“I should have kicked you harder.”
***
“Greg got home late.” Lisa answered Amanda’s expression that questioned her uncharacteristic early-evening inactivity. “He’s taking us out to dinner as a punishment.”
“Fancy or casual?” Amanda dropped her purse on a table by the kitchen door and hung up her coat. She noticed a goose feather stuck to the tip of her right shoe and quickly snatched it up.
“I think just casual; I’m not that mad at him. What do you have there?” Lisa asked.
Amanda swore to herself. She really needed to get out of this house and away from the Flynns, especially Lisa. She hadn’t seen the feather, and couldn’t possibly know that it was in her hand; she had unconsciously sensed Amanda’s reaction to the offending and revealing object. “I seemed to have picked up a feather along the way.” She opened her hand to reveal the partially crushed feather.
“Wash your hands after you get rid of it. Geese are such filthy birds,” Lisa said with a shudder. “I’m going to check on Greg.”
Amanda tossed the feather into the garbage and dutifully washed her hands in the sink. This whole home situation was rapidly becoming untenable. She hadn’t been inside Lisa’s mind for weeks, and in fact had actively closed her mind to Lisa’s, yet their reciprocal connection remained strong. It was only a matter of time before Lisa’s empathic sense solidified into certainty that this was not the same Amanda who had left for Central America months earlier. She dried her hands and decided to change out of her jeans and sweater, imagining that they had been impregnated with her thoughts and dark desires.
“We are leaving in exactly nine minutes,” Greg said to Amanda as they passed in the hall. The return of his cheerful demeanor correlated exactly with the closure of the Larry Idle case. The heat was off Greg and his unit; in fact, somehow even their mistake had been turned to their advantage. Randi Garner, in her public statement following Abby’s confession, had been asked about John Eden’s arrest and sudden release. She answered simply that the system worked, and despite being lied to and misled, the police never developed tunnel-vision and ultimately uncovered the truth. An editorial in this morning’s Denver Post lauded the Colorado Springs detectives for not throwing in the towel and whining about a nonsensical legal distinction that led to the release of a “killer,” and encouraged the Denver police to adopt the professional attitude of Colorado’s second city.
“I will be ready in three.”
“Three Female-Minutes,” he said from the kitchen.
A half hour later they were sitting across from each other at Luigi’s Italian Restaurant, waiting for someone to take their drink orders. Lisa pulled a copy of the Denver Post from her purse and casually began to fan herself with it. “Sometimes it gets a little warm in Colorado’s second city, don’t you think so honey?”
Greg beamed, with a bread stick in his mouth. “It’s like I always say: it’s better to be lucky than good.” The waiter arrived, took their order, and disappeared. “Did you ever go see the therapist, Amanda?”
Lisa stopped fanning herself and gaped at her husband. “Where did that come from?”
Amanda already knew. “Abby Eden confessed after seeing her therapist. It was the same one you mentioned, Amanda. Christi Bates.” Greg turned to his wife, trying to be casual, but his light tone had a shiny edge of accusation.
“I haven’t called yet, but if she’s good enough to convince a murderer to confess, maybe I should call now,” Amanda said. Instead of being uncomfortable with the tacit lie, her mind viewed it as a challenge. Greg liked to portray himself as just one of the boys, promoted more out of longevity than competence, but Amanda knew the real Greg Flynn. He was obsessed with details and had the tenacity of a bulldog. Decades ago he learned to trust instincts that time and experience had since honed to a razor’s edge. He was in fact Colorado Springs’ version of Lieutenant Columbo, and Amanda simply smiled back at him, waiting for him to ask “just one more thing.”
“She said that someone else was in the elevator with her, but when the doors were opened she was alone.” He leaned back as the waiter placed his iced tea in front of him. Once their order had been taken, Greg continued as if there had been no interruption. “She said that some Amazon woman rode down with her and tortured the truth out of her.”
“Insanity defense,” Lisa sang.
