The Whole Truth (16 page)

Of course. I had forgotten about the problem of a killer's ego. Of course, he wouldn't want to admit that anybody could exert any power over his own thoughts, except him. He wouldn't want to make himself that vulnerable; only victims were supposed to do that. And yet the fact that he has mentioned it at all meant that he had been thinking about it.

I remained seated until the door snapped shut behind them.

This could take forever, was my thought, and it might not be worth anything when I got it. And yet, it was well known that sociopaths often started their reign of pain with small animals. Dogs and cats were common, easy targets. Did the memory of a cocker spaniel make Ray feel uncomfortable for just that sort of reason?

No, I argued with myself, because if the memory of torturing an animal made him feel uncomfortable, he couldn't be defined as a sociopath, could he? These things could get very circular, and the more books on psychology I read and the more analysts I met, the more round and round I went sometimes. It was a good thing I could quote the "experts" in my books, because my own opinions about these things were as firm as tapioca pudding.

All I knew was that I was going to have a hard time creating a real-sounding life out of, "Dog. Orange and white."

I made a bet with his lawyer that he'd do it.

For the session of hypnotic regression, Ray sat with his legs sprawled on the raised bottom of a reclining chair, with his fingers splayed on the armrests, and his eyes closed.

And what a strange session that was.

After taking Ray through a relaxation exercise, the psychologist said, in her literally hypnotic voice, "With your eyes closed, look down at your feet. What do you see?"

Ray laughed. "Little feet. Little white feet. Bare."

"Now move your gaze up your body. What do you see?"

"It's like a dress, only it's not. I don't know why. Does this mean I'm really a girl?" The question was sarcastic.

"Don't worry about what it means." The doctor's voice was relaxed, neutral, resonant. It reverberated in the listener's chest like the low notes from a cello. 'Just be there. See what you see. Do you think it's a little girl's dress?"

"No. Feels like a boy. But why's he wearing a dress?"

"I'm going to ask you to look around you now, and see if you can see anybody else who is there. Do that now."

"A lady."

"Try to see her face. Does she look like anybody you know?"

"Yeah, sure, she looks like that movie star. Cool."

"Movie star. Do you know her name?"

"Can't think of it."

"Are you saying anything to each other?"

"She's jabbering about something, I don't know what. Oh, I'm in bed, she's by the side of my bed. Yum."

"How do you feel toward her?"

"Ooh, I want to kiss her. I love her, and she loves me."

"Okay, so you're a little boy in bare feet wearing something that seems like a dress."

"I'm not wearing a fucking dress."

'Just relax into it. It can't do you any harm. Just let it be as it is. You're perfectly safe in this deep place. Now I'm going to jump you forward in time to the next thing that happens. I will count backward from three to one, and when I reach one, you will be there. Three. Two. One. You're there. What is happening?"

"I see her. Through a window. She's leaving. No! Don't leave without me! I want to go, too! Mommy, wait for me!"

"She's your mother?"

"I guess."

"And you're standing at the window watching her leave?"

"No, I'm running after her."

"Where is she going?"

"Into some trees."

Ray looked on the verge of saying something else, but then didn't. Even with his eyes closed, his face looked as if he were watching something with great intensity. Again, he appeared about to speak, but then he held his tongue, and looked as if he were fixated on some scene playing inside his eyelids.

"I'm going to jump forward again—"

"Somebody's calling me."

"Yes? Calling your name?"

'Jimmy! Jimmy. Where are you? They're all really worried. Everybody's looking for me. They think I'm lost."

"Are you lost?"

"No, I found her."

"What's happening now that you've found her?"

"She's dead. All dead."

"Your mom? How did she die?"

"Don't know."

"How do you feel when you see she's dead?"

"I don't understand dead."

"Yes, you're a child. Is there sadness?"

"I don't understand why she won't get up. Wet."

"Wet? Is she wet? Your mom? Did she drown?"

"We're in water, not very deep, like a swamp. I have to go get help for her."

