Dark Lie (9781101607084)

by Springer, Nancy;

  Bert did not know the identity of this putative serial rapist/killer.

  But he did know that Blake Roman had been profiled as one.

  And he did know that Sam White had suggested Blake Roman’s name to the FBI, and so had that Fulcrum police officer who really should mind her own business.

  What he still didn’t get was why. Why pick on his grandson? What was the connection?

  “CANDY GOT LAID HERE,” read the wall.

  Okay, so what? Blake had taken advantage of half the girls in town when he was a young buck. In his way, after his parents had died, Blake had become as notorious as they had been. Bert had heard rumors about the kid fooling with girls under the stairs in the school, back in the stacks in the library, under bridges at night, wherever. Candy, Candor, Dorrie, whatever her name was, had been only one of many. So now, close to twenty years later, this Dorrie Birch White character had gone missing, so what? Why drag Blake in?

  Well, maybe it was kind of peculiar that Blake kept renewing the writing on the wall. But even so—

  Bert broke off his attempt to line up some thoughts in a row, because he saw Sam White descending the basement stairs to the locked door.

  Damn strange, a door without a handle. Not the way any normal person would choose to shut out unwelcome company. But it sure had worked. That door wouldn’t budge—

  Bert blinked. The green door was moving.

  Sam White had barely touched it this time, but the green door swung open.

  Wide open.

  Silent. Inward. Dark.

  Bert stood rigid, staring, not likely to yawn again anytime soon. His mind struggled against what he was seeing, but his gut comprehended it completely.

  Nobody had been able to open that door before.

  But now somebody was in control.

  Somebody inside.

  Inviting Sam White into a trap.

  And it had to be Blake.

  Bert knew this instantly, with bone-deep intuitive certainty, because he remembered too clearly: Blake, damn brilliant kid in his freaky way, when he was only ten years old already putting together gadgets for his crippled daddy. Remote control coffeepot, remote control microwave clicker. Remote control switches for fans, lights, heaters. Door openers, door locks.

  Blake.

  Good son. Clever. Clever son of a bitch.

  Bert felt as if his insides had turned to soup. He couldn’t move or he’d slop himself, watching Sam White, hands cuffed behind his back, walk into the darkness behind the yawning door.

  God. The guy was either incredibly brave or two eggs cracked in his dozen. Or both.

  * * *

  Sam peered into the basement behind the open door. He saw only shadows.

  In those shadows somewhere he would find Dorrie. He felt stark certain of it.

  But he didn’t know whether he would find her alive.

  He walked in slowly, testing each step with his big feet. Couldn’t even feel his way with his hands, because they were locked helpless behind his back. Didn’t know what he was going to do if he needed to rescue Dorrie from some creep with a gun; tell the guy, Wait, excuse me, don’t shoot, don’t hit me until I get close enough to trample you? Sure. A lot of good he’d do Dorrie by getting himself killed.

  Yet Sam considered that he had no alternative but to walk into this shadow hole.

  After a few shuffling steps he began to hear someone crying.

  Or he thought he did. It was hard to tell when his frightened body insisted on gasping like a guppy out of water. Sam stood still for a minute, held his panicky breath, tried to tune out the pulse yammering in his ears, and listened.

  Yes. He could hear it, off to his right. It sounded like—Sam had hardly ever heard Dorrie cry, and never like that. He didn’t think it was Dorrie. Too young, too soprano. It sounded like a girl, maybe the missing girl, the Phillips girl, moving around and making a choked-down panicky sobbing sound, as if she was trying not to be heard but she couldn’t hold back her whimpering.

  Turning toward the sound, Sam realized his eyes were adjusting to the dark and he was beginning to be able to see. That vertical shadow line ahead was a corner, and somewhere beyond it, a yellowish electric light was sending a few rays his way.

  Sam sidestepped until his shoulder bumped against the wall; then, using that contact for guidance, he walked forward. Slow steps. Three. Four. Five.

  Six. Sam edged around the corner and found himself blinking at a stretch of shabby hallway—shredded carpet, or had somebody dumped garbage? Splotches and blotches of something on the floor. It was hard to see through tears and harsh light and harsher shadow, hard to put the picture together with an exhausted, stricken mind. Hard to comprehend paneled walls with sections missing, lying splintered—or were those sharp things shadows, or parts of the door?

  A broken door. An old-fashioned wooden door with a big hole busted right through its rectilinear middle, as if this insane place were a circus and the door was made of tan tissue paper a lion had plunged through.

  The light issued through that hole. From behind that door.

  It had to be the door to a room.

  Where someone was crying.

  Sam walked forward to see why.

  * * *

  I struggled along a dark passageway, so shadowed, so far under so much weight of earth and mortality and transience, a straight and narrow tunnel rife with angel cries and devil shouts and thunder gong noise. Bells, bells, bells. A silver shining presence accompanied me—a crescent of moonlight? An angel, a devil? Or a shaman, a psychopomp, a guide? The journey felt long, long, perhaps beyond my strength. I staggered, I fell, I crawled, I fell farther, I hitched, I crept on my elbows while the companion shaped like a silver fish swam in my blood, while I swam in my own blood toward—nearer, yet too far—the end of the tunnel of travail where light shone, and the name of the light was love.

