Am I dead? I wondered as the light streamed into my eyes. It wasn’t a warm sensation-more like the grinding of gears against metal, brakes after the brake pads have worn. I should’ve been surrounded by darkness, I remember thinking, but instead I was immersed in light, too much light, white hot and blinding. I wanted to turn away from it but found that I couldn’t move.
“Hello, sugar bear.”
David again. I wasn’t surprised. Wasn’t exactly relieved, either. But he was something to look at. As always.
“What are you doing here? Do you know what happened to me?”
He didn’t have to answer. He gave me that soft, knowing look, the one he always used to disarm my wrath.
“I feel so… stupid. So ashamed.”
“You shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” A thought occurred-I should try to open my eyes. I needed to orient myself, separate the real from the imagined. “I think I’m… broken.”
“You did before.”
“But this is… different. This seems… I don’t know. Final. Unrecoverable.”
“I’ve felt like that.”
I looked at him unflinchingly, peering into the depths of those overwhelming blue eyes. “I guess you must’ve.”
“But here’s what you need to remember, Susan.”
“You’re giving me advice?”
“This is what you already know. What you’ve always known. What I could never figure out. When you forgive others, you’re not doing them a big favor. You’re doing yourself a big favor.”
“David.” All at once I wanted to reach out, wanted to hold him, wanted to bring him back to me and never let him go. “Am I dead?”
“What do you think?”
“I think… I saw someone. Something. Before you. It was beckoning to me.”
“And you think it was…?”
“You know what I think it was.”
“You think it was Death.”
“Can you tell me what to do?”
He smiled that goddamned irresistible grin. “Well, if he wants to play chess with you, don’t.”
“How long has he been in there?” Lisa asked.
“Days,” O’Bannon replied. They both peered through the window of the door to the small police library where Darcy had taken up residence. He had his books, an evidence file, and an Internet connection. “I’ve been sending in food-pizza and stuff-and sometimes he eats it. I don’t know when was the last time he slept.”
“What does he hope to find?”
“I don’t know. I’ve asked, but he can’t really explain it. He just starts stuttering and flapping his hands. I think maybe he has some crazy idea that if he punishes himself enough, it will bring Susan back.”
“What do you think?”
O’Bannon looked away. “You know what I think. What everyone thinks.”
Lisa’s face crumpled. She pressed a hand against the wall to prop herself up. “I should’ve been with her that night. She called me, but I was off on a date with some loser I didn’t even know. If I’d been with her-”
“He might’ve taken you both.”
She shook her head, brushing away her tears. “No. I could’ve stopped it. It’s my fault.”
O’Bannon walked to the water fountain and splashed cold water on his face. “You sound like Darcy. He says the same thing.” He used his shirtsleeve to dry himself off. “Susan had been so depressed, felt so isolated. I think she thought she had lost everything, that no one loved her anymore.” His teeth clenched. “My God. She had no idea.”
“Is there anything more you could be doing?” Lisa asked, her voice cracking. “Anything I could be doing?”
“Believe me, we’re trying everything possible and then some. We’ve reassigned all available manpower and borrowed more from neighboring jurisdictions. We’re tracking down every lead we get, every sighting. So far, they’ve all been bogus.”
Lisa covered her face. “I’ve-I’ve seen the pictures.”
“Damn! What irresponsible-”
“I made him. This reporter I know at the
Courier.
He showed me.” She pushed herself into the corner, eyes wet and wide. “My God, do you think it’s even possible? Could she still be alive?”
“I don’t know,” O’Bannon said, swearing under his breath. “And at this point, I don’t know if she’d want to be.”
The first sense to return was my sense of smell. There was an acrid bitterness in the air, kind of like coffee left too long on the burner. And there was something else, something fouler. Sour milk. No, that wasn’t it, but it was like that. Stale, stinky. Something I didn’t want to be near.
Then I heard the sounds. Wind whistled in my ears, and I felt cold. And a pounding, crashing sound, an auditory sense of motion. It was that rushing water noise, same thing I’d heard before. A forceful sound, the kind that could sweep me up and wash me away.
