by J. A. Kerley
We walked a long room with polished wood floors, tapestries, curio cabinets holding sculpture that looked pre-Columbian. The furniture was mismatched in a good way, selected for comfort instead of aesthetics. The fireplace was large and deep with a heavy oaken mantel. The only out-of-synch note was the roll of duct tape on the mantel.
Jeremy said, “The owners are a brace of fag ophthalmologists fixing the eyeballs of peasant kiddies in Peru or some such dreadful, goody-goody thing. I’m renting for a month. I had another nest, but had to vacate when you dropped the bricks on my Portuguese cousin.” He winked. “It was a splashy tip-off, obrigado, irmão.”
“Where’s Folger, Jeremy?”
“She’s pissing like a trouper, brother. Keep me safe and you’ll be swimming the ol’ ween once again.”
I hadn’t expected to see Folger. I knew Jeremy too well.
He clapped his hands expectantly. “So, I guess it’s down to bidness, Carson. Are you ready for me? For Sirius?” He lolled his tongue as if panting.
“You knew all along Sirius was a dog, didn’t you?”
“Prowsie and me in flagrante delicto? It would have been the highlight of her life, but we have differing astrological signs. I don’t wish to run afoul of my stars.”
“What happened, Jeremy? To Vangie.”
“She had an anxiety attack, nerves. Had to go for a run. He was waiting. Or he sent someone.”
“Jim Day?”
“I TOLD HER TO STAY PUT. GODDAMN STUPID BITCH.”
I backhanded him across the face. His head snapped sideways and he stumbled backward. His hand reached to his cheek.
“Never call Vangie anything like that again,” I said. “Not in my presence.”
His eyes narrowed and started to heat up. I said, “Don’t even think of giving me that look. All it’ll see is my back going out the door.”
He raised his eyebrows, jammed his hands in his pockets, gave me a smile of plastic bonhomie.
“So you’ve heard of Jim Day, Carson?”
“Harry did my work well. But I’ve still got a lot of holes. Like how did it all come together. How did Day approach you?”
“Oh my,” he said. “You want to start at the very beginning …”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Folger listened closely to the voices. All she saw was black. Jeremy Ridgecliff had slipped through the trapdoor to the roof, set a wooden beam over the chimney, lashed a hardware-store block and tackle to the beam. He’d tied her into a rope harness and cranked her effortlessly up the chimney. Her toes swung just above the flue. A breeze sifted up the chimney. It smelled of incense and rustled her hair.
For a brief moment it occurred to her that she could die here. If something happened to Carson. If Ridgecliff took off. She’d spin in circles and die in a sooty chimney.
But Ridgecliff had, for the most part, seemed calm and in control of himself. Unnervingly so for someone pursued by an angry NYPD. As if he knew something no one else knew. Or perhaps that was a manifestation of the insanity. Another aspect of Ridgecliff struck her: He was like a very old man in a forty-year-old body. A strange notion, because he was like an adolescent child at the same time.
The voices started anew. Carson knew Ridgecliff, of course. They’d been familiar since Carson had interviewed Ridgecliff in the Institute. But it seemed he knew him better than she’d been led to believe …
“It was the summer after high school, Carson. A year after father died. I was walking to town and thinking about college in the fall, amazed some big university would give me a free education just for answering silly questions in a test. A guy in a truck pulled alongside. Jim Day, but I didn’t know that yet. He said I’d brought honor to the whole county, him included. I was secretly pleased to have made a grown man so happy …”
We were in facing loveseats by the front bay window. Jeremy had insisted on killing the lights, arraying a dozen lit candles throughout the room. “I haven’t seen candlelight in years, Carson. We’re not allowed fire, for obvious reasons.” The air smelled of candle wax and the sticks of the lavender Japanese incense he had discovered in a drawer. Shadows jittered in the corners.
“Jimmy said he’d take me to the library, but took me to …the spot. When he showed a gun I remembered him as one of the cops from that day, the young one who never left the car.
