Lana’s eyes flashed up at Nikki like two flares.
‘Like you could kill someone with your bare hands and enjoy it?’
‘We’re not here to talk about my feelings,’ Nikki responded evenly.
Lana laughed bitterly. ‘So you have. Thought so.’ She paused and stared out of the office window. ‘I guess everybody has at some point. Wanted somebody else to suffer. I mean, really suffer.’
Poor Trey really suffered, Nikki thought. Since Haddon broke the news, she hadn’t been able to go more than a few minutes without an image of Trey’s torn and mangled body leaping, unbidden, into her head. Lisa Flannagan had suffered too, of course. But Lisa didn’t haunt Nikki the way Trey did. Despite her feelings of guilt and sadness over her death, despite everything, Nikki still couldn’t bring herself to like Lisa. Even now, the young model’s entitlement and her casual cruelty towards other women left a sour taste in Nikki’s mouth.
She still hadn’t reported the break-in at her house – if you could call it a break-in. Somehow she suspected that Detective Johnson, for one, wouldn’t dignify it with such a title. ‘An unlocked door and a single missing photograph?’ She could hear his sardonic, mocking voice now. ‘That’s not a crime, Ms Roberts. That’s middle-aged memory loss catching up with you.’
With an effort, Nikki wrenched her attention back to Lana. ‘I’m curious,’ she observed. ‘Why would you choose to focus your anger on these young women around Wilders, and not on the director himself? It seems to me he’s by far the worst offender here. Him and the man who abused you afterwards, at his apartment.’
Lana uncrossed and recrossed her legs in an oddly provocative manner.
‘It’s not abuse if you ask for it, Dr Roberts,’ she said bluntly.
‘Isn’t it?’ asked Nikki.
Lana’s eyes narrowed. Who was this woman to judge her? This beautiful doctor who men still lusted after, and who was only now reaching the peak of her career? What the hell could someone like Dr Roberts possibly know about how it felt to be left on the shelf, discarded by the world, dumped in a box marked ‘Too old. Too ugly. Finished. Worthless.’? She didn’t know shit.
‘I don’t see how,’ she responded coolly. ‘I told him what I wanted him to do to me and he did it. That’s the joy of Tinder. No questions. No strings.’
‘So you wanted him to hurt you? To humiliate you?’ Nikki frowned. Minutes ago, Lana had sat there shaking while she described a sexual encounter of such bestial brutality even Nikki had gasped listening to it. After almost two decades as a therapist, it took a lot to shock her. But the things that Lana Grey had been subjected to – willingly, she now claimed – had done it.
‘Don’t you get it? I wanted to own the humiliation!’ Lana shrieked. ‘I wanted to take it back. To control it. Anton Wilders wants to treat me like a whore? “I’ll see you and I’ll raise you, dude!” It’s called feminism,’ she added defiantly, sitting back with an ‘I rest my case’ flourish.
Letting a guy urinate in your mouth is feminism? thought Nikki. Most of her patients twisted external reality to some degree to fit with their own neuroses, their own skewed self-perception. But Lana took the proverbial cake.
‘Have you heard from Johnny lately?’ Nikki threw out the question casually, as if it weren’t charged with a hundred pounds of Semtex. Johnny was Lana’s abusive ex-partner. He still called her from time to time or ‘dropped by’ her place; this despite the fact he was married now to a much younger, much more successful actress and the father of two small boys.
Lana looked out of the window.
‘No.’
Nikki could see at once she was lying.
‘I told you. I blocked his number,’ Lana explained, unnecessarily. ‘He’s dead to me.’
‘So when did you last see him?’ Nikki pressed.
Failed auditions always brought Lana down, but they were also a part of her life routine, a commonplace disappointment. More often than not, when she went off the rails like she had today, acting out sexually and putting herself in danger, ‘Johnny’ was involved somewhere.
‘No idea. Months ago,’ Lana lied.
