Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (16 page)

“Anyplace in here a guy could’ve hidden?” Clayton asked.

“There, maybe,” Tyler replied, gesturing toward the bedroom closet. “Haven’t been through it yet.” Sergeant Tyler went on with her work.

Clayton walked over and opened the closet door. It was a walk-in space, furbished with rods at different heights and sections of drawers and open shelves. The floor was covered with the same pile carpet as the rest of the bedroom. A half dozen clothes bags hung on one long rod, but they were not pushed all the way to the end. There was a space between the bags and the end wall of the closet.

Clayton felt a sudden chill of certainty. At times like this, he congratulated himself on having come from a credulous family that believed in auras, divining rods, and religious healing. He didn’t believe in any of those things himself, and he certainly did not consider himself to be a psychic. But at crucial moments, Clayton simply
knew what he knew.
It was something like a birthright.

There was a ghost in this closet—not a literal ghost, but a very palpable one. He could feel its presence. It was as if time had looped around itself, and the killer was in there even now, waiting for his opportunity. It was as if Clayton had only to grab him and slap the cuffs on him to stop him from killing—and in a magical stroke, the irrevocable would be revoked.

Clayton edged toward the far end of the closet and looked at the space. Yes, there was enough room for someone to stand. On the bottom edge of the wooden shelf, he saw some fibers caught on a splinter. He took a pair of tweezers out of his shirt pocket and carefully removed the strands, put them in a bag, and labeled it.

Clayton stepped back out of the closet, handing the bag to Tyler.

“Don’t touch anything in there,” Clayton said. “I want forensics to go over it.”

*

Filed.

That one word flashed through Marianne’s mind as the coroner’s assistant reached for the handle on the metal door. The drawer slid out with a sickening, metallic rumble. The contorted, naked body lay beneath a translucent plastic sheet. The assistant pulled the sheet back discreetly, just below the shoulders, as if protecting the corpse’s modesty. This gallant gesture struck Marianne as vaguely necrophiliac.

Marianne took a good look at the corpse’s face.

“That’s her,” she whispered. “That’s Renee.”

But it was a lie—the first lie she had told tonight. This thing on the stainless steel table was not Renee. The expression, the colors, even the shapes of the cheekbones—everything about it was all wrong. It was an unconvincing forgery. Renee herself was not here—not on this table, not under this plastic sheet, not stashed away in this monolithic filing cabinet. Her corpse might be here, but that was not at all the same thing.

Marianne was seized with shame at her falsehood. Was it too transparent? Did the lieutenant know that she was lying? What would he say if she told him the truth? What would he say if she told him that Renee simply wasn’t here, that she had to be somewhere else—that she was a
missing
person, not a dead one? But it was too late to tell him differently.

She became sick with horror, but she did not actually feel it—not the way she might feel joy, sadness, pain, or rage. It was more like she
heard
the horror resounding in some distant basement of her soul—the sound of the first death with its contingent anguish echoing down to her throughout all time. There had to be a word for this weird, unfelt, audible horror. She had no idea what that word might be.

She felt her legs totter under her. She felt the detective catch her. She felt him start to drag her toward a chair. She felt herself jerk away from him defiantly, yanking herself to her feet, furiously commanding the blood cells back into her brain. She staggered back toward the table, propping her hands against its cold steel edge, staring at the pinched eyelids, imagining the dead eyes behind them.

Renee’s not here.

With no one inside those eyes, Marianne could look nowhere except into her own heart. And where was her fury? Where was her outrage against this crime? Why didn’t this room and all its adjoining hallways ring out with her cries for justice, for revenge?

The outcries simply did not come. The deed was too awful, too final not to have been done with some implacable purpose. There was something almost religious about it, something beyond Marianne’s comprehension. The thought of the person who had made this corpse did not fill her with anger but with an inexorable wave of awe-struck humility.

She could not grasp this crime.

She could not judge it.

For these very reasons, she knew she had to find its perpetrator. She had to look into his eyes as she could no longer look into these, she had to search out his heart, she had to learn his purpose and take it away from him before judgment and vindication could at last be done.

But first, I have to find Renee.

*

Nolan Grobowski reached out and touched the woman’s arm. She didn’t shake him off this time.

“It’s time to go,” he told her.

She nodded and let him lead her away.

Nolan kept studying the woman’s expression. It was a perfect blank. It had been blank throughout the whole episode. But he remembered the dead weight her body had made when she fell into his arms. The faint had felt real enough.

