Killer (4 page)

“At the end. On the left.”

I follow the tilt of his head, past one deserted office after another, thinking
there is either a lot of crime today or none at all.
At the last office on the left, I find a fit guy in his forties with premature gray hair and—at last—a shoulder holster. He looks up as I stop at the door.

“Detective Marsh?” I extend my hand. “Jack Rhodes.”

Marsh rises and shakes my hand. “Thanks for coming out, Mr. Rhodes. Can I get you anything?” He is already on the move, leading me out the door. I turn to follow, but before I leave I notice a dog-eared copy of
Killer
on the credenza behind his desk.

I follow Marsh back through the office rabbit-hole and out into the empty corridor. He walks down the corridor and stops and unlocks a door and opens it for me to enter ahead of him. The door has a small window at eye level which is reinforced with steel wire, and when it closes behind us I hear the bolt sliding back automatically, locking us in.

“Have a seat, Mr. Rhodes.” Marsh indicates a metal chair at a metal table with a faux walnut top. There are two other chairs across the table. There is nothing else in the little room. No phone, no clock, not even a wastebasket.

Marsh takes one of the chairs across the table from me. He has a manila folder in his hand, which he places on the table between us. He pulls a piece of paper from the folder and reads it for a moment. His eyes are small and gray and his face is smooth and hairless, with a preternatural tan. The silence becomes uncomfortable.

“So how can I help you, Detective?”

Marsh sits back and looks at me. We both let the moment play out until he puts the piece of paper down and squares it carefully against his manila folder and decides to speak.

“Do you know a woman named Beverly Grace?” he asks.

The name is familiar.
But from where?

“…No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

Marsh looks at me with what I realize is his poker face. His interrogation face
.

“You sure?”

Then it hits me: Beverly Grace was the name I chose for the murder victim in my first book.
But I changed her name…

“I’m sure,” I say. “What’s this about?”

Marsh leans back and laces his hands behind his head like he’s shooting the breeze with his buddies: “They’re building a bunch of condos out near Temescal Canyon, in the Palisades. Fucking developers just won’t stop, you know,” Marsh smiles, his eyes not leaving mine, looking for my response. “Four months ago, a backhoe digging the sewer lines dug up a woman’s body.”

Marsh reaches into the folder and takes out a photograph and slides it across the table to me: a nude, headless woman’s body in a hole in the ground. What’s left of her skin is shriveled around her bones like wrinkled, rotted brown wrapping paper and her arms end in handless stumps.

Jesus. That’s how I killed the victim in the first book. Decapitated. Hands cut off…

I push the photo back across the table and Marsh is watching me. I know I am one of hundreds of people who have sat in this chair in this little room and looked across this table at this man with the small gray eyes. I am one of hundreds of suspects, victims, witnesses, snitches, bystanders, dead-ends, and liars of every stripe.

“Took forensics forever to figure out who the woman was. Then one of our Assistant DA’s mentioned the case to his wife, who happens to be a big fan of yours, and she gave me your book.
Killer
, it’s called?”

“That’s right.”

“In your book, the killer murders a woman with a similar name. Cuts off her head and her hands and buries her in Temescal Canyon, right?”

I feel the blood drain from my face.
I had forgotten that it was Temescal Canyon in the book. A shallow grave…

Arnie was right. I don’t need this.

“That’s right,” I tell him.

Marsh just sits there. He lets the silence fill the room again.

“So you think this is some kind of…elaborate copycat…” I begin, then I hear a key unlock the door and in walks my old friend, Cloudy Necktie. From the Infirmary. Five years older, and a much more somber necktie.

“I asked my associate to join us. You’ve met Detective Larson,” Marsh says.

Larson looks at me and nods. I nod back, noticing a manila folder in his hand. Nobody says anything. I turn back to Marsh.

“So you think this is somebody copycatting the murder in my first book?” I intend it as a statement but it comes out as a question. I notice the small of my back becoming damp.

“Well, we just have some questions for you, Mr. Rhodes,” Marsh says casually, tipping his chair back on its rear legs.
Just a couple of guys shootin’ the shit.