"You're leaving her to find help?"

"Yeah."

"Do you find it?"

"No, they find me. My dad cries and gives me a big hug."

"Try to see his face. Does he look like anybody you know?"

"Weird. That other movie star. The dead one. I don't know his name, either."

"What's going on now?"

"Everybody's been real worried and searching for me. They thought I died. The whole town is happy to find me. But my dad feels bad 'cause my crazy mom is dead."

"Crazy? She was insane?"

"Yeah, nuttier than a fruitcake."

"But you're safe now, in your father's arms?"

"Yeah."

The psychologist chose that moment to bring Ray up out of the hypnotic trance. Afterward, while Ray still reclined in the armchair, the doctor complimented him. "You are a very talented trance subject. It's rare for people to do so well the first time. They don't usually go so deep so fast. Only about fifteen percent of my clients do as well as you just did. It was a pleasure to work with you."

"Great," Ray said, in a mocking tone.

"Ray, think back over this experience, if you will. And tell me, do you make any connections with something in your present life?"

"Yeah, I'd like to kiss a movie star."

The consensus in the crime unit immediately after the hypnosis session was that Ray had put one over on them again. The story starred yet another devoted mother, even if she was crazy, and not perfect. One more idealized dad. And the romance of everybody in an entire town concerned over the welfare of poor little Ray.

"Could be worse," Paul Flanck observed. "This time he could be telling us about something he really did. Like, maybe he killed a woman. Maybe his own mother."

"In water," Robyn contributed. "A swampy area."

"Someplace on earth," Paul added, sarcastically.

"Big help," his partner said. "Maybe if we'd gotten her name and the so-called dad, maybe we'd have something."

"Right, like they're real," he joked.

"It feels familiar to me," she insisted. "I wonder what movie stars he was thinking of?"

The hypnotherapist—a woman in her fifties— listened to the young detectives debating this and said with an air of amused disbelief, "Haven't you guys ever heard of Rain-tree County"

They drove to a video sales and rental store, feeling foolish.

There among "The Classics" was their answer, all right: Raintree County. Robyn picked up the cardboard cover and handed it over to Paul so he could also see the two young and beautiful faces pictured on it: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, the "actor who died."

When they viewed it, there was the storyline just as Ray had spun it out under hypnosis: The scene of a small boy named Jimmy, in a nightshirt that looked like a dress, which was the sort of thing all children used to wear to bed. He was in bed, as his "crazy" mother told him goodbye, though the child didn't comprehend she meant "forever." There he was running to his bedroom window. Catching a glimpse of her as she vanished into the forest. Running out of his room, out the front door and across the wide lawn, chasing her.

The detectives watched it with their mouths hanging open, shaking their heads in wonder and dismay at their strange, fantasizing suspect.

"There it is!" Robyn pointed at the screen. "Elizabeth Taylor's dead in the swamp! Just like Ray said. And there are all the townspeople out searching for the boy. And here come's Dad."

Montgomery Clift, she meant.

"Jimmy" was a fictional child in a movie recalled by a murder suspect with the same surname as the title of the film.

"Strange days," remarked Paul Flanck.

On the screen, the Montgomery Clift character, who was named 'John," said, in a resigned and disillusioned voice, "There is no Rain Tree."

"You said that right, Monty," Paul cracked. He turned toward Robyn and me. "What's that old-timey word for ghost?"

"Haint?" Robyn offered. "Shade? Specter?"

"That's it. Maybe that's what we've got jailed up. Not a man, or a real human being. A specter. Wooo."

Robyn thought of another line of dialogue in the movie they had just watched. At one point, a character said of the little boy who was missing, "He hasn't been found yet. " And Robyn thought, The real Ray Raintree hasn't been found yet, either.

There were other uncanny quotes from the movie that haunted her, too, such as: "Another day of corpse-making:," and "Tomorrow you're starting a journey to a place called hell. "

They wished they knew what it all meant.

