Authors: J. A. Kerley
“Think Ocampo figured this all out beforehand? Tell me it was accidental.”
“Donnie is Gary’s exact replica, and Gary Ocampo’s made a good living by selling comic books. He knows the market and plays it like a first-rate stock-picker. He’s shrewd and canny, and leverages it to his advantage. I figure Donnie is just as smart.”
Roy sighed. “Scott’s memories are messed up, right? Even though he got away?”
I nodded. “Scott got lucky. We didn’t.”
I started to the door but Roy called to my back. I turned. “Correct me if I’m wrong, bud. But doesn’t Scott’s escape mean Donnie’s now got an empty space on his dance card?”
I was heading to my office when my phone went off. When I saw the name
DONNA.
I cut into the restroom, ducked into a stall and hit the
Talk
button, hoping she’d been able to come through.
“You answer your own phone down there at the FCLE, Carson?” the amused voice said. “I figured you’d have a secretary for that. Or a valet.”
“Funny, Donna.”
Three days back I’d called Donna Cherry of the Kentucky State Police, a special investigator now based in Jackson, Kentucky, about thirty-five miles from Jeremy’s mountain hideaway. When Jeremy had lured me to Kentucky several years ago, I’d found myself involved in a local case. Cherry and I had started out as adversaries and evolved into something altogether different. I had called to ask a favor: that she personally contact Dr Auguste Charpentier and request he call me. She knew Jeremy only as a retired professor of psychology who had provided a bit of assistance on the case, and assumed I wanted to re-establish contact with a question about a new case. Of course, what I wanted was for Jeremy to open his door to a cop asking that he call me.
It would make my point: I’m serious.
“Like I said,” Cherry continued, “I’ve seen Doc Charpentier a time or two, once at the Campton library, once at the grocery in Stanton. He was his usual reserved, polite self. Plus he looked super great, like he’d been working out. But then, he was always a kind of sexy dude …” She paused. “For a middle-aged guy, of course.”
As Charpentier, Jeremy used simple tricks to age himself. Though almost forty-five, my brother’s clear blue eyes and flawless skin made him appear closer to my age of thirty-nine. Charpentier looked in his mid-fifties.
“You finally got a chance to personally pass on my message?”
“I needed to run down the Mountain Parkway into Slade, so I dropped by his place. You’ve got bad luck, my friend. That big ol’ cabin was as empty as a ghost town. I peeked in every downstairs window. The only thing inside were echoes.”
“Damn,” I whispered, feeling my heart sink.
“I stopped by the local post office. He cancelled his box last week and left no forwarding address. You missed him by days, hours maybe.”
“Nothing to say where he’s headed, Donna?”
“Zippo. I figure he got tired of retirement and took another university position, Crown Prince of Oxford University, maybe. Charpentier had way too much candlepower to wither away in the woods, Carson. That guy could be anything he wanted.”
Debro flicked on the lights and peered through the window in the metal door. Jacob Eisen was naked on the floor and seemed to be trying to swim. But instead of a foamy path in his wake, he was leaving blood. It looked like someone had followed him with a paint-smeared mop, spreading red in a foot-wide swash.
Eisen stopped paddling and tried to push up on his arms, his mouth, chin and chest glistening red. His hands slipped in the scarlet viscosity and his face banged to the linoleum. One of Eisen’s trembling fingers slid into the red hole of his mouth, digging deep until stopped by his thumb.
His eyes grew as wide as if seeing a demon and he tried to crawl from the hideous vision, slipping and sliding in his own fluid, blood spattering from his mouth as screams came out in a red and silent spray.
Debro stood at the window, but his mind was far away, tumbling back in time and as it tumbled, his body grew round and clumsy and his knees quivered with its weight. His hands swelled until his fingers were as plump as sausages, his knuckles like dimples in the fat …
the hands atop a barroom table with a half-consumed daiquiri beside them.
“Hey, you,”
calls a voice from a dozen feet away.
“Yeah, you – Chubby. Does your ass beep when you back up?”
He’s in a bar trying to make friends. It’s late and the boys at a table across the way have noticed him. They’re tough boys in paint-tight jeans and leather jackets, hard little monsters who make themselves big by making others small. Debro had seen them noticing him and laughing among themselves, but it’s the wiry boy with hard dark eyes under kinked red hair who’s been laughing the hardest. He’s the leader. The others are as meaningless as dust.
