“And Candace gets her life ruined,” Jesse said.
“I’m a lawyer,” Rita said.
“I represent my
client.”
“I know,” Jesse said.
Rita put her feet up on Jesse’s coffee table. She was wearing a
tailored beige suit with a fitted jacket and a short skirt. Jesse admired her legs.
“And,” Rita said, “people
recover from rape.”
“I guess so,” Jesse said. “And
maybe she will. But she doesn’t
think so now.”
Rita stared at him.
“My God,” she said. “You really
care about her.”
“Right now,” Jesse said, “home
alone, maybe in her room
listening to CDs, she cannot imagine going to school tomorrow. She cannot imagine facing all the kids who will know that she was gang-raped and photographed naked. And the three guys who did it will be in the same high school, maybe the same class, certainly the same cafeteria … Think back, when you were sixteen.”
Rita crossed her ankles on the coffee table. She was wearing dark high heels with pointed toes and thin ankle straps. She sipped her martini and stared at her shoes for a moment while she swallowed slowly.
“I represented Marino. My job, since I couldn’t get him off, was
to bargain for the best deal he could get. The other lawyers jumped in with me, and we came up with a package deal. I did a good job.
While I am,” Rita smiled at him, “no longer a little girl, I am a
woman, and as a woman I sympathize with the girl. But I wasn’t
hired to be a woman.”
“A lot of the kids in her school will think she was probably
asking for it, and they’ll think she finked to the cops, and ruined
it for three good guys including their football star.”
Rita took another sip of martini.
“I know,” she said.
They were silent. Rita looked past her martini glass at something very distant. Jesse drank some orange juice.
“I saw the pictures, of course,” Rita said. “Spread-eagled naked
on the ground. Raped, photographed … to them she was just another form of masturbation.”
Jesse was silent.
“A sex toy,” Rita said. “A
thing.”
They were both quiet. Rita finished her martini. Jesse poured the rest of the shaker into her glass. She took two olives from the small bowl on the coffee table and plomped them into her drink.
“The court going to specify the community service?” Jesse
said.
“They’ll leave it to the prosecution. Once they’re sentenced
we’ll get together with Reagan and decide something. Usually the
prosecution consults the schools.”
“You have any input in this?”
“Informally, sure. Besides, Reagan wants to score me.”
“Don’t blame him,” Jesse said.
“Who supervises their
service?”
“The court, in theory. In fact the people they’re assigned to
serve with are supposed to keep track of their hours, and rat them out if they don’t do what they’re supposed to.”
“Which often makes community service a joke,” Jesse
said.
“Often,” Rita said.
“How about they serve their sentence with me?” Jesse
said.
Rita stared at him and began to smile.
“They sweep up,” Jesse said,
“empty trash, run errands, shovel
snow, keep the cruisers clean … like that.”
Rita smiled at him some more.
“And you would, of course, take your supervisory responsibilities seriously,” she said.
“I would bust their chops,” Jesse said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rita
said.
She put her martini glass down and stood and stepped around the
coffee table and straddled him where he sat on the leather hassock and sat on his lap facing him. The movement lifted her short skirt almost to her waist. She pressed her mouth against his. After a time she leaned back.
“If I could use your shower,” she said,
“I’d fluff up my body a
little.”
“Down the hall on the right, off my
bedroom.”
Jesse’s voice sounded hoarse to him.
“Conveniently located,” Rita said.
She stood, smoothed her short skirt over her thighs, and walked
to the bathroom.
52
It had begun to snow softly when Jesse pulled into the visitor’s
parking space near the Seascape entrance. The same elegant and careful concierge tried not to stare at the rifle he was carrying as she phoned the Lincolns.
“Penthouse floor,” she said.
“I remember,” Jesse said.
Lincoln was waiting for him again, in the small foyer.
“Oh,” he said, “my
gun.”
Jesse handed it to him. Lincoln smiled.
“It’s not linked to any drive-by shootings or anything?” Lincoln
said.
“None that we could discover,” Jesse said.
“And it wasn’t used
to kill the four people in Paradise.”
“Oh good.”
Brianna Lincoln came into the living room.
“Mr. Stone,” she said. “What a
nice surprise.”
“Jesse was just returning our rifle, Brianna.”
Lincoln smiled again.
“He said it has not been involved in any crime.”
“I’ll put it away,” Brianna
said. “Can I get you coffee, Mr.
Stone?”
“Jesse. Sure, that would be fine.”
“Cream, two sugars?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled.
“Brianna,” she said.
