Stranglehold (35 page)

While all the time the thing inside grew and grew, the sheer
need
of it constantly expanding. And eventually—if it ever did come to light—leaving its famished, wasted host to fend for himself as best he could in order to seek whoever and whatever else had come in contact with it. Family, friends, marriages.

Getting inside them too.

Even courts. Even lawyers and judges.

The parasite didn't think. It fed.

And nothing was exempt.

There was no reason involved. No intelligence to speak of in the organism.

Only hunger.

It was up to them, to the social services system and the courts, to apply reason like a poultice to a wound made by long seasons of the lack of it—while they themselves already had the thing inside them too, had already been affected.

Some of them, like herself and Judge Burke, over and over again.

It changed them. One way or another.

She wondered if any of them were really up to the job. And how the judge would find tomorrow.

She walked to her car across the darkened street. An hour's drive from home, she thought, another hour maybe to get to bed. Already she wished for sleep.

There were times she'd thought she'd like to have a husband and kids of her own someday but this was not one of them. Not with this thing inside her.

I hope they get that goddamn light fixed by tomorrow, she thought.

We need some goddamn light here.

She saw the door open and
Sansom
, Wood and Stone emerge from the judge's chambers and got up from the bench. None of them looked happy. Wood paused and said something to the other two and then walked off alone down the corridor.
Sansom
and Stone glanced at her and then seemed to avoid her eyes as they approached her.

My God.
How bad was it?

How much worse could it be?

She sat down again, unwilling to trust her legs a moment longer.
Sansom
sat to her left, Andrea Stone to her right.

"Nobody wins on this one,"
Sansom
said. He shook his head. "God."

"Tell me." Her voice sounded strange to her, hoarse, as though she'd been shouting.

"The good news is that Arthur gets no unsupervised visits whatsoever. None. Apparently the judge believed the videotape, not the recant. For my money that's the only decent part of any of this. It gives us far more leverage on appeal and ..."

"On appeal? Oh, Jesus. What do we need an appeal for, Owen?"

He glanced at Andrea Stone.

"Because you don't have custody, Lydia. I'm ... I'm really ... I'm very sorry."

She couldn't speak. She couldn't even ask him why, how it had happened. It was as though for a moment her soul had led to some safer ground than this—leaving only the shell of her sitting empty between these people. She could almost view herself seated there, her face pale in the ray of bright warm sunlight streaming through the narrow window.

"Burke's worried about what he called 'a recurrence of the mother's emotional instability.' I can't believe it, but those were his words exactly. He's still hung up on us taking Robert to those damn doctors and your denying Arthur visitation if he happened to decide to order it—even though he
didn't
order it. So what we'll have to do, what we'll have to prove, is that you're anything
but
unstable. I'm afraid that's going to take some time. I've got to be honest with you, it could be as long as six months before we can make a go at this again. In the meantime you do have visitation. Unrestricted. And Arthur doesn't. We'll document every facet of your life, round up employers, former employers, relatives, friends. One big push in, say, six months' time, and I think we can break this thing for good. We don't have to worry about Arthur anymore, only the judge. That should make things easier."

"Six ... months? Where? In that place ... that shelter? Some foster home?"

Sansom
glanced at Stone again.

"No. I know you're not going to be happy with this. Certainly we're not. But Burke's given custody to the grandparents. To Ruth and Harry. To Arthur's parents."

"He can't
do
that!"

She was aware of Andrea Stone's cool smooth hand on her forearm.

"He's done it, Lydia. With the strict provision that Arthur cannot be living with them or even be allowed to stay there overnight. I still think a foster home would be preferable and both Andrea and I argued that. But it's not at all unheard of when a judge has questions about each parent's fitness for custodianship. He'll prefer, if possible, to keep a child in the extended family. There's plenty of precedent. We argued for Barbara. But Barbara's a single working woman. I think if your own parents were alive, he'd have..."

She felt sudden rage.

"Ruth and Harry brought up a goddamn
child molester
, Owen! What the hell is he thinking? Is he
out of his fucking mind
?"

Sansom
glanced toward the judge's chambers across the hall. The door was closed but Burke was still inside there and the walls were thin.

"I think we'd better get out of here," he said. He looked up and down the empty corridor. "Go get a cup of coffee or something. This is ..."

"I don't
want
a fucking cup of coffee!"

"
Lydia!
This is exactly what we need to avoid right now! Jesus! We need to avoid it for the next six months. Do you understand me?"