I wished it would.
My eyes finally opened on a bleak field of gray. Was I in the desert? I wondered. On a mountaintop? Took me more than a few moments to realize what I was staring at had to be an overcast sky, since I was lying flat on my ass. Literally. Because I was naked.
I suppose that shouldn’t have been a big surprise, all things considered. I was on something hard and flat and grainy. Dirty. It was in my skin and under my fingernails. I wondered how long I had been there. A long time, I thought.
I tried moving and was amazed to find I actually could. My joints were stiff, stiff to the point of near immobility. My skin hurt. But I forced myself. I sat up, and it couldn’t have taken more than half an hour or so.
I surveyed my surroundings. I was in some kind of gravel pit, white and chalky, no one else around as far as I could see. The crashing sound I’d heard was water, huge tumbling quantities of water, tumbling down not far from where I lay.
Eventually I had to turn my attention to myself, in all my glory. My skin was red and scorched, except for the bruises, which were many. I was exposed, floppy, veined, dirty, about as unattractive as it was possible for a woman to be. I repulsed myself.
What the hell had happened? I tried to recall, but the effort made my head pound. I remembered being captured. I remembered lying on his table. I remembered being scared, so scared, like I haven’t ever been before, not even when I found out about David. I remembered hating myself because I was helpless. I should’ve figured a way out. I should’ve pulled some clever last-minute trick that saved the day. Instead, I became a victim. Another pawn in the hands of a psycho who had proved himself a thousand times smarter than I was.
I had no sense of time and no timepiece. I’d forgotten what little I ever knew about telling time with the sun, so I can’t possibly say how long it was before I noticed the boxes. Seemed like an eternity that I sat there thinking, crying, cursing, not able to move, not wanting to move. But eventually that passed, or at least subsided. And I turned my attention to the shoe boxes he had left at my feet.
There were two of them, each with a message scribbled across the top in indelible black marker. The first box read: TO HELP YOU REMEMBER.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I slowly opened the envelope inside, not wanting to know what it contained, but unable not to look.
The envelope contained pictures, lots of them. Polaroids, amateur stuff, obviously taken by Edgar himself. They all had the same subject. Me.
They must have been taken while I was under the influence of his drugs. My eyes were open, but there was no one home. I could tell. There was no me in there. Only my body. My naked body.
I had been posed, over and over again, different for each picture. He had… made me do stuff. He had me playing with myself. Touching myself. Sexual poses, me on all fours, me with my legs spread, me dry-humping the furniture. One nasty pose after another. In some of them, he’d given me props. A broomstick. A Coke bottle. A dildo stuck in my mouth. A dazed, zoned expression on my face, like I liked it. Like I was drunk and I liked it.
I fell forward on my hands, heaving. He must not have fed me, because nothing came up, much as I tried. I hurled so hard I expected the lining of my stomach to spew out. I felt sick. Betrayed. Abused. Raped.
I wanted to throw the pictures away, to lose them, to forget they ever existed. And then I saw the sheet of paper in the bottom of the box. It was a mailing list. All the places he had sent copies of the pictures. All the local television stations. National news agencies. Local radio shows. Police headquarters. The FBI. Chief O’Bannon.
He’d sent the pictures to Chief O’Bannon’s home.
Darcy.
I fell forward, scraping my breasts against the gravel, wanting to hurt myself, wanting to die, wanting this to all be over, just please, please let it be over. I pounded the box with all the force my fists could muster, which wasn’t enough to dent cardboard. Look what he’s done to me, David. Look what I let him do to me.
Of course it was just a matter of time before I opened the second box. It had been labeled, too: TO HELP YOU FORGET.
Only one thing inside that one. A quart bottle of scotch whiskey.
I ripped the lid off the bottle and pressed it to my lips. I was hungry, starved, thirsty, desperate to forget. I opened my mouth and let the liquor course down my throat.
