Dark Specter (14 page)

“Rachael, he’s dead. He must be. It’s just a matter of time before they find the body. I’m sorry, but there’s no point in either of us trying to pretend otherwise. It merely delays the process of healing.”

I suppose I sounded sanctimonious and insincere. She gave me a withering look.

“He’s always been dead to you,” she said. “You never wanted a child in the first place.”

There was some truth in this, although the moment David was born and I held him in my arms, what I had or had not wanted became irrelevant. But Rachael had never forgiven me for not responding the way she had hoped when she announced that she was pregnant. Now she was taking her revenge.

“It doesn’t matter what you or the police think,” she went on with an icy calm. “I
know
David is alive. That woman is just trying to throw me off the trail. She knows I’ve seen her, and that sooner or later I’ll catch up with her. She’s trying to make me despair and give up. Well, it won’t work. She may have fooled everyone else, but she can’t fool me. I’ll never abandon David whatever happens. Never.”

Nor did she. When her fanatical faith finally deserted her, she joined him.

Two days later Rachael went to visit with her mother. When she didn’t return, I called and discovered that she had left the house at six. It was now almost nine. When another hour passed with no sign of her, I alerted the police, but there was little they could do at that time of night. Even when a full search began, it was two days before they found her body in the car, parked in a clearing off a back road in a state forest thirty miles out of town.

Maybe it was that final conversation with her mother that finally broke the self-induced spell which had been protecting Rachael. By now the story of David’s bloodstained garments had appeared in the papers and on TV, and Rachael’s mom—a matter-of-fact midwesterner from a German farming family—must have drawn the same conclusions as everyone else, and would not have hesitated to tell her so. Rachael’s comforting illusions could survive my skepticism, but she was defenseless against her own mother. Having postponed the reckoning with the truth for so long, she was swept away when it finally occurred. On the way back from her mother’s she stopped at a pharmacy and filled the repeat prescription for sedatives which the doctor had given her a few days earlier. Then she went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka, and drove to the lonely glade in those woods and consumed them both.

I had already been through so much chat Rachael’s death merely confirmed me in my state of total numbness. I seemed to have been exiled to a zone beyond feeling, and I never expected to return. In the end I did, but gradually, and with frequent relapses. It was two months before I started to feel even fitfully normal, or rather to realize how abnormal I had been feeling for so long. It was another month after that—much of which time I spent with my parents back East—before I could even think about picking up the threads of my life. As soon as I did, I realized that they were like the threads of David’s shirt: slashed and drenched in blood.

Take the Chevy Nova, for instance. It was no longer a car but Rachael’s death chamber. How could I use it to drive to work or to stock up and save at Safeway? I soon realized that the house would have to go too. Every square inch was mined with memories, any one of which was enough to blow my fragile sanity to shreds. I put it on the market and moved into a rented apartment downtown. The idea was to put what had happened behind me and start again in a new place, with new friends and a new life. The college had given me the rest of the semester off, as much to avoid unwelcome publicity as anything else, I suspected. With the summer vacation coming up, I had several months in which to pull myself together and—the phrase seemed appropriate for some reason—“get my head together.”

Instead I fell apart more completely than ever before. For days at a time I didn’t even get out of bed. I unplugged the phone, which brought a succession of calls from oversolicitous people wanting to know how I was “getting along.” I didn’t open my mail or read the papers. I turned the television to face the wall and left the drapes drawn all day long. Dishes and clothes went unwashed. I hardly ate.

At the time I thought I was just having another relapse into the shock and grief which had overwhelmed me for so long. I realize now that it was more than that. What had happened was hard enough to deal with in itself, but it also called into question everything I had been doing in the years before, and what I was going to do now. Ever since awakening from the acid dream, I had dedicated myself to coming to terms with the realities of life. I had traded in the cheap thrills of my youth for a package which, so I believed, would make up in security and substance for what it might lack in other respects.

Despite the high tone I had taken with Sam, the truth was that this had not always been easy. I had married Rachael because she seemed to epitomize the solidity I was searching for, but there were times when this very fact made her seem an unappealing mate. Our sex life had never been better than perfunctory, and fell apart completely after her abortive second pregnancy, but I had been faithful to her out of principle. My job often seemed little more than an obstacle course designed to test my endurance to the limit, but I’d stuck at that too.

And the result? A woman had staged a fake birthday party in order to abduct a child, any child, and that child was mine. Both David and Rachael had been taken from me, and the whole way of life I had given up so much to preserve had been destroyed. I felt as if I was being mocked for ever having tried to do the decent thing.

There was no way I could simply start again. I had lost my faith, and had nothing to replace it with. After what had happened, I could no longer believe that responsibility, self-sacrifice and hard work were their own modest reward. But I had invested so much time and energy in that illusion that I no longer believed in anything else either. The result was a paralysis of the will which was reflected in the weeks I spent in that apartment, staring at a wall as blank as my own mind.

I was roused briefly from my lethargy by the news that our house had been sold. I made arrangements for a moving company to strip the place of our possessions and put them in storage until I felt able to deal with the task of going through them and deciding what to do with everything. The day before the movers came, I drove over to Maplewood to remove a few more clothes and sort through my papers and documents for anything I might need. While doing so, I happened to come across the bar receipt on which Sam had written his name and phone number. The area code was 206. I looked it up in the phone book. It covered the western half of Washington State.

