“Since when does the director of Behavioral Sciences keep tabs on people’s politics and religion?”
“Since J. Edgar Hoover, or 9/11, depending on how you see it.”
Clevenger sipped his brew. “I need to know anything from his past that might have crushed him narcissisti-cally, extinguished his sense of self enough to make him willing to kill in order to live his brother’s life. I need to know if he was ever around a dissecting table— anatomy lessons in art school, anything. And, obviously, any connection to another victim would be key.”
“We’ll get right on it. What else can I do for you?”
“That a trick question?”
She laughed.
An unexpected break in the ice. “Why don’t you come see me?”
“And then what?”
He didn’t have a good answer.
McCormick was merciful enough to leave him tongue-tied only three or four seconds. “Let’s face it,”
she said, “our relationship would be even harder to solve than this case.” She paused. “Tell me what else you need from the FBI.”
Maybe he would have felt better if she sounded angry, but she sounded resigned to his speechlessness, even sympathetic to it, and that made him feel as empty as he had leaving Billy’s cell. Even emptier. “I want to interview the families of the other victims” he managed, “starting with the man from Southampton “
“RonHadley.”
“And working backward—the twelve-year-old in Montana, the two victims in Connecticut.” He heard the front door open, saw North Anderson walk in.
Anderson headed toward Clevenger’s office.
Clevenger motioned him in.
He took a seat opposite Clevenger’s desk. He was nearly six feet tall, the same height as Clevenger, with a nearly shaved head like his. The two of them also shared an intensity of gaze—at once understanding and unrelenting—that could occasionally elicit a confession from the most hardened of criminals. If Anderson hadn’t been black, the two of them would have looked like brothers, instead of just feeling that way.
“If you have the time, I can schedule all of them over the next four to five days,” McCormick said. “I may even be able to set up Southampton for later today. But I know you’ve got Billy to think about.”
“Schedule them,” he told her.
“I’ll call you.”
“Thanks.” He hung up.
“You look like hell,” Anderson said.
“Thank you, too.”
“Did you see Billy?”
Clevenger nodded, reached for his coffee, took a long swallow. “They roughed him up pretty good when he got there. He didn’t like the idea of being strip-searched.”
“Who the fuck... ? That’s why they didn’t let me in to see him.”
“He was at Mass General getting worked up. It was some new recruit with a bad temper.” He saw Anderson’s mind starting to work at the same time as his jaw—always a sign of trouble. ‘The guy’s been suspended,” Clevenger said. “Nothing to do about it. It had to be at least half Billy’s fault.”
“Is he alright?”
“He may have lost some or all of the vision in one eye. I don’t know yet. I’ve got to get him over to Mass Eye and Ear for follow-up.”
“Shit. I’m sorry”
“His eye is just the beginning, He could end up doing two to five on this “
“Who are you getting to represent him? Haggerty?”
Clevenger shook his head. “He can use a public defender this time.”
“Right,” Anderson said. He didn’t sound convinced.
“All he wanted from me was bail and a lawyer. He needs some time to think.”
Anderson smiled.
“What?”
“You’re the shrink. But I’ve hung around you enough to know there was no way on earth he was gonna tell you what he really needed.”
“And what was that?”
“His dad.”
“You know something? I’m not sure about that anymore. I’m not sure he even thinks of me in those terms. Maybe we never got there. Maybe we never will.”
“Sure he does. And so do you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be suffering through this discussion. You wouldn’t look like shit.” He nodded at the wastepaper basket beside Clevenger’s desk. “And you wouldn’t be sneaking vodka in your coffee.”
Clevenger glanced at the basket, saw the empty nip. He’d meant to bury it. “Let’s move on to the case, leave me and Billy for later,” he said. “I’ve got to fill you in on something.”
“Whatever you say, partner.” He seemed to know, as a real friend can, that there would be a time to push the issue, and that this wasn’t it. “Fill me in. Then I’ve got something for you.”
Clevenger told him about the note the killer had sent President Buckley.
“A serial killer inspired by the president,” Anderson said. “The administration can’t let that see print.”
