He sneered at me. “You don’t know a thing about it, asshole. Dogface bitch.” He lowered His head, bearlike, and lurched toward me, in my face, close enough so I could feel His hot breath as He ranted, “Christ, I’ve never seen such an ugly slut. What is that crap all over your face, pimples with pus on them? What kind of crud you got, bitch, AIDS?”
The rash was ulcerating and oozing, evidently. How nice. I wanted to tell Him that my crud was worse than AIDS and He was likely to die just because He’d breathed on me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t, because I knew what I might have to do any moment now.
Backing away another step, I said, “It’s nothing. A skin condition. Just something that happened. The way something might have happened to Candy,” I added, directing Him back on task, as my Ed Psych teachers would have said, but carefully keeping my tone gentle. “Something she couldn’t help.” I eased one hand over to Juliet, touching her rigid shoulder. She stood with both arms clenched around herself, wrapped in my coat as if in Kevlar. I gave her only a quick glance; had to keep my eyes on our captor. “Um, maybe somebody made Candy go away,” I ventured, thinking of my parents, who had—I realized for the first time in my life—rescued me from Him. Bless their narrow-minded heads, they had saved my life, however blindly and harshly, by removing me from Appletree. Remembering that hegira, I said, “Maybe somebody took her away from you.”
He, of course, attributed to the suggestion a very different meaning from the one I had intended. “Shut up! She wasn’t that kind. Not Candy. There wasn’t nobody else for her.” He glowered at me, so vehement that I flinched, thinking He would hit me or, much worse, stab me—
But then His knife hand sagged. “See, all the other girls I had up till then were just slut du jour. . . .” Pandora tilted uncertainly. “They were ordinary, they’d done it before, they dished it out or not, they said, ‘Okay, but you got to wear a condom,’ or they’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to get warts,’ or crabs, whatever, or first they’d say, ‘Sure, whatever you want,’ and then they’d change their dumb-ass minds and say go jack off. But Candy . . .” He glared at me. “Candy was different. She thought different. She even looked different. She was smart and yet she was sweet and pure. She’d never been there before. She didn’t know a thing. I took her. I took her every step of the way. One thing at a time. And she loved it. Nobody can say she didn’t love it. And it was her first time. It was like holy rape. Like rapturing the Virgin Mary.”
Dear God. How much horror had my parents saved me from?
I babbled, “But I thought you hadn’t gotten to, um . . .” Playing my part. I knew all too well what He had done. I knew. . . . I knew . . . something I’d whitewashed over in my bowdlerization of my personal fairy tale, couldn’t remember. . . . But it didn’t matter, because I was playing a role. Had to remember that. Stupid fat ugly interfering bitch, especially the stupid part. I prattled, “I thought you hadn’t consummated the relationship?”
“Con-sum-mated the re-la-tion-ship?” Mimicking my voice, He started to laugh again, the yapping laughter of a vicious dog. Then flick went the mood switch. Two steps and He stood inches from me, glowering, knife poised. “You dumb fuck,” He whispered fiercely, “of course I screwed her. I screwed her plenty. What I didn’t get to do was join with her in blood. What I didn’t get to do was slit her wrists.”
EIGHT
Knowing that Chief Angstrom wouldn’t give her an inch of slack when other cops were watching, Officer Sistine “Sissy” Chappell waited for an opportunity to speak with her boss alone. Normally she would have tapped on his office door at the Fulcrum PD, but he (like her, and all the others) was still at the Phillips home waiting for a possible ransom call. Maybe an hour went by before he noticed her and called, “Sissy, ain’t your shift up? Go home. Get some rest.”
