When She Was Bad: A Thriller (20 page)

Irene waited a full minute, then slowly began lowering the metronome’s speed, one setting at a time, and with it the girl’s breathing. And as her breath rate slowed, her heart rate slowed…and slowed…and slowed….

“Lily?” whispered Irene. “It’s all right, dear, everything’s okay, you’re safe now, it’s safe to open your—There you go, that’s my girl. Hello, Lily.”

5

“Anybody home?” a female voice called from the living room. “Carson, Mama Rose?”

Lying on their backs, their hands cuffed through the headboard railing, Mama Rose and Pender exchanged complex, profoundly meaningful glances.
We made it!
was the primary message in both sets of eyes, but a sincere acknowledgement of the ordeal they’d gone through together was also in there someplace, along with a mutual recognition that their lives were about to get seriously complicated again. “Back here, Dennie!”

Footsteps; then a mahogany-skinned, pie-faced, burstingly pregnant woman, shirtless under faded overalls, appeared in the doorway, staring in horror from the denim-and-tie-dyed-clad body on the floor to the mummified couple on the bed. “Mama Rose? Mama Rose, what happened?”

She doesn’t know, thought the older woman. Doesn’t know L’il T.’s dead. Doesn’t know she’s a widow, doesn’t know that kid inside her is never gonna see his father. “Cut us loose, then I’ll tell you all about it,” she croaked through dry, cracked lips.

It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. Big-bellied and awkward, Dennie had to kneel and go through the corpse’s pockets until she found the universal cuff-key in the watch pocket of his jeans, then climb onto the bed and lean across Pender to reach their handcuffs, her swollen, blue-veined breasts swinging free inside the overalls. Ever a gentleman, and unable to avert his glance, he closed his eyes until she had finished.

It took several minutes for sensation, in the form of a thousand agonizing pinpricks, to return to their unused limbs. In the meantime, it was Dennie who cut through their linen mummy wrappings with a pair of shears, and Dennie who held a glass of water to Mama Rose’s parched lips, tenderly cradling the back of Rose’s head on what remained of her lap while the older woman sipped noisily, greedily, water dribbling down her chin.

Then Dennie eased Mama Rose to a sitting position, propped her up with the bed pillows, rolled up Mama Rose’s pant legs, and began massaging her calves with both hands to restore the circulation. “Now will
somebody
please tell me what’s going on around here?” she asked. “Teddy never came home last night and he’s not answering his cell phone.”

Rose glanced imploringly at Pender, who was busily chafing his crossed wrists with his tingling hands. He refused to acknowledge her unspoken plea: You tell her. She turned back to Dennie. “Worse than that,” she said.

“Is he…is he hurt?”

Tough-talking Mama Rose, who had always scorned euphemisms, found herself unable to get the d-word out. “Teddy’s…he’s gone, Dennie. Carson, too—they’re both gone.”

Dennie kept working, head down, rubbing the life back into Rose’s legs. Mama Rose thought for a minute the pregnant girl hadn’t heard her, or had misunderstood; then the tears began plopping down onto her bare shins, and she remembered something Dennie had told her once: that Eskimo babies were taught to cry silently.

She longed to take the younger woman into her arms, but they weren’t working yet; she longed to cry for Carson—and for herself—but somehow the long night of horror had robbed her of tears. Which was just as well, because with a cry of surprise Dennie suddenly left off massaging Rose’s legs, and pressed her hands to her own great belly.

“What? What is it, honey?”

“I think I felt a contraction,” said the newly widowed mother-to-be.

“Well that fucking figures,” said Mama Rose. “That goddamn fucking well figures.”

6

Daylight crept reluctantly through the cracks in the blinds. Outside the darkened office, the small town stirred to life. A newspaper thudded onto a front porch; a neighbor’s dog barked to be let out; a crow on the back fence angrily greeted the new day.

Inside, despair. “It’s not fair,” Lily moaned, rocking back and forth on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands clasped around her shins.
“I
never did anything wrong,
I
never hurt anybody.”

