”
Riker shook her head violently. “No, please don’t do that. Nicky would kill her if the police came by. I probably overreacted. Probably she’s okay and he just won’t let her answer the phone. He’s done that plenty of times.”
“Don’t you think your friend would have tried to call you if she couldn’t make it? He can’t be with her every moment.”
“I know, I know.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Maybe she has. We didn’t turn on the phone this summer. Every time I call her I have to run up to the pay phone on Atlantic.”
“It’s your choice, Connie, but my advice is to get someone involved before your friend gets hurt too badly. Get her out of the house and into a shelter. There are plenty of those around, and they won’t tell her husband anything about either one of you. I promise.”
Connie nodded. “Yeah,” she said halfheartedly. “I’m sorry I bothered you all with this.”
“You didn’t bother anyone,” O’Shaughnessy said. “You do as I said.”
She followed Officer Davis back to her car. “You run the tag with the state?”
Davis nodded. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Get her a number for Human Services and try to stress that she call it. I’ll see you later, huh.”
Davis nodded.
O’Shaughnessy dialed her cell phone. “Mac. Never mind. Go on home. False alarm.”
22
FRIDAY, JUNE 3
TEXHOMA PANHANDLE, OKLAHOMA
Dr. Chance Haverly sat in her office in the corner chair she usually reserved for her patients. The file in her hands was heavy and old—the psychiatric chronicles of Earl Oberlein Sykes.
Earl was the son of a career criminal. His juvenile record began at twelve and grew in proportion to his age until he turned seventeen, which was when he had begun to trifle with felonies such as auto theft and burglary. But all of them, to that point, were property crimes; Sykes appeared to enjoy destroying things to get attention.
Surprisingly, he was arrested only three times as an adult. All of the arrests were minor and none required more than a weekend’s stint in jail. Sykes had either learned how to stay out of trouble or had teamed up with some brains. Haverly believed it was the latter.
Then came the accident. Sykes was tried and convicted of two murders for vehicular homicide. He had been using drugs and was running from the police when he ran a school bus full of teenagers off the road.
Had he been in Rikers or Joliet, his life would have been quite different. Private, progressive prisons like Jenson Reed were contracted by the government on the premise that they brought rehabilitation to incarceration. Modern behavioral therapy included expensive drugs and psychoanalysis not normally available to prisoners. Only lifers with nonviolent histories were eligible for the chance to rehabilitate themselves in prisons like Jenson Reed.
Time passed in Jenson Reed. One day Sykes was mentioned as a potential parole candidate, a suggestion that triggered a venomous response from the community in New Jersey where he had been arrested. Sykes was not about to have an easy time with a parole board. Not as long as the victims’ parents and siblings were alive to testify against his release.
Fifteen years later, the community resistance died off and relatives moved away; doctors at Jenson Reed, examining the strange cauliflowerlike growths on Sykes’s body, discovered a whole new rationale for releasing him. Sykes was beginning to die.
Prison administrators were always under pressure to show rehabilitation results in the form of paroled prisoners, which was foremost in the administrator’s mind when he prevented a board from viewing the psychiatric files of Dr. Haverly concerning Earl Oberlein Sykes. The man had only two or three years to live anyhow and most of that was going to be in a hospital bed. Sykes was the perfect candidate to put back in the community.
She flipped through the pages.
10/12/87 ES is withdrawn, highly suspicious of authority. Has the capacity to develop complex skills. Recommend grade-seven entry into GED and skill levels evaluation preceding vocational placement.
4/17/89 ES appears disinterested in bus accident that led to incarceration. ES considers the accident and the ensuing trial inconsequential circumstances of his life (he states he can’t recall the accident, therefore he can’t have emotion for the victims). ES similarly not interested in surviving family members. Therapy objective is to elicit remorse for the resulting deaths.
In the beginning she wanted to open the book on Sykes. To make him rediscover every negative moment in his life so that he would be better equipped to handle similar experiences in his future.
Sykes was suspicious of her motives from the start. Session after session, Dr. Haverly explained her role in the rehabilitative process, the meaning and the purpose of psychotherapy, the laws governing privacy. It took months for him to accept that no one would use what he said against him, but once he did, once he started talking, his conversations weren’t about the bus accident that sent him to prison. They were about killing a teacher’s cat and raping his neighbor’s daughters.
She thought at first that he was just showing off. Sykes said he was only thirteen when the first of his alleged sexual assaults took place. But then he began to talk about others and still others, and the doctor began to understand that Sykes was no candidate for rehabilitation. Sykes’s was not a story about a boy on drugs and a tragic traffic accident. Sykes was a sociopath, a sexual predator; his psychopathic life had simply been interrupted by an unrelated event. That was why Sykes had no interest in the bus accident. He truly didn’t care about or connect with the teenagers he’d killed.