She had heard of people going crazy and killing strangers out of sheer frustration and she thought she knew what they felt like now. She would have liked to walk in through that door and break a chair over Burke's face, pummel him until his mouth ran red with blood. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hurt somebody. For the first time in her life she could almost want for a gun.

"You've got to stay in control," Andrea Stone said softly. "Lydia, you
have
to."

She almost laughed.
In control
. She hadn't had control of anything since the whole thing began.

Andrea was right, though. She would have to do it for Robert.

It was all for Robert and always had been.

If the rage did not subside she at least could bank its fires for the moment.

"Let's go," she said. "Before I walk in there and tear his goddamn eyes out."

"Good idea," said Stone, "before I start thinking about helping you."

They walked out into morning sunlight. The sun felt good on her body and for a moment she was almost comforted. Then a thought occurred and she felt her stomach churn.

"Harry and Ruth," she murmured. "What does 'supervised visitation' mean, Owen? I mean, who does the supervising? Who arranges the meetings?"

"As Robert's legal guardians, they do."

''I don't trust them."

Hell, after all these years she felt she still barely knew them. But she knew they were devoted to Arthur.

"Come on, Lydia. I don't think they'd stand by and let Arthur molest their grandson,"
Sansom
said. "The
judge'll
inform them that they'd be open to criminal charges if anything remotely like that happened. And after all this ... commotion about it, I'd think they'd be pretty careful. Wouldn't you?"

"I don't know what they'd do."

What she did know was that another measure of power had just passed out of her hands. She felt its loss immensely—a loss that matched but in no way exceeded that other loss, the loss of intimacy with Robert, with her son, which would inevitably follow, the loss of all the days and nights—at least for the time it took to return him to her. She felt almost resigned to these losses. Almost, though not quite, cold enough to play the hand being dealt to her.

That didn't mean that she was resigned to being powerless. She'd watch them. And if anything happened to Robert ...
anything
...

They'd wish they'd never met her. Ruth and Harry. Arthur. All of them.

For a day and a half now Duggan had been looking for Arthur
Danse
and his big black Lincoln—ever since the Bernhardt girl came in off the highway the night before last wrapped in a trucker's blanket, raped and bruised and bleeding from a deep gash in the hand. Ever since she described a car that could easily have been Arthur's Lincoln and sat down with a troopers' composite artist to arrive at a face that, except for the softer rounded shape to the chin and the slightly higher forehead, looked remarkably like him.

He'd been looking. And coming up with nothing.

Not at Arthur's house. Not at his parents' house. And not at The Caves. There was an APB on the Lincoln but nothing had come of that yet either. His lawyer hadn't even been able to reach him with the results of the latest hearing.

Arthur
Danse
had disappeared.

And that wasn't like him.

Jake over at The Caves said that the business could pretty such run itself at this point, at least for quite a while, but Arthur was a hands-on guy when it came to his restaurant. He was in there almost every night. So why the sudden change of habits? Stress over the court's decision—which had practically branded him a baby-fucker? That was Ruth's pinion. The lady was bitter. Was he unable to show his face around town because of the publicity?

It was possible.

But just as possible—
more
possible as far as Duggan was concerned—it was because of Marge Bernhardt.

Maybe his first survivor.

He got a list from Jake on the distributors and retailers for the product line and called each of them, but they hadn't heard from
Danse
either.

Without a car to search or a suspect to question he was left with going over the minutiae of the victim's story. There was no doubt in his mind that whoever grabbed her was the same guy who'd killed the rest of these women. Anal and vaginal rape, bondage, the peeled switch which—lucky for her—he didn't get around to using, and finally the nail to the hand. Practically his signature.

That and the Van
Helsing
bit. Which he hadn't got to either.

Trouble was that the girl didn't know cars or guns or knives or
tenpenny
nails for that matter.

All they had was her composite.

In case he was wrong about
Danse
they were running that through the computers down in Concord for a possible match.
Whoorly'd
suggested that maybe he'd sold the car and they were working on that angle too.

He had plenty of other work to do right here on his desk but none of it was holding him and he had to fight the urge to just climb into his car and go cruising, go hunting for a big black Lincoln. Maybe drive by Harry and Ruth's place again. Hell, he'd do that every hour on the hour—be glad to—if he thought it would do any good.

Got to have patience, he thought. Police work is patience. You know that.

But he didn't like having Arthur among the missing.