“You’re in the wrong bar, tubs,”
he smirks.
“The chairs are only rated for four hundred pounds.”
Debro smiles and waves, like he’s enjoying the sport. But inside, fear and shame.
“You know there’s a superchub bar in east Lauderdale, fat boy. Shouldn’t you be up there mixin’ with the Michelin Men?”
Superchubs were enormously obese gay men with a fetishistical following in some circles. Debro went to the bar once and it sickened him. Their look, their smell, their hairy grossness. Their joy at being fat. He wasn’t one of them.
“My crew and I have a bet, beefy. They think you need to put a bookmark in the flab rolls to find your dick. I think you wrap a string around it and let the string hang out. Which is it?”
Debro forces a grin to his face and mimes pulling a cord in front of his ponderous belly
. “You win. It’s the string.”
Laughter, but not with him, at him. At his simpering, broken smile, at his self-loathing weakness. He should get up and punch the leader, beat his smirky face into a slimy puddle. He looks at his hands, but instead of balling into fists, they retreat beneath the table.
The red-haired guy spins to his companions and smirks, then turns to Debro.
“We got another bet, doughboy. When you come, do you shoot lard?”
Over the years, Debro had been on the savage end of many nasty tongues, but Jacob Eisen had the nastiest of all, an acid-edged tongue that reveled in spewing insults and meanness …
Which was why Eisen no longer had the tongue. Twenty minutes ago Debro had reached into Eisen’s gaping mouth, snatched the tongue with pliers, pulled it as far out as possible. The tongue had offered less resistance than gelding a hog.
Eisen had started choking and Debro had rolled him to his belly where he moaned and gurgled and dug at his face as blood spilled across the floor. But now he seemed to have mostly forgotten the tongue, swimming around the room like a fucking mermaid. Justice had been done, and Eisen could go back to his filthy world. There were others awaiting punishment.
Debro returned to his apartment below, turning the TV to the LOGO channel and stripping off his shirt, preparing to pump iron, get the guns warmed up for the next challenge. He started to reset the weight on his ’bells, but stopped … hadn’t he just had a major triumph? It had been glorious, removing the little bastard’s instrument of hate, and as he had sawed at the slimy tongue, Debro had struggled to stay on task through a monumental orgasm.
A celebratory drink was called for.
Debro rolled the barbell back to the corner and went to the kitchen, catching his reflection in the glass of his cabinet doors. He was smiling. Debro studied himself as if seeing a well-done portrait, then stopped and admonished himself. Best not get too pleased. After all, hadn’t he fucked up his latest attempt by letting the pathetic, stuttering troll named Derek Scott escape into the street? Allowing him to run to the police?
It had been a major mistake on Donnie’s part.
Debro started laughing. He reached into the fridge and plucked out a beer. He was more invisible than ever.
Another fifteen-hour day became another fifteen hours lost in the crime-solving department, and the brother side of things was no better. It appeared Jeremy had decamped from Eastern Kentucky on a permanent basis.
After he’d escaped from everything the NYPD could throw at him (including, at times, me), his year-long disappearance had been one of the most difficult times in my life, with every phone call ringing the potential for life-changing horror:
Hello, Detective Ryder? Captain Ralph Stewart here in Pittsburgh. We’ve caught a killer named Jeremy Ridgecliff. You ain’t gonna believe this, but the freak’s telling us you’re his brother and the reason he’s out on the streets. I know he’s bug-eye crazy, but you can appreciate we’ve got to rule out all the manure this loonie is spreading …
The thought of living that way again felt like a punch in the gut. But I concentrated on the single pleasant thought in my life, tonight’s dinner with Vivian Morningstar. I felt like a kid watching his Christmas tree burn from the bottom up: At least I could focus on the lovely angel up top until the flames arrived.
The restaurant was an intimate family place with six tables and a single waiter. I ordered a brew to sit across from her vino and we both ordered
ropa vieja
, that hearty Cuban dish of shredded beef cooked with tomatoes, onions and peppers and often served, as this was, with
platanas maduros
, black-ripe plantains sautéed in butter and demerara sugar.
