Kiss of the Bees (26 page)

“What kinds of interviews?” he asked.

“I tracked Andrew Carlisle’s mother down at her retirement home up in Chandler. I thought hearing about him from her might help me understand him better. But he was already several moves ahead of me there.”

Mitch Johnson knew exactly what Diana Ladd Walker was leading up to—the tapes, of course. He and Andy had discussed Andy’s giving them to her in great detail, long before it happened. But he had to ask, had to convince her to tell him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Andrew Carlisle was a master at mind games, Mr. Lazarus,” Diana answered. “At the time we started the project, I still didn’t understand that.”

“Games?” he repeated. “What kind of games are we talking about?”

“Andrew Carlisle was toying with me, Mr. Lazarus, the same way a cat torments a captive mouse.”

So am I,
Mitch Johnson thought, concealing the beginnings of an unintentional smile behind his iced-tea glass.

“In the beginning,” Diana continued, “I don’t think he had any intention of my writing the book.”

“Really. That’s surprising,” Monty returned. “Why, then, did he bother to write to you in the first place?”

“Of all his victims,” she said slowly, “I’m the one who got away. Not only that, even before this book, I had achieved a kind of prominence in writing that Andrew Carlisle could never hope for. I think that ate at him for years. After all, I’m somebody he didn’t consider worthy of being one of his students.”

“That’s right,” Monty Lazarus said. “I remember now. Your husband was admitted to the writing program Professor Carlisle taught, but you weren’t. Your husband—your first husband, that is—was he a writer, too? Did Garrison Ladd ever have anything published?”

“No,” she answered. “He never did.”

“But he was enrolled in Carlisle’s class at the time of his death. Presumably he was working on something, then. What was it?”

Diana shook her head. “I have no idea,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure there was a partially completed manuscript, but I never read it. The thing disappeared in all the confusion after Gary’s death. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what was in it?”

Mitch asked the speculative question deftly like a
picador
sticking a tormenting pic into the unsuspecting bull’s neck. And it did its intended work. It pleased him to see her struggle with her answer. She took a deep breath.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think knowing that would serve any useful purpose at all. Whatever Gary was writing, it had nothing at all to do with Andrew Carlisle’s focus on me, which, in my opinion, boils down to nothing more or less than professional jealousy.”

Oh, no,
Mitch wanted to tell her.
It’s far more complex than that.
Instead, Monty Lazarus looked down at his notes and frowned. “Let’s go back to something you said just a minute ago, something about Carlisle being a couple of moves ahead of you. Something about him never really intending for you to write the book. If that was the case, what was the point?”

“He was hoping to humiliate me publicly,” Diana answered. “I think he thought he could get me to make a public commitment to writing the book and then force me to back out of it. But it didn’t work. I wrote the book anyway.”

For the first time, Mitch was surprised. Diana’s answer was right on the money. Andy had told him that he didn’t think she’d have guts enough to go through with it. That was another instance, one of the first ones Mitch had noticed, where Andy Carlisle’s assessment of any given situation had turned out to be dead wrong.

“It still doesn’t make much sense,” Monty said, making a show of dusting crumbs of tortilla chips out of his lap.

Diana knew it did make sense, but only if you had all the other pieces of the puzzle. Monty Lazarus didn’t have access to those. No one did, no one other than Diana. Those were the very things she had left out of the book, the ugly parts she had never mentioned to anyone, including Brandon Walker.

She had absolutely no intention of telling the whole story to Monty Lazarus, either. Those things were hers alone—Diana Ladd Walker’s dirty little secrets. Instead, she tossed off a too-casual answer, hoping it would throw him off the trail.

“Let’s just say it was a grudge match,” Diana said. “Andrew Philip Carlisle hated my guts.”

Almost a month after that first interview with Carlisle up in Florence, Diana was still waiting for the first written installment, which had taken far longer for him to deliver than he had said it would.