“Whitney didn’t want it to leave her office. I promised her it wouldn’t leave ours.”
“Got it.”
“What have you got for me?” Clevenger asked.
“I’m starting to connect dots,” Anderson said. “When Jeffrey Groupmann’s skyscraper project collapsed, the biggest loser turns out to be a hedge fund called Next Millennium Capital Partners, out of Manhattan. One of their board members is Sidney Stimson.”
“Who is he?”
“She
. Among other things, her nephew was Gary Hastings, the twelve-year-old victim from Montana.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I still speak Nantucket.”
Anderson’s stint as chief of police on Nantucket Island was the gift that kept on giving. He was still in touch with the rich and famous families who summered there. “Can you track down the other investors?”
“I’m already on it.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
FOURTEEN
West Crosse had been
trying to sketch the main residence of the Rawlingses” Montana estate since leaving Maritza, just after midnight. He was surrounded by a sea of paper. He had not eaten, or slept.
lime was running out. His greatest and, almost certainly, final work was at hand: rebuilding the first family. It mattered not at all to him whether he lived after achieving God’s plan for them. He wanted only to finish each of the projects he had started.
His challenge in Montana was to design something true to Ken Rawlings’s roots in Pennsylvania and the rugged simplicity of his Quaker upbringing, yet also true to Maritza’s childhood in Cuba, where Moorish and Spanish colonial influences resulted in staggeringly extravagant baroque buildings. To do so, he had to marry the clean lines that would appeal to Rawlings with the wide windows and balconies, arches, elaborate wooden ceilings, window grates, and stained glass that would speak to his true love.
He knew what it felt like to close in on the right
plan—the growing excitement inside him, the steady building of confidence. All loose ends tied. The way clear.
He thirsted for that clarity. Then he got down on his knees and prayed for it.
The Rawlingses were a lie. Ken Rawlings had married his wife Heather out of insecurity, because he worried he would never achieve enough success in his own right Now he had Abicus, her father’s diamond mining company, but he had no peace, and no children. And why should he? Should God smile upon a lie any more than gravity upon a weak foundation?
When inspiration finally struck, it was a tidal wave that lifted Crosse up. He sketched one rectangle inside another, creating a central courtyard, typical of a Cuban colonial dwelling. To keep the courtyard alive to the world outside he drew four massive arches clear through the house, one centered on each wall. Across the facade he added the same arched windows that had graced Ken Rawlings’s grandfather’s barn. He covered the gabled roof with cedar shakes, to be stained red to match the half-round roof tiles of Old Havana.
The result was stunning—a Spanish-American fortress in the mountains, built around a Zen center, pregnant with possibilities.
He worked feverishly, roughing out floor plans. He drew the master bedroom, a Cinderella suite with every luxury for the new lady of the house, once the hired help. He placed two window seats, each deep enough to make love in while gazing at snowcapped mountains. Across the cathedral ceiling he drew trusses to be cut from a majestic Pennsylvania oak that had fallen on
Ken Rawlings’s grandfather’s farm during a thunderstorm a month before.
The main house would have six bedrooms—one for Ken and Maritza, four more for their two sons and two daughters, one for a nanny.
He raced on to the nursery, three interconnected rooms down the hall from the master bedroom, allowing for multiple births and space for a nurse. He added tall windows, inspired by the rotunda of Cuba’s Museum of the Revolution, fitted them with wooden grates to filter the light. Then he sketched a series of stained-glass skylights in each room, in the shape of shooting stars.
He worked until the minute he left his room and checked out of the Delano, barely in time to catch a noontime flight to Chicago, where he had another plan to complete.
He boarded the plane, leaned back in his seat. He felt magnificently exhausted—well used. And as he fell off to sleep he heard the voices of girls and boys calling to one another, saw them playing tag in the courtyard he had just designed, laughing as they ran out through one archway, in through another, weaving perfect childhood memories.
FIFTEEN
“What are you afraid
of?” Ted Pearson, Clevenger’s psychiatrist, asked.
