Tell No One (6 page)

I knew dreams. What I had seen on the computer wasn’t one.

It wasn’t a ghost either. Not that I believe in them, but when in doubt, you might as well keep an open mind. But ghosts don’t age. The Elizabeth on the computer had. Not a lot, but it had been eight years. Ghosts don’t cut their hair either. I thought of that long braid hanging down her back in the moonlight. I thought about the fashionably short cut I’d just seen. And I thought about those eyes, those eyes that I had looked into since I was seven years old.

It was Elizabeth. She was still alive.

I felt the tears come again, but this time I fought them back. Funny thing. I’d always cried easily, but after mourning for Elizabeth it was as though I couldn’t cry anymore. Not that I had cried myself out or used up all my tears or any of that nonsense. Or that I’d grown numb from grief, though that might have been a tiny part of it. What I think happened was that I instinctively snapped into a defensive stance. When Elizabeth died, I
threw open the doors and let the pain in. I let myself feel it all. And it hurt. It hurt so damn much that now something primordial wouldn’t let it happen again.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Half an hour maybe. I tried to slow my breath and calm my mind. I wanted to be rational. I needed to be rational. I was supposed to be at Elizabeth’s parents’ house already, but I couldn’t imagine facing them right now.

Then I remembered something else.

Sarah Goodhart.

Sheriff Lowell had asked if I knew anything about the name. I did.

Elizabeth and I used to play a childhood game. Perhaps you did too. You take your middle name and make it your first, then you take your childhood street name and make it your last. For example, my full name is David Craig Beck and I grew up on Darby Road. I would thus be Craig Darby. And Elizabeth would be …

Sarah Goodhart.

What the hell was going on here?

I picked up the phone. First I called Elizabeth’s parents. They still lived in that house on Goodhart Road. Her mother answered. I told her I was running late. People accept that from doctors. One of the fringe benefits of the job.

When I called Sheriff Lowell, his voice mail picked up. I told him to beep me when he had a chance. I don’t have a cell phone. I realize that puts me in the minority, but my beeper leashes me to the outside world too much as it is.

I sat back, but Homer Simpson knocked me out of my trance with another “The mail is here!” I shot forward and gripped the mouse. The sender’s address
was unfamiliar, but the subject read Street Cam. Another thud in my chest.

I clicked the little icon and the email came up:

Beneath this, clinging to the bottom of the screen, just five more words:

Larry Gandle, the man with the bad comb-over, watched Eric Wu quietly handle the cleanup.

Wu, a twenty-six-year-old Korean with a staggering assortment of body pierces and tattoos, was the deadliest man Gandle had ever known. Wu was built like a small army tank, but that alone didn’t mean much. Gandle knew plenty of people who had the physique. Too often, show muscles meant useless muscles.

That was not the case with Eric Wu.

The rock brawn was nice, but the real secret of Wu’s deadly strength lay in the man’s callused hands—two cement blocks with steel-talon fingers. He spent hours on them, punching cinder blocks, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, performing sets of one-finger push-ups. When Wu put those fingers to use, the devastation to bone and tissue was unimaginable.

Dark rumors swirled around men like Wu, most of which were crap, but Larry Gandle had seen him kill a man by digging his fingers into the soft spots of the
face and abdomen. He had seen Wu grab a man by both ears and rip them off in a smooth pluck. He had seen him kill four times in four very different ways, never using a weapon.

None of the deaths had been quick.

Nobody knew exactly where Wu came from, but the most accepted tale had something to do with a brutal childhood in North Korea. Gandle had never asked. There were some night paths the mind was better off not traversing; the dark side of Eric Wu—right, like there might be a light side—was one of them.

When Wu finished wrapping up the protoplasm that had been Vic Letty in the drop cloth, he looked up at Gandle with those eyes of his. Dead eyes, Larry Gandle thought. The eyes of a child in a war newsreel.

Wu had not bothered taking off his headset. His personal stereo did not blare hip hop or rap or even rock ‘n’ roll. He listened pretty much nonstop to those soothing-sounds CDs you might find at Sharper Image, the ones with names like Ocean Breeze and Running Brook.

