“Yes, Belle always keeps a knife under her pillow. It has something to do with her ex-husband trying to kill her, or something.”
“You people …” smirked the first officer, seducing the second officer into echoing laughter. “Was she expecting you to try to kill her too?”
“No,” I said emphatically. “She just felt safer sleeping that way.”
“If we open up the bedroom door, as we are about to, will we see a discernible knife mark on the other side?”
“I’m guessing,” I said. “That is what it sounded like.”
They both got up. “Let’s go and have a look, then,” said the first officer. “If there is tangible evidence that she tried to stab you with a knife, it doesn’t matter who she is. She is who she is, and she tried to stab you. We don’t need to go into the rest. The psychiatrists and the courts can work that one out. We assume you will press charges.”
I hesitated. “I’ll have to see about that but if you have a reason to take her away with you now, that would be convenient.”
“You could call your son back,” observed the second officer.
“I could,” I agreed. “If she is now Belle, she is going to be very distraught, poor thing, but I need to win a few hours to see if I can fix this mess. Then, if she is really Belle again, maybe we can return to our normal, happy lives. The trouble is that I will never really know whether she is Belle or not. Rafaella may or may not be intelligent - we’ve discussed that many times - but she is certainly cunning, deadly cunning, as it turns out.”
The first officer smirked again. “We will leave you with that problem, Sir. Let’s go see your wife and examine that door. If your wife admits to having attacked you with a knife, that will make things very much easier.”
I unlocked the door. Belle was lying on the bed, looking devastated - lost and apprehensive. “What’s going on?” she asked in a small voice.
“Your husband informs us that you attacked him with a knife.”
“Attacked him? With a knife? I would never do that, Luke, you know that. I love you more than life itself. How could you think that I would ever do a thing like that? I would never even think of doing a thing like that.” She stared at me tearfully, trying to create a connection between us.
Meanwhile the second officer was examining the back of the door. He called the first officer over. “This certainly looks like a knife cut.” He turned to Belle. “Do you happen to have a knife in the room, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she replied eagerly. “I always keep a knife under my pillow.”
“Would it be there now?”
Belle rummaged around under her pillow but failed to find her knife. “It is always here,” she explained, confused. “Luke, have I been sleepwalking?”
“No, Belle, you have been Rafaella.”
“Rafaella? Why would I want to be Rafaella. I hate her. I want to kill her.”
That did it. The first officer recited her Miranda rights.
“I am being arrested?” she asked quietly.
The second officer emerged from the bathroom holding the knife in a dry face cloth. “It was in here,” he said. “It was as well that the other door was locked. She was probably trying to attack you via the other door and then dropped the knife.”
“I did that?” said Belle.
“It appears that you did, ma’am.”
Belle stood up from the bed and held her hands out. “Then arrest me. I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember anything. It’s like I’ve been in a fever or a trance or something. But I’m obviously a danger to Luke and Stevie, and maybe to myself too, so it is for the best if you take me away with you. I wouldn’t hurt either of them for the world, not if I am in my right mind, that is.”
It was a sad procession down the stairs, with Belle constantly looking over her shoulder at me and the two cops gently guiding her.
“I’ll see you soon, Belle,” I said. “I love you. I love you so much. I’ll fix this for all of us.”
“I love you too,” Belle replied. “I am so sorry this happened. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
“I know you wouldn’t. But Rafaella would. She would be delighted to hurt all of us.”
“That bitch!” exclaimed Belle, showing some of her honest fire for the first time for weeks, “That bitch deserves to burn in hell. She will burn in hell, even if I have to go there with her to make sure that she is there and that she stays there.”
“That’s my Belle,” I smiled.
“Your Belle,” Belle confirmed. “I am all yours and you are all mine. Forever.”
I let my tea towel drop.
“And that,” Belle crowed, “is definitely mine. All mine. Take care of it for when I get back to you.”
I located my cell phone and called Stevie.
Chapter 29
I woke up to a weight pressing on my chest and a face looking into mine.
“I got you,” Zack exulted. “And I’ve got her too. I’ve got her. I know where she is.”
“Who?”
“Rafaella, you idiot. I know where she lives. I’ll take you there. I don’t know what happened but she fucked up. I have been trying to track her for weeks but whatever she is isn’t easy for me to see. Kind of like you find it hard to see ghosts. They must be in a different dimension or something. She kept losing me. But tonight she left a trail. She’s living just around the corner, in Clayton Street. Come on, let’s go get her!”
I was struggling to breathe. “How comes you have got so heavy all of a sudden?”
Zack chuckled. “I don’t know. Don’t care.” He moved down the bed nevertheless.
“Let’s be clever about this,” I said. “I want to serve her with the divorce papers. Now we know where she is, we can catch her tomorrow when I have been to see Carol Jasinski, my divorce lawyer. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. She’ll be plotting something new. She won’t be on the move just yet. We have time.”
Zack looked doubtful. “It looked like she was packing.”
“I’ll take that chance,” I said. “I’m going to serve those divorce papers on her if it kills me.”
