Body of Lies (25 page)
This is how he saw himself, as some sort of monster. Whoever this girl was, he regretted killing her in his own fashion. It hadn't stopped him though. She wondered if he'd felt the same thing when he'd killed his brother. The paintings might tell her that, but she wouldn't get a chance to look for that now. In the distance, the sound of sirens rose. She only hoped someone on Bates's force was a little quicker on the uptake than he appeared to be.
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Once Bates's men arrived, Zach took Alex aside. “How are you doing, really?”
“I'm fine.” She touched her fingers to the cut at her temple. “Believe me, I've gotten worse scrapes.”
That wasn't what he meant, and she had to know that. He remembered how fiercely she'd trembled in his arms. Considering how little emotion she showed on a regular basis, her fear had to be extraordinary. “What did he want?”
“Primarily, I think he wanted to gloat about how clever he was. He had everybody fooled. He created this life as a woman, which left him free to do whatever he wanted as a man. He also told me that Walter hadn't committed those rapes, he had.”
Although their fingerprints would be different, their DNA would be the same. He'd seen criminals get off before after they gleefully reported they had a twin, thereby introducing reasonable doubt without having to give another piece of evidence. In this case, it worked in reverse, since everyone assumed Thorpe had a sister. There was no one to blame but him. Damn.
He wondered how that made Alex feel, knowing that she had been right all along. Thorpe had been innocent, at least the Thorpe they'd convicted had been. But that didn't seem to be on her mind.
“I want to go back to the house,” she said.
“Why?”
“Between the studio and the room inside, it seems to be a testament to the twins' lives. The answers have to be inside.”
He would have asked her what answers she sought, but he thought he knew. Who were these people, really? How had Walter's twin assumed a female identity? He couldn't conceive that any hospital would have falsified birth records that needed to be sent on to the state, even in a backwater town like this. But he had to admit, whatever had been done had been accomplished a long time ago for the ruse to work, long before computerization had taken over the record keeping of the world.
He led her back to the house with an arm around her waist. He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to her. He didn't want to disturb any physical evidence, but he wanted to see what she'd find.
Once inside, she circled the room, not focusing on the pictures but seeming to look for something else. She settled on a photo album that rested on a plastic book holder. The cover had a quilted green and yellow pattern covered in plastic. There was nothing on the first page, but the first spread showed two old-style sepia birth certificates that like negatives had white writing. One was for Homer Williams, the other for Virgil. The birthday didn't match Thorpe's. This would make him a year younger than they believed. The birthplace listed was Rockford, New York.
Good God. When he'd looked into that town, he'd been trying to find a Thorpe family that had lived there. No wonder he'd come back empty. He'd been looking for the wrong name.
Alex turned the page and found copies of two more birth certificates, the ones for Walter and Virginia Thorpe. These were more modern certificates garnered from a town in Louisiana. The birthday they had for Thorpe was on there. Virginia was listed as a year older. He'd bet anything the original owners of the birth certificates had died a long time ago and Thorpe's mother had used their identities to fashion new ones for her children.
He'd already called Craig to let him know what was going on. He and some of the others were on their way up. Now that she'd found what they needed, he wanted to get her out of there, first to have her head looked at and then somewhere quiet where he could really assess the toll seeing one of the Williams brothers had taken on her.
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Even though it was the middle of the day, all she wanted was a shower and a bed, in that order. Zach had brought her to the one hotel the town boasted, which was little more than a bed-and-breakfast. She didn't care. Without a word to him, she slipped into the bathroom, shed her clothes, and stepped into the shower. The first blast of water was icy cold, but she didn't care about that either. She adjusted the temperature and, leaning her forehead against the cool tile, waited for the water to warm.
Her head throbbed, not from the bruise, which didn't require anything more than a Band-Aid. A migraine was building behind her eyes, in her sinuses, and it was going to be a doozy.
She heard the bathroom door open and a second later Zach stepped into the shower behind her. She hadn't anticipated that he would follow her. She hadn't thought of anything other than washing that man's touch from her body. Intellectually, she knew that couldn't really be accomplished, but emotionally she needed the illusion.
Zach pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her waist. He kissed her temple, her cheek, the side of her throat. “Are you okay, baby?”
She turned in his arms, buried her face against his neck, and shook her head. She wouldn't be okay until Williams, whichever one he was, was caught. Only then could she be sure he wouldn't hurt anyone else. “He blames me,” she whispered against his neck. “He blames me for getting Walter to talk. He did call me after he got out of prison. His brother found out about it and killed him. I think that was the catalyst for everything else he's done. As much as he hated Walter, he probably loved him as well.”
“Shh.” Zach stroked her hair from her face. “You can tell me all this later.” He tilted her face up to his. “I'm sorry I left you alone. You're not alone. I won't let that happen again.”