“Sure.”

“In your book, a woman named Grace Beverly is decapitated, her hands are cut off, and she is buried in Temescal Canyon.”

“That’s right.”

“Now we find a woman named Beverly Grace decapitated, hands cut off, buried in Temescal Canyon.”

“I understand. So you think someone has used my book as a…to copycat the murder in the book.”

Larson sits on the edge of the table too close to me, his arms crossed, facing me.

“Can I ask you something, Mr. Rhodes?” Larson’s voice is harsher, raspier than I remember. “Where do you get your ideas? For your books.”

Again that question.

“I make them up,” I reply. The two detectives look at me, allowing the silence to swell.

“What’s going on?” I ask. “Some nut decided to mimic a murder in one of my books. This is why you wanted me to come out here?” I look at both of them, getting irritated with the silent treatment.

Larson looks down at his shoes. I notice he wears no wedding ring. Maybe I was wrong about the Father’s Day necktie. His jacket sleeve is stained at the cuff and there is a button hanging loose. Divorce is more likely.

“Your first book,
Killer
, was published in 2002?” Marsh asks me.

“That’s right, in February.” 2/2/02 was the day Arnie called to tell me the book was going to press, the date fixed forever in my memory.

“Beverly Grace was reported missing in 2001,” Marsh says.

I stare at Marsh, trying to comprehend this. I can’t.

“A year
before
your book came out,” Larson helps me with the math.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“We’re a little confused about it, too,” Marsh says. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you. See if you had any ideas.” Marsh rocks further back on two legs and laces his fingers behind his head again, looking at me steadily.

“I have no idea…” I shake my head. “There must be some mistake.”

“Do you remember where you were or what you might have been doing back in the summer of 2001?” Larson asks.

“No. I don’t.”

“You were drinking a lot, weren’t you?” Larson has a slight smirk now. I resist the urge to get up and twist his face into a different expression.

“At least, that’s what we know from the file we have on your arrest,” Larson adds, opening
his
manila folder. “The murder charge? Richard Bell?”

“Right,” I say. “You charged me with a murder I didn’t commit, I do remember that.”

“And the juvie arrest, in West Covina,” Larson says, reading my file. “Assault and battery on one Carlos Vasquez, age 19. Wanna tell us about that?”

“I grew up in a bad neighborhood. I blame the schools.”

“You put a gangbanger in the hospital.”

“And this is the thanks I get.”

“So you’re a badass,” Larson gives me the hard stare. In a weird way it calms me down. Guys like Larson are easy. Their only weapon is fear.

“I don’t like bullies,” I say.

“That why you broke Vasquez’s jaw?”

“The only way to quell a bully is to thrash him,” I say.

Larson glares at me, his face getting pink. He reads from my file again. “Third place Golden Gloves regional welterweight…”

“Second place. If you’re gonna intimidate me with expunged juvie records, at least get your facts right.”

Larson’s jaw muscles start flexing. He wants to hit me so bad
I
can taste it.

“Alright, take it easy,” Marsh lets his chair down on all four legs and leans toward me, his elbows on the table, his steady stare unchanged. Guys like Marsh are harder to deal with. They don’t rattle. They don’t try to intimidate. If Marsh boxed he’d be an out-fighter, keeping his distance, controlling the pace of the match and methodically wearing his opponent down.

“Let’s take it a step at a time,” Marsh says. “You published your book in February of ‘02. But you obviously wrote it before then.”

“Of course.”

“When did you write it?”

“A year or so before. I don’t remember the exact date I finished.”

“Do you remember when you submitted the manuscript to a publisher? Did you give it to a friend before then, or an agent? Another writer, maybe?” Marsh asks.

“My agent read it and he submitted it to several publishers. If you want names and exact dates you’ll have to ask him. Or my attorney,” I add, just to say the word aloud in the room. “But I finished it in the spring.”

“In 2001?” Marsh asks.

“Yes.”

Marsh nods slightly. Then we go back to the silence. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic.

“Was your book based on any…personal experience?” Larson asks.

“Of course not. It’s fiction.”