‘I want you to try and think again about transference, Lana. That’s your “homework” for this week. Try to notice the way that you take emotions that are about one thing or person – like your anger with Anton Wilders; or your shame about your own behavior – and misdirect those feelings towards others. The young women in that auditorium. Me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Lana, her voice and body both brittle with repressed pain.
Nikki gave her an Oh, I think you do look.
‘Try it,’ she said. ‘See what you notice as you move through your week.’
Lana left, stalking out of the room almost as angry as she’d been an hour ago, and only slightly more enlightened.
‘Take care of yourself,’ Nikki called after her as she left, an ugly sense of foreboding suddenly seizing her out of nowhere.
Too many people were dying around her. She hoped Lana wasn’t about to take any more stupid risks.
Goodman watched as Lana Grey pulled out of Nikki’s building in her leased Prius. He’d already learned that the actress was six months in arrears on the car and owed thousands in unpaid interest on the subprime loan she’d used to pay for it. The Victoria Beckham dress and pumps she wore to the audition had already been returned to Neiman Marcus, right after she finished with hook-up guy but before she swung by therapy. Goodman wondered how Lana was affording Nikki Roberts’ fees. He made a note to check the accounts later.
He assumed she was heading home now to her lonely, rent-controlled apartment in Ocean Park, and an evening of what? Another meaningless encounter with a stranger, perhaps? Or pills, booze and bed? What a tragic life. But he knew everything he needed to for now. He was done following Lana for the day.
Five minutes into his drive home, his phone rang.
‘Anything to report?’ Johnson’s voice sounded crackly. Bad line.
‘I’ll fill you in tomorrow. But no, not really. How about you?’ Goodman asked. ‘Any leads on Brandon Grolsch?’
‘Nothing,’ Johnson admitted. ‘I’m calling it a day. See you bright and early tomorrow.’
‘Mañana.’
Goodman hung up. Then, on a whim he pulled over. Waiting for a break in the traffic, he did a U-turn and headed back towards Century City.
About twenty minutes later, his patience was rewarded. Nikki Roberts’ Mercedes pulled slowly out of the garage beneath her office building, turned into the alleyway and then out onto Avenue of the Stars.
Re-starting his engine, Detective Lou Goodman slipped into the stream of cars behind her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Anne Bateman tightened her bow fractionally and brought it down to rest on the bridge of her violin. Anne’s violin was something between a dear friend and a love object. An early eighteenth-century Pietro Guarneri, it was one of the first really valuable gifts her husband had given her, the week after their wedding.
‘But this must be worth seven figures!’ Anne had gasped, opening the beautifully inlaid case it came in, a work of art in itself, before lovingly lifting the Guarneri into her arms. ‘It’s exquisite.’
‘Like you,’ Anne’s husband had purred, delighted to have been the source of such joy.
They’d been on honeymoon in Tahiti at the time. So it must have been eight years ago. Eight years, thought Anne, gripping her precious violin more tightly. Some days it felt like eighty.
She was sitting in the orchestra pit at Disney Concert Hall, about to start the first rehearsal for the LA Phil’s sold-out performance of The Best of Stravinsky on Friday night. Anne knew the great composer’s violin concertos inside out and backwards, but it didn’t stop her experiencing the same mixture of excitement and fear she always felt before a big performance. She’d tried to talk about her stage fright in her session with Dr Roberts earlier. But Nikki (‘You really must call me Nikki, Anne.’) ha
d insisted on bringing the conversation back to Anne’s husband, and what she would keep referring to as Anne’s ‘backsliding’.
‘Think of how far you’ve come,’ Nikki had pleaded with her. ‘Think how hard-won your freedom was. Are you really prepared to give all that up, to let him back in?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anne answered truthfully.
‘You need to ask yourself why you would do that,’ Nikki pressed. ‘Why you would even consider it, after everything that’s happened.’
She was right, as usual. When Anne was sitting in Nikki’s office, it seemed so obvious, so clear what she should do. Or not do. But the moment she walked out, that certainty deserted her, and with it her resolve. It was as if the further away Anne Bateman got from her therapist – the more miles she put between her Prius and Nikki’s Century City office – the weaker Nikki’s influence over her became. And in the vacuum left behind, her husband’s power grew.