We ate slowly to savor, speaking as we dined.
“How are things coming with the department?” I asked. “Prepping for the exit scene?”
She buttered a piece of steamy, fresh-baked bread. “The incoming path will share duties with Fontova and Nelson until getting a handle on things, then hopefully move into an upper-level position.” Pop … between her wide and lovely lips went the bread.
“Clean and efficient. How’s your staff taking it?”
“They’ll be happy to see the gorgon go.”
“Horsecrap. They revere you, Vivian.”
Rolled eyes to hide the embarrassment. “Misplaced, but yeah, some do. It’ll be hard, Carson. I’ve been there for a decade, and we hit some home runs.”
“You’ll hit more. Any thoughts on specialty?”
“I’ve not even started my courses. I can’t think about what I’ll—”
“You already have, Viv.”
Her fork paused mid-lift and the hazel eyes – shaded brown today – regarded me curiously. “Am I that transparent? Or are you that good at reading people?”
I smiled. “Some people.”
“Trauma appeals to me, working in an emergency room and making decisions, weighing alternatives, fast-running a list of potential solutions through my mind …” she paused and her eyes darkened. “The only thing that worries me is, what happens the first time I make a wrong decision and someone dies?”
“You answered yourself by saying ‘the first time’. You’ve acknowledged that death will happen – in that milieu it can’t
not
happen – and it’s a part of the job. All you can do is work the stats in your favor, which you’ll do by becoming one of the best there is.”
Another pause. “Have you ever made a mistake that cost someone’s life?”
“Yes. Usually by not getting to a solution quick enough. But when I mull over my mistakes, which I do in darker moments, I leaven them with counts of lives saved. There are more names in that column, Viv. A lot more.”
She thought for a moment and nodded. Then, as if feeling the conversation had gone far enough down that road, her face brightened and she reached for my hand. “I was thinking this afternoon … I basically only know about you from your college days onward. Aimless for a couple years, the odd jobs. Until your friend Harry Nautilus convinced you to become a cop. But what about family? Do you have siblings?”
I took a sip of beer to dampen my upcoming lies and revisited the “only-child” scenario I’d glibly espoused dozens of times before. Only three living people knew of my brother: Harry Nautilus, Clair Peltier, and a troubled and alcoholic Mobile pathologist named Ava Davanelle, fired long ago.
Jeremy had injured me during a trip to the institute for advice on a case – he exacted a horrific price back then – and when Ava nursed my wounds I had confessed my secret. Ava had seemed fascinated by the depressing horror of my childhood and the claws by which it still clutched my daily life, and she demanded to accompany me on my follow-up trip to the Institute, where more information from Jeremy would require another payment of pain.
The confrontation between Jeremy and Ava had been searing. Made a hater of women by our mother’s retreats from responsibility, Jeremy had circled Ava like a hawk, belittling her with every swooping pass: “
A tender li’l thing like you wading through DEAD BODIES, Miz Davanelle? Ha! Do you pick at them … a pinch of tissue here, a strand of sinew there? Or do you just watch as a LOWLY MAN DOES THE WORK? What DO YOU do with bodies, sweet thang?
”
Ava had refused to be cowed by his taunts, and actually seemed to enjoy the dangerous confrontation with my erratic, angry brother. “
I do a lot of things with dead bodies, Mr Ridgecliff
,”
she’d calmly replied.
“
But most of all I like to slice open their bellies, climb inside and paddle them around like canoes
.”
I had been amazed by the power with which the formerly shy and meek woman had constrained and confounded my brother. Every lie he threw she turned into wounding truths and threw back harder, and I had watched breathlessly, afraid Ava would finally push Jeremy into violence. But somehow – through instinct or luck – she sensed where Jeremy’s boundaries lay, and we all survived that dark evening. In the end, Ava had won: Jeremy was confounded and silenced by her courage, which kept him from injuring me further.
In retrospect, I think Ava forced Jeremy to look within himself during the following days, and in that time he began to change. And though he would never be normal, he ceased to be the lit stick of dynamite that had darkened our relationship since his incarceration. I received no more shrieking midnight calls. No more babbling, incoherent threats. And he never again needed to cause me physical pain.