Twisted (15 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Maura rang the bell one more time, then knocked hard on the doorjamb, thinking that maybe Doerr was in there sleeping or something. After all, who would leave their beloved pet cat in the path of a hurricane? Still, nobody answered. Maura stood there for another moment, her hands on her hips. A delicate little
meow
pierced the noise of the rain, and Maura looked down to her left.
The cat was edging its way along the foundation, staying under the eave just enough to avoid the rain. The color of old burlap with splashes of cottony white and charcoal gray in its coat, the cat was so fat its teats wagged as it walked along, its belly scraping the ground like a dust mop. The animal gazed up at Maura with that comical leeriness in its eyes that only a defanged domestic animal can summon when its hackles are up—as though it were saying,
Boy, if I were in the wild right now, you would be dead meat. Unfortunately, all I can manage at the moment is an arched back and a few feeble hissing noises
.
“Hello there,” Maura cooed, kneeling down by the obese kitty.
The cat hopped up on the porch, purring now, immediately wrapping itself around Maura's shins. Maura stroked its matted fur. The animal seemed ravenous, and maybe even a little weak. Maura picked it up. Stunned at how little it weighed, she kept softly stroking its head, murmuring softly, “Is your master home, sweetie? Huh? Is your master home?” The cat prodded its head amiably against Maura's shoulder. She looked at the animal's collar, and saw that the tag had a registration number and Michael Doerr's name, address, and phone number.
Maura glanced back at the house for a moment, pondering, considering her options.
She could easily get in through the rear screen door, and had a fairly plausible excuse now. She could pose as a concerned neighbor, worried about the imminent hurricane as well as the cat's welfare. If Doerr was in there, and caught her, she could simply say the cat had wandered into her yard or had darted out in front of her car, and she was just making sure the animal was safe.
Taking a deep breath, her decision made, Maura carried the cat around the side of the house, past a bare, soupy patch of mud that looked to have once been a vegetable garden, a plaster Holy Madonna statue sunken in the mire like some relic of a lost civilization. The backyard was mostly mud ... but still bore signs of a stubborn pride: a newly planted hedge of meticulously trimmed boxwoods, a marble birdbath by the rear door filled with fresh water.
Maura put the cat down, then pushed the tiny rubber pet door open, pressing the side of her face against the door in order to reach inside the darkness. With great, grunting effort she reached up, feeling for a latch or a knob. She had always been fairly flexible, especially as a kid, amazing people in gym class with her twisting pelvis. All at once she felt a button jutting against her index finger, and she poked it repeatedly until it gave. The door clicked suddenly, then gave slightly with a nudge from her shoulder.
The door swung open, and she was inside the kitchen, the calico curling around her boots like a little, furry motor.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
The house was as still and silent as a tomb, the dust motes hanging in the shafts of gray light shining down onto the kitchen's spotless linoleum floor like pale fire. The air smelled of mold, as did most interiors in this town, but also of cleanser and cinnamon and mint. Maura gave the shelves and sink a cursory glance, astonished at the neatness.
“Hello?”
Only the implacable silence answered, as dead and flat as a cinder block. Maura sniffed the air for a moment, seeking that telltale odor of cat shit. How could this guy have a cat and not have the faintest odor of cat piss or poop in the air? She strode across the tile floor to the adjoining hallway, the skin on the back of her neck prickling with goose bumps. An adjacent door led into a little half bathroom.
Maura peered inside the john, again gazing in awe at the tidiness. Porcelain so clean it was positively luminous. Scented candles on the back of the commode. A lovely little Toulouse Lautrec lithograph on the wall. On the floor, tucked underneath the sink like a dollhouse, was the reason for the shit-free odor of the place: one of those ridiculous little motorized, self-cleaning litter boxes.
For a limited time only
, the late-night infomercial announcer had gushed many times,
you too can own the amazing Miracle-Litter! For three easy payments—a fully automatic cat-dropping disposal system that senses waste and sweeps it away, packaging it in easily removable, sealed Zip-Loc bags!