“Ma’am is my mother.”
Jesse sat, as he had before, looking through the picture window
at the ocean. The snow continued softly, blurring the view.
Lincoln laughed.
“I feel like I ought to apologize,” he said. “If it had been my
gun, it would have made things so much easier for you.”
Jesse smiled.
“Think how I feel,” Jesse said.
Brianna came back with Jesse’s coffee in a stainless steel mug.
She put a doily down on the end table near him and set the coffee cup on it.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at him warmly. He smiled back.
“You have respect for your tools,” Jesse said. “The gun was
clean.”
“Any tool works best if it’s well
maintained.”
Jesse glanced around the living room.
“This is a great room,” he said.
“Yes,” Brianna said. “We love
it.”
Jesse stood and walked to the window.
“On a cop’s salary,” Jesse said,
“I’ll never get a view like
this.”
Both Tony and Brianna smiled modestly.
“We were lucky, I guess,” Brianna said.
“And Tony is
brilliant.”
“I can see that,” Jesse said.
He turned slowly, looking around the room.
“How big is this place?” he said.
“We have the whole top floor,” Lincoln said.
Brianna smiled.
“Would you like a tour?” she said.
“I sure would,” Jesse said.
“Come on then,” she said.
Tony went with them as she took Jesse through the den with its huge electronic entertai
nment center, into the luminous kitchen, through the formal dining room, past three large baths, and into the vast bedroom with its canopy bed and another entertainment center. The bed was covered with a thick white silk comforter.
“The workbench,” Tony said, nodding at the bed.
“Wow,” Jesse said. “You must not
have any kids or dogs living
here.”
“Brianna and I decided against children,”
Tony said. “We met in
our late thirties, by which time our lives were simply too full for children.”
Jesse nodded, looking at the big room, taking it in.
“Any family at all?” Jesse said absently.
“No,” Tony said. “We are all the
family each other
has.”
Jesse nodded, obviously dazzled by their wealth and taste, as they walked back to the living room. He sat and picked up his coffee and sipped it.
“Where’d you two meet?” he said,
making
conversation.
“He picked me up in a bar,” Brianna said.
“In Cleveland of all
places.”
“It was an upscale bar,” Tony said with a smile.
“I’ll bet it was,” Jesse said.
“Are you both from
Cleveland?”
“I am,” Brianna said. “Shaker
Heights. Tony was doing his
residency at Case Western.”
“What did you do?” Jesse said.
“I was a lawyer.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Fifteen years. I don’t think
we’ve ever had an
argument.”
“That’s great,” Jesse said.
“Do you have any leads in this serial thing, other than the fact
that the victims were shot with a twenty-two?” Tony said.
“Nothing much,” Jesse said.
He made a rueful little smile.
“That’s why I was pinning my hopes on you,” he
said.
They all laughed.
“Oh well,” Brianna said.
They laughed again.
“Would you like more coffee?” Tony said.
“No, I really should be going,” Jesse said.
“If it had been us,” Tony said,
“why on earth would we want to
do such a thing?”
“Everybody needs a hobby,” Jesse said.
They laughed.
“Seriously though,” Tony said.
“Why would we do something like
that?”
“Both of you?” Jesse said.
Tony shrugged and nodded.
“A shared sickness, I’d guess,”
Jesse said.
Tony laughed.
“At least we’d be sharing,” he
said.
53
“They were flirting with
me,” Jesse
said.
Dix sat silently back in his chair, one foot on the edge of a desk drawer, resting his chin on his steepled hands. His fingernails gleamed quietly. He always looks like he’s just
scrubbed for surgery, Jesse thought.
“Especially the husband,” Jesse said.
“Tell me about the flirting,” Dix said.
“He kept coming back to the killings. I was trying, sort of
indirectly, to learn a little about them. Whenever I’d ask a question, you know, like, where’d you two meet?
he’d steer us back
to the killings.”
Dix nodded.
“And you’re convinced it’s
them,” Dix said.
“I’ve been a cop nearly all my adult life,” Jesse said. “It’s
them.”
“We often know things,” Dix said.
“Before we can demonstrate
them.”
“I need to demonstrate it,” Jesse said.
Dix smiled.
“Ain’t that a bitch,” he said.
“How come,” Jesse said, “that
sometimes you talk like one of the
guys on the corner, and sometimes you sound like Sigmund Freud?”
“Depends what I’m talking
about,” Dix said.
“Talk about the Lincolns,” Jesse said.
