by J. A. Kerley
“You c-can’t hurt me. It’s all backed up. I have c-copies.”
Jeremy moved beneath the streetlamp. He studied arrows and lines snaking from Trilateral Commission to Ronald Reagan to the House of Saud to GW Bush. The Bay of Pigs was represented, as were the Kennedys. Each name was followed by a half-dozen exclamation points.
Jeremy stepped to the man’s side. Shook the page in front of the man’s eyes. “How long have you known about this?”
“T-Twenty-two years.”
Jeremy replaced the anger in his face with calm. He surprised the man by gently squeezing his shoulder.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it? They used hidden speakers to fill my house with noises at night. They were always sneaking up on me, dressed as repairmen. They put things in my food to make me sick.”
The man’s eyes widened. “You’re …one of us?”
Jeremy looked from side to side, whispered, “They were after me for a decade, but I managed to get free.”
“HOW?”
Jeremy put a finger to his lips and pointed to an approaching jogger, a man in white sweats, MP3 player wire running to his ears. The jogger shot an uninterested glance as he padded past.
“He saw us,” the man gasped. “Do you think he’s one of Them?”
“He’d been wired for sound,” Jeremy said. “Did you notice one wire was black, the other one white?”
The man’s hand swept to his mouth. “Oh Jesus …”
Jeremy crouched to look the man in the eyes. “Things are falling apart in Washington. They might be willing to forget you. I made them forget me.”
“TELL ME HOW! I’ll do anything!”
“Shhhhh. I bribed them. And I was free.”
“The NSA takes bribes? The CIA?”
Jeremy rubbed his fingers in the money-whisk motion. “It’s Washington, everything slides on the green grease.”
“What do they want?”
“What can you give them?”
The man’s brow wrinkled in furious thought as his fingertips drummed his briefcase. “Paper money’s going to be worthless soon. I can get my hands on Krugerrands, gold coins. Most gold is radioactive, but the South Africans make Krugerrands immune to the rays. I can’t get many – seventy or eighty thousand dollars worth or so.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing to Them.”
“They’ll soon be the only currency left. Give them half. It’s what I did.”
The man’s wary eyes returned. He pulled the briefcase to his chest, pages spilling across the pavement. “You could be one of Them. You’ll steal from me and still follow me.”
Jeremy patted the man’s forearm, one friend to another. “If I was after your money, wouldn’t I ask for all of it?”
The man absorbed the information, sighed with relief. “I don’t want to meet them. Can you take the gold for me?”
Jeremy straightened, put his hands in his pockets, shot furtive looks from side to side.
“I’ll have to catch the red-eye to DC tomorrow. Can you get the gold tonight? And maybe some cash to tide them over?”
SEVEN
The next morning I entered the detectives’ room to a heavy smell of sweat and adrenalin. Bodies were moving fast, papers shuffling, phones ringing. Cluff was on the phone and staring down at his fax machine. I watched a heavyset detective cross the room with a cup of coffee, enter a cubicle a dozen feet away, start talking with a colleague.
“Too freakin’ much,” the chunky guy said, laughing.
“What?”
“Len and me just got back from a condo in Tribeca. Ritzy place, owned by a husband and wife, the guy manages an investment firm. Good people, they keep a room for the wife’s brother, Gerald. Gerald’s forty-two, got a few head problems, mainly he’s paranoid-schizo. Gerald does OK until he skips his meds, then he weirds out, hides from the Feds, that sort of thing. The boys in blue track him down a couple times a year, bring him home.”
“Conspiracy type?”
“In spades. Seems Gerald came home last night, snuck in the husband’s office safe and grabbed forty-seven grand worth of Krugerrands the investment guy had stashed.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yep. By the time Mr Investment finds the shiny coins missing this morning, Gerald’s given them away, plus twenty-six thou in cash. Said he was buying his freedom from the CIA.”
A laugh. “Who’d Gerald give the stuff to? He say?”