Turning away from the bathroom, Maura searched for the cat's feeding bowls. She found two of them on a neat little rubber mat under a butcher block table. One of the stainless steel bowls was licked clean, only a little brown crust of cat food remaining around its rim. The other bowl, presumably the water bowl, was as dry as pumice stone.
Doerr had obviously been away for quite a while. In fact, Maura started wondering if—
Something rattled out in the living room, cutting off her thoughts.
It sounded like a coin tumbling down a slot, or perhaps keys jiggling in a lock—
keys in a lock!
Maura froze then in the chill of her panic, paralyzed with indecision, goose flesh spreading down the backs of her arms and legs. Should she flee or stay and act stupid? Greet Doerr at the door like a nosy neighbor?
Pay no attention to that strange lady in your house, she's just crazy old Mrs. Kravitz
. The jiggling noises stopped almost as abruptly as they started, and Maura began backing toward the rear screen door, each creaking footstep erupting like mortar blasts in her brain.
Maybe it was just a mailman, a delivery boy slipping a package inside the front door. Maura was inches away from the back screen now, her gaze locked on that front hallway, her eyes positively bugging with panic. She reached out blindly behind her for the door handle.
“
Hey!”
The sudden cry behind her was accompanied by the sound of the screen door bursting open.
12
Maura instinctively whirled and threw her hands up to shield her face. In doing so, she lost her balance and tumbled backward onto her ass.
The young man lurched into the kitchen with both hands wrapped around the grip of a small black handgun. Dressed in a Tulane sweatshirt, cargo shorts, and sandals, he was soaked to the bone, and shaking so severely it looked as though he might have a neurological disorder.
He pointed the quavering barrel down at Maura and screamed: “
Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you doing in my house!”
“I—I just—I just wanted to—” Maura stammered there on the linoleum, seeing stars from the fall, mouth dry and dumb from the panic. She tried to formulate her words, but it wasn't easy, she had never looked down the barrel of gun before, especially one gripped in the sweaty hands of someone who looked as though he might shake out of his own skin.
“Who are you? Who are you!”
Michael Doerr stabbed the gun barrel at her, shrieking so loudly now the cords in his neck bulged and pulsed with each word. Filmed in sweat, reeking of fear, he wore his close-cropped spit curls all teased up today, like a club kid or a lost member of Mili Vanilli. Back at the funeral home Maura hadn't noticed the tiny silver stud in his left nostril, or the eyeliner around his soft brown eyes. If he hadn't been holding that gun, Maura probably would have been marveling at how pretty he was.
“I met you at the professor's funeral!” Maura blurted, trying to form some coherent thought, trying to buy time. “Name's Maura County, a friend of Moses!”
Doerr's face twitched at the familiar name. “A friend of
Moses
?”
“I was a friend of Professor De Lourde! From the Sun City case! We met at the funeral!”
“The
funeral
?”
“Yes, we met at the funeral, and I just wanted to talk to you, and I saw your cat outside, and I was worried with the storm coming and everything, so I brought her around back, but I saw ... um, um ... I didn't see any ... she had no water or food, so I just thought I would give her a little water, and I'm sorry, please, please don't shoot, okay? Okay?”
There was a long, agonizing pause then as Doerr held the gun with sweaty, trembling hands and tried to focus through watery eyes at this unexpected intruder on the floor of his kitchen. For an excruciating moment, the silence stretched, neither of them saying a word.
As if on cue, the cat suddenly trundled out from under the kitchen table and trotted toward Doerr, mewling softly, belly swaying.
“
Get outta here! Go on! Git!”
The cat darted away at the sound of Doerr's angry howl, vanishing into the living room.
On the floor, scalp crawling with terror, Maura looked up into the young man's eyes. She noticed something then, something that she hadn't seen at first. Behind all the fiery rage, behind the bluster, Doerr's eyes were raw with fear.
