Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  “Is Isaac my dad?” said Simon.

  She dropped her fork. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Well, someone has to be, right?”

  “I told you that your father was—”

  “In the CIA, and that you couldn’t tell him about me without causing danger to his cover and possibly his life,” said Simon. “Which I thought was really cool when I was five years old, but I’m older now, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

  Lorelei put a big bite of eggs into her mouth. She was just as bad as Mia.

  “Plus, Jordan and I compared stories about our dads, and we both concluded that our mothers were lying to us. So, is Isaac my dad?”

  “No,” said Lorelei. “He’s not.”

  “So, who is?”

  “Can we do this some other time?”

  He tore his toast in half. “Like when?”

  “I don’t know. Later.”

  “This evening after school?”

  “No, Simon, not this evening.”

  “Then I think we should do it now, because I think you’re just hoping that if we put it off, I’ll forget all about it, and that’s not going to happen.”

  “Simon, please.” She looked into his eyes. “Let it go for now.”

  He took a bite of his toast and chewed.

  She set down her fork, feeling sick to her stomach.

  “You know, I think the only reason you would lie to me about my dad with a story like that is if my dad was actually like… a criminal or something. Is that what it is?” There was no emotion in Simon’s voice.

  She looked up at him.

  He popped a piece of toast in his mouth. He chewed.

  “Would you really want to know if that’s what it was?”

  Simon stopped chewing. He looked stunned, truly stunned, as if he hadn’t properly considered the possibility his hypothetical theory could be true.

  “Simon, I’m sorry. Please, your father was—”

  “What did he do?” said Simon.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Is he a murderer?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Simon…”

  “Is that why you think I killed those girls?” he said. “Do you think I inherited some kind of bloodlust from him or something?”

  She drew in a shaky breath, trying to find her voice.

  He got up from the table. “You should know that’s scientifically impossible. There’s no murder gene.”

  “Simon, please, I never meant for you to find out like this.”

  He went into his room. “It’s okay. I wanted to know,” he called out.

  She got up from the table and started for the door to his room. “It’s not okay. We should talk about it some more. I should explain it better.”

  He came out of his bedroom, and now he was wearing his back pack. “I’m going to catch a ride to school with Jordan, okay?”

  She caught him by the arm. “Simon, wait. You shouldn’t go to school. Stay here, and let’s talk. Let’s spend the day together.”

  He pulled out of her grasp. “I don’t think so.” He started for the door to the apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” she called after him.

  He went through the door and shut it behind him.

  Lorelei dragged her hands over her face. Could it have possibly gone worse than that? She had sometimes thought about telling Simon the truth, in an abstract sort of way, but she’d never really thought through the nitty gritty of how she’d talk to him about it. Now, it was done, and she’d botched it.

  The door opened again. It was Simon.

  “Sweetie.” She hurried to him, holding out her arms.

  “What’s his name?” said Simon.

  She stopped moving. She let her arms drop.

  “I think I have a right to know,” he said in a bland voice, his gaze going through her.

  She nodded. “Okay. I guess so.”

  He was quiet, waiting.

  “His name is Crispin Edmund Barker.”

  * * *

  “I think it’s a shit idea,” said Isaac’s voice over the phone.

  “Well, I know you do,” Lorelei said. “You already made that very clear to me. But can you get me in to see Crispin Barker or not?” She was at the kitchen table, where she’d been ever since Simon had walked out. The dishes were still dirty and the leftover breakfast was congealing in the pans on the stove, and she hadn’t made a move to clean any of it up.

  Simon was right. There was no murder gene.

  But things like autism, which Simon had been diagnosed with, had been shown to be hereditary. And there was some research that indicated a moderate genetic influence on psychopathy. However, a lot of research pointed instead to a diagnosis that had primarily to do with nurturing. Many violent killers were neglected as children and never properly formed the ability to empathize as a result.

  Many.

  Not all.

  “Why aren’t you staying home with Simon? After everything he’s been through, I doubt he’s going to want you to run off alone to some prison today.”

  “Simon didn’t want to stay home. He wanted to go to school.” She should tell Isaac about the disastrous revelation of Simon’s paternity. No. She was too ashamed. She couldn’t do it. “He doesn’t like to be behind with his studies. It stresses him out.”

  “Well, he’s going to call you and ask to come home after he gets there. He’s going to realize he’s more stressed out about being accused of murder.”

  “I don’t think so.” She didn’t think he wanted to see her right now. All she could think about was that stupid Pearl Jam song. It was running through her head on repeat. Son, have I got a little story for you…

  She should have known better. For a child not to know who his father was, it was an identity crisis. Finding this out was traumatizing. Simon was going to be angry with her for lying to him. She should never have hidden this from him.