“Won’t say anything, except he’s finally free and they’re all safe. He’s a happy camper. Showed us some backward scribbles on a piece of cardboard, claimed it was his receipt from the CIA …”
I shook my head and walked away, seeing Waltz arriving, opening the door of his office, tossing his hat to the corner of his desk. I crossed the floor, making my face benign, guileless. I had chosen duplicity over truth and there was no turning back.
My fear of discovery wasn’t overwhelming. I’d gone to a fair amount of trouble to wall myself off from my past. Except for paying a computer-savvy friend to delete items from a college database, it was mostly legal, changing my name and spreading carefully chosen rumors. Unless the few who knew of my connection to Jeremy Ridgecliff pointed my way, anyone looking for the missing brother of a blighted family might think the guy boarded a steamer and fell beneath the horizon, never seen again.
“What’s up, Shelly?” I asked, poking my head through his door.
“Cluff dug up tax records from Ms Dora Anderson. She wasn’t born a realtor, it was a career change.”
“From what?”
“A social worker in Newark. It was years ago, but …”
We were in Newark a half-hour later, in the city’s social services department. It resembled the detectives’ room at the precinct – a large space jammed with cubicles and filing cabinets and lined by small offices and conference rooms. Unlike the detectives’ room, the workers were predominantly women, the scent tending to perfume and hand lotions and other womanly nostrums. There were more pictures of families on the desks, fewer guys grinning beside large fish.
We had been directed to Jonnie Peal, a fortyish woman who held her head sideways as she talked, looking away every few seconds, like someone was whispering in her ear a half-dozen words at a time.
“Dora worked in the office all day. A mid-level administrator. Assignments, mainly, coordinating the schedules of our contact staff. I recall her having her realtor’s license back then. A part-time thing, weekends. One day she went for it full time. Guess she got tired of scheduling. Pay was better. Couldn’t be worse.”
“No contact with clients?” I asked.
Ms Peal nodded to a row of wide cubicles separated by tall gray dividers. “She worked in cubicle fourteen. Sat there all day long.”
I looked at Waltz. Desk-bound workers rarely made enemies that mutilated your body. It was the caseworkers, the folks on the street who were avoided, jeered, cursed, spat on, and sometimes harmed as they thrust themselves into situations where they were neither understood nor wanted. Cohabitational situations were bad, toss in kids and things got worse. Though parents might allow an infant to wallow in filth for days, let a social worker suggest inadequate care and things could explode into violence. But Ms Anderson had been insulated from those situations.
“That’s wrong,” said a voice. “Dora wasn’t always at that desk.”
We turned to see a petite, sharp-dressed Hispanic woman a dozen feet away. She stood up from a desk where she’d been on the telephone. Her phone rang. I figured it rang all day.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She punched a button on the phone and walked over. “I’m Celia Ramirez. Been here twenty years. Dora started in Social Services as a caseworker when she was fresh from college. It didn’t work out, I guess. She was put in filing, worked her way to scheduling.”
“She worked out of here? This office?”
Ms Ramirez pointed to an adjoining annex. “Back then she worked in Children’s Services. You know what kind of nastiness they see ov
er there?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Unfortunately, I do.”
We followed Ms Ramirez’s directions to the Child Welfare section of the department. It mirrored government offices everywhere: cubes, chairs, desks with piled-high in-baskets, cabinets. But I knew horrors lurked in the cabinets and case files, the seeds of serial murderers. Psychopathic killers are created in childhood. They come from backgrounds of physical and psychological abuse on a scale almost inconceivable to the normal American mind.
No matter how childhood is stripped away, by sex or pain or perverse and relentlessly inventive combinations of the two, it leaves, or never begins. Many children endure these cauldrons of despair to create what we call productive lives. But endurance is a skill, not a foundation. Many are wounded in some way, unable to form normal relationships, or know anything akin to inner peace. Others have all vestiges of personality destroyed, as if an angry fire had seared away their soul. Nothing remains to hold evil at bay, and everything becomes a possibility.
Waltz noted my silence, said, “Are you all right, Detective Ryder?”