“You’re the boss,” Zack conceded. And from Zack, that was almost as good as him calling me ‘Dad’ too.
* * *
I phoned Carol first thing in the morning. She said she would be in her office for two hours. She would print off the divorce package immediately. As Rafaella was in the country, we didn’t even have to worry about the Hague Convention. We were not at risk of violating Britain’s sovereignty if she was living over here, however temporarily.
I ran down to her office in Market Street and grabbed the papers.
“Go get her,” Carol said as I headed back for the door.
“Oh, I will,” I said, “I will.”
* * *
Zack and Stevie met me outside the house.
“What are you doing here, Stevie,” I asked. “You’re supposed to be in school.”
Stevie punched Zack, a blow which naturally passed straight through him. Zack punched Stevie back. That one didn’t.
“I’m getting a broader education,” Stevie declared. “And I’m working. I’m your witness.”
“You are related to me,” I objected.
“No, I’m not,” countered Stevie. “Not if you aren’t divorced. I am only related to you if you are divorced.”
I laughed. “Perhaps you should think about becoming a lawyer,” I said.
Zack wrinkled his nose. “All lawyers go to hell, even the good ones. Everyone beyond the veil knows that.”
We stood outside the house where Rafaella was living. Now what?
“I’m going to ring the doorbell,” Stevie said.
“She won’t answer it,” I replied.
“You two hide, then.”
It wasn’t hard for Zack to hide. I hugged the wall in the covered area to the side of the front door.
I was right. There was no answer.
“Maybe she’s not hom
e,” suggested Stevie.
“Maybe she’s gone for good,” replied Zack.
“Perhaps we should loiter outside her front door,” I added.
“We’ll come back in an hour,” suggested Zack. “There’s no cover here. She’ll see us.”
We returned in an hour. Stevie rang the bell. I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs.
It wasn’t Rafaella.
“We are looking for Rafaella,” I said.
“Who?” the girl replied. I looked at her hard to see if she might be Rafaella in disguise. She didn’t appear to be.
“Do you have a woman living with you in the house? About thirty years old, blonde hair?”
“Yes,” the girl replied, “but I can’t let you in if you don’t even know what she is called.”
Zack slipped past her and ran up the stairs. A few seconds later he was back doing a thumbs-up sign.
“I think we can,” I said as Stevie and I pushed past her and followed Zack.
“Denise!” the girl shouted up the stairs. “I couldn’t stop them!”
Rafaella had reached the door as we appeared panting on her landing. Well, I was panting, Stevie not so much and Zack not at all.
She looked startled. “I was just going out,” she said.
“You have just been out,” I riposted.
“I can do as I like,” she insisted.
“Not this time. This time you do what I want.” I pushed her through her doorway. “Firstly, here are our new divorce papers.”
She didn’t look pleased. “So that is what this is all about …”
“No, it isn’t what this is all about. This is all about Zack here, and Belle, and the five DeGamo people you killed.”
“Zack where?” she asked, startled.
“Oh, he is here.”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” she protested. “You have finally gone completely mad, Luke. I said you needed to see a psychiatrist. Now it is probably too late. You’ll end up in a lunatic asylum. I did try.”
“And you’ll end up in prison,” I said.
Rafaella laughed. “What evidence do you have that I killed anyone?”
“Zack is a witness. You killed him.”
“Zack is dead. Dead people make terrible witnesses.”
“And then there are the DeGamos too …”
“Dead too, apparently. You are not learning, Luke.”
“You are right,” I said. “All the witnesses to your crimes are dead. That should tell us something.”
“It tells me that you are completely deranged.”
I shrugged. “At least I have served my divorce papers on you in front of a witness.”
“Your step-son.”
“Not yet. We have gone through all that outside.”
Rafaella pulled her face. “OK, I’ll accept the divorce papers. I’ll even sign for them. Will that make you happy?”
“It is certainly a start.”
“Good, then you can go. Do you have a pen?”
I looked Rafaella up and down. She was caught off-guard but determined to take charge of the situation. I wondered what I had ever seen in her but I could see it in front of me now - a small child who was afraid. I had wanted to protect her but I had realized before I left her that no amount of concern for her, care for her or love for her would ever satisfy her, would ever make her feel protected.
Despite her fighting stance, she was nervous and vulnerable as Stevie and I stood there. She was, after all, a woman facing a tall man and a tough twelve year old boy, not sure how this scenario would play out, what we would demand of her.
“Are you going now?” she demanded. “I have a friend I am meant to see. He is a hundred times the man you are, Luke, you will not be surprised to know, far better looking, slim, and he really cares about me, really loves me.”
I didn’t even feel a tiny pang of jealousy. “Good for you,” I said. “I hope he is all those things.”
Rafaella lurched forward into me. At first I thought she had launched a surprise attack on me, especially as I discovered I had blood all over my hands as I caught her back. Whose blood? Mine?
I pushed her away from me and checked my front. There was no ripped shirt, no sign of injury on my body at all.
Rafaella crumpled into the fetal position on the rug in the middle of her room and started moaning.
“What just happened?” I asked Stevie.
“Zack stabbed her in the back.”