Lyssy sat next to her, his hand resting lightly on the nape of her neck. “We know, believe you me, we know,” he murmured soothingly. His posture and manner, his facial expressions, even that
believe you me,
were so eerily reminiscent of Al Corder that if Irene hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn there was a family resemblance.

The rocking slowed; Lily turned her tear-streaked face toward Irene, who was sitting in a side chair drawn up in front of the sofa. “What happens next, Dr. Irene? Where do we go from here?”

“You
don’t need to go anywhere, dear. If what Lyssy just told us is true—and if Lilith was telling
him
the truth—then you haven’t committed any crime. Quite the opposite, in fact: Alison says you saved her life. So whatever Lyssy decides to do—keep running, turn himself in—there’s no reason you couldn’t stay on here with me.”

“And you won’t send me back to the Institute?”

Irene smiled ruefully. “I promise you, dear, that’s one mistake your uncle Rollie and I won’t be making again.” She turned to Lyssy. “As for you, Lyssy, I strongly recommend you give yourself up before anybody else gets hurt—including yourself. But if you do decide to keep running—”

Lyssy cut her off in mid-sentence. “Dr. Cogan?”

“What is it, Lyssy?”

“Could I talk to you alone for a second?”

She glanced around the tiny office. “Yes, of course. Lily, will you be all right by yourself for a few minutes?”

“I guess.”

Irene led Lyssy out into the hallway, leaving the office door open so she could keep an eye on Lily. “What is it?”

“What I told you before, about how Lilith said it was Max and Kinch who did all the killing back at the director’s residence?”

“Yes?”

“What if it wasn’t true? What if she told me she’d killed one of them herself? Like maybe the psych tech you found upstairs in the bathroom.”

Irene felt her hopes sinking.
“Is
that what she told you?”

“Just say she did—do you think there’s any way the police would be able to tell?”

“There’s something called forensics, Lyssy. Fingerprints, fibers, transfer evidence—they’ve got it down to a real science. So I’d say yes, if Lilith committed one of the murders, there’s a good chance they’d be able to figure it out.”

“And if they did, what would happen to her? Would they still let her stay here with you?”

Irene recalled her brave speech to Pender in the airport yesterday morning: I don’t care what she’s done or how involved she was, I won’t let them put her away again. “Probably not,” she said, sick with longing for the good old days—say, five minutes ago, when her options had seemed so straightforward and uncomplicated.

7

What to do, what to do, what to do? Pender’s initial instinct was to grab a phone and call 911—then he remembered what MacAlister had told him about Carson yesterday: dirty as can be, fingers in everything from meth to money laundering. And no doubt Mama Rose was up to both wrists in the same illicit pies. If he summoned help, the cops would be swarming all over the place in a matter of minutes—he pictured Mama Rose being led away in handcuffs.

But why, he asked himself, should that make a difference to him? So what if he’d grown fond of her? He’d been a lawman his entire adult life—he should have been jumping at the chance to help put her and what was left of her gang away. Besides, if he didn’t make the call, he’d be helping Maxwell escape, or at least extend his head start, which was already close to twelve hours and counting.

So why was he feeling so goddamn
guilty,
as if he were about to do something dishonorable? Which instinct should he turn his back on, the professional or the personal? Was it once a cop, always a cop, or did being retired give him some wiggle room, ethically speaking?

The answer, he already knew, was no, it didn’t. But having come to that conclusion, Pender found himself asking: Do I give a flying fuck? Then he realized he already knew the answer to that question as well.

Rather than use his own or one of the house phones, he knelt down next to MacAlister and went through his pockets—rigor mortis was just beginning to loosen its hold on the stiffened limbs—until he’d found Mick’s cell phone, which he used to dial the FBI tipline from memory.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “Ulysses Maxwell left Shasta County around eleven o’clock last night driving a red, late-model Cadillac convertible with white upholstery and California plates. The owner’s name is MacAlister, first name Michael or Mick. He’s not with Maxwell though. The DeVries girl
is
with him, but she’s a hostage,
not
an accomplice—she seems to be in some sort of trance state.”

“Sir?” said the tipline operator. “Sir, don’t—” Pender pressed the End Call button.