“I'm a writer, Michael. I'm a journalist, and Professor De Lourde was a friend of mine ... and, and, and Sandi Loper-Herzog gave me your address, and I just wanted to ask you something about the Yucatan expedition—”
“The
what
? The Yucatan!”
“I swear to you the only reason I came inside was that I saw your cat needed food and water, and please, the gun, could you please not point that gun at me anymore? Please!”
The young man cocked his head at her, still trembling, trying to compute what she was saying, still gripping the gun with both hands. “You came here because you just wanted to ask me about the ...
Jesus
!” He cringed and stiffened suddenly, as though the mere notion of the Yucatan trip gave him apoplexy. The barrel of the gun wavered, lowering slightly. “You have no
idea
,” he snarled at her suddenly. “You have no
idea
what you're dealing with ... what you're getting yourself into!”
For one awful instant, looking up at the crazed young man, Maura got the impression of a caged animal, a whipped dog forced into a corner, growling and spitting now out of pure terror. But terror of
what
? Maura decided to push her tactic one notch further. “I'm sorry I surprised you,” she said as softly and gently as possible. “I can see you're very upset, I'm sorry, but I meant no harm.”
Doerr was crying now. Silently. Shoulders trembling, lip quivering. The gun sagged a little farther in his hands, now pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle somewhere in the vicinity of Maura's Doc Martens. “You have no idea, you have no fucking idea,” he uttered under his breath.
Maura rose very cautiously to a kneeling position, holding her hand up. “I'm sorry but it seems like you're frightened by something
other
than me,” she said. “Am I right? You can tell me what it is, Michael, this is totally off the record, you can tell me.”
Now the gun fell to his side as he wept softly, pathetically, still shaking.
Maura rose. Very carefully. Hands raised in a reassuring gesture. “It's okay. Maybe I can help you. Tell me what's wrong. Maybe I can help.”
The gun fell to the floor—the metallic
thunk!
making Maura jump slightly.
“Michael?” She took a cautious step toward him. She could smell his fear like musk. His knees were skinned and lacerated. His long fingernails had grit under them. “What is it? What's going on?”
He looked up at her, his eyes fixing on hers for the first time. “You want to know what's going on?”
“Yes, Michael, I do. Tell me what's going on and maybe I can help.”
He rubbed the tears off his face, sniffing back the terror. Then he looked at her. “What's going on is, he's coming here to kill us all.”
Maura stared at him. “Who? Who's coming? Are you talking about the hurricane killer?”
Silence.
“Who's coming, Michael?”
The silence deepened.
By midmorning forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida, began revising their estimated time of arrival for Fiona. Originally she was moving in a northerly direction across the gulf, a vast, swirling mass of mayhem nearly a thousand miles in diameter, with winds exceeding 190 miles an hour at her core; but she was only moving longitudinally at only about thirty-five knots. Then, around 9:30 a.m. eastern standard time, aircraft reconnaissance reports and satellite images confirmed that the storm had quickened its pace northward to fifty knots, which would move the time of impact up to between ten and eleven o'clock that night.
To make matters worse, experts now agreed that Fiona had not only experienced “explosive deepening,” but also was experiencing cycles of “eye wall replacement.” This rare phenomenon is seen only in the most intense hurricanes. It meant that Fiona's eye had begun contracting, followed by the formation of a bigger, nastier
outer
eye wall. This new eye would eventually choke out the original inner eye, and the storm would intensify tenfold. Simply put: Fiona's eye would be getting bigger and bigger, and more deadly, as it roared across the gulf toward New Orleans.
Grove and Kaminsky were just outside Augusta, Georgia, on Highway 20, driving through a rain squall, when the first reports of Fiona's amplification came over the air. Grove immediately started calculating how much time they had left. Barring any major traffic tie-ups, they were probably still about nine hours away from New Orleans. That would put them there around seven o'clock that night—only a couple of hours before the anticipated arrival of Fiona.