  And yes, the story about the CIA was stupid, something she’d come up with to please a five-year-old boy. She should have planned it out better, but she remembered being caught off guard the first time he asked and blurting out the first ridiculous story that crossed her mind. Yes, she’d known that someday he’d want to know about his father, but she had thought it would still be some time off. She’d been wrong.

  God, with all the things she’d done to this poor boy, maybe it wouldn’t be surprising if he had snapped. Maybe he was a murderer and she’d driven him to it. She hadn’t been the greatest mother in the world. She’d done her best, but her best had been piss poor sometimes. Maybe she’d warped him…

  She felt tears gathering in a lump in her throat. She swallowed them.

  “I’m not going to call, Lorelei. I’m not setting this up for you.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please, just try.”

  “No,” said Isaac. “It’s idiotic, and it won’t be good for you. He’ll get under your skin and he’ll rile you up. You think your nightmares are bad now? After you see him, they’ll be off the charts.”

  Actually, she hadn’t had any bad dreams last night. She’d been certain that she would, but for some reason, she’d slept soundly. Was it possible she’d had it wrong for all this time, and that confronting her fears was actually therapeutic? Well, that would be ironic. (Or would it?) “Isaac, do this for me. Please do this for me.”

  “It’s a very, very bad idea,” said Isaac. “And they probably won’t clear you anyway. You don’t work for the FBI anymore, and this is incredibly short notice.”

  “Hell, what’s he doing in there all day? It’s not as if he’s busy.”

  “Just… just don’t get your hopes up.”

  “So, you’re going to call, then?”

  He sighed. “Damn it, I shouldn’t, but, yes, I’ll try.”

  “Thank you, Isaac. Thank you.”

  They hung up.

  And then she sat at the table in the kitchen for a few minute
s more, but she found she couldn’t bear to sit still now. She could very well be face to face with Cris in just a few hours, and she hadn’t seen him since after he’d been arrested all those years ago.

  Nearly seventeen years ago now. A very long time. He’d be different now. He’d be older. She wondered if he’d still be attractive.

  She desperately hoped he wasn’t. She hoped that prison had broken him down and that he was grizzled and beaten and wrinkled. She couldn’t handle still wanting him, not after everything. That would be perverse.

  And anyway, Isaac was right. He probably wouldn’t be able to clear it for her to go. She’d probably get all riled up and nothing would happen.

  She got up from the table and started to clear off the dirty dishes. She put them all into a pile and took them over to the sink. Turning on the water, she squirted some soap onto a sponge. She rinsed a dish, then started to scrub.

  When she was a little girl, her mother had taught her to run a sink full of water and then to let the dishes soak in there. But she didn’t like doing that, because she felt like the water got full of bits of food and oil and things and that the dishes got dirtier from being in it than they would have otherwise. So, she just ran the water the entire time.

  She used to have a dishwasher, back before she’d moved into this apartment, back when she worked for the FBI. But she found that she didn’t much miss that, because loading the dishwasher took nearly as long as just washing the dishes anyhow.

  After she’d washed the plates, cups, and silverware, she got the two skillets off the stove and scraped any leftover food on them into the trash. She washed those too.

  Maybe the phone had rung while she had the water on, and she hadn’t heard it. It was possible that Isaac already had an answer for her. She went back to the table and picked up the phone. She hit the power button. Her screen came on, but there were no missed calls.

  She turned on the vibrate function and stuck the phone in her pocket. Now, she’d be sure to get a call when it came through.

  The table and the counters were dirty. She found some spray cleaner and spritzed all the surfaces. Then she used a paper towel to wipe them clean.

  She surveyed the kitchen. It looked good in there.

  Now what?

  Could Isaac be right? Could seeing Cris make her nightmares worse? What if it dislodged something in her subconscious that sent her into a tailspin?

  Crispin Edmund Barker was one of the more prolific serial killers in American history. As she’d suspected from her profile, it turned out that he also did work as a professional hitman. He killed for various organized crime syndicates, and he was considered one of the best. After Barker had been arrested, there was an upswing in the number of bodies in mob cases that were recovered.

  Barker also had kills that he did for himself, ones that he didn’t get paid for. Those involved young women with curly hair. He seemed to prefer that the curls be loose and the hair be a medium length, but he did occasionally deviate to tight curls and short hair. It seemed he had a type, and Lorelei never did discover if this type corresponded to a real woman out there somewhere—possibly his first victim—or if it was just indicative of what he found attractive. Serial killers often only set out to kill one person, but found that they craved the excitement of the crime afterward, and so set about trying to recreate it. The curly-haired women could have been that.

  Between the kills for his business and the kills to scratch his itches, he was pretty busy. It was amazing he’d operated as long as he had without being caught, given the sheer amount of murders. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t that amazing. Lorelei knew that there were many, many cold cases and unsolved murders out there. How many of them were the work of some crafty serial killer who was smart enough to keep from being caught?