Davy was home from school for a few weeks. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Diana and Brandon had planned to take Lani and Davy up to the White Mountains to visit some friends who owned a two-room cabin just outside Payson. The four-day outing was scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, as soon as Brandon came home from work. Fate in the form of a demanding editor intervened when the Federal Express delivery man came to the door at nine o’clock Thursday morning. The package he delivered contained the galleys for her next book,
The Copper Baron’s Wife,
along with an apologetic note from her editor saying the corrections needed to be completed and ready to be returned to New York on Tuesday morning.

“I’d better stay home and work on them,” she said to Brandon on the phone that day when she called him at his office. “You know as well as I do that I can’t do a good job on galleys when we’re camped out with a houseful of people up in Payson. I have to be able to concentrate, but you and the kids are welcome to go. Just because I have to work doesn’t mean everybody else has to suffer.”

Brandon had protested, but in the end he had taken Lani and Davy and the three of them had gone off without her. Once they were piled in the car and headed for Payson, Diana had locked herself up with the galleys and worked her way through the first hundred pages of the book before she gave up for the night and went to bed. The next morning, when she went out to bring in the newspaper, she found an envelope propped against the front door. Although it was addressed to her, it hadn’t been mailed. Someone had left it on the porch overnight.

Curious, she had torn the envelope open and found a cassette tape—that and nothing else. No note, no explanation. She had taken the tape inside to her office and popped it into the cassette player she kept on the bookshelf beside her desk.

When the tape first began playing, there was no sound—none at all. Distracted by a headline at the top of the newspaper, Diana was beginning to assume that the tape was blank when she heard a moan—a long, terrible moan.

“Please,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Mr. Ladd, please . . .”

Diana had been holding the newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As soon as she heard her former husband’s name, she dropped both the paper and the cup. The paper merely fell back to the surface of the desk. The cup, however, crashed to the bare floor, shattering on the Saltillo tile and sending splatters of coffee and shards of cup from one end of the room to the other.

Diana leaned closer to the recorder and turned up the volume. “Mr. Ladd,” the girl’s voice said again. “Please. Let me go.”

“No help there, little lady,” a man’s voice said. “He’s out cold. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

The voice was younger, but Diana recognized it after a moment. Andrew Carlisle’s. Unmistakably Andrew Carlisle’s and . . . the other? Could it be Gina Antone’s? No. That wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be!

But a few agonizing exchanges later, Diana realized it was true. The other voice
did
belong to Gina Antone all right, to someone suffering the torments of the damned.

“Please, mister,” the girl pleaded helplessly, her voice barely a whisper. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please . . .” The rest of what she might have said dissolved into a shriek followed by a series of despairing sobs.

“But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Don’t you remember telling us that you were taking us to a bad place? It turns out you were right. This is a bad place, my dear. A very bad place.”

There was a momentary pause followed by another spine-tingling scream that seemed to go on forever. Diana had risen to her feet as if to fend off a physical attack. Now she slumped backward into the chair while the infernal tape continued to play. Gradually the scream subsided until there was nothing left but uncontrollable, gasping sobs.

“My God,” Diana whispered aloud. “Did he tape the whole thing?”

Soon it became clear that he had. It was a ninety-minute tape, forty-five minutes per side. Halfway through the tape, the girl began passing out. It happened over and over again. Each time he revived her—brought her back to consciousness with splashes of water and with slaps to her face so he could continue the terrible process. Sick with revulsion, Diana realized he was orchestrating and prolonging her ordeal so the whole thing would be there. On tape. Every bit of it, even the horrifying finale where, after first announcing his intentions for the benefit of his unseen audience, Andrew Carlisle had bitten off Gina Antone’s nipple.

Shaken to the core, Diana listened to the whole thing. Not because she wanted to but because she was incapable of doing anything else. She sat in the chair as though mesmerized, as though stricken by some sudden paralysis that rendered her unable to make the slightest movement, unable to reach across to the tape player and switch it off. Unchecked tears streamed down her face and dripped unnoticed into the mess of splattered coffee and broken china.