“Jimmy started talking about rain and dams and rivers. How water builds up and threatens the dam. How it NEVER stopped raining. He was describing ME. He saw it in the clearing. He saw how my ANGER AND HATRED had been building under years of THOSE FUCKING BEATINGS RAINING DOWN AS I BURIED MY FACE IN THE PILLOW AND SCREAMED DOWN TOWARD HELL AND HOPED IT COULD SAVE ME BECAUSE GOD AND JESUS AND ANGELS IN HEAVEN AND ALL THAT SHIT MAMA YAPPED ABOUT WEREN’T DOING A DAMN THING!”
“Easy. It’s all right. Relax.”
My brother closed his eyes until his breath stilled. “Jim understood what had happened, Carson. He said our father must have been insane because any sane man would hold his head high if he had a son like me.”
“Day was there from that moment on, right? When you went to college?”
Like John Muhammad had moved into Lee Malvo’s life until he owned his very breathing.
“I told my counselor the dorm was so loud I couldn’t concentrate. I was allowed to move off campus. Jim was with me. I finally had a father, Carson, a teacher. Not the usual things taught by ordinary fathers, but the special secrets of the world.”
I could hear Day’s voice applying the sociopathic credo like a soothing balm: We’re not ordinary, Jeremy, we’re special. Ordinary rules don’t apply to us.
“Day taught you secrets of women,” I ventured. “That they were evil.”
“Women had one ability: squirting other people out of them. It took FILTH AND DISGUST to put people in them, and then they squirted people out through the tube where FILTH and DISGUST took place. It’s an UGLY and DEGRADING process, Carson. SICK!”
“And our mother?”
He snapped his head sideways and spat on the floor. He eyes turned to me to see if I’d challenge him on the act. I didn’t. We’d regressed to a dangerous place. He was neither in the present nor the past, but an unstable junction of the two worlds.
“Day decided it was time to murder women?”
I saw his hands tighten toward fists. “Retribution is a holy act. We became warriors. Warriors can’t commit murder.” He spoke it like rote, and I figured he’d heard it a thousand times.
“Tell me how it started. The first one.”
“We found a restaurant frequented by house-wifely types fighting middle age. I sat in a small nearby park and feigned emotional distress, my beloved cat hit by a car. A woman noticed my pain and comforted me. I asked if she’d accompany me to the restaurant. Jimmy was in his van at the edge of the park. He had a rag and chloroform. The right amount made them dopey but awake. Jimmy liked them to see what was coming.”
“Coming where?”
“Jimmy had fixed the basement to be easy to clean. There was a bathroom with a sink, a hose connection. Four drains. Speaking of drains, I have to piss.”
He unfolded his legs, bounded from the couch, and went to the bathroom.
When I heard the toilet flush I took a deep breath. I had brought the story to the site of the killings. To the point where Jeremy’s point of view changed in his interrogations. It was time to step through that final door.
To find out what happened in the kill zone.
Shelly Waltz walked into the Pelham campaign headquarters, feeling relief at being away from the station. The department was in uproar looking for Alice Folger. Knowing what he knew made him feel like a traitor. If it all fell apart, which was likely, that’s how he would be remembered in the department: Shelly Waltz, traitor and scumbag.
The situation was all in Ryder’s hands. What if Ryder was allied with his brother in some bizarre machination? What if they were sawing Alice Folger in pieces right now?
“Are you all right, Detec
tive? You look a little pale.”
Sarah Wensley, Pelham’s majordomo, appeared at his side. The phone banks were still filled with happy faces. Did political activists ever sleep? The opposite contingent – across the street and behind the barricades – obviously didn’t. The signs waved, chants echoed across the pavement.
“I’m fine, Ms Wensley. Indigestion or something. Anything in the mail today?”
“No dolls, mouths or otherwise, I’m happy to say. Another screaming letter from that Blankley guy.”
“The candidate’s still leaving tomorrow?”
“She heads to New England right after her address to the convention.”
“Keep your eyes on that mail. Mr Borskov thinks there’s one more doll in the series. If someone’s been counting down to a message or whatever, it’ll be in the final doll.”