“There’s not going to be a trial; she doesn’t need a defense.” He went back to the breadsticks. “I was hoping that by chance you had stopped by and maybe saw a tall black woman who had an affinity for torture.”
Amanda cocked her head ever so slightly and looked confused. “Greg, I was with you when that woman was arrested. Remember? You took me to that hot-dog place. You left me there when you got the call.”
Greg looked up from the wicker basket, confusion and then recognition creasing his face. “That’s right. I forgot my keys and you brought them to me.”
Amanda nodded, and Lisa stared at her husband. “Greg, maybe it’s a good time to take some time off.”
“No, I’m fine. This has been the strangest week. Let’s forget about it.” He smiled brightly.
CHAPTER 30
It took Amanda eight more days before she took her first life. She didn’t count the four Honduran soldiers whom she had shot; that had been self-defense. This was murder in every sense of the word. Cold, calculated, pre-meditated murder, performed for her pleasure alone, and without hesitation. Angel Diaz was not a nice man by anyone’s estimation, and some on the extreme right of the political spectrum would argue that Amanda had in fact done society a favor, but that had never figured into Amanda’s thinking. She moved through society but remained distinct from it. For now, she required the infrastructure created by society—food, water, electricity, and a fringe element that served to meet her unique desires—but she had no wish to contribute to society, at least beyond what was required to maintain the pretense of normality.
***
Angel Diaz was the epitome of society’s fringe element. A Mexican national, he had grown up in the barrios of Tijuana, literally a stone’s throw from the promised land of the United States. Like his brothers before him, he gravitated into the drug trade primarily because of a lack of options and the easy money. It was fairly easy, mindless work: unload the truck, stack the product, carry it down the tunnel, and then hand it off to his American counterpart. Even the risk of incarceration was virtually non-existent, so long as he stayed on the Mexican side and kept his mouth shut. The only real inconvenience was that it was universally done in the dead of night. Everything hummed along in perfect harmony for years, until the Sinaloa Cartel tried to expand their operations westward. Angel barely knew that he was a tiny cog in the Tijuana Cartel; he and his brothers worked only when the mood suited them, and saw themselves more as independent contractors, happy to work for anyone so long as they got paid. When the shooting started, however, the Sinaloas failed to make the distinction. Two of Angel’s three brothers were gunned down while unloading a pickup, and the third barely survived a shot in the head as the drug war weaved its way through the slums of Tijuana. Allegiance now became a matter of survival, and his choice was easy. Two years later, with the Sinaloa Cartel in full retreat, Angel Diaz had a tattoo of fourteen bullets encircling his right wrist and was a respected and feared lieutenant in the Tijuana Cartel, which now controlled all drug smuggling in Western Mexico and the Baja peninsula. The war had taught Angel and his overlords the undeniable lesson that stagnation invited confrontation, and confrontation was bad for business. Deciding to expand beyond their historic distribution, they sent the naïve and expendable Angel north to sniff out new opportunities. He eventually discovered Pueblo, Colorado, and that he was on a relatively long leash. It took him almost ten years to carve out a violent niche in an already saturated market, and to gain a degree of independence not available to his colleagues closer to home. Which is how A
ngel Diaz appeared on Greg Flynn’s radar.
Colorado Springs is a relatively quiet city, not as flashy as its northern neighbor, Denver, or as dangerous as its southern neighbor, Pueblo. Relative to the region, unemployment is low, in part because of the extensive military infrastructure and tourism. Educational standards are reasonably high, and the prevailing political opinion is conservatism with a half step to the left. The citizens of The Springs paid their taxes, came to complete stops at stop signs, and more often than not said hello to strangers. So when the bodies of three prostitutes were found in a dumpster outside the bus station, people took note. Drugs, prostitution, and the inevitable violence associated with them could be found in Colorado Springs, but generally one had to go in search of them. The murders now brought it into the homes of every Springs resident who had a newspaper subscription or a television. For weeks a slow news cycle ensured that the three victims were not forgotten. Greg and his department devoted the majority of their resources to the case, but all they could come up with was a name never spoken aloud: Angel Diaz. His reputation preceded him, and an impenetrable wall of intimidation and threats shielded him. After weeks of banging their collective heads against it, the world began to turn again and necessity forced the triple homicide to slide from the front burner to the back burner, and then finally off the stove altogether. It was Greg’s only unsolved multiple homicide, and he naturally turned back to the cold case once Larry Idle was off his plate.
