Sam ended where he had begun, in the parking lot, shaking his head.
Bert was right.
Bert couldn’t be right.
For no reason except that he could not stand still, Sam started to search the gravel of the parking lot.
Bent over, scanning, he worked his way back the fence, into the weeds at the far end, then out again. At the edge of the gravel he spotted a flashlight he recognized lying on the ground. He stared, swallowed hard, blinked, and didn’t touch it or move it. Captain Walker should be proud of him for not messing with the evidence.
“Sam!” Bert yelled from around the street-side corner of the building. “They’re here.”
Walker and the FBI guys had finally arrived, evidently. Sam turned to go tell them about the flashlight.
“White! Sam White!” Walker bellowed. “C’mon over here.”
* * *
“Have you ever flown in a small aircraft before?” The copter pilot had to yell in order to be heard above the engine noise.
“No!” Sissy yelled back.
“Well, here.” Over his shoulder he handed her something made of gray paper folded flat with a sort of oversized twist tie along the top—a barf bag. Sissy laid it aside without comment, but she knew she wouldn’t need it. Nervous Nellies with butterfly bellies didn’t go into law enforcement.
“Buckle up! Here we go!”
Sissy felt liftoff almost as if she were in an elevator, then a quirky sort of slue, a slight tilt, and the chopper bumbled toward Appletree. Sissy looked down through a window with delight; despite the seriousness of her situation, it was a revelation to see the Ohio countryside, flat as a billiard table, from low altitude.
“I never knew there were so many mounds!” she exclaimed even though no one could possibly hear her.
The slanting early-day light showed them clearly, earthworks left by prehistoric people before even the Mongolian “Native Americans” had come there, excavations encircling conical hills, or sometimes double mounds resembling peanuts, and one long double serpentine complete with snake head. Over and past them, seemingly without noticing them, ran a modern surveyor’s pride of patchwork-quilt property lines. Dairy farms and soybean fields, train tracks and roadways, housing developments and industrial parks, formed a thin overlay upon something that had nothing to do with them, that was ancient, very ancient and primitive.
Sissy watched a freight train, visible from end to end, crawl across the enigma below her like a worm.
Ahead lay what looked like toy blocks and matchboxes clustered around a golf tee—houses, businesses, water tower. Gee, someone had painted a big apple tree on the latter. Mentally Sissy shifted gears to be all police business when the copter sat down on what appeared to be the high school parking lot. Now she got to do the crouch-run head-low-beneath-rotor-blades thing she’d seen so often on TV.
As she did it, a man got out of the back of a waiting police cruiser, left the door open for her, walked around, and got back in on the other side.
Waving to the copter pilot, Sissy bounced in with him. Immediately the uniformed officer in the front seat drove off at what Sissy would classify as a level-orange speed.
The man in the backseat with her shook her hand. “I’m Agent John Harris.” He introduced himself with no trace of ego, and he looked more like a slim, fit college professor in a rumpled raincoat, Columbo-style, than an FBI field agent. Maybe he was in forensics.
“Sistine Chappell,” Sissy responded, “no relation to the Vatican.”
Harris chuckled. “Thank you for reminding me of the advantages of having an ordinary name.” Indicating the case file she clutched with both hands, he asked, “Could I have a look at that?”
“Of course.” She handed it over, then gazed around at Appletree as the cruiser zipped them through it.
With boarded-up stores, pawnshops, and tattoo parlors, the place looked like an armpit among small towns, one of many. The streets and sidewalks were empty, and Sissy heard no sirens, but she saw quite a conglomeration of flashing lights up ahead. Their car turned into a side street, then stopped.
Harris, Sissy saw, had one of Blake’s love notes in his hand as they both got out of the car. “Follow me. We have to get through this crowd.”
And quite a crowd it was, dressed-up gawkers who had probably been on their way to church being held back by annoyed-looking police who didn’t look very spiffy in comparison. Sissy felt underdressed, especially when a broad-shouldered man in a well-fitting suit took hold of her elbow, smiled at her, and started shoving people aside for her special benefit, kind of like Moses parting the Red Sea, except this guy definitely worked out.
Within a few moments Sissy found herself on the other side of the police cordon, standing along with Agent Harris among more men in suits. One step forward and she had a clear view of the focus of everyone’s attention. A three-story brick building with ranks of boarded-up windows, probably a factory from back in the days when they depended on daylight. Between her and it, a van of an odd gray-brown color apparently deserted in its gravel parking lot. And along the building’s foundation, boldly painted graffiti.
Sissy’s eyes widened, taking in the handwriting, more like brushstroke writing. At the same time her ears tuned in to Agent Harris, by her side, saying to someone, “The probabilities are very high that it was written by the same individual who wrote these notes Dorrie White had in her possession.”
Oh, crap. Was that all they had wanted her here for, to bring the notes so that their handwriting expert—who did comparison only, never analysis—could look at them in juxtaposition to the graffiti?
Sissy’s heart shrank. For this she was sacrificing her job?
