Authors: Koethi Zan
He was barely trying to hide his jealousy of, and—it seemed to me—contempt for, Adele.
After a few more fruitless tries to get him back to Jack Derber, I stood up to leave, nearly falling over the chair as I backed out. Exiting as gracefully as I entered, I thought.
CHAPTER 20
I called Tracy several times that day but got no answer. Clearly, she was avoiding me. There was no way I could piece together what I had without her, so I decided to pay her a surprise visit, just as she had done to me.
I changed my flight that afternoon and flew into Boston rather than New York. It was good to be back on the East Coast, even if only for a few days. My real plans would take me even farther afield.
From Boston, I rented another car and took the scenic route to Northampton. I was impressed with myself for so much driving. I was no longer overtaken by debilitating panic when behind the wheel, only mildly discomfited.
I drove straight to Tracy’s apartment, whose address I had Googled earlier that day. If she could show up on my doorstep, I could show up on hers.
She lived in an old white clapboard house on a quiet, well-tended block that looked incredibly bourgeois for someone of her ilk. There were two doorbells, each with the names carefully typed out. Hers was on top. I noticed there were bars on the window of the door. Maybe Tracy didn’t feel as secure as she pretended to be.
I wondered if I would have to wait on her narrow front porch as she had waited for me, but after a minute I heard footsteps on the stairs inside. Tracy peered out at me through the window, and then the curtain flopped back into place. She hadn’t exactly looked pleased to see me, but after a brief pause I heard the lock click. An excellent lock. She opened the door quickly but not all the way.
“Now what?” she said, hand on her hip. She didn’t have makeup on and looked tired. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought she’d been crying.
“I have to talk to you. I’ve been back out to Oregon, and I have more information.”
“Well, if it isn’t the girl detective.” She shrugged her shoulders and invited me in, sounding resigned. I followed her up the stairs.
The first floor of the house was cheery, with the palest yellow on the walls and an old dark wood-framed mirror in the entryway. But as we ascended to Tracy’s apartment, the wall color shifted to a dull, muted gray. At the top of the landing I came face-to-face with a framed photograph of a man in chains. That prepared me a little for what waited on the other side of the door.
Tracy’s apartment was the antithesis of my own. The walls, which were high because the attic floor had been removed to create a huge cathedral ceiling, were painted the same gray as the stairs. They were covered in black-and-white photography and etchings. All the images were ones that would have given me nightmares if I looked at them too long. The overwhelming drabness made it seem as if Tracy had tried to make her apartment into a prison cell. And it worked. I felt trapped.
If it hadn’t been for the signs of homey disorder and the smell of brewing coffee, I might have turned to leave. One entire wall was covered with built-in bookshelves, crammed full all the way to the top, the larger hardcovers shoved in horizontally, the smaller paperbacks double-shelved. The volumes were so numerous, they spilled out onto the floor, on tabletops, in chairs, some of them open and turned upside down. Some had their places held with gnawed pencils, broken points jutting out of them.
The apartment was a single large open room, with a loft at one end for her bedroom. I could see the tip of her unmade bed from where I was, the black comforter spilling out a bit over the ledge. She had clearly been working, because in the front corner, her laptop was buzzing on the desk, and what looked like draft manuscript pages were scattered all around.
“Now you see why I was so stunned by your apartment. Have a seat,” she said.
She pointed to a chair next to her desk, which held a stack of books precariously leaning against the back of it. She walked over, lifted the pile all in one armload, and tossed it onto the plush couch. They slid across the velvet cushion, half of them landing on the floor. Tracy gestured again to the chair.
I sat down and launched into an update on my activities in Oregon. I was nervous. I wanted to sound as compelling as possible, since I hadn’t inspired much interest from Jim. Suddenly, winning Tracy over to my quest seemed like the most important thing I’d done in my life. I didn’t know if I could keep at it alone, and if she also dismissed the things I had found, I didn’t know if I had the heart to pursue the plan I’d formulated on the plane ride back.