“Maybe that I found someone who can’t be helped,” Clevenger said. “Maybe that I made a mistake.”
They were sitting in Pearson’s study, in deep, worn leather armchairs, facing one another. Clevenger guessed they had sat that way at least a couple of hundred hours over the past seven years, trying to hone in on whatever kept him going back to the bottle, probably the same thing that kept him from letting himself fall completely in love, commit completely to a woman, start a complete family.
Pearson turned his head slightly to the right and squinted at Clevenger, as though he were trying very hard to hear faint music. “A mistake...” He rubbed his thumb back and forth over his sterling and turquoise ring.
“Adopting him in the first place.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “I understand.” He was eighty-two years old, barely five feet tall. His hair had gone
white, his skin had wrinkled, and his blue eyes had paled. But his mind had only sharpened. He had listened to thousands of patients, tens of thousands of stories. He knew most of the ways people tie themselves in knots, and he never tired of helping them get free. “You’re that arrogant. You think you’re that good.”
Clevenger shook his head. “I said I
didn’t
think I could help him.”
“I heard you. You waltz into this young man’s life, put in three years, figure if he hasn’t turned around, he’s a lost cause.”
“He’s not getting better. He’s getting worse. He’s headed for jail.”
“Is that when you’ll stop loving him?”
Silence.
“Or have you already?” He turned away before Clevenger could answer, stared out the window at a flowering boxwood he had planted forty-four years before, the day he opened his practice. “Some father.”
That landed like a grappling hook in Clevenger’s soul. “Why are you ... ?”
Pearson looked back at him. “Who have you really given up on, Frank—Billy or yourself?”
Clevenger didn’t respond.
“Neither one of you had anything but pain as a child. Maybe you can’t bear to sit with his any longer. You can’t keep your eyes open to that much darkness.” He paused. “I forgive you that. I’m not judging you. But I won’t pretend someone else might not find light inside that young man.”
Clevenger sat there several seconds. When he tried
to speak, his throat was too tight, so he sat there a little longer. Tm not sure where to look anymore,” he said finally. “I guess we’re both lost”
Pearson leaned forward. “How about looking at that? Where did you get lost?”
Clevenger shrugged. “Trying to be a father to him, trying to do better for him than my father did for me.”
“Scary?”
“Yes.”
“Hopeless?”
“Sure seems that way.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” Pearson asked, “that Billy is experiencing the same things you are—fear and hopelessness? Have you ever wondered whether he’s making you feel those things as a way of telling you how
he
feels?”
“Transference.”
“Like they teach you in residency.”
Clevenger kept listening.
“He’s lost where you are—trying to be a father,” Pearson said. “He’d rather go to jail. He thinks he’ll fail that miserably at it”
That felt like the truth. It explained what was happening. And Clevenger was ashamed he had missed it “And here I am agreeing with him,” he said.
“In more ways than one.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’d rather drink than get a clear verdict on whether you can be a better father to Billy than your father was to you. Billy would rather get locked up than find out whether he can do it for Jake. Pick your poison, isn’t that what they say?”
“That’s what they say.”
“You want Billy to have courage? You want him to try to be something to that baby that no one ever was to him? Show some courage yourself. Put down the booze, once and for all.”
Clevenger’s eyes filled up.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Pearson said.
Clevenger looked out at the boxwood tree.
“C’mon, Frank. I’m an old man. Don’t make me work so damn hard.”
Clevenger smiled. Several seconds passed. “I was just thinking how different it would have been for me, how different I might have turned out, if I’d had ...” He stopped himself, shook his head.
“If you’d had ...” Pearson pushed.
He shrugged. “A decent father,” Clevenger said. “Maybe someone like...” He glanced at Pearson. “I’m not making any sense.”
“Someone like me?”
“Talk about transference,” Clevenger said, with a chuckle. “I don’t know what the hell I’m saying right now.”
“Sure you do,” Pearson said. “And there’s nothing funny about it.”
Their eyes met.
“I wish you’d had a father like the one you
imagine
me to be,” Pearson said. His tone grew especially warm. “I wish I could have been that good a father to my own kids.”