“I’ve been in too many of these places, Shelly.”
“Don’t I know it. Listen, two of us might seem heavy handed. Want to keep it one-on-one again, you being the one?”
I nodded. “Sounds right.”
He squeezed my shoulder, then stood on tiptoe and scanned the floor. “I’ve got to find a restroom. I drank two cans of diet fudge goo this morning.”
I wandered until I found the director, Eugenie Brickle, a slender and handsome black woman in her fifties with searching eyes. They searched me from toes to hat before deciding I was on the side of the angels.
“How long was she a caseworker?” I asked as we strolled the sidewalk in front of the building so Ms Brickle could have a cigarette. She didn’t really smoke, just sort of touched the cigarette to her lips and inhaled as she pulled it away, puffing out nothing. I figured her for a long-time smoker who’d found a way to get the motion without the potion.
“Dora worked with us for two years. Then she was moved to clerical. It was that or be let go.”
I paused, waited for a loud bus to pass. “Dora wasn’t good at her job?”
“Maybe too good, too sensitive. She didn’t know how to compartmentalize. Every child was Dora’s child, every situation could have a happy ending. If it didn’t, the failure was Dora’s. It was tearing her up. It wasn’t doing the staff a lot of good either, finding her weeping in the washroom three times a week.”
“It seems strange she left the field completely.”
We came to the end of the block, turned around. Ms Brickle had not-smoked the cigarette almost to the filter.
“Her mother lived with Dora and had been ill for several years. It’s why Dora did real estate on weekends, to help with the bills. Her mom took a turn for the worse and the bills piled higher …”
“Dora jumped for the added pay.”
“I imagine she was a super realtor, working to give every buyer a happy ending, find the dream home. Maybe that’s what she threw herself into. But she never let go of her social-work days completely.”
“Why do you say that?”
We stopped at the door. Ms Brickle pressed the cigarette into the sand of a receptacle, tapping it deep, so all that remained was a tan circle the circumference of a .32 shell.
“I was over in the city, saw her about a month back. She was clicking down the street in high heels and print dress flapping in the breeze, looking bright and happy and about to jump straight up into the blue sky. I asked if she’d just sold Donald Trump a building. She laughed and said she’d crossed paths with a client from her Child Welfare days, and he had made it through hell; not just survived, but was building a good life for himself.”
“She say who it was?”
She shrugged. “We see so many kids I probably wouldn’t have recalled the name. Just someone she’d seen in the course of her job.”
“A success story.”
“Even Dora had figured him for a lost child, too broken to ever be made right. But there he was, a responsible adult, working a good job and making a difference in the world. That day it wasn’t the real estate work lighting her face up, Detective. It was a case from years and years ago. Dora got her a happy ending.”
EIGHT
“Could you please stop pacing, Doc?” Harry Nautilus said. “It’s driving me nuts.”
Nautilus rolled a chair behind Dr Alan Traynor, bumping the back of Traynor’s knees. The psychiatrist half sat, half fell, into the chair.
“I’m trying to stay calm,” the acting head of the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior mumbled. He ran pink fingers through thinning white hair, tiny blue eyes twitching behind wire-framed bifocals. “It’s all so mystifying. What would make Dr Prowse do such a thing?”
Nautilus sat another chair in the book-filled office that had belonged to Dr Evangeline Prowse. He rolled toward Traynor until their knees touched, hoping to lock the nervous shrink in place.
“I need to understand Dr Prowse’s last few weeks.”
Nautilus had left Mobile at six a.m. He’d spent most of the drive on the phone with the State Police, making sure they were working together, not at odds. For now, the death of Dr Prowse was being disseminated as inconclusive. That a patient was missing was being played close to the vest. Had Jeremy Ridgecliff been prowling the Alabama countryside, there would have been a full shrieking alert. Roadblocks. Helicopters. Bloodhounds.
“Dr Traynor?” Nautilus prompted. “Did you notice anything strange?”
“Like I told the State Police, I wasn’t here. She sent me and the three other senior staffers to a conference in Austin. It was last minute and strange.”