“Good choice,” said Mama Rose. “For a second there, you had me worried.”

Pender looked up, saw her holding a handsome nine-millimeter Colt with a blue-steel barrel and a fine-grained hickory grip. His eyes went from the gun to the phone in his hand, then back. “Likewise,” he said.

“Are you going after him?”

In the past, Pender’s mind had always summoned up pictures of the victims to drive himself; now the first image that came to his mind was of himself, lying there helplessly while Maxwell trussed him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “Oh, yes.”

“Here, you’ll probably need this.” She turned the gun around and handed it to him butt-first. Their eyes met in ironic recognition of all they’d been through, and of the mutual, and extremely unlikely, bond of trust that had been formed; then Mama Rose looked away, embarrassed. “I’m going to drive Dennie to the hospital in her car. You can take the pickup in the driveway—the keys are on the bureau there. I have to warn you, though—when you’re done with it, don’t keep it or try to sell it. Just park it someplace and walk away.”

“I understand,” said Pender. “And thanks—for everything. But there’s one more problem.”

“What’s that?”

He jerked a thumb in MacAlister’s direction. “He had a wife, too.”

8

The little office, scarcely large enough to contain Dr. Irene’s desk at one end and the couch at the other, held a world of memories for Lily. Here, fifty minutes at a time, two or three times a week, she’d spilled out her hopes and fears, her childhood nightmares and adolescent insecurities—in a sense, she’d grown up in this room.

But as she sat waiting on the couch while Lyssy and Dr. Irene conferred in the hallway, Lily felt far from nostalgic. Just knowing that Dr. Irene was out there discussing
her
future with a man she scarcely knew (as far as Lily was concerned, their entire acquaintance consisted of a twenty-minute stroll through the funny little park in the middle of the Institute) made her stiffen with resentment. People were always making decisions for Lily, and yet things could hardly have turned out any worse if she’d decided for herself—or flipped coins or consulted a Ouija board.

Of course, at the heart of her resentment, as always, was a white-hot hatred for what her parents had done to her, and for this abominable disease of hers—but not, oddly enough, for Lilith. Instead she found herself admiring what little she had learned about the alter, who seemed to be everything she wasn’t: fearless, remorseless, resourceful, and above all, capable of protecting herself.

“Lily? Lily, we need to talk.”

She looked up. Lyssy was limping toward her, looking smaller than ever in the oversize white T-shirt and the button-fly jeans with the cuffs turned up. Dr. Irene had just sat down at her desk on the other side of the room and was putting on a pair of old-fashioned acoustic headphones the size of earmuffs.

“Pump up the volume,” Lyssy told the doctor. “I need to hear the squeaking from here.” Then, to Lily, as he sat down next to her: “So she can’t listen in on us.”

“Why not just leave her out there and close the door?” They were both whispering; between whispers, they found themselves listening for the tiny, tinny music leaking out from the psychiatrist’s headphones.

“Because we can’t trust her not to turn us in.” He leaned in closer. “Lily, you have to decide whether you want to come with me or stay behind with her.” He saw her glance across the room. “Dr. Irene can’t help you with this one—it’s a decision only you can make.”

“Why would I want to go someplace with you?” said Lily without thinking. “I hardly even know you.”

He winced; there was a sadness in his gold-flecked eyes she regretted having put there. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I keep forgetting you’re not Lilith. You see, me and her, we were kind of…you know, we were kind of in love. We were going to go away together as soon as we got hold of those bikers’ money. Only like I told you before, there was the accident with the radio in the hot tub, and you were like a zombie or something, so I brought you here instead so Dr. Cogan could fix you up.”

“I know, I know—you
told
us all that.” Except the part about Lyssy and Lilith being in love. Were they also
lovers,
in that other sense of the word? Lily wondered. Had that man had sex with
her
body? It was almost too weird, and definitely too uncomfortable, to contemplate.

“But there’s one thing I didn’t tell you the truth about,” Lyssy continued. “That part about how Lilith said Max and Kinch killed all four people at the Corders’? That’s what we want the cops to think. That way you could go free, while one victim more or less isn’t going to make much difference to me as far as my sentence goes.