It would have been better if she’d cried, though. It would have seemed more real.

Besides, she had snapped back too quickly. For her sake, it would have been much better if she had cried. But maybe she couldn’t cry.

Fainting is easy. Crying is hard.

01100
DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE

After Lieutenant Grobowski returned Marianne to her car in front of Renee’s condominium, she sat at the wheel and stared into space. The bright morning sunlight reflected off a dozen points of the chrome and glass, together with the droplets of water left from last night’s long rain. The light hurt her eyes. She dug in her handbag for sunglasses, but quickly realized she had left home without them. She had taken nothing except her handbag. She didn’t have any clothes to wear other than what she had on.

So what’s the next order of business?

First, she had to find a place to stay. She briefly considered the Quenton Parks Hotel. Perhaps it would be a good idea for her to be near one of the murder scenes. But what would be the point? What did she seriously think she was going to do, carry out her own personal investigation? If she wanted to keep tabs on the police, fine, but going back to the Quenton Parks would be too much like a teenager staying all night in a haunted house on a dare. This wasn’t a game. Marianne needed a place where she could collect herself, come to terms with what had happened, and figure out what to do next.

She drove instead to the Pacific Surf Hotel in Santa Monica and checked in. With no luggage, no makeup, and wearing well worn house clothes, she knew she looked conspicuous. But she couldn’t muster up much concern about appearances.

The Pacific Surf was a modern hotel, spare in decor, and a welcome improvement over the Quenton Parks’ inhuman gaudiness. Marianne went to her room, took off her shoes, and dropped on her back across the expansive bed. She expected relief to hit immediately. It didn’t. She ached horribly all over. But the idea of rising from the bed to take off her clothes was unimaginable. She was determined to lie there until the aching passed.

The ache was actually noisy—a kind of hum. It was the sound of overloaded wires and circuitry, the same hum the fluorescent ceiling tubes had made back at the morgue. She also remembered the hum from her childhood. When she was a little girl in Philadelphia, she used to play in a field with a high, sloping embankment at its end. Carved into the embankment was a wall with a fifteen foot stretch of concrete pavement leading up to it. There was a door in the wall bearing a red sign announcing DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE. And from behind that door came that loud, steady, forbidding hum.

In those long ago days, she used to pause in her play and stand at the edge of that concrete pavement and listen to that hum. She wondered what would happen if she defied the sign and approached the door. She imagined that the electricity would reach out from behind the door and grab her and kill her. She never took that chance. She always stood safely on the grass beyond that pavement.

A lot of good it did you to play it safe. That ugly noise has followed you through life and caught up with you. Now it’s invaded your body.

This was worse than any insomnia she’d ever experienced. After a while, she sat up. The humming wasn’t quite as loud in this position. She stared senselessly at the blank wall in front of her for a few long moments. Then she picked up the phone, called the number the two detectives had given her, and dutifully informed the switchboard operator of her whereabouts.

She looked at her watch. It was seven-thirty in the morning. It was no good just staying here. She had to go somewhere. She had no idea where, but she had to go somewhere. She briefly thought about taking a shower before going out, but it hardly seemed worth it, considering that she would have to put on these same clothes afterward. She walked out of the hotel and got into her car and started driving.

She decided not to worry about where she was going. She would just drive around until she reached a threshold of exhaustion that matched her relentless aching. Then she ought to be able to sleep. But she might have to drive a long time. Her inner, high-voltage humming had gotten a lot louder—so loud that she could hear it even over the sound of her car engine.

She guessed that this aching hum was a kind of surrogate sorrow—a thing to fill the gap where her grief ought to be but somehow still wasn’t. And where was her grief? When should she expect it to kick in? Why hadn’t she cried? When was she going to cry?

To her own surprise, she noticed that she was driving toward Renee’s condominium. Why was she going there? She parked across the street from the condo, turned off the engine, got out of the car, and walked up to the front door.

Then she realized why she had come. She wanted—
needed
—to find and talk to somebody, anybody, who had known Renee.

The front door of the building was controlled by a buzzer system. Renee’s unit was 2-A. Marianne buzzed 2-B, hoping that the closest unit also meant the closest friends. After a few moments, she heard a crackle over the little speaker.

“Yes?” asked a male voice.

“My name is Marianne Hedison. I was a friend of Renee Gauld’s.”

“Yes?” said the voice again.

Did he hear me?
She almost repeated her name, but instead she said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Are you another reporter?”

“No.”

