Vanished in the Dunes (23 page)

The door opens. She still wears the pink-and-white dress. From this close he sees that she looks very different. He levels the pistol at her, pushes the door open wide, and steps inside.

“Remember me?”

He stops speaking and studies her again. Now he's less than two feet away. The hair looks pretty much the same and the body wrapped in the familiar dress is just as sexy as he remembered, but the overall effect he sees is that of a different person. This Heidi is slightly taller. The big difference though is in the face. It is definitely familiar, but it's not Heidi's. The eyes are just as black and the skin tone is just as olive, but the nose is too long and the bump in the middle is gone. He breathes deeply, and his eyes flutter closed for a moment before he rubs them with his free hand.

“No. You wouldn't remember me. I'm the man who fucked Heidi for over a year, but I've never fucked you. At least not yet. So who the hell are you?”

There is no answer, just a short intake hiss as the woman gasps for breath. He enters the house and slams the door.

“Where's the bedroom?” His words fly out like a fist.

She doesn't answer and seems to struggle to stay upright. Her face pales in contrast to the olive complexion of her arms. He spins her around just as he sees her legs begin to shake. He pushes her forward. She stumbles across the room and stops when one hand grabs the door jamb at the edge of a long corridor. He drags her away and moves down the empty corridor, but this time he pulls at her arm rather than pushing at her back. He stops at the first room with a light, a bedroom.

“This should do. Is it yours?” His voice trembles with anticipation. One hand holds her against the wall and the other waves the gun in a small overhead circle.

“Ja.” She speaks for the first time and half raises one hand to point into the room.

The room is painted a light blue. The only light comes from a single lamp that rests alone on a small table adjacent to a queen-sized bed that's crowned with a light-colored wood headboard. There is no spread and the pillows are fluffed and the blanket turned down. A small dresser of similar wood occupies the opposite wall. Its surface is empty except for a television that plays an old movie with token volume. Dark curtains are drawn across the only windows.

He pushes her across the room. She lurches to the bed and crumples at the edge. One hand reaches out and clutches a pillow to her chest.

No. She isn't Heidi.

“Who are you? I won't ask again.”

She fails to react. His words fall on a woman paralyzed by fear. Paralysis makes him thinks of another chemical he almost used for Posner, the tropical poison curare. It works like deadly snake venom and leaves its victims paralyzed and unable to breathe. He will make her talk though. It's easy enough.

“Take your clothes off!”

She pulls the pillow tighter across her chest, but he moves forward and pulls it away.

“I said take off your clothes! Now!”

She looks around as if help could be found somewhere in the sparse room, but the only diversion from her fear is a nearly soundless Cary Grant on the television. She looks at Stern again.

“I'm Heidi's sister, Brigid.”

“She doesn't have a sister. She would have told me.”

“We had a big fight several years ago.”

“Later,” he says. “Tell me all about it later.”

He is no longer listening, just staring. Now she's Heidi again, not Brigid or whoever. The face and body morph back into the woman he knows. The woman he thought he'd lost. But she's back now. It's not a great leap to have Heidi back again.

He takes off his jacket and drops it on the dresser next to the television. Then he puts his gun on top of the jacket. When he speaks again his voice is very different, softer, and even tender.

“Get undressed, Heidi. You know you want to. It's what you always want.”

She stands from the bed with effort and one trembling arm stretches behind for the zipper. He stares for a moment longer, tastes a sudden dryness in his mouth, and then begins to unbutton his shirt.

Wisdom knows that with their current information, it'll be no problem for the Suffolk County Police to get NYPD's help in getting a warrant to search Stern's New York apartment. Stern is now officially a fugitive. The day has passed, however, without a sign of the man.

At a quarter to nine on the morning after the events at Posner's house, Bennett calls Wisdom with preliminary results. Except for a few hours of troubled sleep, Wisdom hasn't left his desk since he got back from Posner's house. Brigid is back at her house and Posner is at Southampton Hospital for observation. The County police are in charge now, yet Wisdom won't let it rest until they clear it all up, not with Stern still running around. He grabs for the phone and comes perilously close to knocking over a nearly full cup of coffee in the process, even though a few splashes fly across his desk. Bennett ignores Wisdom's curses and plunges ahead.