‘First violin! Anne, my dear. Are you with us?’
Henrik Leinneman, the conductor, kept his tone polite – he lusted after Anne Bateman too much to lose his temper with her – but he was clearly irritated. All this daydreaming was unprofessional, not to mention unfair to her fellow musicians. Anne was a brilliant violinist, but still terribly young. At times like these, her inexperience showed.
‘Sorry, Maestro. Everybody.’ Anne bit her lower lip, a nervous gesture that made her look even younger. ‘I’m ready.’
Leinneman led them back into the second movement, and Anne swiftly lost herself in the music, allowing Stravinski to transport her to a world without her ex, a world without pain or conflict or denial or despair. How she wished she could stay there forever!
Anne Bateman had been only sixteen years old when she first met her future husband, a wealthy and powerful real estate developer some twenty-five-years her senior, at a concert in Mexico City. Already a well-travelled musician by then, this was the first professional trip Anne had taken without her mother as a chaperone. (Linda Bateman had come down with the flu the weekend before, and the tour managers had assured her that Anne would be well taken care of in Mexico. Besides, Anne was a sensible girl, who took her music deadly seriously. She’d have no time to get into any mischief between her grueling schedule of rehearsals and performances. What harm could possibly come to her?)
Anne’s soon-to-be husband was forty-one when they met, newly married to his second wife, and a notorious womanizer. The moment he laid eyes on Anne, he knew he had to have her. And not just have her. Keep her. Hold her. Protect her. She was by no means the most beautiful girl he’d ever bedded. But never in his life had he felt such love, such instant and powerful yearning. Or at least, not for a long, long time.
Anne never stood a chance. It was like an iron filing meeting a giant magnet. The overwhelming force of his personality sucked her in like the death-star. Despite her inexperience, the teenage Anne was profoundly attracted to him from the start. Handsome, exciting, radiating sexual energy like a sun god, as soon as he came backstage and took her hand she felt a charge of desire jolt through her, unlike anything she’d known before. Except perhaps the charge she felt when she was playing, lost in her music on stage. But this was stronger. Deeper.
They became lovers immediately. As soon as Anne left Mexico, he began flying all over the world to snatch a few hours with his young mistress; although it wasn’t until two years later, the day after Anne’s eighteenth birthday, that he finally ditched his heartbroken wife and swept Anne away to Costa Rica, where they secretly married. Anne’s parents, Linda and Gerry, were appalled. ‘You’re his third wife? And this fella is how old?’ But they soon got over their new son-in-law’s past – including no less than five children from two former wives, the oldest only a year younger than Anne – after he bought them a new, five-bedroom house in San Diego as a ‘wedding present’ and then invited them out to stay at the palatial beach-house in Cabo he now shared with Anne, flying them there by private jet.
Not only did their daughter seem deliriously happy, but she was also a newly minted member of the Latino super-rich. True, Anne’s new husband was the same age as Gerry Bateman and had what might politely be referred to as a ‘checkered past’ with women. (His first wife had left him after numerous affairs, the last of which had culminated in a love child, Rico.) But really, didn’t everyone deserve a second chance? And since when should a little thing like age stand in the way of true love? The main thing was that he supported Anne’s music.
‘Naturally she must keep playing! It was her playing that made me fall in love with her in the first place,’ he told Linda, over Cristal and oysters on the beachside terrace that first trip to Cabo. ‘All I want on this earth, Mrs Bateman, is to make your daughter happy.’
‘He meant it,’ Anne told Nikki, remembering the happy times during therapy. ‘He really did at the time. He tried.’
But Anne’s husband was controlling by nature. He simply couldn’t help himself. The love he felt for his new young wife, the need she aroused in him, terrified him. It wasn’t long before he began erecting walls around her. At first it was a few, specific concerts that he objected to.
‘Let’s not do Paris this year, angel.’
‘Not do Paris?’ Anne looked perplexed. ‘But I have to. I’m committed.’