“If you’re a reporter, please go away.”

“I’m not a reporter. I was here last night when the police were here. I just want to talk.”

No answer came from the speaker. Marianne felt her throat choke with despair. Could she cry at last? That would be wrong. It wouldn’t even be grief. She wanted to cry over the loss of her friend, not some total stranger’s refusal to let her into his home. Her inner hum turned deafening.

“Please,” she said, trying to keep her shaking voice under control. “I just want to talk to somebody who cared about her. Please.”

There was a long pause, then a strident buzz. Marianne quickly opened the door. She went upstairs, where she was met by a tall, brown-haired young man, probably in his mid-twenties. He was handsome, but his eyes were red and bleary.

Maybe he hears the humming, too.

The man looked Marianne over carefully, apparently satisfying himself that she was not a reporter.

“Please come in,” he said at last. He ushered her into the unit where a shorter, slightly rounder man was waiting.

“I’m Roland,” the man who had met her said. “This is Tony.”

Tony shook her hand and showed her to a seat. “Would you like anything? Coffee? Something to drink?”

Marianne felt the urge to ask for a bourbon, but she reminded herself that it was still early in the morning. Decorum wasn’t exactly a priority, but she didn’t want to collapse in a dead heap in front of these gentlemen.

“Coffee, please,” she said.

Roland exited into the kitchen. Tony was sitting on the sofa, turned slightly sideways, his body hunched forward as though in pain. Marianne could see that he was somewhat older than Roland. His face was strained, but he managed to give Marianne a kind, commiserating look.

“It’s been so awful,” Tony said.

“Yes,” Marianne agreed. She glanced around. The room was elegant and ornate, with rich colors and a collection of authentic Chinese and other Asiatic pieces mixed with comfortable modern furniture. The unit looked larger than Renee’s.

Roland returned with her coffee. “Do you want cream or sugar?” he asked.

“No. Black’s fine.”

“I’m sorry if I was rude,” he said, handing her the cup and saucer. “This is the first lull we’ve had in reporters all morning. We’ve told them to go away, but it doesn’t help.”

“They don’t seem to care about anybody’s feelings,” Tony added. He seemed to keep his body deliberately still, as if holding it taut against the expected onset of pain. Roland stood beside the couch. The three people fell silent. In the silence, Marianne noticed that her internal humming had stopped. She still hurt, though.

Now she wondered what to say. She reminded herself of her Quaker family, among whom silence was revered. She was always taught that there was nothing wrong with being quiet among people, that a lot could be said in simple stillness. Marianne had often tried to apply that wisdom to everyday social life with its frequent lulls and silences. But it was difficult. She could never be sure whether other people liked the quiet, whether they accepted it as a kind of communication. Renee had trouble with the quiet. Were these two men like Renee—always resisting stillness?

Marianne felt an urgency to speak.

“How did you … find out?” she asked.

She saw Roland buckle slightly, as if someone had struck him. His eyes clinched, and his coffee cup rattled slightly in its saucer.

Tony spoke in a strained voice, “We—
Roland
found her.”

Marianne felt a wave of shock.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said.

“Yes,” said Tony simply, starting to rock back and forth very slightly. “Sit down,” he said to Roland. “You’ve got to sit down.”

Roland sat down on the couch next to Tony.

“We can’t talk about that part of it,” Roland explained. “It’s not that we don’t want to, but we can’t. The police asked us not to talk about any of the details of the murder.”

“I don’t want to,” Marianne assured them. “I only want to talk about Renee.”

It became easier from there. The three shared a few reminiscences. Marianne spoke of her six-year friendship with Renee, and Tony and Roland spoke just as feelingly of their briefer one. They had met Renee socially and had immediately struck it off. They shared the same interests, politics, and music. They laughed at the same jokes. They had become an inseparable trio.

Inseparable.

The word made Marianne shiver deep inside. It seemed a terrible commentary on their friendship that Renee had never told her about these two men. What had happened? Why had so many important things been left unspoken?

“Do you know what plans have been made for the funeral?” Marianne asked, after the reminiscences began to wane a little.

“It will be in Iowa, the little town where she came from,” Roland said. “We talked on the telephone to an aunt. We offered to help with things here—the condo, paperwork, you know.”

“Are you going to the funeral?” Marianne asked.

“No,” Tony said. “We’ve never actually met any of her family.”

“We’d love to go,” Roland added. “It would be fascinating to meet her people, to find out how such a free spirit as Renee came out of the farm belt. I’m sure they’re wonderful people. But would they feel comfortable with Tony and me? We decided it’s best for us to do what we can right here.”