“We recognize that,” Marsh says affably. “We just have a set of unusual circumstances here and we’re covering all the bases.”

“You said she was reported missing in 2001,” I say.

“Right,” Marsh says.

“Was that when she was killed?” I ask.

“Hard to say,” Marsh admits. “Forensics is still breaking it down.”

“Well, all I can tell you is I wrote the book and sent it off to my agent sometime in the spring of 2001 and it was published in February ‘02 and that’s it,” I say. My shirt is sticking to my back and I want out of this little room with these two men. “Is that it? Because I have some other business in town I need to deal with before I go back to Vermont.”

They glance at each other.

“We’re just trying to put together a time line,” Marsh has left the crime scene photo turned toward me so I can look at it: a headless, handless corpse these men have to account for. A real woman who had family and friends and boyfriends, a young woman living her life until…

Then Marsh does something I have seen detectives do before. He slips out another photograph: an 8x10 of Beverly Grace, alive and happy. He places it right next to the police photo of her decayed, mutilated corpse so I can see them side by side.

I open my mouth to tell them I know this trick. I have the words already formed in my head:
I know what you’re trying to do, Detective, but it won’t work on me because I don’t know this woman
—

And then it hits me.

I
do
know her.

The photograph—the happy one—the high school yearbook photo...

I know this picture.

The back of my neck chills as I look at Beverly Grace’s smiling face before me.
I know this girl—class of ’97. Long, straight hair. A brunette with large, sweet eyes and a soft, oval, pretty face and that black turtleneck sweater with the delicate gold cross hanging around her neck on a gold chain as fine as angel hair…

The room constricts and I can’t focus on anything but that picture…that face that I know, even though I have never seen it.

But I
have
seen it.

My heart shifts into high gear and needles of panic prickle up and down my arms and legs. I look at the detectives and I can tell they see the hot flush on my skin. They have become still, watching me. I have to get out of here.

I stand up.

“If you want to talk to me any more about this I think you should call my lawyer in New York,” I say.

They stare at me like I’m Charles Manson. I turn to the door and wait
.
My hands are shaking.

“Mr. Rhodes,” Marsh begins—

“We’re done,” I cut him off. “Either let me out of here now or get my lawyer,” I say the magic words.

Finally Larson gets up and unlocks the door and I am free. I walk down the empty corridor as fast as I can without running, my heart hammering in my chest.

“We’ll be in touch, Mr. Rhodes,” Marsh calls after me as I head down the empty corridor.

THINGS PAST

The first thing he noticed when he awoke was that, for the first time, he could no longer stretch out fully on the floor of the closet. He was eight years old now and he knew it. He knew because that’s what the Witch told Social Services when they came and made him start school. He had begun first grade at age eight. He was older than the other children but he was small and frail for his age, and incapable of social interaction. He was given an IQ test his first week of school and the teachers were astonished. He scored 168—higher than any student they had ever seen—but he only lasted another six weeks before he was expelled. He had written a story about cutting the head off a girl in his class who had refused to talk to him. He liked the girl because she looked like the Angel, with her blue eyes and pale skin. But when he finally mustered the courage to speak to her she ignored him and he became enraged. He knew he couldn’t hurt her or he would be in trouble and the Witch would beat him. So he wrote about cutting her head off and found himself in trouble anyway. And the Witch burned him with cigarettes and beat him with an extension cord until his back was striped with bright red blood.

He had come to accept the beatings in silence, his eyes dry and vacant. Any form of attention was a relief compared to the closet. He couldn’t bear the isolation, tossed into the dark place like the soiled laundry that made his bed. That’s what enraged him about the girl at school. She didn’t mock him or lash out at him—she ignored him.

The second thing he noticed when he woke was a new feeling. He had dreamt of being held naked in the arms of the Angel and as he came awake he found himself with his first erection. He explored himself in the darkness, looking up at the Angel. He whispered things to the Angel—sweet things of childlike longing—and she responded in kind. He had spoken with her many times since she sang to him that first time, on his fifth birthday. He loved her so. She listened. She responded. Now the feeling became more intense, and he knew he could never, ever live without her.