  * * *

  In his mind Sam wanted to stop, go back, stay away, never know. But his big blundering feet insisted on carrying him forward.

  To the shattered door.

  Its breach, a jagged oval, framed the jumble of images within so that he saw it as a grotesque vignette, not something he had to quite believe, not yet. For an instant he just saw objects overlapping in confused juxtaposition:

  Table shoved into a corner. Overturned chair. Drips and puddles of red on the floor. Brown coat lying there. No. Brown coat was Dorrie. Covering Dorrie, or Dorrie’s body. Girl, teenager, kneeling over Dorrie with thick ribbons of something silvery gray hanging off her hands and feet. Broken glass. Beer cans. Big hunting knife on the floor. Knife same color as metallic ribbons. Weeping girl wrapping and wrapping the silver gray stuff around Dorrie’s left wrist. Red mess on Dorrie’s arm, her hand, her clothes.

  Blood.

  Dorrie.

  Oh, my God.

  At the sound Sam made, the crying girl screamed, snatching the hunting knife from the floor, crouching over Dorrie with it as her stare darted to the door, the invader. Her wild wet eyes fixed on Sam, and for a hallucinatory moment he thought she was Dorrie, a disheveled new butterfly Dorrie that had just emerged from the dead brown cocoon Dorrie lying on the floor. The next moment sanity returned, and he recognized her: Yes, it was the missing girl. Juliet Phillips.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, pushing against the door with his shoulder. Something heavy—oh. Sofa. Sam forced the door open a couple feet anyway and edged in. “Is she—is she . . .” With all his hammering heart Sam wanted to rush to Dorrie and help her, hold her, will her to live. But damn the handcuffs, the best he could do was waddle toward her.

  Raising the knife, the girl cried, “Who are you? What do you have behind your back?”

  Crashing to his knees on the hard floor, Sam said, “Handcuffs.”

/>   “You’re a—you’re a prisoner?”

  Intent on Dorrie, Sam didn’t answer. Unable to feel for a pulse with his hands, he did it with his face, mouth to her throat, exploring with his lips like a baby.

  Yes. Yes! He found a pulse. He felt her breathing.

  “She’s alive!” he cried, straightening to face the girl across Dorrie’s unconscious body. “She’s alive,” he informed her earnestly.

  She met his gaze, and within an eyeblink she’d decided he was harmless; he saw her face dismiss any fear of him. She let the knife drop to the floor. “But I can’t get the bleeding stopped,” she wailed, clenching Dorrie’s wrist between both her hands. The silver gray ribbon stuff, Sam saw, was duct tape. Juliet had been bandaging Dorrie’s wrist with it. But blood flowed from under the tape.

  Sam stared at the tape, the blood, just barely comprehending. He blurted, “Who did that to her?”

  “Him,” the girl said with a note of hysteria in her voice. “She cut the tape off me before she fainted, but I don’t know where He is. He could come back any minute. And she’s bleeding to death!”

  “No, she’s not. She’s not.” Not with an ambulance parked outside. Reeling like a drunk, the handcuffs throwing him off-balance, Sam struggled to his feet, intending to go yell in Walker’s ear until he got through. But once upright, he discovered he could not leave Dorrie’s side. Could. Not. A kind of gravitational force bound him to her, stronger than the steel binding his wrists.

  So it was up to him to fix her. Practical. Mechanical. “Find something to tie real tight around her arm,” he told the girl.

  “A tourniquet! Duh!” With frenzied haste Juliet Phillips grabbed for a shoe box lying nearby, snatched from it something red—thong panties? She tied the fabric, whatever it was, around Dorrie’s upper arm, then stuck the knife handle through it, twisting to tighten it.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, eyeing the flow of blood from Dorrie’s wrist, “please stop.”

  Oh, God, thought Sam, what else can I do? Lurching closer to the broken window, he lifted his head and bellowed, “Help! We need help down here! Send the medics!”

  But he couldn’t tell whether his words were heard, because the sound of his voice was punctuated by an explosion far stronger than any exclamation. CRACK, like the crack of doom, a blast from somewhere close at hand, in the basement, so near that Sam could feel the concussion in the air.

  Gunshot.

  Hanging on to Dorrie and her makeshift tourniquet, Juliet screamed.

  SEVENTEEN

  Seeing Sam push open the green basement door and enter, Bert had known from his training what he should do. He needed to get on his radio, inform Walker, alert the FBI.

  But he didn’t. Instead, his hand, as if acting on its own, went to his belt and presented him with his sidearm.

  Bert snapped the safety off the pistol. For once, his aging body needed no coaxing. It moved forward on its own, toward the cellar entryway.

  Headed down the steep steps.

  Toward that open door.

  And into the dark.

  With no idea whose side he was on.

  Silently, cautiously, Bert slipped into the dark basement. Taut, with his handgun at the ready, he stopped at the first corner to listen. He heard the girl crying. Heard a man’s voice make an inchoate sort of croak. Whipping around the corner with his weapon leveled, Bert saw that the sound had come from Sam White, who was blundering into a room with a broken door.