“Officer Chappell,” said the man to whom Harris had been talking. Sissy looked up just as he turned to her and offered his hand; shaking it, she faced a pair of gray eyes so crystalline that they gave his otherwise standard face cinematic good looks. “Gerardo,” he introduced himself unnecessarily; now she remembered having seen him in the Phillips home. Because he had been bent over papers, she had not noticed his remarkable eyes. “Chief Angstrom has told me that you do a kind of profiling from handwriting—”
“Angstrom told you that?” Sissy could not hide her surprise.
Gerardo grinned. “Well, not without profanity.”
“I bet he didn’t call it profiling.”
“No. But I do. I would be interested to hear any insights you can offer into our unsub.”
“Unsub,” she remembered, meant unidentified subject. This man was cautious. All he could be sure of was that Dorrie White long ago had a boyfriend named Blake.
Sissy said, “Discounting the love letters, just looking at what’s written on that wall”—with her chin she pointed toward the painted scrawl—“you can see he’s unstable. His slant’s all over the place, although predominantly it’s toppling to the right. That indicates how emotional and impulsive he is. See the d at the end of ‘laid,’ how it’s falling off the word? And how it’s kind of bloated to look almost exactly like he’s giving you the finger?”
“Son of a—”
“Or not you, exactly,” Sissy quickly amended. “The whole world. Attitude.”
“That’s uncanny. How could I not see that before?” Agent Gerardo studied the offending letter. “Do you think it’s conscious on his part?”
“No way of telling. It’s a common trait in the handwriting of felons, like the distorted descenders—the hooked tail on the g and y. Aside from rebelling against the natural flow of handwriting, they’re in the lower zone, making them sexually kinky.”
Gerardo let this pass, seeming better able to deal with the deformed d. “Just from the handwriting, would you say he’s dangerous?”
Sissy paused to consider, noticing how all the background noise, all the babble, came from behi
nd her, from the civilians in the crowd and the cops restraining them. Loudest was Walker bellowing for Sam White to come over here: “Get your butt over here!” Sam White, who arguably had the best right of anybody to scream his head off, completely ignored Walker while searching the parking lot for some reason, quite silent. Just as silently the Weimaraner-colored van sat abandoned in the middle of the gravel, while beyond it, on the far side of the lot, the “CANDY GOT LAID HERE” building gave off no fireworks, no gunshots, no fiery explosions, but stood as still and silent as death. Waiting.
Sissy Chappell replied with care. “Yes, I think he’s dangerous. The sick kind of dangerous, if you know what I mean, like this guy probably had a horrific childhood and is terribly screwed up.”
“Another common trait among felons.”
“True. I don’t see any clubbed strokes—that would indicate a brutal sort of cruelty—but there’s a disturbing deformity in his writing. It’s not only very angular—that’s common among aggressive men—but the angularity is habitually recurved to form shapes kind of like the point of a saber. I think this guy might have an affinity for knives.”
“Interesting.”
“Just a self-educated guess.”
“You mean you didn’t go to school for this?” Gerardo grinned. “Make me another self-educated guess. Do you think it’s Blake Roman’s handwriting we’re looking at?”
“I personally think so, yes, although there’s no proof. Just facts that fit. He’s from Appletree. Only a couple of years older than Mrs. White. He could have known her in school. He could be the one who called her Candy. You know her real first name is Candor.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Stick around, would you?” Gerardo turned away abruptly, looking for someone. “Walker! Where’s Captain Walker?”
“Right here.” The man walked up to stand directly in front of Sissy but facing Gerardo. Somehow even in obedience he managed to look belligerent. He asked no questions, just stood there.
“Walker, what do you know about anybody surnamed Roman who used to live in Appletree?”
“Somebody by that name does still live here.” Walker spit on the ground. “But you’d have to ask Bert.”
THIRTEEN
“Bert! Get over here!”
Bert heard, and without looking knew the bellowing voice to be that of Captain Walker, and pretended he hadn’t heard. He knew all too well what Walker and the FBI wanted to ask him, and he wasn’t ready to answer. Sheltering himself from view behind the van, he tried to feel darkly amused by the whole thing, Sam White snubbing Walker while looking at the gravel as if he hoped to find his wife there.
Bert recalled having a wife once, but she’d been gone so long he barely remembered. . . . Why couldn’t he remember his sweet, sensible Lillian nearly as vividly as he recalled his son’s slut of a wife, Pandora?
That bitch.
The way Pandora ran things, her regulars got their kicks from screwing her in front of her crippled husband—that was what she called him to his face, crippled. She and the client would lift Randall Roman out of his wheelchair, park him wherever they wanted him, tie his hands, do their thing, and enjoy it while he cursed them and cried. The more sadistic johns were likely to give Randall a bloody nose or a split lip if he called them the wrong name. For this, rumor had it, they were charged extra.
Anyway, Randall Roman had killed himself. Slit his wrists.
Or that was the common view.
Maybe even true.
What made it hard to figure was that Pandora Roman was found dead in the bed with her husband. Wrists slit. Both of them naked.