Waltz saw Secret Service agent Banks in the corner, coiled wire running to his earpiece as he kept a wary eye on the crowd across the way. Waltz pulled several sheets of newly manipulated photos from his briefcase, handed them to Banks.
“Our updates on Jeremy Ridgecliff, the guy suspected of killing the women. Pass ’em around your people.”
Banks studied the faces: Ridgecliff as a blond, with dark hair, with a goatee, with mustache, and electronically shaved bald. Banks tapped the top sheet with his fingernail.
“Is this Ridgecliff really as smart as you say?”
“Rocket-scientist smart. Even worse, he likes being smart, know what I mean?”
Banks continued to absorb the photos. “Yeah. He wants to show it off. Make the perfect kill.”
“Exactly. So far in his life, he’s got eight kills attributed. Six for sure. Five were women.”
Banks raised an eyebrow to Waltz. “He political?”
“He’s a non-denominational, equal-opportunity psychopath.”
Banks nodded toward Pelham. She was laughing and schmoozing a dozen head-bobbing reporters. “You think Ridgecliff is a direct threat to our lady?”
Waltz sighed, shook his head. He had to tell the truth.
“If you see Ridgecliff near Pelham, don’t think twice. Blow Ridgecliff apart.”
We’ll still find her, Waltz told himself. Even if Ridgecliff goes down, Ryder will find Alice.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Jeremy returned. He’d lost the wig, washed the makeup from his eyes and removed the concoction or mechanism altering their shape. Though his skin remained unnaturally dark, he again looked like my brother.
“Where were we? Oh yes, the –”
I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the first woman you killed, Jeremy.”
He spun away and began pacing, moving faster and faster, chased by a fire I couldn’t see. The candle flames shivered as he swept past with his fists clenching and releasing. I jumped in front of him. Took his shoulders and pulled him tight.
He held on to me a full minute, as if finding his equilibrium. He reclined on the bright Oriental carpet and stared into the white ceiling, thinking a long time before he spoke.
“I was supposed to do it, the release. I entered the room, accepted the holy knife, and walked toward the woman, but my legs died.”
“Died?”
“I fell to the floor. Nothing was holding my weight.”
“You couldn’t get to her?”
“I tried five times.”
Five? “This happened on every attempt?”
“My legs worked backing up but died going forward.”
I saw the women on the floor, naked and terrified, screaming into tape or a gag. My brother starting toward them with the weapon. Falling to the floor, wriggling and impotent.
“Day was there?” I asked. “In the room?”
“Of course, Carson. It was his party.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“The knife was dishonored by my cowardice. He took the knife to the bathroom to be reconsecrated beneath water. The knife returned, clean and bright and ready for its mission. The knife always returned.”
The knife entered the room …
“What did you do, Jeremy? While Day butchered the women.”
“I watched. And then I’d throw up and crawl away.”
“You never once …?”
He put his hands over his eyes and lay without motion. I walked to the window and stared out at a world where most people lived ordinary lives, no dark secrets, no hidden tragedies, no nights that followed you across the room with wadded sheets and covers.
I turned back to my brother. “You finally confessed to Vangie. The whole story. Everything.”
“Every word, Carson. From my first memories.”
“Because Vangie had become your psychoanalyst.”
His hands slipped from his eyes. “At the Institute she was just a warden. Dealing with savages. Burnouts. People who thought devil dogs were eating their brains. ‘You’re different, Jeremy,’ Prowse told me for years. ‘I wish you’d let me behind that last door, Jeremy.’”
“So after all those years, you opened the door.”
“I got tired of hiding.” He rubbed his eyes like he was getting weary. “I said we’d talk if I was a regular patient and not one of the savages. I told her get me a phone and we’ll keep regular hours.”
“You met – so to speak – on Saturdays.”
“One to three o’clock. She sat at her desk in Gulf Shores, I laid on my bed with my phone and told her everything.”
“Harry found a photo of you on her wall.”