“Two things of interest: one, he had another six needles of insulin in his apartment fridge. The man could have been his own lethal-weapon machine, especially since his official hospital medical records show no evidence of diabetes.”

“And the other?”

“We found some unusual pills in his medicine cabinet. Notably a nearly full bottle of something called Seroquel.”

“What?”

“Seroquel. It's apparently an antipsychotic drug prescribed for schizophrenia.”

“God. This is getting messier. Who's the prescribing doctor?”

“He is. The hospital may have suspended him, but he still has his license. That's why he can still prescribe. For himself or anyone else. That's how he got the insulin. The needles were still in a bag with the pharmacy name on it.”

Wisdom questions aloud what other prescription medications Stern's helped himself to.

“We'll have a list of all other drugs he's ordered either to self-medicate or otherwise in a few more hours, at least from that pharmacy.”

“Okay and thanks for keeping me in the loop.”

His last words disappear into Bennett's dial tone.

“So the doctor is psychotic.” His words tumble out and roll over a silent audience.

Wisdom pulls up the Internet on his screen and starts to research mental illnesses. Police work provides a broad education beyond the law. Wisdom has a general fragmentary knowledge of many medical issues, but is probably less informed about mental health matters than anything else. He could call the department psychologist, but first opts for a quick check of the web. He finds a site with the heading, “An Introduction to Schizophrenia.” He opens it and begins to read, but almost as quickly has a chilling thought. Heidi used to be a resident in psychiatry, and now that her ex-lover might well need her professional help, it's too late. A mental postscript forces him to wonder whether Heidi ever knew Stern had such a problem.

The details go on for pages and there's no end to the links available to other websites on the subject, but in twenty minutes he manages to absorb some basic essentials. A blurred distinction between truth and fantasy jumps out at him. A person might behave in a very normal fashion one moment, and then switch seamlessly into an entirely different person where a wide range of abnormal behavior is possible. Some references are to split personalities and there are many cases on record of multiple personalities in the same individual,
each waiting for some trigger to release them. A person could curse, cry, hallucinate, and in general depart from normal human interaction in an instant. Violent behavior is possible. One of the medical treatments mentioned includes the drug Seroquel, the one found in Stern's apartment.

Wisdom leans back and focuses his eyes on a square white ceiling tile. If Stern needs Seroquel, it's very likely that he may suffer from hallucinations, and if so, then what would he have thought when he caught a quick glimpse of Brigid in Posner's driveway, looking for the entire world like the Heidi in his memory? How would a troubled mind react to seeing his presumed dead lover turn up alive and as beautiful as he remembered? Maybe it wouldn't mean much if he was on his meds, but they did find the mostly filled pill bottle in his apartment, didn't they? If he's off the meds, then he could really be off-the-wall.

His thoughts are interrupted by another call from Bennett.

“Got some more interesting news for you. After Brigid told us about Stern having a white car we checked registrations for white cars against local addresses. Seems the people down the block who live in a house on the far corner of Posner's street have a white Chevy Malibu. And get this. It's the same location where Stern's cell phone calls were made. Only he wasn't standing outside when he made them. He was in the house. A team just got back from there. No white Chevy, but Stern's rented Ford is in the garage. And one more thing. There's plenty of evidence that the guy spent time upstairs, and from the bedroom window he'd have a clear view of anyone around Posner's house.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he could have doubled back and watched everything going on from his cozy little window seat. He could have seen all of us come and go as well.”

“Including Brigid. He could have seen Brigid.”

“Right. And he could have followed her back to her house. When did she leave Posner's? Late afternoon?”

“That's it. But I had a cruiser stop by after she got home as well as this morning. Everything seemed quiet.”

“Did patrol speak to her?”

“Yes. Yesterday as well as this morning. Everything seemed normal and quiet.”

“I wouldn't trust quiet in a case like this.”

“Roger that. I'm on it.”

He presses another button to dial the patrol dispatcher and asks them to patch him through to the cruiser that checked out Brigid's house that morning.

“It was exactly eight-o-five when I knocked on the door. I'm reading right off my book.”

“Anything unusual?”