Dix nodded without saying anything, as if to confirm that he’d
expected Jesse to ask. He took in a lot of air and let it out slowly.
“One of the reasons that psychiatry
doesn’t have a better
reputation is that it is asked to do too many things it doesn’t do
well,” he said.
“Like explaining people you’ve never met?”
“Like that,” Dix said. “Or
predicting what they’re going to
do.”
“Not good at that either?”
Dix smiled.
“No worse than anyone else,” he said.
“Well, tell me what you can,” Jesse said.
“I won’t hold you to
it.”
Dix leaned back in his chair.
“Well,” he said. “People do not
repetitively and freely do
things that they don’t like to do.”
“Why would they like this?”
“We may never know. They may not know.”
“Speculate,” Jesse said.
“Well, certainly it could give one a feeling of power, and the
more one did it, and the more one got away with it, the more power one would feel.”
“Hell,” Jesse said. “I know it
doesn’t prove they were powerful.
But he was a doctor, and a successful inventor. She was a lawyer.
They appear rich.”
“Power is in the perception,” Dix said.
“You’re saying maybe they didn’t
feel powerful.”
“Maybe not,” Dix said. “Or maybe
they didn’t have a shared
power.”
“His power, her power, not their power?”
Dix shrugged.
“Or,” he said, “perhaps it is a
bonding ritual.”
“Explain,” Jesse said.
“They’re a couple, and this makes their coupleness
special.”
“The family that kills together, stays together?”
“They have a shared secret. They have a shared specialness.
Ordinary couples are leading ordinary lives: food shopping, changing diapers, having sex maybe once or twice a month, because they’re supposed to. These people have found a thing to share that
no one else has.”
“Serial killing?”
“Each has the other’s guilty
secret,” Dix said. “It binds them
together.”
“For crissake, they do this for love?”
“They do this for emotional reasons,” Dix said.
“And love is an emotion.”
“Love, or what they may think is love,”
Dix said.
“What might they think is love?”
“Mutual need, mutual mistrust, that needs to be overcome by
mutual participation in something that ties them together.”
Jesse thought about this. Dix waited.
“Will they keep doing this?” Jesse said.
“No reason for them to stop.”
“Why was he flirting with me about this?”
Jesse
said.
“Maybe the same reason people like to have sex in nearly public
places,” Dix said.
“Phone booths and movie theaters,” Jesse said. “Stuff like
that?”
“The danger of being caught increases the guilty pleasure.”
“So they know it’s
wrong?”
“The Lincolns? Sure. Its wrongness is its appeal.”
“What will they do next?”
“I have no idea,” Dix said.
“What I’ve been giving you are
informed, or at least experienced, guesses. I’ve talked with a lot
of wackos in my life. All I can say by way of answer is that there is often an element of ritual in these kinds of crimes, and thus they would tend to keep repeating the ritual.”
“Doing the same thing over and over.”
“Yes.”
“In exactly the same way?” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“Why do you suppose they were photographing my home?”
“I don’t know,” Dix said.
“Maybe they like to first possess the victim’s image.”
“Victim?”
“What do you think?”
“I think they want to kill me next.”
“They might,” Dix said.
54
It was snowing again. Pleasantly. Not the hard nasty snowfall of
a Northeast storm. This was the kind of fluffy downfall that would leave the town looking like a winter wonderland. In a day or two, the reemerging sun, and the strewn salt from the streets, would shrink it in upon itself, and it would become an implacable mix of dirt and ice, marked by dogs, and littered by people. But right now it was pretty.
“Pretty doesn’t have a long shelf
life,” Jesse
said.
“Are you speaking of the snow?” Marcy said. “Or
me.”
They were on the sofa looking through the window in the living room of her small house in the old downtown section of Paradise where the winding streets made the pre-revolutionary town seem older than it was. Marcy was drinking white wine. Jesse had club soda and cranberry juice.
“Snow,” Jesse said.
“It’ll be ugly by Thursday.”
“And I won’t.”
“No,” Jesse said. “You got a
long time yet.”
Marcy was wearing a gray dress. She had kicked off her heels and
put her stocking feet beside Jesse’s on the coffee table.
Jesse
drank some cranberry and soda.
“No wonder you have a drinking problem,”
Marcy said. “You drink
a lot of whatever’s in front of you.”
“Yeah, but think how clean my urinary tract is,” Jesse
said.
“Well, that’s certainly a
comfort,” Marcy said.
They were quiet, watching the snow. There was a small fireplace
faced with maroon tiles on the far wall of Marcy’s living room.
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