Confidential Memorandum
To: File
From: Dr. Chance Haverly, Director of Client Services
Subject: 86–591
Date: 6/13/91
ES began a physical exercise routine last week. This is a new development in his lengthy incarceration, most likely a response to the notification of eligibility for his first parole hearing in sixteen years.
ES relates the details of an adult rape in which he restrains the victim in a junkyard. He states he keeps her there for several days and threatens to dispose of her in a bottomless pit. He likes the reaction he gets from her. He likes to see her diminished.
This is the second time he has mentioned a bus and the third time he has mentioned the pit.
All those years ago she had been fooled. Her first thoughts were that the bus was a symbolic representation of the accident and that the women he claimed to abuse represented the teenagers he hurt. She thumbed back to her notes on the conversatio
n.
While there is no indication that Sykes has a religious aspect to his life, the woman begging for her life represents his own need for forgiveness. The pit under the bus is unquestionably his hell.
She snorted.
She had thought he was going through a “loosening up” phase at the time. To her it was a sign of progress that he was talking, even if he was making up stories to veil the turmoil that was going on inside his mind.
Here was the key to his success, she’d told him. You are about to unearth the hidden obstacles that prevent you from being productive in society.
Reading her own words made her sick.
Confidential Memorandum
To: File
From: Dr. Chance Haverly, Director of Client Services
Subject: 86–591
Date: 12/20/96
Graphic rapes are meant to shock me. His accounts grow more fantastic all the time. Is it just me, or does he try to impress others as well? A side note to speak with Captain Ridenour on A block.
It is difficult to accept that ES raped and tortured several women as he claims. The number of missing bodies would have prompted intercession by the law. Neither is there a foundation for sexual history in his juvenile records. Is he only having fun with me, or is this for real?
With time she saw the folly of her efforts.
Week after week, month after month, she began to see the extent of his depravity. He had been leading the sessions all along. She was his plaything. For eighteen years he was symbolically masturbating and making her watch.
Then he was diagnosed with skin cancer and cancer of the pancreas. The surgeons removed part of the organ, but only to relieve the symptoms. Cancerous cells had already spread into the stomach and small intestine. In time they would spread to his kidneys and spleen and finally his upper organs, his heart, and his lungs, which would signal the beginning of the end.
So they intended to release him, never mind what a sociopath with a year left to live was likely to do. Never mind what his psychiatrist said.
A phone rang in the corridor and she jumped. She reached to switch on a reading lamp, turned the ringer off, and flipped through the contents of his file, thinking the thing had become as vile and corrupt as he was.
She remembered the last time he spoke to her. His eyes traveled slowly down her body, stopping at the hemline of her skirt. “I’m getting out, Doc,” he’d said, head bent low toward the ground. He smiled and the ugly scar slid to one side of his neck. “Will you miss me?”
23
FRIDAY, JUNE 3
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Sykes stuck a cigarette in his mouth and pulled back the curtains of his kitchen window. The news said there would be a few more hours of sunshine before the storm rolled in.
He’d panicked in the early-morning hours when he called to report in sick. Ben Johnson was already there, which meant that something was up. Fortunately Ben knew about his chemo treatments; calling in sick wouldn’t seem so odd, unless the cops were looking for him and then it was already too late.
Still, here he was, and no one had come to get him.
How in the fuck had she caught on to the sanitation truck anyhow?
He could hear the groans of old springs as his neighbor settled into a chaise longue. She was tanning, which was all she ever did besides sleep; she said she lived off her old man’s Social Security benefits so she didn’t have to work unless she needed something extra. Sykes had seen her pole-dancing at the Lucky Seven.
She was lying belly down now on a towel, beer resting on the bumper of a long deceased pickup. Her bra was on the ground next to her and an orange cat was draped over the truck’s headlamp licking its paws.
Her name was Denise and she’d once invited him to see the Harley-Davidson Sportster dripping oil on a beach towel in the living room. Her husband, who was in heaven now, would have wanted her to keep it, she’d told him.
Sykes took a book of matches from his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke up into the air and rolling the sweat out of his scanty whiskers with the side of a filthy thumbnail. He scratched his bleeding neck and tossed the match into a pink flamingo ashtray. He was unshaven and hadn’t bothered to shower. The backs of his hands and wrists were flecked with the short hairs of the Rottweiler from the night before.
He’d taken a chance, sticking his head into O’Shaughnessy’s car window like that. He knew he’d startled her, but he just had to look into those eyes. He’d also taken a chance sneaking back to the garage. It had been so tempting to take her out right then and there, but then she’d heard his footsteps and he lost the element of surprise.