“Should I take him to Benny’s?” Wu asked. His voice had a slow, odd cadence to it, like a character from a Peanuts cartoon.

Larry Gandle nodded. Benny ran a crematorium. Ashes to ashes. Or, in this case, scum to ashes. “And get rid of this.”

Gandle handed Eric Wu the twenty-two. The weapon looked puny and useless in Wu’s giant hand. Wu frowned at it, probably disappointed that Gandle had chosen it over Wu’s own unique talents, and jammed it in his pocket. With a twenty-two, there were rarely exit wounds. That meant less evidence. The blood had been contained by a vinyl drop cloth. No muss, no fuss.

“Later,” Wu said. He picked up the body with one hand as though it were a briefcase and carried it out.

Larry Gandle nodded a good-bye. He took little joy from Vic Letty’s pain—but then again, he took little discomfort either. It was a simple matter really. Gandle had to know for absolute certain that Letty was working alone and that he hadn’t left evidence around for someone else to find. That meant pushing the man past the breaking point. There was no other way.

In the end, it came down to a clear choice—the Scope family or Vic Letty. The Scopes were good people. They had never done a damn thing to Vic Letty. Vic Letty, on the other hand, had gone out of his way to try to hurt the Scope family. Only one of them could get off unscathed—the innocent, well-meaning victim or the parasite who was trying to feed off another’s misery. No choice when you thought about it.

Gandle’s cell phone vibrated. He picked it up and said, “Yes.”

“They identified the bodies at the lake.”

“And?”

“It’s them. Jesus Christ, it’s Bob and Mel.”

Gandle closed his eyes.

“What does it mean, Larry?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Larry Gandle knew that there was no choice. He’d have to speak with Griffin Scope. It would unearth unpleasant memories. Eight years. After eight years. Gandle shook his head. It would break the old man’s heart all over again.

“I’ll handle it.”

K
im Parker, my mother-in-law, is beautiful. She’d always looked so much like Elizabeth that her face had become for me the ultimate what-might-have-been. But Elizabeth’s death had slowly sapped her. Her face was drawn now, her features almost brittle. Her eyes had that look of marbles shattered from within.

The Parkers’ house had gone through very few changes since the seventies—adhesive wood paneling, wall-to-wall semi-shag carpet of light blue with flecks of white, a faux-stone raised fireplace à la the Brady Bunch. Folded TV trays, the kind with white plastic tops and gold metal legs, lined one wall. There were clown paintings and Rockwell collector plates. The only noticeable update was the television. It had swelled over the years from a bouncing twelve-inch black-and-white to the monstrous full-color fifty-incher that now sat hunched in the corner.

My mother-in-law sat on the same couch where Elizabeth and I had so often made out and then some. I smiled for a moment and thought, ah, if that couch could talk. But then again, that hideous chunk of sitting space with the loud floral design held a lot more than lustful memories. Elizabeth and I had sat there to open our college acceptance letters. We cuddled to watch
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and
The Deer Hunter
and all the old Hitchcock films. We did homework, me sitting upright and Elizabeth lying with her head on my lap. I told Elizabeth I wanted to be a doctor—a big-time surgeon, or so I thought. She told me she wanted to get a law degree and work with kids. Elizabeth couldn’t bear the thought of children in pain.

I remember an internship she did during the summer break after our freshman year of college. She worked for Covenant House, rescuing runaway and homeless children from New York’s worst streets. I went with her once in the Covenant House van, cruising up and down Forty-second Street pre-Giuliani, sifting through putrid pools of quasi-humanity for children who needed shelter. Elizabeth spotted a fourteen-year-old hooker who was so strung out that she’d soiled herself. I winced in disgust. I’m not proud of that. These people may have been human, but—I’m being honest here—the filth repulsed me. I helped. But I winced.

Elizabeth never winced. That was her gift. She took the children by the hand. She carried them. She cleaned off that girl and nursed her and talked to her all night. She looked them straight in the eye. Elizabeth truly believed that everyone was good and worthy; she was naïve in a way I wish I could be.