Zack was standing there, a long vegetable chopping knife in his right hand. Blood was dripping down half the blade. “I’m being kinder to her than she was to me.” He laid the knife down on the draining board next to the sink.
“That will take even more explaining,” I sighed.
Zack smiled. “It will shorten the divorce proceedings, though. By about six months or so, I heard you and Mom say.”
“Is she really dying?” I asked, wondering if I would start to feel something for Rafaella as she bled copiously into the rug and mentally drew into herself to counteract the pain.
“I hope so,” said Zack. “I’m sorry, Luke, this may be hard for you. I’m guessing you loved her once. But she has killed six people, including me, and tortured you and Mom and I don’t know how many other people. Probably thousands. She is better off dead.”
That is when the police arrived and came pounding up the stairs. It was Officers Martinez and Nielsen.
“Back on duty again, I see,” I greeted them.
“And yet another serious incident with you right smack in the middle of it,” Luiz Martinez replied. “The second in a few hours or so, I hear. I think we had better deport you before there is any more trouble. I’m not saying that you are responsible for any of it, but you are always where trouble is. You can say goodbye to your wife, or lover, or whatever she is on the way.”
“Nooo!” shouted Stevie. “You can’t do that.”
I tousled his hair. “Don’t worry, Stevie, the officer is joking and maybe in a bad mood today. They can’t deport me. We have just served the divorce papers. This is a mess we can definitely fix.” I looked down at Rafaella’s body. “If we could solve that one, it’s a home run.”
“Like you even know what that means,” scoffed Zack.
This book is dedicated to Kathleen, who has lived
this story far more than anyone will ever know.
Coming shortly …
‘Before they were ghosts’
The sequel to ‘Before there were angels’.
Read Chapter One now.
Chapter 1
I’ll rephrase my own saying. ‘Everybody believes in ghosts, only some think they are actually exist, and no-one expects a ghost to stab anyone.’
And some people are virtually impossible to turn into ghosts, however much they deserve it, and however much we prayed for it to happen.
So Rafaella survived - worse, she thrived - once she got to the St. Francis’ Hospital. Those guys are too brilliant by half. It’s just a shame they don’t give people a psych test before they operate on them.
Stevie and I had a problem. We were saying … what? That I was talking to Belle from the doorway, Stevie was standing next to me, and someone we didn’t notice came up and stabbed her in the back.
That was going to hang together well.
“Who was this person?” the detective asked me, cynicism written all over his face.
“We didn’t see him,” I said. “Or her,” I added, because logically if I didn’t see him, it could have been a her. And whoever it was did use a kitchen knife to stab her.
“What, never?” the detective pressed me.
“Never.”
“He, or she,” he smirked, “just vanished into thin air?”
“That’s exactly how it was,” I said. “You’ve got it in a nutshell. I couldn’t have put it more succinctly.”
The smirk turned into a snarl. “Let me get this straight -“
“You’ve got it straight already,” I interposed
sarcastically, curious to see what his next expression would be. After all, when you have had to deal with Rafaella fucking with your entire family, even a snarky San Francisco cop holds no perils. I might have handled an LA cop more cautiously.
Pure hatred. That was his next expression. Wherever could he go from there, homicidal rage? “Let me get this straight …” he repeated, “you and your son -“
“He’s not my son,” I corrected him.
“You and your step-son,” he bulldozered on.
“Even that is arguable,” I said.
“You and Stevie Parsons -“
“He prefers to go by his father’s name.”
“Which is?”
“Bullhorn.”
He gave me a double-take on that. “Seriously?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Why did he call himself Steven Parsons earlier?”
“So you wouldn’t be able to trace him afterwards?”
“You and Stevie were talking to your ex-wife, Claire Parsons, or Rafaella,” he hurried on before I could interrupt him again, “and someone, male or female, stepped up behind her, stabbed her forcibly in the back, and disappeared.”
“That was less concise,” I commented, “but absolutely correct nonetheless.”
“And you have no idea who this person was?”
Now how did I answer that? I paused. “Would you believe it was a ghost?” I asked.
“No,” he replied flatly.
“Then I don’t have the slightest idea who it was.”
He booked me.
* * *
Rafaella, of course, on her immortal soul - not that she had any of it to lose - insisted that I had stabbed her, and Stevie insisted that my story was correct.
They believed Rafaella over me but they had some hurdles to overcome. The knife that had been used had only her fingerprints on it. It had not been wiped clean, only wiped to the point of being smeared, and those fingerprints were indubitably hers. Secondly, the attacker had been right handed and I was left handed.
However, the killer, so to speak, to their case was that I am 6 foot 5 inches. The assailant was much more Stevie’s height, even exactly Stevie’s height. Try as they might, they couldn’t get a 6 foot 5 man to deliver that blow at that angle without pretending that he tripped over the edge of her rug and stabbed her by accident while he asked her what she wanted to eat for lunch. They must have gone through close to one hundred dummies trying to recreate my downward slice to flow conclusively into her wound, but concluded that it was irrefutably not me who delivered it.
Before There Were Angels Page 17