‘I’ll un-commit you.’ He waved a hand regally. ‘It’s so far, Anne. And I can’t travel with you this time. Tell them you’ll do New York in September instead. They’ll understand.’
‘But my love, that’s not how it works.’
‘You know I hate it when we’re apart. I need you, angel.’
He reached between her legs, and Anne felt her own desire overwhelm her, as it always did with him, and the fight – if it ever was a fight – was over before it began. But it wasn’t long before one concert became many. Soon all foreign tours were vetoed. Even when Anne performed locally, in Mexico City, she was tailed constantly by heavily armed guards. Before long the same guards were taking her shopping or to the gym. Lunches with girlfriends were spied on. Anne began to feel lonely and oppressed.
‘You don’t understand, angel,’ her husband would tell her lovingly. ‘You’re not in Kansas any more. This is Mexico City. Wealthy women get kidnapped every day here. Some of them are released for ransom money, but many others are raped or killed. The drug gangs show no mercy.’
He told her the story of Valentina Baden, whose sister had been kidnapped, never to be seen again, and who had founded a charity to help support families of the missing. And about the young American au pair girl, Charlotte Clancy, who had also disappeared without trace, right here in the city. Those who were found were often returned to their family cut up into little pieces and stuffed in plastic bags.
‘You don’t see it, because I try to protect you from the news, from the reality of what’s out there. But the danger is real, Anne.’
‘Then let’s move,’ Anne pleaded. ‘We have money. We don’t have to live here, darling. We could go back to the States, or even Europe. We could travel—’
‘I have to be here. For my business,’ he said, more curtly than usual.
‘But surely you could develop real estate somewhere else?’ Anne pressed. ‘It’s not as if there aren’t other markets.’
He grabbed her wrists, not painfully but forcefully, and pulled her to him, stopping her mouth with a kiss that was similarly forceful. ‘We cannot leave, Anne. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.’
Something in his eyes warned her not to argue.
That conversation marked a change in their relationship. The love was still there, on both sides. But from that point on, it went hand in hand with fear. Anne had more and more questions but she was too afraid to ask any of them. For the first time it dawned on her that she was now officially stepmother to five children. Why was it that their father barely saw them? Leaving a wife, or even two wives, was one thing, but surely it wasn’t normal to walk away from one’s own children? Anne knew her new husband
paid maintenance and school fees and the like. But she’d only met the children from his first marriage once, and the two younger ones from his second marriage a handful of times. None of them had seemed to have any real relationship with their father.
Lonely, unable to play her violin other than privately, for him, and cut off from family and friends, Anne started to panic. Life in the gilded prison of her marriage was rapidly becoming unbearable. But life without her love was equally unthinkable. He had been her world, her rock, her idol since she was sixteen years old. And he still needed her, and adored her, every bit as passionately as he had back then. Anne was physically afraid of him, yet he had never hurt her. Was she becoming paranoid? Was it all in her head?
It was only after he started pressuring her to have a baby – a sixth child he would barely know – that Anne knew she had to get out. By now estranged from her parents, who would have taken her husband’s side anyway, she managed to contact an old friend from the San Diego Youth Orchestra, who helped her book a flight and return in secret to the US while her husband was away at a business meeting. Despite arriving in California with only her precious violin, her passport and a few hundred dollars in her wallet, Anne swiftly reconnected with her old contacts in the music world and began to work again. It felt like a rebirth, and for a while the joy of performing and having her freedom back eclipsed all the feelings of loss and guilt over her abandoned marriage. By the time her husband tracked her down, about a month later, and began his campaign to win her back, she was already much stronger, almost a different person.
Almost.
The problem was, she still loved him. Still missed him, even though she knew she couldn’t go back. Even after she landed her dream job with the LA Philharmonic, the feelings of pain and regret over abandoning her marriage continued to creep up on her, to the point where she worried she might be on the brink of some sort of breakdown. She had already started forgetting things, sometimes blacking out entire evenings or stretches of the day, overwhelmed by stress.
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