She shook her head. She didn't blame him. He'd only done what Bates should have. Whatever sound they'd heard was probably engineered by Williams to draw at least one of the men from the house, leaving her less protected. Bates had gotten more than what he deserved for his inactionâa slight concussion that required an overnight in the hospital.
But she knew Zach meant more than that by his words. He was making her a promise that had little to do with physical togetherness. He'd always told her that he was there for her, and for a long time he was. He wanted to be there again. He wanted more from her than whatever this thing was between them. So did she. She'd never really stopped loving him; that emotion had just gotten tangled in with so many others. Losing him once nearly killed her. The only question remaining was, could she chance that?
Since she didn't have an answer, she leaned up and pressed her mouth to his. He crushed her to him as his tongue slid into her mouth, probing, tasting. But she whimpered, not from the pleasure she felt but the gathering pain in her forehead.
He pulled away and looked down at her, his hand cradling the side of her face. “What's the matter, baby?”
“Migraine. A big one.”
He pulled her to him and turned off the water. He used one of the towels to blot her hair, and wrapped her in another. He slung a third around his waist and lifted her from the shower.
At least the bed was soft and clean smelling when Zach laid her on it. She closed her eyes, but she could tell what he was doing as he moved around the room. He drew the curtains and shut off every source of light. Then he came back to her, settled them both under the covers, and pulled her to him.
“Is that better?” he asked.
She nodded and pain sliced through her.
“Relax,” he whispered against her ear. He massaged the juncture between her right thumb and index finger, a pressure point that was supposed to alleviate headaches.
She melted against him as he spoke to her in a soothing, monotone voice. His voice was so low that she had no idea what he was talking about. It didn't matter. She felt herself growing drowsy and the pain of the migraine receding. She snuggled against him and let sleep overtake her. She'd worry about the rest of it later.
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Even after Alex had fallen asleep, Zach continued to hold her. He pressed his lips to her temple. He hadn't allowed himself to dwell on it before now, but he could have lost her today. If Williams had been more interested in killing than proving his own worth, she might be gone now. His whole body trembled with the repercussions of that thought. He couldn't lose her again, not in that way, not in any way. He'd tried to tell her that today. Heaven only knew if she'd gotten that message, but he'd tell her in every way he could think of until it sank in.
A knock sounded at the door. He quickly disentangled himself from her, hoping to get to the door before whoever was on the other side woke her. He checked the peephole to see Smitty on the other side. The boys from New York must have driven like madmen to get here so soon.
“Just a minute,” he told Smitty, went back to the bathroom, and pulled on his jeans. When he opened the door, Smitty gave him a once-over that left no doubt what he thought Zach had been up to.
To Smitty's unasked question, he said, “She's sleeping. What's going on?”
“For one thing, we found the girl depicted in the painting in a shallow grave a few feet back on the property. She was still warm.”
Damn. If he and Alex had come up last night, they probably would have walked in on her murder. But the smile on Smitty's face told Zach he wasn't finished. “What else?”
“Way in the back in the corner in the dark of that shed there's an old freezer. We think we know what happened to Mama.”
Twenty-three
It was nearly midnight when Alex started to stir. In the intervening hours, he'd gotten Smitty to buy them some clothes and other toiletries since he didn't plan to take Alex back to the city until she was better. Bates's deputies were guarding the entrances to this place, and since Williams would have to go through him to get to Alex, he wasn't worried.
About seven o'clock, Smitty had brought them some dinner. Zach had eaten his sitting at the desk, the only furniture in the room besides the bed and dresser. He'd consumed three-quarters of the bottle of wine that came with the meal, too. The alcohol had taken a little of the edge off himâa little bit, but not much. He wanted her to wake so that he could see that she was all right, but he didn't want to push her to wakefulness before she was ready.
Finally she sat up, gathering the covers around her. Her hair had dried wild around her face. That and the warm light from the single lamp he'd turned on presented a sultry picture. He tamped down on his libido, since this wasn't the time. Or maybe it was, but not yet.
She brushed a strand of hair from her face and smiled at him. “What are you doing all the way over there?”
He wasn't that far away, but he got up and lay down on the bed next to her, leaning up on one elbow. “Feeling better?”
“Much.” She leaned down and kissed him, but withdrew almost immediately. “You've been drinking?” she asked.
She sounded so indignant it surprised him. He hiccupped in a way he thought she'd find funny and let his eyes go half-mast. “Only a teensy bit.” He held up his thumb and forefinger with a wide space between them. He grasped her elbow to pull her toward him. “Come here and give Daddy some sugar.”