I’d always wondered if she’d died that same way—with that naïveté intact—still clinging through the pain to her faith in humanity and all that wonderful nonsense. I hope so, but I suspect that KillRoy probably broke her.

Kim Parker sat primly with her hands in her lap. She’d always liked me well enough, though during our youth both sets of parents had been concerned with our closeness. They wanted us to play with others. They wanted us to make more friends. Natural, I suppose.

Hoyt Parker, Elizabeth’s father, wasn’t home yet, so Kim and I chatted about nothing—or, to say the same thing a different way, we chatted about everything except Elizabeth. I kept my eyes focused on Kim because I knew that the mantel was chock-full of photographs of Elizabeth and her heart-splitting smile.

She’s alive.
…

I couldn’t make myself believe it. The mind, I know from my psychiatric rotation in medical school (not to mention my family history), has incredible distortive powers. I didn’t believe I was nuts enough to conjure up her image, but then again, crazy people never do. I thought about my mother and wondered what she realized about her mental health, if she was even capable of engaging in serious introspection.

Probably not.

Kim and I talked about the weather. We talked about my patients. We talked about her new part-time job at Macy’s. And then Kim surprised the hell out of me.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asked.

It was the first truly personal question she had ever asked me. It knocked me back a step. I wondered what she wanted to hear. “No,” I said.

She nodded and looked as though she wanted to say something else. Her hand fluttered up to her face.

“I date,” I said.

“Good,” she replied with too hearty a nod. “You should.”

I stared at my hands and surprised myself by saying, “I still miss her so much.” I didn’t plan on that. I planned on keeping quiet and following our usual safe track. I glanced up at her face. She looked pained and grateful.

“I know you do, Beck,” Kim said. “But you shouldn’t feel guilty about seeing other people.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I mean, it’s not that.”

She uncrossed her legs and leaned toward me. “Then what is it?”

I couldn’t speak. I wanted to. For her sake. She looked at me with those shattered eyes, her need to talk about her daughter so surface, so raw. But I couldn’t. I shook my head.

I heard a key in the door. We both turned suddenly, straightening up like caught lovers. Hoyt Parker shouldered open the door and called out his wife’s name. He stepped into the den and with a hearty sigh, he put down a gym bag. His tie was loosened, his shirt wrinkled, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Hoyt had forearms like Popeye. When he saw us sitting on the couch, he let loose another sigh, this one deeper and with more than a hint of disapproval.

“How are you, David?” he said to me.

We shook hands. His grip, as always, was callous-scratchy and too firm. Kim excused herself and hurried out of the room. Hoyt and I exchanged pleasantries, and silence settled in. Hoyt Parker had never been comfortable with me. There might have
been some Electra complex here, but I’d always felt that he saw me as a threat. I understood. His little girl had spent all her time with me. Over the years, we’d managed to fight through his resentment and forged something of a friendship. Until Elizabeth’s death.

He blames me for what happened.

He has never said that, of course, but I see it in his eyes. Hoyt Parker is a burly, strong man. Rock-solid, honest Americana. He’d always made Elizabeth feel unconditionally safe. Hoyt had that kind of protective aura. No harm would come to his little girl as long as Big Hoyt was by her side.

I don’t think I ever made Elizabeth feel safe like that.

“Work good?” Hoyt asked me.

“Fine,” I said. “You?”

“A year away from retirement.”

I nodded and we again fell into silence. On the ride over here, I decided not to say anything about what I’d seen on the computer. Forget the fact that it sounded loony. Forget the fact that it would open old wounds and hurt them both like all hell. The truth was, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. The more time passed, the more the whole episode felt unreal. I also decided to take that last email to heart.
Tell no one.
I couldn’t imagine why or what was going on, but whatever connection I’d made felt frighteningly tenuous.

Nonetheless I still found myself making sure Kim was out of earshot. Then I leaned closer to Hoyt and said softly, “Can I ask you something?”

He didn’t reply, offering up instead one of his patented skeptical gazes.

“I want to know—” I stopped. “I want to know how you found her.”

“Found her?”