It was the kid, their boy, who had found them that way the next morning. Kid was fifteen years old at the time. Found the bodies all bled out, called 911. Dead calm on the digital recording. Kind of wooden. Numb. In shock.
Understandable. Kid couldn’t have loved his dad or his mom all that much. There’d been rumors that she had been known to make him watch too.
Or let him watch. Whichever.
So there lay Penny and Randall Roman dead in what looked like a double suicide, like they’d made a pact and done it together, like in their own sick way they’d really loved each other.
Public opinion wouldn’t leave it at that, of course. Randall Roman a suicide, sure, people could believe that, but Penny? It had to have been a murder-suicide. Randall had slit her wrists and then his own.
Except why would she just lie there after her wrists were slit, unless someone forced her to? And how would her no-legs no-balls husband force her to?
There’d never been any official verdict. Death under suspicious circumstances, that was all. Could have been suicide-suicide. Could have been murder-suicide, maybe even with Penny as the murderer. Could have been murder-murder by a third party unknown.
To Bert it looked like murder-murder.
By a third party known.
To him.
And to him only.
Because of something he knew that nobody else alive knew. Except the murderer.
Bert hadn’t said anything, but he happened to know that Randall Roman didn’t go naked. Ever. At all.
The diaper had to have been removed and Randall cleaned up after he was dead.
And Bert surmised who might have done that. And arranged the bodies to make them look like lovers.
Just a hunch. No real proof. But an old cop learns to trust his hunches.
Anyway, he knew the boy better than most, although he hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with the kid. Couldn’t stand to, because visiting with the boy meant encountering the mother, and the way Bert loathed her . . . Some of that loathing rubbed off on his feelings toward the youngster too. Unpleasant kid, totally spoiled and messed up. The only child, the youngster was the hub of the household and his parents’ whole daytime world, for good or bad. Penny would get so mad at him she’d knock him across the room, and then she’d cry about it, and cuddle him, kiss him all over, buy him anything he wanted—and then, it seemed on purpose, the kid would make her mad again. Bert liked kids as a rule, but something about this brat repelled him, and his revulsion had grown stronger as the boy had grown into a teenager and took to slouching around all martyred and gloomy with black clothes on. Bert knew it was wrong for him to feel the way he did, but feelings don’t listen to rules, and his wouldn’t let him love the boy the way a grandpa should.
Nevertheless, the kid was his grandson.
Just the same, knowing what he knew, Bert hadn’t taken young Blake to live under the same roof with him and his wife after the deaths of the boy’s parents. He sure as heck didn’t want to end up as suicide pact number two, dead in bed with his wife, wrists cut. Her diabetes and all the rest of it, health problems galore, had given her and him excuse enough. They had let the boy go to a foster home.
Bert kind of regretted that now that he was old and alone. Sometimes he thought he had failed in his duty to his family, and wondered whether he could have made a decent human being out of the boy, made a difference. Other times he regretted that he had failed in his duty as an officer of the law, felt the guilt of his silence. Girls had died because of his silence.
One regret pretty much balanced the other, and together they kept his mouth shut.
He wondered whether the kid even realized that he, Bert aka Grandpa, was still alive to tell what he knew.
* * *
“Really?” I breathed in the wispiest voice I could manage with my back against the wall and a knife wound in my arm. It was a good thing I didn’t have the strength to give in to the nausea in my gut, or I would have puked. “Blake . . .” I forced my voice to caress the name. “. . . it really happened? Your mother and father died together in a suicide pact?”
“They did it to each other,” he said without any emotion that I could hear or see. “They didn’t do it to
me.”
What had they done to him?
I knew a little bit, but the rest I could only guess. If Juliet was to live at all, and if I lived through the next few minutes, it would be by guesswork and intuition.
I murmured, “But they—they slit each other’s wrists? That is so—so unbelievably brave and loving and romantic.”
I was beginning to know what I had to do.
No. Fever was making me think it. Lupus inflaming my mind as well as my body, that plus terror making me think sick things. Sick.
Don’t do it.
But I had to.
I had to go ahead and be Candy, the first true Candy, because Blake was still Blake.
I had to try it, to save Juliet.
Do it.
What scared me the most was not that I had given myself permission. What really terrified me was that I had the darkness in me to understand, to empathize, and to act. Knowingly this time, I could do it. Go there. Into the wild, warped, vehement world of Blake Roman. It was hard to acknowledge how vulnerable I myself had been in my adolescence, a lonesome, needy loser raised by—face it—parents whose harsh religion verged on sadism. Parents who, even though still technically alive, had in a sense killed each other. Like Blake’s.
Not that I fully believed what Blake was saying of his parents, that they had committed mutual suicide. Something about that messy double death rang true, but his tonelessness told me how much was hidden.
Weird intuition of my fevered mind told me what to ask next. “Blake,” I ventured, “your knife . . .” As if acknowledging a third party in the conversation, I nodded to Pandora, mother of all castrating bitches, standing in the clutch of his hand. Reverently I asked, “Is Pandora the same knife they used?”
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