by LS Hawker
The difference? When John did these things, Nessa would push back by pretending she didn’t notice that anything was wrong. She’d get louder and jollier, acting as if they’d never been so happy, just to goad him. And he’d get chillier and icier and more long-suffering, and she’d want to clock him in the face. And finally she’d lose her shit and scream at him, and he’d finally spill what his fucking problem was and they’d end up laughing, and then they’d tumble into the sheets and have make-up sex—when he could get it up. The medication had put a damper on that, but the fact was she hadn’t minded that much.
With her mother, the silences were more dangerous. Scarier. Because as a kid, when Mom pulled the love away, you knew you were lost. You knew you didn’t exist anymore. She had made you disappear with her anger and disappointment.
But enough navel-gazing. She had work to do. Nessa sat at the table with her laptop and opened her email. She had several Google alert notices. DeadJohnDonati had been a busy boy.
She’d tried to talk Isabeau out of looking at the alerts anymore, but to no avail. Today, on Nessa’s blog, DeadJohnDonati had posted this:
Nessa trivia question: What was her secondary hobby as a teenager? Was it A) played in a band or B) charged $5 per blow job, $10 per lay, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue?
Isabeau read over her shoulder before Nessa could close the browser.
“Now it’s just getting ridiculous,” Isabeau said. “I wonder if all this is having the opposite effect of what John intends. Oh, Nessa Donati, she’s from outer space! She’s got three heads! She was a hooker!”
If only it was ridiculous.
Nessa had to find him and stop him before everything came out. Now that her boy was gone, Nessa had work to do. She was going to find John. And she was going to stop him.
Chapter Seventeen
SHE WAITED AN hour before driving to the police station. She wanted to make sure Linda and Tony wouldn’t come back before she left.
At the station, she talked to the desk sergeant. “Can I speak to Detective Treloar?”
“He’s not in.”
She hated to ask for Dirksen, but she didn’t have any other choice. She sat in the waiting area, fidgeting, for fifteen minutes before Dirksen appeared.
She stood. Her voice shook. “Can we go somewhere private to talk?”
“Sure,” he said, and led her down the hall to an interview room. He pulled out a chair for her on one side of the table, then sat on the other side.
“I think my husband is alive,” Nessa said.
He wasn’t expecting that; it was clear from his surprised expression. “What are you talking about?”
“I have reason to believe that John staged his disappearance.”
It sounded even crazier when she said it out loud, and the contemptuous twist of the detective’s mouth reflected this.
“Really,” Dirksen said. “And why do you believe that?”
She swallowed. “I also think he’s the one who put the ad on FantasyIslandXXX.com. I assume you know about that.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he actually looked sympathetic, although maybe she just hoped he did.
Nessa explained most of the things that had been going on, unable to think of certain nouns, using too many words, sounding like a flustered hausfrau. It was humiliating and frustrating.
She handed the detective her file folder of screenshots: the comments, the website (without the naked photos, of course), the social media accounts—everything she and Isabeau had found online. She hoped this would speak for her.
As the stack of paper clunked onto the desktop and rattled the ice in the detective’s fountain Coke, his mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding me with this?”
“This isn’t all of it,” Nessa said.
He riffled through it, not really looking, and pushed it aside, probably to set in a pile along with all the books everyone says they’ve read but never quite get through, like Joyce’s Ulysses.
“Do you have a department that investigates cybercrime?”
He laughed. “No.”
“Can you contact the FBI, get their help? They probably have more resources to do this sort of thing than you guys do, right?”
“We’ll consider that.”
Nessa stared at him. “No, you won’t. I can see it in your face. You’re not going to do anything.”
“We have our hands full with real crimes, Mrs. Donati.”
“Like attempted rape?” she said. “Like that?”
“There’s no indication that your husband is responsible,” Dirksen said.
“But someone is. Someone came into my home. Held a gun on me. Threatened my life with my three-year-old son in the next room.” She shouldn’t have said that last bit, because she was afraid she was going to cry, and she could not cry in front of this asshole.
“Lady, that’s not my case. Your husband’s disappearance is.”
Lady. Baby. Honey. Dismissive terms for hysterical women like her.
She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to turn Brady in, but if ever there was a time to break a promise, this was it.
“Listen,” she said. “I found out that the locksmith who changed our locks actually sold the keys to John. Twice.”
Dirksen again leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms but said nothing.
He didn’t believe her. Or maybe, more accurately, didn’t want to.
“Detective Dirksen,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and reasonable. “Do you have some sort of problem with me?”
He regarded her. “Listen, Mrs. Donati. I skimmed some of your blog and I can see why you kind of irritate some people.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What?”
“You’re pretty sarcastic. Some people find that offensive.”
