Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (43 page)

That's all.

He doesn't know his own strength. Isn't aware of the dynamics involved, how little it takes, or he wouldn't do it,
no way
would he do a thing like that.

Just his palm. His open palm, his palm and the juncture between his thumb and forefinger. He's not strangling her. He's not smothering her. He's just making his point.
How does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot?
he demands.
You tried to hang that puppy, you puppy-hanging sonofabitch, so
now
how does it feel?

Don't. Ever. Do. That. Again.

Five words.

Pushing the palm of his hand into her throat for emphasis. That's all, really, all he is doing. It's just for emphasis.

Emphasis.

________

Steve sat in the living room of his grandfather's cabin. It was late afternoon. The dog was in the other room. The man was gone, if he had ever existed. It was just Steve, alone in the dark, trying to make sense of what he had seen and heard.

Had it been a dream? Was he still dreaming?

He did not believe he had it in himself to kill someone, least of all a little girl. It couldn't be true.

But on some deep level, like batter pouring slowly onto a flat surface, the realization spread across the breadth of his soul, until in fact he really
did
believe it.

He'd seen the act he had committed—seen it clearly—but now it was going, almost gone. He knew it had happened. It was like looking at the wing of an airplane and knowing that the air flowed over and under, creating lift, even if you could see nothing but the wing and the sky.

I was drunk
.

Not just drunk, he amended. Blacked out.
All these years, I had no real memory of what happened
.

There were fragments. The cookout. The beer. If his memory was reliable as to the details, he remembered the girl and the puppy. But the other things—the things The Man Without a Face had shown him—those kept slipping through the sieve of his memory. They were hard to grasp. They were evaporating like mist burned off by the sun.

He could articulate what he did. He had pushed on the girl's throat and cut off her air. He assumed she had collapsed and died. He assumed he had buried her. He didn't know when that happened. He didn't know if he had debated burying her. If he had debated calling the sheriff. If he had tried to revive her. What he had felt.

All of that was gone.

There were just the flickering images of her grabbing the puppy and his outsized anger. And his hand to her throat.

He didn't know if The Man Without a Face—the younger version of himself—had told him the truth. He didn't know if he had said those words:
Don't. Ever. Do. That. Again.

Not for sure.

And after that—

It was all blank until he had awakened with a hangover.
That
, he remembered. The pain in his head excruciating. Movement excruciating. As it had been the day after he dug for her, the day after he had found her up here on the mountain. A bloated pulsing ache all over his body, drenching him in sour-smelling sweat.

Suddenly, he remembered the vision he'd had on his most recent walk up to Camp Aratauk. The image of a hotter, drier hike, the heavy backpack, the trail up from Sabino Canyon.

I never hiked up here
.

But that wasn't true, was it? He
had
hiked up here, eleven years ago. He'd hiked up here because he’d been angry.

How had he forgotten that?

He had parked his car in a Sabino Canyon parking lot and hiked all the way up from the valley floor. He'd hiked because he was angry, and he'd hoped it would take the edge off. Because of Linda and that prick Gardner.

You were so angry you left your car down below, and you hiked up a whole mountain. Hiked up Sabino Canyon, all the way to the cabin
.

Now he remembered. He remembered it clearly.

Your anger was like fuel. That was what got you through that punishing hike in one-hundred-degree temperatures, the water running out halfway up. But you knew there would be plenty to drink up on top, all you had to do was get to your grandfather's cabin,there would be plenty to drink—

So much to drink, he had blacked out.

The morning following his hike, he had walked into town for picnic supplies. Steak, beer, potato salad. He'd intended to have himself what his mother used to call a “pity party,” a barbecue for one. He remembered getting pleasantly snockered—again. Maybe he'd even started to feel sorry for himself, maybe he had begun to feel the full weight of the tragedy, that the woman he loved had cheated on him with that puppy-killer Bill Gardner—

After that, though—except for a brief image of the girl, the puppy, his palm pushing at her throat—it was a blank. A blank until he woke up hurting. Going in and out of a drunken sleep throughout the day and night. Waking to thunder and lightning.

The next morning, he'd felt fine. Cooking bacon and eggs, he’d seen on the television that a little girl had gone missing from an outing at Rose Canyon Lake. And still he hadn’t remembered a thing.

How could he have forgotten a whole long weekend? How could he have forgotten driving from LA to Tucson and hiking up to the cabin in the woods?

Because if I remembered any of it, I would have to remember it all.
Coming up here was a thread in the fabric. You pulled that one thread, and everything would unravel. Everything would come apart, and he would know what he had done.

He closed his eyes. More thoughts straying into range. Walking near Rose Canyon Lake. With other people. Trucks and search-and-rescue vehicles and awnings and ice chests full of bottled water, people holding hands as they walked the grid—

He had helped them search, completely unaware that he had been the man who had killed that little girl and buried her up the hill from his cabin. All that time—

I didn't know
.