Crap. She had to do it. Walking over to stand by Angstrom’s chair, she asked, “Chief, could I have a word with you?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
It wasn’t just sheer laziness that kept him from moving his ass from that chair, Sissy intuited. He was testing her. She had no choice except to unzip Dorrie White’s laptop computer case and pull from it a rather messy wad of notebook paper, which she placed on the Phillipses’ dining room table in front of her boss. “Those were hidden along with the pink notebook under Dorrie White’s mattress. They’re notes from her high school boyfriend, and his handwriting strongly suggests that he might be a psychopath. I think—”
By speaking rapid-fire, she managed to get this far, but no further, before Chief Angstrom stopped her with a snort of disgust. What she wanted to say she thought was that instead of calling this the Phillips case, with Dorrie White as the perpetrator, somebody ought to consider that it might be the Dorrie White case with some unknown subject, maybe this high school boyfriend, as the perp. But right now Chief Angstrom was interested only in bawling her out. “Sissy, I told you before, don’t go talking nonsense to me about handwriting. There isn’t a speck of proof—”
With unusual daring she interrupted. “Handwriting analysis is not a science yet because there haven’t been enough studies made. But there have been extensive studies of the handwriting of the prison population, which enables me to say with certainty that this”—she pointed to Blake’s love notes—“is the handwriting of a dangerous felon.”
“You say,” Angstrom shot back. “So what? You’re nothing but a green rookie, and even if you were a so-called expert on handwriting, that kind of testimony is not admissible in court.”
“Polygraph test results aren’t admissible in court either, but we still use them as an investigative tool—”
With lessening patience he overspoke her. “Have you read these?” He jabbed at the pancake stack of yellowing notebook paper with one expressively offended finger.
“Yes, of course.”
“And is there anything in them that says the boy is criminally inclined?”
“His handwriting—”
“Screw his handwriting! You want to check him out on the basis of nothing but his handwriting?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, forget about it. You’re off duty. I’d suggest you go home and get some rest.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
Sissy considered that a suggestion wasn’t an order.
She drove to Fulcrum PD headquarters and, rubbing her eyes, settled her weary body at one of the computers there. What she did on her own time was her own business. Using a departmental computer on her off time might not be considered her own business, but if Chief Angstrom said she was a green rookie, okay, she would be a green rookie who didn’t know any better.
Waking up the computer—which was doing what she should have been doing, sleeping—Sissy keyboarded her shield ID number plus a departmental password to log on.
While she waited for the computer to do its thing, she couldn’t help remembering how definitively Chief Angstrom had shut her up. Maybe a half hour had gone by since, but it still stung. She sighed. Not so much angry as philosophical, she wondered when, if ever, she could expect respect as a police officer. So far she got none from anyone, not her fellow officers and especially not her own family. Her mother opposed her choice of career because it was too dangerous, while her father seemed to think it wasn’t dangerous enough; he wanted her to go into the military and maybe follow in his footsteps as a fighter pilot. Her sisters thought she was trying to be a hotshot, her brother in the marines sided with her father, and her other brother, the family underachiever, warned her she’d better find a job far from him and his street gang. Not wanting to shoot him any more than he wanted to shoot her, she had complied, graduating from her local police academy back in New Jersey, but then finding her first job in another city across state lines.
Which took her away from her family, but unfortunately also took her away from all her old friends. And Fulcr
um was proving to be not an easy place to find new ones outside of a church.
Her gangsta brother, now, he got respect in the old neighborhood, and Sissy rolled her eyes at the thought; her brother’s criminal friends had his back, but who had hers? Neighbors? She hardly knew them except as apartment numbers in her building. Fellow officers? Maybe, but nobody really wanted to connect with her, the greenest of rookies, until after they had seen her in action for a while.
The computer gave a kind of satiated burp that meant it was ready, and Sissy began, as protocol demanded, with a background check on Candor Birch White even though she felt certain Dorrie was cleaner than a detergent commercial. Partly Sistine believed this because she’d seen Dorrie White’s home, Dorrie’s choice of harmonious and soothing colors, and her many big pillows and soft surfaces, comfortable sofas and easy chairs and recliners made even more welcoming by pastel lap robes Dorrie had probably crocheted herself.