  It was a chilling thought, and so she tried to distract herself with something else.

  She couldn’t think of anything.

  She got her phone out of her pocket. She knew that it hadn’t rung or vibrated, but she checked it anyway.

  Nothing.

  Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe she didn’t want to see him after all.

  No, of course she didn’t want to see him. She wasn’t going for some kind of social call. She needed to see him. This was important.

  But she had to admit she was unprepared for looking him in the eye. When she had known him, he had been someone different than the man who lured pretty women with curly hair back to his house where he plied them with laced drinks that made them unconscious before he strangled or smothered or stabbed them to death. He liked to play with the ways he killed his victims. It was as if he was trying out different things, trying to figure out which way he liked the best by experimentation. One thing he never did was to harm their faces. The faces were always kept pristine, and he took care during the mummification process to preserve their features.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine Cris doing those things to women, because she could. She could definitely put him at the scene, and she could even picture the face he’d made when he was at the height of sexual pleasure wreathing his features as he squeezed the life out of some girl. Imagining it was not difficult, but it was exactly what made her unprepared to look him in the eye.

  How could she speak to him after he had done such horrible things? How could she speak to him knowing that and also knowing that he had used the same hands for murder as he had used on her body? Being near him would drive home how true it was, and she couldn’t stand for it to be true.

  She sat down on the couch in the living room, and her breath was growing short. She struggled to get herself together.

  She could do this.

  She had to do this. For Simon.

  But what if Isaac couldn’t get her in? That was a very real possibility. She needed to stop thinking about this.

  Instead, she got up and began to straighten up the living room. Most things were in their place, so she started lining up knick knacks and candles on the mantle, putting them in a precise spot and then changing her mind and moving them again.

  She went over and pulled the curtains aside, letting in bright sunlight.

  It blinded her.

  She pulled the curtains shut again.

  The light had illuminated a lot of dust. She’d seen pieces of it shimmering in the beams of light.

  Maybe she should vacuum.

  She got the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and plugged it in. She yanked the cord out, hand over hand, pulling it out as far as it would go.

  In her pocket, there was a violent vibration, accompanied by a jangling sound.

  She jumped, letting out a little cry.

  Her phone!

  She answered it. “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me,” said Isaac. “You can see him tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, at two o’clock,” said Isaac. “That okay?”

  She had wanted to go today, to get it over with. But tomorrow would work. It would give her time to prepare.

  * * *

  But she didn’t prepare anything. In fact, now that she knew it was going to happen, she felt the knowledge looming over her like a dark cloud, and she did her best to ignore it.

  She wanted to think about something else, and the first thing that occurred to her was that she still didn’t know who this friend of Simon’s was, the one who’d gone with him to take pictures of the girls. She wanted to figure that out, and she thought she might be able to.

  Back two years ago, when Simon was fourteen, she’d finally allowed him his own Facebook page with the caveat that he would share the login with her and that she would be able to access it at any time. She could also change his password at any point she wanted to take Facebook away as a punishment. The arrangement had worked fine, and she had only changed the password once or twice. However, she did log in to his Facebook every weekend just to check and make sure she still had access. She didn’t snoop around or do anything, she just lo
gged in and then logged right back out.

  She was going to log in again today, but this time she intended to do a little bit of snooping.

  She got out her laptop and sat down at the kitchen table with it. Usually, she used her laptop sprawled out on the couch or the bed, but for this, she felt the need to be upright. It seemed that she shouldn’t approach it casually.

  She pulled up Facebook. She was logged in to her account, so she logged out and then she typed in Simon’s account information instead.

  Instead of scrolling through the newsfeed, as she would if she were under her account, she went straight for his messages. She wasn’t sure if kids like Simon used the message function, but she thought there might be a good chance, considering there was a separate app for it and everything. She could see Simon treating it just like texting.

  And she was right. He seemed to do exactly that.

  But there was nothing to be learned from the messages, because he seemed to only ever message one person: Jordan.

  The two kept up long, long conversations that seemed to mostly be about the minutia of their day.

  Had pancakes for breakfast today, wrote Jordan. What about you?

  Same as always. Eggs and toast, Simon replied.

  You should change it up sometimes.

  I like eggs and toast.

  Lorelei skipped to another conversation.

  What did you get for #32 in the homework?

  What did you get?

  I asked first.

  Right, but I want to make sure you’re not trying to cheat off me.

  Dork.

  You’re a dork.

  No, you are.

  No, you.

  Lorelei decided to skip that one too. Was there nothing here? She scrolled through conversation after conversation, but none of the were with anyone except Jordan. Geez. Whoever this guy was, maybe Simon didn’t talk to him on Facebook.

  And then a new message appeared at the top of the screen. It was from Jordan. Are you okay? I’ve been thinking about what you told me about your dad all morning.

  Lorelei bit down on her lip, feeling wretched.