It was hazy, hot, and humid. The wind would pick up dramatically, according to the weather report. Coastal flooding was a possibility.
The orange cat dropped to the ground and went slinking under his neighbor’s trailer. It was a cat much like his English teacher’s cat. Same color. Same startled eyes.
He’d hung Miss Carney’s cat from the hook of her porch swing—Miss Carney, who said he couldn’t go on to the fifth grade with the rest of his class. When he tossed the cat’s collar on her desk the next day and told her he’d found it in the hall, she grabbed him by the arm and manhandled him into the principal’s office, demanding in a tearful rage that he be expelled.
But as it turned out, she was wrong. And people came to visit his trailer after that. Smiling perfumed people with nice clothes and leather satchels. The social workers looked around in disgust and, feeling sorry for him, told him they would deal with the principal and they did.
So Sykes went on to fifth grade with his friends, and Miss Carney—much to the administration’s surprise—packed her things and moved to New Hampshire.
Carney wasn’t a fool. She had been stalked before and a straight-shooting but cynical detective had finally told her to either kill him in the act or move as far away from him as she could possibly get.
Sykes walked to the back of the trailer to use the toilet again; Xena Warrior Princess was fighting a skeleton on the big-screen TV as he walked by.
He hadn’t forgotten about Bianca Ashley, either. Bianca, in the black Mustang convertible who had wanted to hear him beg for a ride in front of the high school. It took only a moment to wiggle the clamp loose on her radiator hose and then follow her Volvo station wagon until her antifreeze was gone. Bianca had wanted to please him, oh, had she begged to please him in the end.
He pulled up his pants and zipped himself. The window was open; he could smell the creek stinking up to high heaven. He opened the medicine cabinet, found a bottle of aspirin, and emptied it into his hand. Then he tossed five of the pills and Marcia Schmidt’s gold wedding ring in his shirt pocket.
He returned to the kitchen, took a bag of candy bars from the counter and a bottle of water, grabbed his keys, and started down the rusty steps, looking at his neighbor, who had flipped onto her back. Her legs were getting heavy, but her tits still looked great. She opened one of her eyes and looked at him, then closed it again, stretching her arms to yawn. Maybe his luck was holding, but it wouldn’t hold forever. It was time to take the offensive.
A marked police car pulled into the parking lot next to Lecky’s Pawnshop. A young officer waved and Sykes raised a hand. He had noticed an increase in patrols this summer, cops getting out of their cars, shining their Kel lights into the shadows, checking parked vehicles. They were not at all the happy-go-lucky cops of the seventies, twirling their batons and having their pictures taken with tourists. These guys were intense, always in a hurry, always looking for someone.
He took Marcia Schmidt’s wedding ring inside and got forty dollars for it, then spent the afternoon drinking beer in the Anchorage across the street. He took Marcia her chocolates and some aspirin to keep her from getting a fever in the bus. Just another day, he thought. Just hang on another day. Then it will all be over.
It was dark by the time he reached the boardwalk. Young couples strolled by arm in arm. The sea mist r
olled heavily across the street. The town was busy in spite of it.
As he climbed the ramp to the boardwalk, he watched the demon’s eyes roll back in its head, its huge black talons clutching the gates of Strayer’s Pier. Rap music blared as a great gyrating disk appeared then vanished behind the rooftops. A moment later he could hear the rise and fall of the passengers’ screams.
Bodies passed by in waves, old and young, rich and poor. They were from all walks of life, mingling together as one, the patient and the surgeon, the teacher and the dropout.
No one paid much attention to Sykes as he stood in the shadows. The demon’s hooded eyes opened and its head turned menacingly, tongue lolling to one side. A young girl stood beneath it, hands connected to her father, her pink hair bands dividing long blond hair into pigtails. A pink shirt ended inches above her belly button. She was teasing him, making him want her. Was she fifteen or only thirteen?
A crowd of leathered bikers passed, obscuring the twosome from his view; behind them a crowd of Midwestern salesmen and their pudgy wives bellowed their way up the boardwalk. He stood and joined them, riding the sea of bodies, then stepped out quickly into the shadows by the restrooms. Two leathered lovers groped in the darkness behind him. He spat at a pigeon, then tapped the end of a cigarette on the glass of his watch, admiring the curves of the naked woman on his bicep.
Couples were walking with their hands on each other’s asses. Tour groups stampeded along four abreast, feeling safety in numbers.
A young couple stopped to buy snow cones, and Sykes felt an ache in his groin when the man slipped his hand up under the back of the girl’s T-shirt. He scratched hard at the base of his skull, finding blood on his fingernails when he brought the cigarette to his lips again.
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