Tracy listened quietly, raising her eyebrows with surprise when I told her about the S&M club, her eyes opening wide and her jaw dropping when I explained how I had followed the van to the warehouse. I couldn’t tell if she was surprised by what I had seen or by
what I had done. Probably the latter. Finally, I told her about the books in David Stiller’s office. She shrugged that off.
“Everyone in academia reads those writers. It’s
de rigueur.
Foucault changed academic life forever. He gave everyone a new perspective to write about. Look, I have a whole section of my own library devoted to him. The indelible mark of too many years spent in grad school.”
She pointed to an area in the middle. I walked over. “Bataille too. I mean, he writes about sex and death. That’s all academics care about. Really all anyone cares about, as a matter of fact.”
“But doesn’t that directly tie into what Jack did to us?”
“I’m sure he used it to justify his actions, like so many other men who want to subjugate women, while simultaneously giving it all an intellectual spin. I can easily see how he would have cottoned on to the idea of having a ‘limit-experience,’ living a life outside societal rules, et cetera. Foucault, Nietzsche, all of them. Excuse-mongers.”
I had gotten up and was perusing Tracy’s shelves as she spoke, and I found one filled with Bataille’s books. Her collection was even more extensive than David’s. I pulled out a few but froze when I saw one called
The Bataille Reader
.
I couldn’t believe it. There on the cover, in a white setting framed with a black border, was a drawing of a headless man. In one hand he held what looked like a heart with flames coming out of it, in the other a short knife. He had a skeleton drawn over his crotch, and his nipples were little stars. I took it over to Tracy, my hands shaking.
“Tracy, doesn’t this look like, isn’t this …”
She looked at me questioningly, clearly not seeing what I was seeing.
Finally, I spat the words out, “The brand. Isn’t this the
brand
?”
I pulled down the side of my jeans and underwear enough so
that she could see it clearly on my hip. She looked at the picture and back at my scarred flesh. Admittedly, it was a little hard to tell, because the scar tissue had grown over the original mark, but the outline was definitely the same.
Tracy stared in silence for a moment before finally looking up to meet my eyes.
“I think you might be right. I never noticed it before. Maybe because I try to avoid looking at the goddamn thing—it’s not exactly a memento I treasure. But also, my brand is incomplete. I twisted hard to the right when the iron touched my skin, so my mark is only partially there. It makes it look very different.”
She stood up and showed me hers, in roughly the same place on her hip, though a little farther toward the back. I could see what she meant about it—half of the torso and one of the legs was missing entirely—but I also noticed that on her the imprint was a little more distinct on the upper right. I could clearly make out the knife held in the headless man’s hand.
“What does it mean?” I asked her.
Tracy sat down, and I did too, my hands clutching
The Bataille Reader
.
“It was an image created for a publication that Bataille was involved with, but as I recall, it was also the symbol for some sort of secret society. A bunch of these intellectuals back in the thirties formed this group just before the war. They were all looking for a mystical ecstatic experience or something. I’m not sure, I only took one class on surrealism, but I vaguely remember it had something to do with human sacrifice. I think it disbanded pretty quickly. We’ll have to look it up.”
“I may not be up to date on the literary crowd from the thirties, Tracy, but I do know something about math. And ‘society’ implies more than one. Do you think this means Jack created some sort of secret society at the university, maybe based on this group? Maybe
with David Stiller?” I flipped through the pages of the Bataille books, stopping here and there to read passages. It made no sense to me whatsoever. And it was sick.
I looked back up at Tracy, “What is wrong with these people? ‘Horror,’ ‘desire,’ ‘corpses,’ ‘filth,’ ‘sacrifice’… Jesus. Was Jennifer
sacrificed
?”
I put the book down slowly and gripped the sides of the chair, the images of debauchery and mayhem from those pages spinning in my head.
Tracy looked alarmed, but I think it had more to do with the color draining from my face than from our discovery.
“Whoa, whoa, you’re jumping the gun here, aren’t you? So Jack had a thing for some dead philosophers with a perverted social club. Most psychopaths have some strange interests, to say the least.”