Sissy’s intense interest in handwriting analysis was just part of her study of the larger field of graphology: personality as revealed in unconscious doodling or conscious creativity, choice of colors, choices in the different ways of filling space. Sistine could not imagine that anybody who collected Flutterkitties could ever plan and execute a violent crime. She had seen a peaceable but yearning soul in Dorrie’s collections of figurines and art as well as in the daisy and butterfly and rainbow magnets on her fridge. She had noticed that Dorrie White kept liquid hand soap in flowered dispensers beside all the sinks, preferred rounded corners to sharp ones in just about every context, used ruffled pillow shams on the beds. To Sissy’s eyes, a hundred details in the White house revealed Dorrie to be a homebody who put others above herself and probably contributed to charities alleviating the suffering of hungry children or stray animals.
Even more important, Sistine had seen Dorrie White’s handwriting in that pink Juliet Phillips scrapbook. Smallish handwriting, very round, slanted a bit toward the right, with short ascenders and a small midzone but ample descenders, garlands, and end strokes. In other words, Dorrie White was timid, very kindhearted, and warm but lacking in self-esteem. She was unhappy in her daily life but had no ambition to do anything about it; she was probably a romantic dreamer.
And she was generous. Very generous.
While thinking all of this, Sissy checked wants and warrants in her region, then statewide, even nationwide, before she finished off by Googling “Candor White” to see whether she had ever made headlines of any kind. All the results were negative, meaning good. Dorrie White could not have been more clean.
In Officer Chappell’s opinion, presumption of innocence in regard to Dorrie White deserved a lot more attention than it was getting in the Fulcrum Police Department right now.
Not for the first time, Sissy mentally questioned the competency of Chief Angstrom. Not because he was maybe racist and almost surely sexist; those all-too-common attitudes she could deal with. But she simply could not understand how Chief Angstrom could be so stupid as to discredit handwriting analysis. How could he, a law enforcement official, not understand that the entire legal system he upheld was based on signed documents simply because each person’s handwritten signature is as individual as a fingerprint? And nobody disputed that experts could match handwriting, that each person wrote differently despite the public school system’s best efforts to teach all children to write alike. So how could anybody say that the differences were not due to variations in personality?
“Get over it,” Sissy muttered to herself. The chief was her CO. He hadn’t even bothered to look at the love notes signed “Blake.” She was through trying to educate him.
Rookie cop Chappell used another departmental password to access NCIC, moved the mouse to the search box, and typed into it a single name: “Blake.”
She pushed “GO,” then rubbed her eyes again and leaned back in her comfortless plastic chair to wait. This was a long shot and it was going to take a long time.
As the computer hummed and chirped to itself, compiling a list of every “Blake” in the NCIC, Sissy Chappell took another look at the handwriting samples she had found in Dorrie White’s bedroom.
Oh, yeah. Throughout his scrawls, “Blake” exhibited the “felon’s claw,” an unmistakable kink of the descenders. Sissy had never seen it so pronounced in any other real-life handwriting sample she had studied; this guy’s handwriting provided a textbook example for the studies that had been conducted of the handwriting of criminals, very different from that of the overall populace. A hint of the felon’s claw in someone’s handwriting usually indicated a liar, especially an adulterer. But when it appeared as blatantly as it did in the samples she held, it was thought to be characteristic of rapists.
Not that any one trait meant a whole lot in handwriting. Like a medical diagnostician, Sistine depended on experience, intuition, and an overall impression for her conclusions. But that was just it: Taken all together, the grandiosity and swagger of this man’s handwriting, its instability, its toppling impetuosity, and especially those final d’s, bloated, protuberant, shaped like a clenched fist giving the finger to the world—
The computer ceased its mutterings and gave an electronic “Ta da!”
Sissy looked: 79,462 hits for “Blake.”
With a sigh, she bent over the computer, beginning the process of sorting and discarding. Eliminate missing children and teenage runaways. Then try “Blake” as first name or aka, not surname. Establish “Blake” as around Dorrie White’s age, say, between the ages of twenty-eight to thirty-eight. Make it twenty-five to forty. Cross-reference “Blake” plus “Fulcrum, Ohio.” “Blake” plus “Ohio” . . .