He was teasing her, but the look of horror that came over her face told him he'd missed the mark. “Not when you're drunk.” She actually fled from him, yanking the cover from beneath him to wrap herself in. She stopped at the entrance to the bathroom, leaning against it as if to protect herself from attack from behind.
He'd never seen her like this before, genuinely terrified, not even after Williams had gotten to her. “What's going on here, Alex?”
“Nothing.” She lowered her head so that he couldn't see her face. “Nothing. I just don't like to be with a man who's drunk.”
He wasn't. Maybe if she hadn't just been recovering she might have noticed that. But what got to him was that she said “a man,” not him. He knew without her telling him that she'd been assaulted. Was that how it started? “Tell me what happened, Alex. Who hurt you?”
Her head snapped up. “Why?” She brushed her hair from her face with an impatient gesture. “So you can run out and kill him for me? Nothing you do can make him deader than he is already.”
She thought he asked out of some macho territoriality bullshit? He couldn't care less. He only cared about her. “Tell me.”
“Why? It happened a long time ago. It doesn't mean anything anymore. I've already worked through it. It doesn't matter.”
If she could see herself she wouldn't try to foist that lie on him. “Then why are you trembling?”
“Can't you just let it be? You can't change anything.”
No, he knew that very well. The past remained immutable beyond his capacity to change it. But if anything she said could help him understand her in the present, he wanted to hear it. “Don't you think I'm capable of understanding what happened to you?”
“No,” she said in a voice so quiet he barely heard her. “You wouldn't understand this.”
“Try me.”
Her eyes squeezed shut and he could see that she was fighting tears. Her hands were fisted against her chest. “Let it be, Zach.”
Didn't she realize he couldn't do that? He wanted to shake her and make her tell him, but by force of will he stayed where he was. “Damn it, Alex. I'm not going to let this drop.”
She sniffled and her throat worked. She looked away from him, obviously struggling with whether to confide in him or not. She shook her head, but when she looked at him again, he saw the anger and resignation in her eyes. “It was Sammy, all right?” She spat the words at him, her voice raised. “It was Sammy. He raped me when I was fourteen. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling as if he'd just taken a blow to the gut. His eyes burned and he couldn't seem to take in air properly. Sammy? He'd never expected that. Not as overprotective as Sammy was. Or that's the label Zach had given it at the time. But in another light Sammy's attempts to keep Alex to himself could appear to be a sick sort of possessiveness.
Nausea roiled in his belly along with a white-hot rage against the man he had once considered his father. Another example of his impotence, for as Alex said, nothing he could do would make that man any deader.
He opened his eyes and looked at Alex. She'd sunk down along the wall until she sat on the floor with her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook and he could hear her sobbing. He inhaled, willing his anger to recede. It was futile at this point and she didn't need that besides.
He went to her and sat on the floor in front of her. He pulled her to him so that her upturned knees fit between his parted ones. She didn't acknowledge him in any way, but he held her, rocking them both gently until her tears subsided.
“It was a little more than a year after my mother died. I still missed her so much. Sometimes when my dad was working nights, I'd lie in their bed and pretend she was still there. That's what we'd do sometimes when he was workingâlie in bed and watch old movies and talk. Half the time I'd fall asleep and she'd wake me in the morning to go to school. I missed her so much, I cried until I fell asleep.”
She brushed a tear from her cheek. “When I woke up, there was something hot and heavy on me, inside me, hurting me. I could smell the liquor on his breath before I could make out that it was him, Sammy. I started to fight him, to try to get him off me, but he was so damn drunk, I don't think he even felt it. He said one word, my mother's name, then rolled over and went to sleep.
“I lay there for a long time, hurt, stunned. I tried to tell myself that he was so out of it that in his stupor he must have thought I was my mother. That would have been bad enough, but manageable somehow. It would have meant he hadn't intended what he did.
“He never said a word to me about it. I would have thought he didn't remember what happened, except I saw the guilt on his face. Sammy rarely accepted culpability for anything, but when he did, he wore it on his sleeve. Besides, if he hadn't remembered, wouldn't he have wanted some explanation for the blood on his sheets? When I came home from school the next day, he'd changed the bed himself so he must have noticed. I was so ashamed.”
She laid her head against his shoulder and cried. He didn't know what to say to her. Of all the victims he'd comforted with pat words of encouragement, he couldn't bring himself to say any of them now. None of those other women had meant to him what Alex did. All he could do was hold her until her tears subsided.
“Do you blame yourself for what happened?”
“I put myself there where he could hurt me. It wasn't like I hadn't known what he wanted from me. I'd noticed the way he started looking at me, and it was not a father's look. Just like all those other narcissistic assholes out there that demand service from their families, if not their wife, then whatever female they can get their hands on. But he was such a coward he had to get drunk to do it. That was the man everyone idolized, a drunk and a man who would molest his own child.”