His run of luck continued when a drunken bar fight a week after Abby Eden’s surprise confession escalated into an exchange of gunfire. Both assailants missed their intended targets, and it was out of sheer luck that only two of the eighteen shots fired in the middle of a crowded bar found a mark. One of the now incarcerated pair insisted that he was willing to trade some information about the “dead hookers” for a one way ticket out of Colorado Springs. The criminal/legal quid pro quo was relatively common practice, and although Greg had never been completely comfortable with it, in this case he was more than willing to make an exception. Three hours into his day, he was asking Randi Garner to push the deal through.
***
Less than eight hours later, Amanda had a name, an address, and a new direction. Her mind buzzed with possibilities, and she had to shorten Mittens’ leash as her alter ego wanted to charge over to Diaz’s house and play with the drug-dealer and some of his vassals. Like with the Edens, she started out by simply driving by his house, acclimating to the smells of the neighborhood. Diaz lived in a sprawling compound that was itself surrounded by other sprawling compounds in the foothills between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. He counted among his neighbors a former governor of the state, an All-Pro offensive tackle for the Houston Texans, and an unusually successful psychiatrist named Eldridge Adegbite. She slowed her Jeep, and it coasted passed the psychiatrist’s large wrought iron gates. Her GPS gave her the address and the county tax records gave her the name, and although her intended prey lived up the canyon, Adegbite’s name gave her mind a tickle and a pause. Not surprisingly, she could see little from the street, just strategically placed scrub trees that gave the false impression of unrestrained nature. Google Maps gave her a satellite view of the area, and she was surprised by how close Diaz had placed his house to Adegbite’s. Both properties were more than fifty acres, yet the two homes were a mere five hundred yards apart, separated by a small hill and a steep draw.
Curious, she said to herself as she accelerated up the street. Conforming to neighborhood norms, Casa Diaz was also not visible from the street, but instead of the rustic rock wall that encircled most of the other compounds, Diaz had a ten-foot stucco fortification complete with revolving cameras that tracked the progress of Amanda’s jeep. She made a U-turn and cruised back down the canyon road, with Diaz’s cameras following her. Her mind jerked again when she drove passed the Adegbites’s gates.
Several minutes later, she was idling in a McDonald’s parking lot sipping a Coke. A blue Prius pulled in next to her, and its interruption nearly stirred her to violence. Its three occupants gave her stern, reproachful looks as they made their way around her polluting SUV. Amanda flipped the nearest one her middle finger.
“Bitch,” he screamed, and then he squared himself to the front of her Jeep. His two friends were halfway to the door when they turned.
Just for a moment, Amanda thought about slipping the Jeep into gear and giving herself a new hood ornament. She smiled brightly.
“Let’s go, fuck-wad,” one of his friends said. All three were stoned, but what made Amanda laugh was the realization that the eco-friendly car wasn’t even theirs; it was Fuck-wad’s father’s.
“Fucking bitch!” He banged her hood with his open hand and turned back to his friends.
“Hey Fuck-wad!” Amanda was out of the car before he had taken two steps. “Did you just bang my car?”
