The Astral (20 page)

He smiled glumly. “For a woman who edits books, you make a lousy metaphor.”

“You think that's lousy, wait till you try my meatloaf.”

They regarded one another grimly for a long moment. Jack felt as if he were struggling through a quagmire, torn between his love for her and his fear of what her obsession was doing to her, to them. If she were ill, physically ill, if she had cancer, he would never leave her, would nurture and succor her in any way that he could.

This was something else though, something he couldn't ameliorate for her, this fixation with Paterson.
That
was her cancer, and it was as malignant, as insidious, as anything that might have corrupted her body. It was poisoning her. Poisoning them, feeding a gulf that seemed to grow ever wider and deeper between them.

“Can't you see,” she began, but he said, sharply, “What I see, Catherine, is that you're married to him, in some psychic way.”

“Don't be dense,” she snapped. “I just want to see his evil ended.”

“That's not your job, Catherine. And it's not just his evil anymore. Somehow, it's become yours, it's imbedded in your soul. It's destroying you. I can't bear to watch it any longer. Every time he goes after you, every time you go after him, it's like some evil test of wills between the two of you, and I am left to stand helplessly aside and watch. It's killing me.”

“There's something I haven't told you,” she said in little more than a whisper. “I haven't told anyone. I can barely bear to face it myself: it's my fault Becky died.”

“Catherine, that's ridiculous. Your daughter was murdered, by those two monsters. They kidnapped her....”

“I could have stopped it,” she said in an agonized voice. “I should have stopped it. I should have been there, only....” She turned tear-brimmed eyes to him, “Only, I stopped to look at a magazine, one of those trashy gossip things. I stood there reading about some Hollywood bimbo for two, maybe three minutes. While they were dragging Becky from our car.”

“There were two men. Armed men. Even if you had gotten there two minutes sooner, what could you have done?”

She shook her head, her voice rising in near hysteria. “They wouldn't have taken her if I had been there.”

“You can't know that, darling, they might just have shot you that much sooner. They might have killed you.”

“You can die and go on living.”

“Catherine, I beg you....”

She turned away from him, her heart aching. How could she make him understand? She hardly understood it herself. Why had she even been given this gift? Gift? It was more of a curse, wasn't it? Yet she had been given it:
there is something only you can do
....

“It's no use,” she said. “I understand how you feel....”

“Do you?” he asked, and now there was an unmistakable note of bitterness in his voice. He was convinced she had no idea how he felt. Worse, he believed she did not because she did not want to. That, more than anything else, tore at him like a demon ripping his guts out of him. Nothing, no one, was as important to her now as Paterson. Second fiddle was not a happy instrument to play.

“...But I can't,” Catherine was still speaking, “I won't give up now, not until I've seen it through. Don't you see, Jack, those children, the ones he's damaged already, and the ones he means to steal. I'm all they have.”

“Can't you see, you're all I have?” he asked. “Catherine, you can't bring Becky back to life.”

For a long moment she stood frozen in place, clenching her teeth, her fists tight, trying to control the anger that flared up within her.

“Damn it, Jack, that's not fair,” she swore finally, and whirled to face him—but he had gone, the door closing softly in his wake.

She stared at it, part of her wanting to run after him, to beg him to stay. She even, for a brief moment, wondered if he could be right, if she should give up her pursuit of Paterson and just run away, run so far that he couldn't ever find her.

There was no distance that great, however. In her heart, she knew that, and she knew, too, that she could never quit so long as he was still out there, still free to do evil. Sadly, she knew something else as well: she would never be able to make anyone, not even Jack, understand what this meant for her.

She stared about at the dreary little cottage with its tawdry furnishings. She was alone. When you got down to it, she had always borne this burden alone, and always would.

Oh, hell, she thought, that is too bleak. Tomorrow, the day after, she'd be ready to tackle things again. Ready to tackle Paterson somehow. Ready to patch things up with Jack. She knew that she had to do that. She couldn't allow this quarrel to continue.

But she still wouldn't be able really to share. Talk about it, yes, but the burden remained hers alone.

Well, then, somehow the means to do it must be shown to her as well, mustn't it? And hadn't the guidance she needed so often come to her in the past? She would just have to trust that it would again.

She walked into the bedroom, threw herself across the bed, and began to cry.

* * * *

It was morning before she slept, and nearly noon by the time she woke, feeling scarcely rested, and utterly weary with living like a fugitive.

And for what, she asked herself for the umpteenth time? Paterson was gone, in Mexico probably, a hundred miles and at least two hours away. She even took the chance of trying fleetingly to find him on the astral level and got only a dim image that told her clearly he was nowhere near.

To make matters worse, she had picked up a bug, had woken nauseous and barely made it to the bathroom before she lost last night's dinner. Or maybe it was the stress of her quarrel with Jack.

In any case, it was one misery too many. She made up her mind that Paterson could not be allowed to steal her life from her by default. He might win after all in the end, but she was not going to give up everything for his sake.

She called Jack at the station and was told he was in a meeting. “Would you like his voice mail?” his secretary asked.

Catherine hesitated. Her feelings were such a muddle: frustration, anger with him for not understanding, anger and guilt with herself because at least a part of her suspected he was right. How could she say all that on his voice mail?

“No, I'll call him later,” she said instead.

* * * *

Chang waved her way past King's secretary and entered his office without knocking. He looked up, surprised. In all the time they had worked together, this was a first. And they weren't on the best of terms at the moment; since her unauthorized visit to Danny O'Dell, of which he had definitely not approved.

“Colley, sir,” she said without preamble. “J. D. Colley. As in John David.”

The King gave her a blank look and waited for explanation.