“Why didn't you tell anyone, Alex?” He had to believe that if anyone knew, it would have cost Sammy his job and sent him to jail. They would have taken Alex from him.
“Tell who? You think any of his cop buddies were going to come there to arrest him? Even if they did, what then? There was no one else to take me in. I'd be put in some foster home. No way. I'd heard stories, knew kids who'd gotten placed with families worse than their own. Sammy was the devil I knew, and I knew how to handle him.”
She brushed a tear from her cheek with an annoyed swipe of her hand. “I knew he kept a spare gun in a lockbox in the basement. I slept with it hidden inside my pillowcase every night, even though he basically left me alone for a while. I knew he'd be back, though. When he came to my room, I pulled out the gun and told him I'd shoot him dead if he ever tried to touch me again. I think it was the first thing I ever said to him that he actually took seriously.”
Zach hugged her to him. What she said explained so many thingsânot the least of which was what she'd meant by the gun being a “gift” from her father. She could see herself as a young girl contemplating that she had no options save the one she took. But after a while, she did have another. “You could have told me.”
She leaned back to look up at him. “Right. I was supposed to tell you, his protégé, that this man you idolized had raped his own daughter?”
She held his gaze for a moment before looking away, but he saw it in her eyes. She'd thought he might not have believed her either. That hurt him more than anything had in his whole life. He cradled her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him. “I loved you, Alex. I would have believed you.” If he'd thought she could handle it, he would have added that he still loved her, but now wasn't the time for that.
“I know you would have. Do you think I would have wanted to see you go to prison for avenging me against my father? But once you came along, I was safe from him, anyway.”
What the hell did that mean? “What are you talking about, Alex?”
She scrutinized his face. “You really didn't know?” She shrugged. “I guess Sammy wouldn't have bothered to tell you for fear that you'd bolt. I didn't realize it myself at first, but I came to realize it after a while. That manipulative bastard had picked you out for me.”
He sputtered, not knowing what to say to that.
She laughed, but not with humor. “Don't look so shocked. I know Sammy. He figured if he couldn't have me he'd control who would. I should have known right away. He never brought his partners home or encouraged them to visit the way he did you. Didn't you find it odd that as domineering as he was, he'd leave us alone together, only to put up a token protest that you shouldn't be hanging around his daughter so much? Especially at the end, he'd leave us together for whole evenings at a time.”
If she'd known, why hadn't she said anything? “Why didn't you ever tell me? Why didn't you put a stop to it?”
She shook her head. “Because I didn't object.” She laughed again in the same way. “I was in love with you.”
He noticed she said was, not am. That seemed logical since they were talking about the past, but it still stung. “Then what was it that killed that feeling? Was it when I left you?” He couldn't believe this would be true anymore, but he asked anyway. “Was it when your father died?” He couldn't bring himself to say “when I got him killed.” No matter how he felt about Sammy now, that fact still remained.
“Zach, my father was dying. He didn't tell me, so I know he didn't tell you. I didn't know it until after he was gone, but he had cancer. By the time he went to the doctor it had metastasized throughout his body. It was too late. Sammy told me that nothing but the job was going to kill him and he made sure of that. You've heard of suicide by cop? His was suicide by perp. He knew what he was doing.”
Zach thought of Sammy lying on the floor, his blood seeping out of his body, his pride in being able to claim he knew the perp was armed. That pride hadn't been about his prowess as a cop but his ability to predict the means of his own demise. Damn Sammy. All these years he'd been blaming himself when Sammy had gotten exactly what he wanted.
“Let me ask you,” she continued. “What were his last words to you?”
“To take care of you, that you were my responsibility.”
“Is that really what he said or are you embellishing it?”
“He said, âShe's yourâ' He didn't finish.”
“He wasn't asking you to look after me, he was giving me to you.”
Zach stared back at her, his brain reeling from all she'd told him. He'd been blind to all of it, all except Alex's feelings for him. As the difference in their ages seemed to mean less and less, he'd begun to feel the same things, too. He'd wanted her, and when she'd offered herself to him, he hadn't put up much of a fight. He hadn't understood that it was part of Sammy's master plan. But now he couldn't help but wonder if she would have given herself to him if she hadn't been programmed to do it. She might have hated her father, but she'd done what he wanted anyway.
It was too much information for his mind to process with any insight. He was bone-weary in more than a physical way. He stood, pulling her up along with him. “Let's go to bed,” he said.
She nodded and let him lead her back to the bed. Once they were settled, he kissed her forehead. “Good night, Alex,” he whispered, but he didn't touch her that night, except to hold her until she fell asleep. He stayed awake a long time after, his brain too busy to sleep.
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