Sarcastic like Howard Stern? Like Perez Hilton? If she were a man, this attribute would be a million-dollar asset. But since she was a woman, she was shrill, abrasive, bossy, strident, high-maintenance. Nessa would not rise to this bait. She would stay on topic. She would be the rational one. “But what does that have to do with—”
“My point is,” Dirksen said, warming to his lecture, “that if you’re going to put yourself out there with a superior attitude and everything, you’re going to attract some negative attention. If you were a little nicer, I’m sure this just wouldn’t even be an issue.”
“Nicer.”
“Yes,” Dirksen said, a smile curling his lips. “More . . . ladylike.”
Her skin prickled with heat. Rage bubbled up inside her. No. She wasn’t going to just sit here and take this. He’d gone way too far. “You know, a blow job isn’t very ladylike, but I’ll bet you never complain about that.”
His fleetingly shocked expression gratified her. But then he masked his response and parried. He leaned forward, his hands on the table. “This is exactly why you will never get any respect. You come on all rough and tough, but the minute someone says something you don’t like, you come crying to the men.”
“Wow,” she said, so incensed her anger doubled back on itself, making her calm once more. “I don’t even know what to say, except that I’m guessing you’re not really going to be any help here.”
He threw his hands up. “If you want to report the locksmith, you need to talk to Detective Treloar. Not me.”
“You’re not going to look for John?”
“We did. In the lake. His body is probably caught in the trees and buildings over by the cove,” he said. “We can’t send divers down there. Too dangerous. But I can pretty much guarantee that Mr. Donati is dead. No credit card activity, no phone activity. He’s dead as a doornail.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Is it possible, Mrs. Donati, that you’re just throwing crap at the wall, hoping something will stick to . . . cover something
else up?”
“Like what exactly?” Nessa said.
“Like . . . when we finally get the DNA tests back, you know what we’re going to find? We’re going to find that your son’s DNA is a familial match to the blood and tissue we found embedded in the side of the pickup truck along with the bullets from your gun.”
He sat back and watched her face, waiting for her to shrivel up, to react. But for once, she was stone. No sweat, no tears, no shaking. Because she hadn’t shot John.
Dirksen leaned forward again and lowered his voice. “We’re going to find out that you killed your crackhead husband, and even though you did the whole world a favor, you’re going to prison for a long, long time.”
She stood, willing herself not to wobble or swallow. “John’s alive, Detective Dirksen, and I guess I’m going have to find him myself. I’m going to look in the crack houses in Manhattan and Junction City, and when I find him, I’m going to blog about how the Riley County Sheriff’s Office wouldn’t help a desperate single mother.” She turned and walked out of the interview room.
She was a suspect, she knew that for sure now, but since they wouldn’t find a body, it would be very difficult to prosecute her for murder. If this guy had anything to say about it though, they would convene a grand jury, and she would be tried and convicted. Nessa would not only lose custody of her son, she would spend the rest of her days in prison for something she didn’t do.
Oh, the irony.
Tuesday, June 21
NESSA RECEIVED AN email from Ella the KCMA receptionist:
Package here for you . . . should I lock it up or do you want to come get it?
Normally, Nessa would’ve waited until her next shift, but she wondered if this was yet another message from John. And if maybe it had some fingerprints on it that she could give to the police to prove it was from him.
She hadn’t been to the radio station during the day since she was hired, so it felt strange to drive out there in the middle of the afternoon. It looked different in the daylight—smaller and shabbier. Inside, she peeked through the window into the on-air studio and saw a short round middle-aged man wearing her headphones and sitting on her chair, spitting into her microphone.
Possessive much?
Nessa turned to Ella, a girl no more than eighteen, who was typing on her keyboard.
“Hi, Nessa,” she said, and finished what she was doing before reaching under her desk and retrieving a padded envelope. She put it on the desk in front of Nessa, who picked it up.
“No return address,” Nessa said. “Just says ‘A Fan.’ ” She turned it over and saw that there was no postmark either. “Did this come in the mail?”
“Nope,” Ella said. “It was just lying against the door when I got to work this morning.”
Nessa thought about leaving to open it. But then again, a witness might be a good thing to have.
So she sat in the reception chair and felt the envelope, but whatever was inside had plenty of insulation around it. Was it too small to be a bomb?
The envelope was lined with two layers of bubble wrap. She tried to tip whatever was inside out, but it wouldn’t budge, so she started to reach inside. But then she had visions of a poisonous snake. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“Do you have a pair of scissors I could borrow?” Nessa asked.
Without looking away from her computer, Ella reached into a drawer, withdrew the scissors, and put them on the desk.
Nessa sliced off the three remaining edges, then carefully folded back the front of the envelope.
“What the hell?” Nessa said.
Taped inside of the bubble wrap was a full hypodermic needle.
Nessa gasped, and Ella looked up from her keyboard.
“What is it?”
Before Nessa could do anything, Ella stood and looked.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
Nessa stared at the syringe in horrified fascination. John had taped it with the needle pointing up. Had Nessa reached inside without looking, she would have been punctured. There might have been enough pressure to inject her with the liquid inside the chamber.