“We picked up some prints at the Morning View house. Paterson's. And his partner's. J. D. Colley. He had a couple of priors for molestation, pled down, got off. That's why he was hard to find. And the description matches.” She dropped a mug shot on his desk.

“There's more,” she said while he picked up the photos and looked hard at them. “We got some other prints, too. That actor's. O'Dell.” She suppressed any temptation to say or even look I-told-you-so. “He lied to us when he said he didn't know Paterson. Plus, we got a man from O'Dell's television studio says there was an incident a while back, some kid said O'Dell came on to him in the john, tried to feel him up. It was all hushed up, big bucks shelled out probably, but the guy says he's willing to swear to it, even has the name of the kid.”

King nodded his head and started to scribble on a piece of paper. “It's enough for a warrant. I want that house taken apart. If he's got any shit there, we'll nail him to the wall.” He glanced up at her and paused, and raised both eyebrows. “Chang, you look like a cat that just inherited a fish farm.”

She allowed herself a grin. “Not a farm, sir, a cabin. O'Dell owns a cabin, out in the woods. At Big Bear.”

King grinned back at her, a rare occurrence. He leaned back in his chair and made a tent of his fingers. “Does he now? Tell me one thing more, agent. Does he hang left or right?”

“Right, sir. Definitely.”

* * * *

Despite everything, Catherine found that it astonishingly good just to be outside, in her car, moving with the traffic on the L.A. streets. It had rained early, but the rain had stopped and an erratic wind seemed determined to drive the remaining clouds away. Her spirits lifting, she promised herself that she would call Jack later in the afternoon and mend things with him. She meant to pick up the reins of her life again, instead of surrendering them to Paterson. What a fool she had been.

She drove straight to the office in Century City. She wanted work, catharsis, a chance to stretch her mental muscles.

She started with the mountain of mail that had accumulated in the few days she had been off. Bills, book proposals, letters. She sorted them into piles and, armed with letter opener, started with the financial stack. She had half opened a bank statement before she took a second look at the envelope and realized it wasn't her bank.

Fidelity Bank and Trust. It was another moment before she registered that this was the bank where Walter kept their joint account. She looked again at the address. Yes, it had been sent to the house and, both their names listed, Walter's first. Somehow this had mistakenly been forwarded with her mail.

She started to write “forward” on the envelope and then, remembering that it was half opened, decided instead she would drop it by the house. There were one or two things she had been meaning to pick up anyway.

She had no more than set the envelope aside than her phone rang and to her surprise, it was Walter on the line.

“What a coincidence,” she said, meaning to mention the statement to him, but he began to talk in a hurry, his voice anxious, stressed.

“Catherine, I...I'm embarrassed to ask, but, I need some money. Some unexpected expenses at the restaurant. I wondered if....” He paused expectantly.

“Of course,” she said, surprised. Walter had always been so meticulous in handling money, she could hardly imagine him running short. Finances had never been an issue between them, however. If anything, she supposed he had been overly generous with her. “How much do you need?”

“Five thousand.” He blurted it out.

The figure was another surprise. She expected him to say a few hundred. It left her briefly speechless.

He misread the pause. “I can pay it back out of the money from the house,” he said quickly. “With interest. I wouldn't ask if it weren't....”

“No, no, that's all right, interest won't be necessary, and I'm not worried about your paying it back. It's only, I don't think I have that much in my account.”

“Can you spare two?”

She did a quick mental calculation. “Yes, I think I can. I'll have to stop by the bank a little later. Did you want me to drop it off at the restaurant?”

“I'll come pick it up at your office. If that's all right? And, Catherine, you are a peach, you don't know how much I appreciate this.”

“Don't give it a thought,” she assured him. It was not until he had rung off that she realized that she had forgotten to mention the bank statement.

Well, no matter, she thought, looking at it once again. He could pick that up with the cash.

She was still staring at the envelope, puzzling at the strangeness of Walter's behavior, when the phone rang again. This time it was a woman's voice, one she didn't recognize. “I'm calling from Fidelity Bank and Trust,” she said.

Another coincidence?
“Yes?”

“There seems to be a slight problem with your account. It's a bit overdrawn. We wondered if you could take care of that at your earliest convenience?”

“You must mean the joint account that my husband and I keep,” Catherine said.

“Yes. That would be the one.” She rattled off an account number. Catherine jotted it down. “It's only a few hundred, you understand. But we do like to stay on top of these things.”

For a long moment Catherine contemplated what she had just been told. It was even more incredible to her that Walter could have allowed a bank account to be overdrawn. “I don't understand,” she said, more to herself than to the woman on the phone.

“Well, there have been some rather large checks drawn on the account of late. Perhaps your husband wrote them, but you have seen the statement, I presume. Or if you haven't, I could send you another copy, if you like.”

The statement?
“No, that won't be necessary. I'll....”

“You really should review the charges,” the voice said, and then there was a change on the line and she was listening to a syrupy orchestral arrangement of Eric Clapton's “Layla.” After a few seconds, the line changed again and a woman's voice, a different voice, said, “This is Miss Frazier, thank you for holding. How may I help you?”

“I was talking to someone else,” Catherine said, “Just a moment earlier. Another woman.”

After a pause, Miss Frazier asked, “Do you recall her name?”

“I...I don't think she gave me one.”

“I see.” Miss Frazier took a moment to consider. “Perhaps I can help you. What seems to be your problem?”

“Our account appears to be overdrawn.” She gave Miss Frazier the account number she had jotted down.

“Let me pull up that account.” Miss Frazier left her to listen to more of “Layla.” It was all legato strings, sweeping crescendos, muted rhythm. Only the melody was recognizable. She hoped for his sake Eric Clapton never heard it.

Miss Frazier came back on the line. Catherine was not surprised when she said, “I don't find anything wrong on that account. Are you sure of the number?”