“Yes, I did, skank.” He turned back towards her and retraced his two steps. He was tall, lanky, and reeked of pot. His two friends didn’t know whether to back him up, laugh at him, or drag him into the restaurant, so they simply stood by the door. “What the fuck are you going to do about it, BITCH?” He yelled in her face and the next minute he was airborne. He landed in the bushes just in front of a window covered by a poster of an impossibly large and juicy hamburger. After a moment’s delay, his two friends ran to his aid, screaming the word “bitch” far too liberally for the situation.
She gave them a moment to extricate Fuck-wad and redirect their attention to her. “I really do object to your language, gentlemen,” she said as the first tire in their Prius exploded with a loud boom that echoed across the parking lot. “I think you should perhaps apologize.” The second tire exploded with a similar report. The small car listed to the driver’s side.
“Whatever you’re doing, just stop it, okay? We’re sorry, he’s sorry, everyone’s sorry, okay?” The smallest and oldest of the three had taken a step towards her, palms up in supplication. Mittens was emitting a low and menacing growl in Amanda’s head.
She held the young man’s eyes and the moment began to defuse. “Maybe just one more?” She smiled mischievously, holding up one finger.
Their spokesman forcefully shook his head, his high now completely wasted.
“One question,” she answered his pleading look. She was having a hard time reading them, both as a result of their intoxication and her energized emotional state. “Where did you get the pot?”
They exchanged a quick look, and finally Fuck-wad spoke in a much more respectable tone. “It’s ours. We, ah, grow it ourselves.”
Amanda stared into him and found that he was telling the truth. It was too much to hope that she would just happen to stumble on a trio of Diaz’s dealers. “Pity,” she said, and both of the Prius’s passenger side tires exploded as one.
Their first instincts were to run to their stricken car or to attack Amanda as she walked back to her idling Jeep, but after a shared hesitation the trio just stood where she had left them. Amanda pulled out and gave them a smile with a little wave as she drove past.
***
“Why do you believe that you are a psychopath?” Eldridge Adegbite was the proverbial stately man. Tall, thin, well-dressed, and with a sharp, hyperarticulate manner of speaking. Amanda thought he should be sitting in a library chair, legs crossed as he puffed on a pipe, and a book in his lap as he introduced “Masterpiece Theater.”
“Doctor, I know I am a psychopath.” Amanda sat across the sixty-two-year-old man. It had only been slightly harder getting an appointment with Adegbite than it had been with Christi Bates, although she did have to wait a day. “I believe that it is something we share in common.”
He smiled benignly at her. “I see; so you believe that I am a psychopath as well.”
“Once again, Doctor, I know you are a psychopath.” The previous fifteen minutes had completely reshaped Amanda’s immediate future. All thoughts of the now
rather banal Angel Diaz were forgotten. She desperately wanted to kill, slaughter, obliterate Eldridge. Even his name was an affectation, but a perfect one. Her mind was practically bursting with excitement over the untimely but exquisitely slow demise of the old fraud. Ahh, but what a fraud. At least in total numbers he wasn’t the killer Diaz was, but what Adegbite lacked in volume he made up with style.
“I stand corrected.” He nodded his head in condescending acceptance. “May I ask you how you know we are psychopaths?”
“Of course.” Amanda leaned back in her own library chair and tried to unmask the psychiatrist-who-wasn’t with her eyes. “We are both social predators. We take what we want and do as we please, without regard to social norms or expectations, and without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.”
“I see that you’ve read Robert Ware.” Adegbite nodded slowly and approvingly. “Then you know that there is no treatment for the condition. No therapy or medication can give you, us, the emotional complexity or empathy that is missing in our psychological makeup. We are irretrievably flawed.” Amanda now nodded her approval. “Which of course raises the question of why you charmed your way into my office?”
Eldridge had been born Lucas Tyler in Davenport, Indiana. His father was a school principal and his mother a school librarian, at least until their untimely deaths when Lucas was nineteen. “I’m curious …” Amanda ignored his question. “What set you off, Lucas? Did you wake up one morning and suddenly decide to burn down the house as they slept? Or did the idea slowly evolve during all those years of stifling boredom?”
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