* * *
“Take me instead,” I said.
I couldn’t manage to sound flirtatious or provocative. Nothing in my upbringing had taught me how to act sexually alluring, and the present circumstances seemed unlikely to encourage any latent talent. But I was desperately sincere in the offer, and I suppose He could tell. He gawked at me.
“Let this girl go,” I repeated, facing Him steadily, willing myself not to step back, even though He had imposed Himself far too close to me, looming only inches from me. “She has her whole life ahead of her.” I heard a choked sound from Juliet, a whimper, a sob, but I couldn’t turn to her. I kept my gaze fixed on our captor. “Take me instead. Do whatever you like to me. It’s all the same in the end. You want blood, I’ve got blood. You—”
He burst into yelps of laughter. I could feel His spit flying into my face. “You crazy fat cow!” He cried, laughing so hard He bent over and had to step back from me to avoid placing His head upon my bosom. “You think I’d touch you with a rabies pole? Dumb ass, you’re either a retard or a psycho!”
I breathed out, relieved not because He had refused me but because the energy in the room had lightened, shifted. I had amused Him. Fine. Keep Him laughing. Straight-faced, I inquired, “You don’t appreciate what an older woman has to offer?”
“This is not about your age, you—What the hell is your name, anyway?”
I shot back the first female name that came to mind. “Maria Montessori.”
Peripherally I saw Juliet turn her head to give me a startled look. Perhaps her parents had sent her to Fulcrum’s Montessori preschool.
Our captor, however, didn’t blink. “Well, Marie, honey, you are not only physically repulsive but you are also the goofiest broad I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you. I imagine you’ve known lots of women?” And insulted them, I thought, and mispronounced their names?
“Oh, yeah.”
“How interesting.” Maintaining steady eye contact and nonjudgmental active-listening posture and all the sincere artifice they’d taught me in educational psychology, I casually sat on the sofa where He’d wanted Juliet to position herself. Not looking at her. I didn’t want Him to look at her. I wanted Him to focus on me and keep
talking. And I remembered that He liked to talk Himself up.
I burbled, “Mostly younger women?”
“All younger women, Ma-rie ba-by,” He bragged. He could call me “Ma-rie” all He liked as long as He wasn’t calling Juliet anything. “Hundreds of them. White, black, yellow, brown—I take them all, and the younger, the better.”
I’d sized up His ego rightly. Or more than ego, really: His was an absolute sense of entitlement. His father had been a cripple, He had told me once—that was the word He had used, not handicapped, not disabled, but “a cripple”—and both His mother and father were dead. In an automobile accident? A tragic house fire? He had never divulged. He had worn an air of mystery the way He wore black clothing. He was an orphan, shuffled from foster home to foster home. He had suffered an unhappy childhood and now He deserved—
Oh, my God.
Something in me recognized something in Him. I had been a Cinderella once. He still was a sick male Cinderella, a hungry self centered on bottomless need. Physically, in my breasts and belly, I remembered the starving-baby sensation of His feeding on me.
I whispered, “What did they do to you when you were little?”
Luckily, He didn’t hear me. He had turned away, swaggering to the far wall again, arms bowed like a bodybuilder’s, knife at the ready, His belligerent back sending a message clearer than words: Don’t Even Think about Trying Anything with Me. He peered at that same place on the wall—oh. A peephole. Now, from my seat on the sofa, I could make out a small black metal circle let into the paneling. But it was well below ground level. How could He see anything through that?
Yet evidently He could. “No pigs yet,” He remarked, wheeling and striding back to Juliet and me.
My cognitive processes not at their very best, I couldn’t think what He was talking about: pigs? My focus had once again fixated on the knife.
“You don’t like Pandora?” He inquired, tilting the blade toward me like a teacher with a pointer.
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