That chance discovery sparked an idea which firmed up into a project over the course of the next few weeks.

O
ne Saturday evening in May Kristine Kjarstad got back from dinner at Ray’s Boathouse with a couple of gay friends and a woman called Betty whose sister had just had an operation for cancer, and who needed cheering up, to find a message on her voice mail.

“Hi, Kirsty, it’s Steve. Listen, if you’re around, tune in to Channel 13 right away.
America’s Most Wanted
is doing a scene that’s just like that Sullivan case, and I figure if the Kansas City cops can get air time, then why not us? Give me a call when you get in, I want to see the rest of it.”

Kristine gave a sigh of relief. Steve Warren’s burning ambition to get on television was one of the many features of her partner which failed to endear him to her, but her first thought had been that the message was from her ex-husband. Thomas was spending the night at his house, which gave Kristine a chance to go out. The price she paid in return was giving Eric the chance to nag her about some detail of the way she was bringing up their son.

It was now four years since she’d thrown Eric out, having belatedly realized that he was never going to change his ways. He’d appeared genuinely astonished by her decision, and maybe even more by the fact that she’d finally got around to making one. That had always been
his
role in the relationship. He’d picked Kristine out at college, where he was majoring in dentistry and she in social science, and dated her assiduously for two years. Once they both graduated, he had proposed and she’d said why not, even though the idea of her marrying a Swede hadn’t gone down too well with her Norwegian family. Looking back at it now, Kristine could see that she had passively bought into his program all along. What she didn’t understand, even now, was why.

Once they were married, Eric had been the one to decide where they should live, who their friends should be, which restaurant or movie to go to, even the most appropriate moment for having a child. Kristine had followed the path of least resistance, standing idly by while he organized every aspect of their life with the same obsession for detail that he lavished on his patients’ dental problems. In a weak, Pollyanna-ish way that now made her shudder, she had kept telling herself that things would soon get better. He would mellow out once they were engaged, once they were married, once they’d settled down, once they started a family. It had taken her eight years to realize that she was living with a control freak. Underneath the masterful exterior which had charmed her at first lay a deeply disturbed individual, weak and anxious, with a compulsion to organize every single aspect of his own life, and that of everyone around him. By the time they finally separated, they were like the impacted branches of trees which have grown too close together, both distorted, both rubbed raw.

But even though Kristine had got him out of the house, she couldn’t get him out of her life. When you have a child, you not only give a hostage to fortune but also to a person you may eventually come to wish you’d never met. With Thomas as a pretext and go-between, Eric could continue to exercise a measure of creepy control over Kristine for the foreseeable future, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Sometimes Thomas relayed the messages himself. “Dad says you shouldn’t cook hamburger so often, it’s full of cholesterol.” Sometimes they came by phone. “I see Thomas is only in the ninety-fifth percentile in English. How rigorously do you supervise his homework? He seems to be spending a lot of his time watching TV.” So although Kristine had no particular wish to feed Steve Warren’s fantasies of fame and fortune, she felt a measure of warmth toward him simply for not being Eric, and called him back to explain that she had been out all evening. Steve Warren cut her off.

“As soon as I started watching it I thought, hey, this sounds familiar. The MO was pretty much identical. Two guys and a woman get blown away in a walk-up. Twenty-two to the back of the head, victims bound and gagged, nothing taken, no sex angle, no prints, no clues, no manifest perp. Jesus, you should have seen the homicide dick hamming it up for the cameras. You could tell he was just
loving
it. Like, ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me!’”

“When did this happen?”

“Couple of months ago. Takes them a while to set it up and do the filming, I guess.”

“Too bad I was out.”

“No prob, I taped it. Got a library of every episode dating back to March of 1989, all except one where my VCR went ape and chewed up the tape. I’ll bring it over tomorrow and we can talk about putting together a package to send them. Someone told me one of the segment directors lives right here, on Mercer Island. We could go over there, pitch it to him direct. Hey, we could be stars! The camera’s gonna love you, babe.”

Kristine Kjarstad viewed the video the following evening. The next morning, she put in a call to the Kansas City Police and after some delay got to speak to Fred Poison, the detective who had handled the case. He insisted on calling her back at the office, just to check that she was who she claimed to be. Once this had been established, Poison was ready enough to talk, but it soon emerged that he was skeptical of the alleged parallels between the two cases and suspicious of his caller’s motives in trying to establish one.

“You’re talking what sounds like a straightforward domestic, Ms. Kjarstad, except you can’t come up with the goods on the guy. This one here’s something completely different. You see the show? Did a great job, huh? Course they had my complete input the whole time, not just the parts where I was on camera. Anyway, what we’ve got is an old man, his daughter who was visiting, and the guy they had in to paint the kitchen. Right? These guys arrive at the door, tie them up, blow them away and then just disappear. I mean it’s like in a different class, you know? Which is why the TV people decided to go for us instead of you guys.”

Kristine frowned.

“Mr. Poison, did you already receive a call from someone in this department?”

“Guy name of Warren? And I told him just the same as I’m—”

“Can I just clarify something? Whatever my coworker may have said or implied, this is my case and I’m not interested in TV exposure. OK? I couldn’t compete anyway. You’re a natural, Mr. Poison, and just let me say that your necktie looked
great
. We don’t see many bolo ties here in Seattle, not the real classy ones.”