And when it was finally over, when Gina Antone’s awful death was finished at last and the recorder clicked off, Diana leaned over and threw up into the mess of coffee and broken cup.

For a while after that she still couldn’t move. Carlisle had made it last that whole time. He had tortured the girl for a carefully calculated ninety minutes. And that was just the part he had taped. From the sound of it there must have been some preliminaries that had occurred even before that. And for inflicting that kind of appalling torture, for premeditating, planning, and savoring every ugly moment of that appalling inhumanity, what had happened to Andrew Carlisle?

A superior court judge had allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. The torture death of Gina Antone hadn’t even merited a charge of murder in the first degree. The State of Arizona had extracted a price of six short years from Andrew Carlisle in exchange for Gina Antone’s suffering. Six years. After that, he had been allowed to go free. Free to kill again.

Stunned, Diana sat for another half-hour, trying to decide what to do. There was no sense in turning the tape over to the authorities. What would they do with it? What
could
they do? Preposterously light or not, Andrew Carlisle had already served a prison term in connection with Gina Antone’s death. Double jeopardy would preclude him from being tried again for that same crime.

So should she keep the tape? Comments made by Andrew Carlisle during the tape seemed to make it clear that Diana’s former husband, Garrison Ladd, had been present at the crime scene but drunk and passed out during most of that terrible drama. Twenty-two years after the fact, Diana Cooper Ladd Walker finally had some understanding of her former husband’s involvement in Gina Antone’s death. It would seem that Garrison hadn’t been actively involved in what was done to Gina, but that didn’t mean he was blameless. Mr. Ladd. Gina had called him by name. No doubt he was the one she knew. That meant Garrison was probably the one who had lured her into the truck in the first place.

When he did that, when he had offered her a ride, had he known what was coming or not? There was no way of unraveling that now, and listening to the tape again or a hundred times, or having someone else listen to it wouldn’t have provided an adequate answer to that haunting question.

Getting out of the chair at last, Diana set about cleaning up the mess of vomit, spilled coffee, and broken pottery. Down on her hands and knees, for the first time ever she was grateful that Rita was dead. Had Gina’s grandmother still been alive, Diana would have had to face the moral dilemma of whether or not to play the tape for the old woman. With Rita dead, that wasn’t an issue.

But what about Davy? What would happen if he heard it? That thought hit her like a lightning bolt. Diana’s son—Garrison Ladd’s son—was still alive. If he ever came to know what was on that tape, it would tell him far more about his father than he ever needed to know.

Finally, there was Brandon to consider. He had headed the investigation into Gina Antone’s death and he had eventually arrested Andrew Carlisle. The plea bargain that had followed the arrest had been negotiated behind Brandon Walker’s back. If he had to endure listening to the grim recorded reality of Gina Antone’s death, Diana knew Brandon would be devastated. He would blame himself for the unwitting part he had played in allowing Andrew Carlisle to slip off the hook and escape what should have been a charge of aggravated first-degree murder.

Thinking about what exposure to the tape would do to both Brandon and Davy was what finally galvanized Diana Ladd Walker to action. Brandon was already carrying around a big enough load of guilt. His son Quentin was in prison due to a fatality drunk-driving charge. As another source of free-flowing guilt in Brandon Walker’s life, that tape was the last thing he needed.

With a fierce jab of her finger, Diana ejected the offending tape. She popped it out of the player and then carried it out to the living room. It was the first weekend in July. At eight o’clock in the morning, the air conditioner was already humming along at full speed when Diana knelt in front of the fireplace and opened the flue. Carefully, she laid a small fire with kindling at the bottom, topped by a layer of several wrist-thick branches of dried ironwood.

Once the kindling was lit, she sat on the raised hearth and waited until the ironwood was fully engulfed before she tossed the tape into the crackling flames. As the heat attacked it, the clear plastic container began to curl and melt. Like a snake shedding its skin, the magnetic tape slithered off its spindle and escaped the confines of the dwindling case. The tape writhed free, wriggled like a tortured creature, burst into flames, and then withered into a glowing chain of ash.