But he knew now, didn't he? It was like the wing of that airplane, shuddering slightly in the air. You couldn't see the drawn arrows above and below it, but it didn't mean they weren't there.

Steve wondered if he had really met Jenny's ghost or if she was a figment of his imagination. Was she real or was she Memorex? The detective, Laura Cardinal, had asked him why his grandfather had crammed that particular newspaper page up into the rafters.

Maybe
he
did it.

Maybe he did it to prove his guilt to himself.

And the collar. The collar in the shed. Did he put it there? Did he bury the book? Did he break into his own shed in a fugue state?

What was real? What wasn't?

He flashed on the strange phone call he'd retrieved the day he saw Jenny. Had that been him, too? Calling himself?

What else had he done?

Steve couldn't remember how he found Jake. He knew what he told people. That he had found him “under the house.” But which house? Whose house?

Had Jake been the puppy Jenny tried to rescue?

Did he find Jake under the cabin up here on Mt. Lemmon?

As hard as he tried to retrieve these memories, he couldn't access them.

________

So he sits in the room, unaware of time going by. Light and shadow flickering on the wooden floor, moving with the afternoon sun. The room cooling, growing darker.

What he's thinking, once he's faced up to his culpability, is this: atonement. He has to get this taken care of,
done
, before he loses his courage. It is a stain, and even though the stain will never wash away, he has to pay for it. He's
ready
to pay for it.

He is ready to confess.

He feels around in the dark and turns on the lamp and picks up the phone, suddenly shaking with adrenaline, stabbing in the number, the number he now knows by heart, Laura Cardinal's cell phone.

One ring, two rings. Three. As he waits, so desperate to shift the load, to share the psychic pain, another thought crowds its way into his mind:

Wait a minute
.

I can't wait, he tells himself impatiently. I have to clear this up
now
. But somewhere inside him the tide is already going out, as it did when he was a kid on the beach and the water pulled the sand out from under his feet.

When he gets her voice mail, the phone he's holding becomes a hot potato. He hits END.

It's been eleven years. What difference will a few minutes make
?

Yes, he'll turn himself in. That's settled. But he needs to think about it. He needs to do this
right
.

For one thing, he's not entirely sure that he actually killed her. The whole thing seemed more like a dream. He can't say for sure if it was a dream or a memory.

And besides, I spent most of that time in a blackout
.

Not that this mitigates his guilt. He doesn't believe in that. But even the worst kind of criminal has someone on his side, someone there to make sure the proceedings are fair. He's far from the worst kind of criminal. He's never broken a law in his life.

He should have a lawyer. He'd be a fool if he didn't protect himself.

The phone rings in his hand. He sees the number flash on the screen.

It's her.

His resolve hardens. He thinks:
Not until I talk to a lawyer.

Outside, thunder grumbles. It may rain. It may be a real gully-washer, as his grandfather used to say.

The light seems to pool around the bronze statue, the cowboy roping the devil.

Steve knows that when he calls the lawyer, it will be tantamount to roping the devil. From that moment on, it will all be out of his hands. He thinks about how imprudent it was for the cowboy to mess with the devil at all. What did he think would happen then?

Steve's not even sure what transpired between the time he had his picnic and the time he woke up with a hangover. It's like a vivid dream. At the time you're in the dream, you tell yourself you will never forget. You even focus on a particular word or image and pledge to remember it. Then you wake up and it's gone. But in his heart, he knows there was at least a space of time that belonged to the devil—his own, personal, private devil's hour.

He has to call his lawyer. He has to
find
a lawyer. A good one. Call people he trusts, some of them friends of his grandfather, and find a lawyer who will look after his interests. He's ready to atone for his sin, but he isn't about to give anything away.

He knows a good person to call. Someone who's deeply embedded in the political infrastructure of Tucson. Someone who will be able to direct him to the right person. He picks up the phone, puts it to his ear. Hears the dial tone.

His heart almost stops in his chest. He can feel it, the dizzying fear, climbing up into his throat. He is almost physically sick.

If he does this now, it is out of his hands. He will have roped the devil, and after that, who knows what will happen?

He hears a jingle. Jake appears in the hallway, looking at him.

“Do you believe in me?” he asks Jake.

The dog says nothing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

It's late in the morning when Laura drives up the mountain. Beautiful, the sun touching the pine tops as she drives through Bear Canyon. But she doesn't feel the beauty. What she feels is regret.

No, it's deeper than that. More like she's been anticipating something so good, so wonderful, she is already sold on it—and suddenly it turns out she can't have it after all. Not only that, but now she has to destroy the very thing she wants.