  Bert lowered his gun. Obviously Blake wasn’t in that room, or Sam White would be dead.

  Bert knew he ought to head in there, assess the situation, render assistance, take Sam White into custody.

  Nope.

  For the first time, Bert acknowledged in his own mind that he was not just following Sam White. And he was not doing his duty as a police officer either. He was not trying to arrest a perpetrator or rescue the Phillips girl or anyone else. And he was not going to radio for backup.

  He was looking for Blake.

  His grandson.

  Silent, like an old gray cat, Bert reached the doorway Sam White had entered and passed it. A long, dim hallway lay ahead, partly illuminated by a blast of electric light from what appeared to be another shattered doorway.

  With impatient bravado he strode down there, knowing that the moment he entered that lit area, he would be a plain target for anyone—not necessarily his grandson—any armed and dangerous perp lurking in the darkness beyond the area he could see. But letting the chips fall wherever, Bert stepped into the light anyway, peering into what turned out to be a bathroom with a watery mess on the floor and two stalls hanging open, empty. Nowhere else in there for anyone to hide. Ceiling light shining like a son of a bitch. Bert flicked it off.

  He gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness before he tackled the next stretch of hallway. Should have given them several minutes more, but by acting like a badass TV cop he had scared himself, and his heart wouldn’t stand the wait. He could feel the old pump pounding fit for a coronary. Could feel the sweat popping out on his forehead. Couldn’t stand himself much longer. Swallowing hard, Bert raised his pistol, strode out of the bathroom, and headed on down the hallway.

  Walking into darkness. Couldn’t see where he was going.

  But anybody down there would see him coming, silhouetted against the light that still shone, not from the bathroom, but from the other room at the far end of the hallway.

  Anybody, not necessarily his grandson.

  Even if it was Blake, the boy wouldn’t know it was his granddaddy coming to get him.

  And if he did know, would he care?

  Bert shied away from answering that question, yet made himself a moving target by sidestepping, taking a few strides, sidestepping again, then back the other way, at irregular intervals.

  Stalking along the unlit hallway, Bert tried to remember the layout of the building. He thought he should be coming to a corner, then a doorway to a stairwell. As his eyes struggled with the darkness, making shapes of the shadows, he thought he actually saw the vertical line of the corner ahead, and he quickened his stride to get behind it. . . .

  Something large blocked his foot. He stumbled hard, falling, throwing his hands up to catch himself, but instead of sprawling on the floor, he slammed into a wall. Not a proper wall but a barrier made of rough wood, which should not have been there.

  He turned, panicked, to point his gun in the direction of the thing that had tripped him up. Just by the feel of it underfoot he knew what it was: a body. But he had no idea whether it was dead or alive.

  Facing back toward the distant light, squinting into the gloom, he could make out the dark shape lying across the passageway.

  A man.

  Playing possum?

  Bert stood waiting, gun at the ready, willing the form to move. Stand up. Curse him. Knife him.

  Get up, damn you.

  But it just lay there. Stone still.

  Hurt?

  Unconscious?

  Bert felt his sweaty hands start to lose control. This was not the way it was supposed to be. His grandson was not supposed to meet him lying down. Grandfather and grandson were supposed to converge face-to-face. Their eyes were supposed to lock. Their fists were supposed to lift. And something was supposed to happen. Some kind of justice or comprehension, and then Bert would know what he was made of because he would know what to do. Maybe shake hands. Maybe hug Blake, maybe kill him. Or maybe his grandson was supposed to kill him instead because he had been such a poor excuse of a grandpa. Or if not that, then maybe he, Bert, was supposed to understand what was wrong with himself.

  Bert’s gun hand quaked so hard he couldn’t steady it. But he kept it up in the air. With his other he fumbled for his flashlight, finally got it out of its holder on his belt with its busi
ness end wavering toward what seemed to be the head of the dark manifestation on the floor. It took his arthritic fingers three tries to get the flashlight flicked on.

  And he saw.

  Blake Roman lay there with his eyes wide open, but not looking at anything in this life.

  The flashlight illuminated Blake’s head with a white aureole of light, and from that halo Blake gazed up with the look of a child, not a man, with the look of a boy who has been utterly betrayed. Like a storybook prince on bended knee mutely begging, Love me, love me, why won’t you love me? A prince wearing a cloak of blood red tied with a crimson ribbon at his throat.

  Bert flinched, swallowing hard, staring at Blake’s throat slit clear across from shoulder to shoulder, at Blake’s blood running down to the floor and spreading like a crimson cape. But then Bert’s gaze locked with the empty gaze of his grandson’s eyes, supposedly the window to the soul that should have inhabited the body his grandson used to walk around in. In the corpse lying at his feet Bert saw nothingness, and he stopped trembling. He knew who and what he was. And he knew to his marrow that he was finished, through, done. Done with being a cop. Done with Appletree; there were other places on earth. Or maybe done altogether.

  Not conceptualizing much of this, just reacting, Bert fired a bullet into the body on the floor as if driving a stake into a vampire.