“Nothing I could see. Oh, she did take more than a few minutes to answer the door. Said she was sleeping. And she was wearing that same dress that she had on the day before. You know, the pink-and-white one.”

“I know,” agrees Wisdom, but a bell goes off. Why would she be still wearing the dress she claims she dislikes so much on the next day? Or, for that matter, even a minute longer than she ever needed to?

“Anything else? Did she say there was any problem?”

“No. Said everything was fine. Thanked me and said goodbye.”

At that moment Wisdom's mind starts to wander and his silence is obvious.

“Anything else, sir?”

“No. that's all. Thanks. Unless you can think of something else.”

“Well there's one thing. Maybe it's nothing, but all the time we spoke, and it couldn't have been for more than half a minute, she kept rubbing her wrists. Alternating hands.”

“Like to get the circulation going?”

“Right. Like someone just took the cuffs off. We've sure seen it enough to know the motion.”

“Holy shit! He's there. He's with her. He's holding her hostage. Where are you now?”

“Montauk village.”

“You're a good ten minutes closer than me. Get over there right away but stay on the main road away from the driveway until I get there. I'll call in for backup. No one in or out.

“And pass the word that I'm driving over there and should make it in about twenty minutes.”

He disconnects and jumps out of his chair. In the process he knocks the rest of his already cold coffee off the desk and onto the floor. He snatches his jacket, hops over a puddle, and races out the door. The wall clock he passes in the hall reads a minute before ten.

He presses the gas pedal halfway to the floor and sticks the overhead on the roof. Just enough time to call Bennett, who'll get onto County. He doesn't care who gets the collar. After all the mistakes he's made, starting with his agreeing to the pink-and-white dress masquerade, he just wants Brigid to be safe. He sees the Old Montauk Highway fork and veers to the right. He risks keeping the speed at fifty despite the blind hills.

“Hang in there, Brigid. I'm coming. I'm coming.”

Even though he's alone in the car and still a few miles from her house, he still hopes she can somehow hear him.

The next morning arrives with shafts of sunlight that steal around the curtains and outline Brigid's rigid body as it lays spread across the white duvet cover. Her eyes are shut, legs splayed apart, as if posed in a men's magazine, but there's no overt eroticism. Her arms stretch above her head where the wrists are tied to bedposts with her own stockings. A shallow breathing betrays the only sign of life. The only clothing is a white bra and matching cotton panties. No thongs in her life, Stern thinks. Not like Heidi who sought the prospect of sexuality in every garment. The plainness and simplicity of the underwear actually desexualized the woman, although he knows it's more than that.

He studies her body again. Her breasts seem smaller when she lies flat and the few tiny black curls that escape the underwear are the only hints at what might have propelled him into a state of erotic arousal, only it didn't work. Nothing worked.

He remembers the previous night. She lay there just as she does now. He'd tied her arms and she began to cry, which he blatantly ignored. He removed his own shirt, pants, shoes, and socks. He hooked his fingers into the elastic of his Jockey shorts and then stopped. Nothing happened. He wanted to fuck this woman out of anger, yet nothing happened. He stroked himself, but arousal still eluded him. She watched him for a moment then averted her eyes.

Just like with Heidi, he remembers. Maybe she really is Heidi. He isn't sure whether he speaks or thinks the words. Logic tells him it's
the fucking Seroquel. He started taking the pills randomly again a few weeks ago from the old bottle, but the results are mixed. Sometimes he feels calmer, yet he still imagines things. Sometimes he still feels like he's in another person's body. Half of him wants to believe Heidi's still alive. The other side to the medication is that it depresses his sexual desire to the point of nonexistence. He accepts now that he's in some kind of sexual twilight zone, where relatively normal social behavior can arrive at the risk of losing all sexual drive. Conversely, if his old sexual appetites return, he assumes it will be at the cost of more serious mental disorders. He clinically dissects his condition, as he always has, mentally adding up the gains and losses of any approach. Sometimes he makes the wrong choice, just as with a patient. Last night he was determined to fuck this woman's brains out but couldn't even get semihard. In the end he tied her up and fled to the living room couch, but sleep joined sexual performance as elusive goals.