I gagged. The booze spilled everywhere, all over me. I bathed in it. As soon as I’d stopped choking, I tried again. I would use more restraint this time, I told myself. Just take a sip. A little sip, then another. Sip myself into oblivion. I raised the liquid salvation to my lips.
This is what he wants you to do.
I stopped. Where had that come from?
This is what he wants you to do. Why do you think he gave it to you?
I pulled the bottle away and stared at it, as if I had never seen such a thing in my life. He was manipulating me, just as he had done from the start. As I had allowed him to do. This is why he let me live. This is why he gave me the bottle. Because he knows I won’t be able to resist.
And he was so right. So bloody goddamn right.
He was trying to break me, to destroy what little was left so he could scoop up the pieces and reshape me into whatever he wanted me to be.
I pushed up to my feet, amazed that I could do it, and walked toward the noise. I stood naked before the god of the waters, staring down from the precipice. It had to be a hundred feet down to the basin, maybe more. I didn’t even have to climb over a barrier. Just one simple step. That’s all it would take to end it, to find peace. Hell of a lot simpler than slashing my wrists with a shard of glass. No one would care. Not after they saw those pictures. And everyone would see those pictures.
The thundering crash of the water crescendoed in my ears.
That’s what he wants you to do.
I stared down into the maelstrom. And saw something I had never seen before.
That’s when I made up my mind.
First, I got the goddamn pictures and tossed them in. The next bit was harder, a lot harder. But I did it. I turned the bottle upside down and let it pour out into the abyss. It would’ve been simpler to just toss in the bottle, but this was more satisfying. It occurred to me that I might be spiking the Vegas water supply. Well, tough.
The booze was gone. The photos were gone. The need to destroy myself was gone, at least for the moment. I was naked, and I didn’t know where I was, and I had no idea how to get back to civilization. Or even if I should.
I fell back onto the gravel as if I were a bag of boneless meat. And stayed there. In time, I fell asleep. Not unconsciousness, not druginduced stupor, but the real thing.
And I even dreamed. Or something like it.
23
Patrick marched into headquarters, his face taut and lined. He threw his coat at the nearest hook on the rack. It missed, fell in a crumpled heap on the floor. He didn’t notice. He slid behind Susan’s desk and started reviewing all the reports on Susan’s disappearance. Just as he had every day this week. Over and over again.
“You’ve got messages,” Madeline shouted from the lower floor, waving pink slips in the air.
“Give them to someone else,” he said, his face buried.
“They want you.”
“I don’t have time for crackpots and false confessions.”
“Some of them say-” She paused, lowered her voice. “They’ve seen Susan.”
“I’ve followed up on twenty-two Susan sightings. Granger has done more than that. Not a damn one has led to anything.”
“You got a problem?”
Patrick whipped his head up. Somehow, O’Bannon was right in front of him. “Sorry. I’ve been… immersed.”
“So I hear. Obsessed, some say.”
Patrick craned his neck. “Sir, when an officer is down-”
He waved it away. “You don’t have to tell me, Chaffee. I’ve known Susan all my life. I used to diaper the girl’s bare bottom.” O’Bannon’s eyes briefly closed. He looked tired, aged. “Madeline says you were making a stink about the files.”
“I was trying to find out everything I could about Susan. Her background, personnel file, police record.”
“You think the key to finding her is in her past?”
“I don’t know. But profilers are supposed to absorb all the data, collect every scrap of evidence, then come up with some brilliant conclusion. And I’ve read everything else.” He paused. “Except one file. It was logged into the computer index. But I couldn’t find it. Madeline thought maybe you had it.”
“She was right. It’s restricted.”
“I don’t know why you pulled it, but if there’s any possibility that it could help us find her-”
“It’s not about Susan.”
Patrick stopped, thought a moment. “I found it listed in her directory.”
“A cross-reference. It’s about her husband. He was a cop, too.”
“David.”
O’Bannon frowned. It was obvious that this was a subject he preferred to leave alone. “How much do you know about him?”
“Not much. Except that he’s dead. And his loss seems to have really hit Susan hard.”