“She wanted a photo to look at when we spoke, something to personalize her experience and diminish the distance. I was baring my soul, Carson. I wanted my picture to reflect it, made her take it with my dingus and orbles hanging out. I made her promise to put the picture up just like I was in the room telling my story: JEREMY STRIPPED BARE.”
Jeremy had always claimed to be viscerally disgusted by Vangie, and over the years had generated a litany of pejoratives: Slut Queen, Doctor Whore, the Cuntessa, Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. It would have been easy to shut Vangie out of his life: Simply stop talking, or request another psychiatrist be assigned to him. Had my brother actually respected Vangie Prowse? In his world, she’d have been his only equal in raw intelligence. Were his relentless anti-Vangie rants and insults a mask?
I said, “When you told Vangie about Day, she tried to track him down, I take it?”
“She’d seen people like Jim Day before. She said he would be killing women. It was what he saw as his mission in life. She asked me everything I could remember about him, even the tiniest things, like the fact that his mama had once told him his daddy-o was from New Yawk City. She eventually concluded Jimmy Day HAD to be somewhere in the New York area, a spiritual destiny. He could come to New York when he was man enough. When he was ready.”
“She was dead right,” I said.
“One thing about old Prowsie, brother, she knew Mommy and Daddy issues.”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, she didn’t know how to wipe away her prints as she investigated.”
“The Prowster tracked down some of Jimmy’s drooling relatives. Word got back to Jimmy that a doctor lady in the old home country of Alabamy was asking after him. He wasn’t a happy pup.”
“Day went South, broke into Vangie’s home.”
Jeremy nodded. “And that’s when he found old Prussy’s precious little secret.”
“The power he had over her,” I said. “What was it?”
He rolled to his stomach and cradled his chin in his hands. A smile ghosted his thin lips. “The secret that made her spring moi? That brought her here? That made us stay in a hotel near Chelsea? The secret she traded her life for? You don’t know what it is?”
“I have no idea.”
He started laughing.
Shelly Waltz opened his desk drawer and removed a vial containing blood-pressure medicine. He was supposed to take one every morning with about a half-dozen other pills, but for the past two weeks he’d needed another in the evening. H
e could tell his BP was spiking by a tension in his neck, a low hiss in his ears.
He popped the pill, washed it down with coffee, and looked out over the detectives’ room. It was quiet, most of the dicks out turning over rocks in the search for Folger.
He heard a rustle of paper from inside a gray cubicle. Cluff was still at work, hunched over the wide sheet of paper unfurled from the large roll on the floor beside the desk. Waltz had watched Cluff work out problems on the paper for so long it seemed normal.
Waltz walked over and leaned on the cubicle wall.
“What’s up, Detective?”
“Ah, just scratching out some new shit,” Cluff wheezed. Waltz saw him push the edge of the paper over a dog-eared pair of files. Hiding them.
“What’s with the files?” Waltz asked.
Cluff’s hairy ears reddened. “Nothing. Just a few loose ends.”
Waltz’s hand pushed the paper away. “Then you won’t mind if I take a look, right?”
Cluff leaned back in his chair, made a sound like a steam train shutting down, his lung-scarred version of a sigh. “It’s not anything. Just some old records from a couple different places.”
Waltz studied the pages. “My, my …old admission records from Newark’s Child Welfare office and Bridges Juvenile Center. I thought the Lieutenant shut down this area of inquiry so we could –”
Cluff swatted the air. “Yeah, I know. Look for a crazy in an Armani eating at the Four Seasons and living in a Park Avenue penthouse. I can’t run all over like I once did, Waltz. I hate it, but that’s the way it is. I got to spend half my time in my goddamn chair catching my breath, so I figured I’d do a little something while I sat. And Ryder never really convinced me there was no New York in Ridgecliff’s background.”
“Sounds like an admirable line of inquiry, Detective,” Waltz said, rapping his knuckles on the top of the cubicle. “Have at it.”
If Cluff was at his desk digging through moth-eaten records, Waltz thought, it was one less chance to find Jeremy Ridgecliff. And thereby doom Alice Folger.