“Please let me know if I can help,” Marianne said. She reached into her handbag for a business card. On the back of it, she wrote “Pacific Surf Hotel.” She handed the card to Roland. In return, Roland gave her their phone number and the number of the aunt in Iowa.

Then another silence fell. Marianne felt moved to broach the forbidden subject of the murder. She had to say something. She had to make her confession.

“She invited me to come that night,” she said. “I didn’t. I can’t help but think … if I had been here …”

“It wouldn’t have happened?” Tony said, finishing her thought. “We wonder the same thing. Why didn’t we stop in her unit for a nightcap, a little conversation? We did it so often, why not that night? And if we had, could we have prevented …?”

His last words dropped into barely a whisper.

Then all was absolutely hushed and still. They searched each other’s pained and frightened eyes. They looked like anguished waxworks sitting together in the silent living room. As she had at the morgue, Marianne caught a fleeting intimation of some awful purpose behind this cruel act. It was not Renee who was being visited with despair and pain. Marianne was. These men were. They didn’t deserve this visitation.

Incommensurate. We are all being punished, and our punishment is incommensurate with our wrongs.

How else could she conceive it? She had failed to show up at a party. Roland and Tony had failed to stop in for late night cocktails. Small crimes of omission, both—but they carried ghastly consequences. Someone had chosen to take it into his heart to judge them for these lapses. Someone had chosen to take the life of someone dear to them as punishment.

He must be powerful.

More than ever, Marianne knew she had to find him.

But first, I have to find Renee.

She saw no such resolve in the faces of the two men before her. They turned their weary eyes toward each other with nothing but love. Tony took Roland’s hand in his. Tony’s hand was pale while Roland’s was slightly darker, but both were loving and strong.

Marianne had grown up among people who took each other’s hands after worship, before dinner, when entering each other’s houses—for all conceivable occasions. Marianne’s father and mother used to hold hands constantly—the most passionate act she ever witnessed in the quiet household. And at her parents’ funerals, in the very depths of her grief, Marianne had felt herself warmly enveloped by an entire congregation bound together by clasped hands.

How did I lose what these men have kept? How did I forfeit this?

Her throat choked again. But still, she could not cry.

*

The living room of Larry Bricker’s West Hollywood home was decorated tastefully with a touch of the macabre. The walls were lined with splendid pen and ink drawings of bats, owls, weasels, wolves, and the like—all creatures of night and darkness. The bookshelf contained perhaps hundreds of reference books about death and violence, all of them hardback, some of them leather-bound antiques. First editions of Larry Bricker’s own horrific fare were prominently displayed as well.

Clayton was sitting on the couch. Bricker was sitting in a chair across the room from him. The slight, balding man’s eyes were glazed with shock as he stared at the floorboards.

“I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” Clayton said.

But Bricker did not seem to hear. This bothered Clayton. He wanted very much for Bricker to have heard him say he was sorry, but he wouldn’t feel right repeating it.

In the silence, Clayton found himself studying the coffee table in front of him. He realized he had seen one just like it in a South Carolina museum. It was, in fact, a portable embalming table, probably dating to the Civil War.

Clayton tried to imagine what a normal visit to Larry Bricker would be like. Bricker would undoubtedly show off his slightly funereal belongings and decor with liberal doses of morbid jest. Guests would be hugely entertained.

Indeed, when Clayton had arrived, Bricker had been jaunty and hospitable, as if prepared for just such a performance. Then he had almost collapsed with shock when Clayton told him the news. He had been sitting here in silence during the long moments since. It was certainly no time for gruesome jokes. The room itself was suddenly infused with an uncomfortable blend of fact and fancy, and Clayton wondered if Bricker might actually be feeling a little uncomfortable in his own surroundings. This might well be the first time Bricker had encountered real violence, real destruction.

“I tried calling her yesterday,” Bricker said, finally breaking the silence. “I got her machine. Now I know ... why she didn’t call back.”

Clayton nodded. “I have to ask a few questions,” he said.

The man looked up from the floor straight at Clayton. “Of course,” he said.

“Please tell me about your relationship with the deceased.”

There wasn’t much to tell, but Bricker was painstakingly honest about it. He hadn’t known the woman long at all. They had only met last weekend when she interviewed him for her radio talk show. But he was fond of her—very, very fond of her. He was sure they would have gotten involved if …