It was right after this that a well-known, local criminal attorney by the name of Leanne English walked into the Howard County Jail one day and announced that she wished to see "my client, Raymond Raintree." When that wish was conveyed to him, "her client" snarled that he'd never heard of her.

"I have been hired to represent him," Leanne shot back.

"Who by?" was Ray's next response.

"None of his business," his new attorney said, and she added for the benefit of the jailer who was carrying these messages back and forth, "or yours, either."

She got in to see him, and that put an immediate end to any experimental psychology, or writer interviews, or statements of any kind from the defendant to anybody but her and her minions. Raymond Raintree was now the property of Sounder, McKee, Morrison and English.

5

Raymond

"Normally, I don't enter a murder case until the trial," I tell Franklin over a plateful of the cheese and vegetable omelette he has brought into my office. He takes his own plate and sits down with it on the apricot leather love seat across from my desk. "If I were doing this book my usual way, I wouldn't even have met you until then."

He seems endlessly fascinated in how I work.

Of course, that makes me endlessly fascinated in him.

"That's when I start covering it in person," I continue, "but I start to research the case long before that, and I also start to correspond with the principals. Like you. I write letters to the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the detectives, as well as to the victim's and murderer's families and friends."

"What do you say?"

"I just introduce myself. I also write to the killer. I have to begin to establish a level of trust that will convince all of those people to let me into their lives."

"You seem to have established it quite well with me."

We smile at each other, coconspirators.

"You're the best omelette maker in the whole world."

"That's why I trust you, because you have exquisite taste."

He wants to know why I haven't done this book my usual way.

"Because it happened in my own hometown," I say. "I knew you by reputation. I'd met Paul and Robyn previously when I did some research at the police department. Judge Flasschoen was a familiar name to me, just from reading the newspaper, and so was Leanne. So it didn't seem necessary to wait for the trial when all I had to do was drive downtown to interview most of you. The only people I didn't know anything about were the McCullens and Ray. Plus, I thought that if I started the interviews early, I would get the book done faster.

"Greed," I now confess. "That's why I did it."

He knows how worried I am now about meeting my deadline.

I broke my own rules, and got intimately involved with the case much sooner than I normally do. And much more intimately, obviously. In spite of that, the whole process seemed much like any other book, until I got to the defense attorneys, but I don't feel that I can tell the state's attorney about that without betraying Ray's lawyers.

Instead of writing to Leanne English, I had just picked up the phone.

"Sounder, McKee, Morrison and English."

"Hello. I'd like to speak to Leanne English, or to her secretary, please."

"Just a moment..."

"I'm Ms. English's secretary, may I help you?"

"Hello. Yes, I hope so. My name is Marie Lightfoot, and I am writing a book about the Natalie Mae McCullen murder case. I would like to set up an appointment to speak with Ms. English about the case."

"I'm sorry but Ms. English is not doing interviews."

"Do you mean, about that case, or about anything at all?"

"I really can't say."

"I don't want to ask her to reveal anything that might compromise her case, I just want to—"

"I'm sorry, but I've been instructed to say, no interviews."

I didn't want to antagonize the secretary. "All right. I understand. Thank you—"

"Ms. Lightfoot? Are you the Marie Lightfoot?"

I smiled at the phone. "I guess I am."

"Oh, this is so exciting! I've read all your books. Are you really going to write a book about this case?"

"Well, thank you. Yes, I am. That's why I need to interview your boss."

"Oh, I wish I could help you, but I can't."

The woman sounded genuinely sorry.

"I understand. Do you think there's any flexibility in their position? If you told them I'm trustworthy as Fort Knox, would that help?"

"No, I'm really sorry."

"It's okay. Thanks anyway."

"If they changed their minds, would you put me in the book?"

My hope lifted again. "I'd even spell your name right."

The secretary laughed, and sounded pleased as she said, "Well, I'll try, I'll really try to get them to change their minds."

"Do you know who hired them?"

"No." Suddenly the friendly secretary turned to stone. The word came abruptly, and was just as quickly followed by, "Goodbye."