“Strange how?”
“The conference had little bearing on what we do at the Institute. It was on interpersonal dynamics, personality assessments, psychometrics …” Traynor’s hand rose to cover his mouth. “Oh Lord. Do you think Dr Prowse sent us to Austin to keep us away while all …the bad stuff was going on?”
“I don’t know enough to answer that. Was anything unusual?”
Nautilus watched Traynor’s face contort through memories. “She’d been nervous the past three or so weeks. But there wasn’t any major incident. One thing stood out, though it wasn’t recent. About six weeks back I was working second shift. Near midnight, I saw the Doctor in her office. I poked my head in, asked if I could help with anything. She said she was perplexed by a case.”
“I’d figure perplexing cases were pretty standard here.”
“She was more than perplexed, she was upset, though trying to hide it. I asked if I could help with anything. She said there might be confidentiality issues involved.”
“Confidentiality holds in here?” Nautilus frowned down the long white hall toward the patient section of the Institute, separated by shining steel doors. Every fifty feet of wall held a button labeled Emergency. It wasn’t referring to fires.
“Not at the Institute,” Traynor said. “But doctor-patient privileges could have been involved if she was talking about a private client.”
Nautilus raised an eyebrow. “Why would a world-renowned specialist like Dr Prowse want to see folks with sibling rivalries, panic attacks …”
“The standard afflictions? She wouldn’t. For Dr Prowse to accept an individual patient, he or she would be very compelling in some way. Of interest.”
“I’d imagine she sees all kinds of ‘interesting’ in here,” Nautilus said. “Jeremy Ridgecliff, for example.”
Traynor nodded. “Patricide following years of childhood abuse, mental and physical. That wasn’t overly unusual, a child reaching the breaking point, taking revenge. What was unusual was the shifting of anger to a disconnected mother, or rather, surrogates. And the startling amount of physical violence inflicted on his victims. Unfortunately …” Traynor shrugged, shook his head.
“Unfortunately what, Doctor?”
“Dr Prowse never fully
opened Ridgecliff up. She figured ways to keep him calm and fairly reality based – that in itself was a monumental success – but she never reached the primal judgment.”
“Primal judgment?”
“Sorry …a term the Doctor and I used for the underlying motivator in killings. Another staffer calls it ‘The Fire that lights all fires’.”
“I thought abuse was the underlying factor.”
“That’s the fact of the case. The primal judgment is how the patient transforms that fact into his own beliefs. How the fact is perceived, interpreted and, in Jeremy Ridgecliff’s case, turned into a murderous impulse against women.” Traynor raised a wispy eyebrow, a note of condescension in his voice. “The concept is perhaps a bit difficult for the layman. A drunken and abusive man beats three sons. One son reads it as a form of contact, a misshapen display of love, and manages to love his father back. The second interprets it as hatred, responds in kind. The third son …” Traynor paused, tapped his fingers to his chin, trying to come up with an example.
“The third son,” Nautilus said, “might do something wholly different, such as judging the pain to be a message from God or Allah or the Universal Oneness – a sign that he’s been chosen for something, and the suffering is necessary.”
Traynor stared at Nautilus as if seeing him for the first time.
“Exactly, Detective. But Dr Prowse never found Jeremy Ridgecliff’s primal judgment, probably because he knew she was looking for it. They danced around the subject, almost playfully at times.”
“Playfully?”
“Both knew it was serious business, but Jeremy Ridgecliff had his whole life to play the game, his form of hide-and-seek. He held tight to his secrets.”
“So the two, uh, toyed with one another. Is that the right word?”
“Ridgecliff could actually be puckish. And wholly charming, when he wished. Lovable, almost. If you didn’t know his history.”
Lovable. Nautilus tumbled the word in his mind. Dr Evangeline Prowse was a friend of his partner. If Carson had a blind spot, it was overlooking imperfections in those close to him. Nautilus narrowed an eye at the nervous Traynor and decided to push him a bit.