“But there’s something weird about these three. The venom David Stiller directs at Adele is pretty intense.”
“Welcome to academia. You have no idea. It’s such a circus.”
“Circus?” Something was tugging at my brain. “David Stiller used that term, and so did Jack … in a letter.”
“It’s actually a pretty generic metaphor,” Tracy said wryly.
“David Stiller misspoke when he said it though. He said …” I thought a minute. “He said the conference circus, and then corrected himself to say circuit.”
“That’s actually kind of funny. It is a conference circus.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some people see it as one of the perks of academic life. You know, the university pays for your trip. The conferences are usually held in decent places. There are some lectures, some panels, and then everyone goes out and eats and drinks like they’re senators of the Roman Empire. Lots of affairs. Plenty of academic intrigue. Alliances form and break off, that sort of thing. It is a bit of a traveling circus, I suppose—of highbrow, know-it-all intellectuals.”
I pulled Jack’s letters out of my bag and carefully started unfolding them, spreading them out on Tracy’s desk. She sighed and cleared some space for me. I looked through the letters, and finally, in the third one he sent, I saw it.
“There,” I pointed at it triumphantly.
Tracy picked up the letter and read it out loud.
“‘And I met you while on the circus train. Two sideshows. More travelers.’”
“‘I met you’ …Tracy, do you think he was in town for an academic conference when he abducted Jennifer and me? And what about you? Would Jim have these details? We need to call him.”
Tracy looked at me hard, thinking. Finally, she nodded, picked up her phone, switched it to speaker, and dialed. By heart, I noticed. As always, Jim picked up at once.
“Jim?” Tracy began, taking the lead as usual. “I’m here with Sarah.”
Jim was silent for a moment. I was sure he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“That’s … wonderful,” he finally said.
I jumped in. “Jim, at the time of my … abduction, was Jack at an academic conference?”
Jim paused as he always did before giving us any new information about our case. I didn’t know if he was worried about our mental states or about breaching his confidentiality obligations. Finally, he spoke. “Yes, actually he was.”
“And what about when I was abducted?” Tracy asked.
“That we aren’t sure of. There was an academic conference at Tulane the week before, but it wasn’t his field. And if he was in town for that, there is no definitive record of it.”
“What was the conference?” I said, realizing that I was holding my breath. I looked at Tracy and saw she was too.
“It was a literary conference.”
“Do you remember the topic?” Tracy said. We knew now that Jack’s interests were broader than psychology.
“Hold on a sec. I’ll pull it up.” We waited, hearing the click of his keyboard over the line. “Looks like … the conference title was
Myth and Magic in Surrealist Literature
.”
Tracy and I exhaled simultaneously. There was something here, whether Jim knew it or not. We looked at each other, and Tracy nodded at me to start.
“Jim. I know you have massive databases and minions to troll through all that information. I want you to do something for us. I know you think everything I am doing is far-fetched, but if you do this for me, I promise I will show up at the hearing and cry my eyes out before that parole board.”
“I have to hear what it is first, obviously.”
“Can you have someone do an analysis of Jack Derber’s attendance at academic conferences for his whole career? I mean, I don’t know how you can do it, but you can—maybe it’s his credit card receipts, maybe it’s through the university …”
Tracy took up the cue. “Have the university turn over his expense reports. Maybe they still have the records.”
“And then,” I continued excitedly, “can you cross-reference that list with the missing persons reports for the same areas at that time?”
Jim went silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “You think there are others? Ladies, there’s no evidence he ever had other captives. We’ve gone through every inch of that house using every forensic tool available, sniffers, UV lights, luminol. We’ve done extensive serological and DNA testing …”
I didn’t want to let Jim on to what else I was thinking, and maybe what Tracy was thinking too, because he would surely think we had gone off the rails.
“Please, Jim. Please. Will you just run the report?”
“I won’t be able to give it to you, even if I do that. You realize that, don’t you? You two are not, contrary to what you may think, credentialed FBI agents.”