Did John really want her dead? She stared at the hypo and wondered.
Ella picked up the phone receiver. “I’m going to call the police.”
Nessa was still staring at the syringe. She could have been killed. She could have died, and Daltrey . . .
Nessa snapped out of her trance. “No,” she said. “You don’t need to do that. I’m going to take it to them right now.”
“I can testify if you need me to,” Ella said.
“Thanks,” Nessa said. “Do you have some Scotch tape?”
Ella handed her a roll and Nessa taped the envelope back together.
She could have been dosed. Germs. Hepatitis. Rabies. HIV. This was starting to remind her of some wack-job conspiracy theory stuff. This was straight-up crazy.
“You should totally post this on Instagram,” Ella said. “It’s not every day you see this kind of thing.”
“Really, Ella?”
“Sorry,” she said, shame-faced.
What was it with this generation wanting to document every single thing they saw, from bloody car accidents to their own reflections? Of course, she was part of that cloud culture now. She was part of the problem. But it would never occur to her to take a picture of a weapon.
Nessa carefully stowed the envelope in her bag. She hadn’t touched the hypo, so she hoped John’s fingerprints could be lifted from it.
Once in her car, she started driving toward the Riley County Sheriff’s Office to get the syringe tested. All of a sudden, she realized that if she walked into the cop shop, they were going to take her fingerprints. There would be no stopping it.
Nessa turned off into an abandoned warehouse parking lot to think it through. Could her doctor’s office do the testing? They probably could.
She removed the envelope from her purse and opened it to examine the hypo.
Since it was still taped to the envelope, it was hard to determine the color of the liquid in the syringe, but it looked very familiar, and she suspected she knew what it was. Heroin.
A scene from Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors came to mind, the one where the ex-junkie girl’s tracks open up like hungry mouths, desperate and dying of thirst.
Nessa actually started salivating, painfully. Her eyes watered. The syringe seemed to have its own gravitational pull. She tried to resist it. She didn’t know for sure that it was heroin. But of course it’s heroin, said the little voice in her head. One little shot won’t hurt. Just one, and then never again.
That voice had spoken to her many times, insistent, seductive, convincing as hell.
Just one more time.
Nessa snatched up her phone and hit the speed dial for Marlon’s number. It rang as she stared, salivating, at the plastic cylinder.
“This is Marlon. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
Beep.
Fuck.
She dropped her phone, panting, tense, literally almost preorgasmic. Every hair on her body stood on end.
Just once.
It blared in her brain, and in her mind’s eye she watched herself let go of the rope.
And then she was clawing through her purse to find something, anything, to tie herself off with. She was nothing but a starving animal hell-bent on survival. Nothing would get in her way now, between Nessa and her smack-lust.
And then her eyes were drawn to her wallet, through the plastic window of which shone Daltrey’s smiling face.
All the oxygen left her body. Horror paralyzed her.
Oh, dear God. What had she almost done?
The Dickies played on her phone.
She hit the button and shrieked into the phone, “Where the fuck were you
? Where were you?” Sobbing, frantic.
“Whoa, whoa,” Marlon said. “What’s happening? Where are you?”
Nessa couldn’t speak for a moment, crying so hard she couldn’t get a breath.
“I called as soon as I could, Nessa,” he said, calm. “Where are you?”
“I almost—I almost—” She couldn’t say it. Couldn’t, because Marlon didn’t know.
He thought she was an alcoholic, like him. She’d never told him her real problem, and she knew this was all wrong. She wanted to tell him, but she just couldn’t.
“You almost,” Marlon said. “But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” She kept her eyes on the photo of Daltrey.
“You’re going to be okay,” Marlon said. “Just for today. You just have to get through today.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you need me to come to you? I can cancel my class if I have to.”
She took a deep, shaky breath, still looking at Daltrey. “No,” she said. “Go teach. I’m okay now.”
“Go to a meeting, and I’ll call you tonight. You can do this, with God’s help. Expect the miracle. Expect it.”
“I will,” she said. “Thank you, Marlon. Talk to you tonight.”
After Nessa clicked off, she wrapped the syringe back up and shoved it in her purse. She put the Pacifica into gear and drove toward her doctor’s office.
She should go to a meeting, needed to, but she didn’t have time.
She parked in the lot outside the medical building. Inside, she approached the receptionist and said, “Would there be any way to squeeze me in to see Kelley this afternoon?”
“What seems to be the problem?” the receptionist said.
“I want to discuss a personal matter with her.”
“You can tell me.”
“I’d rather not, thanks.”
“I’ll take a look at her schedule. What’s your name?”
“Nessa Donati.”
“Have a seat.”
Nessa did and dialed Isabeau’s cell but got her voicemail.
She made her voice breezy as she could. “Hi, girl, I may be late, but I’m hoping to be home in time for dinner. I’ll let you know if it’s going to be later than that.” She clicked End.