In the meantime, Kaminsky made a series of cell phone calls to friends at the NSA, the National Weather Service, and the Hurricane Center. The consensus was, Fiona was shaping up to be a historic event, many times worse than Katrina, which, for many, was beyond comprehension. She would probably be the death knell for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And most importantly, her eye would likely hit landfall somewhere within a mile or two of Jackson Square.
As the world had learned in 2005, this could very easily mean Armageddon for New Orleans, a town below sea level. The levees—which had protected the city for decades but had collapsed the previous year under the strain of Katrina's catastrophic flood tide—were still being repaired and beefed up. A category-five hurricane now would finish them off once and for all.
But sitting on the passenger side of that tricked-out Jeep Cherokee, bumping along Highway 20, watching the quicksilver rain cocooning the outside of the tinted glass, Grove was starting to make other connections to the apocalypse.
It all started with the exorcism last year, the mysterious symbol that Father Carrigan had drawn on the hardwood-slatted floor of that cabin in red dry-erase ink, then had hurriedly wiped away with a damp towel as soon as the ritual had ended. Days later Grove had asked the priest about the symbol, but the padre had simply shaken his head and said somewhat enigmatically, “The truth is, Ulysses ... one needs all the help one can get.” But now, seeing the same symbol echoed in a madman's carnage, Grove was starting to sense a link to the miseries wrought by a killer hurricane.
Only four people were present inside that rear bedroom during his exorcism: his mother, Carrigan, De Lourde, and Grove. Or maybe it was five. Perhaps there was a
fifth
individual present that day—albeit invisible to the naked eye. But what exactly happened after that entity inside him—or whatever it was—was cast out? Where does an evil spirit go after being exorcised? Back to hell? To purgatory? To this day, Grove had yet to become a true believer ... but there was a powerful notion beginning to nag at the back of his mind: Could this killer he was hunting, this lurker in the eye of the storm, could
he
be connected to this entity in some way?
Grove turned to the Russian. “Damn it, Kay, can't you make this crate go any faster!”
 
 
“Michael?”
Maura waited patiently, standing in the center of the living room with the tea and honey, as the young grad student sat on the wingback sofa, his face buried in his hands, a mixture of shame, dread, and nervous tension still rocking through him. The living room was a cozy little assortment of secondhand furniture and garage-sale folk art. From the window, the decor looked authentic and antique, but at this close proximity the furnishings were revealed to be thrift shop specials, draped in frayed bedspreads and adorned with tattered throw pillows. Cheap and shopworn, redolent with mold, yet stylishly displayed.
“Michael?”
He was still trembling, his bony brown knees gathered up against his chest, his back slumped over to the point that he had almost assumed a fetal position. He mumbled something into his hands, his voice hoarse with fatigue.
Maura said, “I'm sorry, what was that?”
“I changed my mind about the tea.” He nodded at the archway across the room. “Out in the kitchen, in the cabinet above the fridge. There's a bottle of sour mash.”
Maura sighed, set the saucer and cup down on a coffee table, and went out to fetch the booze. The liquor cabinet above the refrigerator was well stocked with cheap booze, the no-name off-brand kind of stuff a kid on a grad student's income could afford. The quart of bourbon was half empty.
On her way back into the living room, Maura caught a glimpse of the pistol lying where she had deposited it, on the laminate counter next to the sink, its blue steel gleaming dully in the dim light. It was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson that Doerr claimed he had bought for self-defense at a flea market in Slidell two months ago when the storm season had started up again. He claimed that he never even discharged the weapon, and wasn't sure if it even worked. However, he had yet to explain to Maura just whom—or
what—
he feared.
“Thanks, thank you,” Doerr said when Maura returned with the bottle. He snatched it out of her hands, then took a deep, scalding swig—the kind of gulp one might take before parachuting out of an airplane behind enemy lines or maybe climbing the gallows. He winced at the burning sensation, then took a deep breath. “I'm sorry about the gun, but I thought you might be that
thing.”

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