Twice Dying (17 page)

Monks pulled away and stood with his back half-turned, as if to conceal the bitter wound.

“You can’t just keep on as if nothing’s happened, Alison.”

“She wants to get close to me. I’m going to find out who she is.”

“Yeah? And then what?”

“I don’t know. But she’s not going to hurt me. We have the same thing in us. The mirror, except we’re opposites. I’ve given into it, been passive. She’s fighting.”

“That’s what you’re supplying. What we
know
is that she has killed and possibly tortured several people.”

“Suppose you’d been terribly injured. Someone you loved was murdered. Maybe you even witnessed it. Can you imagine what that would do to you?”

“Where the hell are you getting
that?”

“If I run, or get the police after her,” she said, “that’s what’s going to get me hurt.”

She inhaled the last of the cigarette and dropped it in a street trash basket, its bottom sticky with residue, wire-mesh sides dented from vehicles or human feet expressing rage.

“The strangest thing in all of this?” she said.
“I’m starting to realize I might just have saved Garlick’s life.”

She stepped into the street ahead of a car. Monks had to wait for it and several more. On the other side she turned to face him, touching in him a memory of a myth, lovers separated by a treacherous sea channel that the young man swam every night until he drowned in a storm.

When Monks walked into his house, depression laid on him like a heavy blanket across his shoulders, the likes of which he had not experienced in years: the absurd vanity of a middle-aged man who had allowed himself to think that he might have been something to her besides useful.

He started a fire, fed the cats, poured a drink, and punched the PLAY button on his answering machine.

“Carroll, it’s Roman Kasmarek. I got the PM for Robby Vandenard. From what I can glean, the evidence for suicide is persuasive, but circumstantial. Robby left a suicide note and wandered away from the family estate. He wasn’t found for several months. There was bad decomposition and damage from animals and the wound itself, but he was carrying identification, and still holding his father’s shotgun.

“Hope that helps. I’ll be at the hospital till five.”

Monks found a legal pad and clipboard and sat
on the couch, trying to recall information as it had come.

Alison Chapley stumbles onto the false diagnoses and unjustified releases of several NGIs. It seems clear that this has been calculatingly arranged by Dr. Francis Jephson.

She confronts Jephson obliquely. He claims ignorance, but soon afterward, a private investigator makes inquiries about Alison’s personal life, presumably with the aim of damaging her professionally. She assumes that Jephson is behind this.

In an attempt to protect herself, she goes looking for information that might compromise Jephson in return. She learns that Robby Vandenard, heir to a wealthy San Francisco family, killed a man in 1984, and Jephson was instrumental in getting Robby the NGI verdict. Not long afterward, Jephson’s prestigious JCOG program was founded—with Vandenard money—and Robby was one of the first admissions, thus being guaranteed release after an easy two years instead of a much longer term in a maximum security institution.

But Robby committed suicide not long after his release. Or did Jephson engineer his murder, fearing exposure?

Monks and Larrabee call on Darla Lutey, wife of the hired hand Robby Vandenard shot. She gives them reason to think that Robby was also falsely diagnosed by Jephson, was in fact a sociopath. But the real shock: suspicion that at
age eleven, Robby had murdered his fourteen-year-old sister Katherine.

Alison is called in by Francis Jephson and offered a promotion, in what clearly seems to be a bribe for silence. She refuses. That afternoon, she finds a photograph of child killer Caymas Schulte in her car, with the suggestion that someone wants to give her information.

Monks and Larrabee learn from Dennis O’Dwyer that Jephson’s connection with Robby Vandenard goes far back: Jephson treated Robby at the time of his sisters murder.

In Mendocino, Monks and Alison meet Caymas’s frightened and abused younger brother, Tanager. He tells them about a woman named Naia, who said she was from “the hospital” Caymas had supposedly been taken to, and who paid for a motorcycle in return for showing her Caymas’s hideout. It seemed that Naia had enlisted Caymas to damage or murder someone, but that he had blackmailed her instead. Caymas was now presumed dead.

Tanager leads them, too, to Caymas’s hideout. They find the gift that Naia left for. Alison: a death mask of Caymas Schulte, together with his baseball cap—and a mirror painted so as to ring Alison’s eyes with blood.

Bernard Capaldi obliquely admits string-pulling to get Robby Vandenard the NGI verdict. He confirms and emphasizes the closeness between Robby and Jephson. He does not deny
that Jephson may even have influenced Robby to murder.

Monks gets autopsy reports from Roman Kasmarek indicating that two of the four other NGIs may have been killed, too—disabled and brutalized first.

The spotlight, by now, is clearly on Francis Jephson. He is certainly culpable of unethical behavior. Robby Vandenard was in a position to compromise him, even have him sent to prison, thus giving Jephson an excellent motive to kill Robby—and perhaps to continue on, to eliminate a similar risk with other NGIs.

Monks and Larrabee check out a missing NGI file: Thomas Springkell, who was a friend of Robby Vandenard. Robby reneged on the friendship after his release; Tommy got depressed and disappeared. Larrabee brings up the possibility that Jephson has used Tommy to kill.

And now, Alison is convinced that she is safe. Naia will reveal herself to Alison soon. To start a law enforcement search or try to hide could be disastrous.

Monks got up and poured another drink, admitting in the confessional of his heart that if Naia was only killing men like those NGIs, it would not be hard to look the other way.

Inside her house, Alison poured a glass of chilled chardonnay and ran a hath. Her fingers traced
the dark bruises on her face, neck and between her breasts where she had taken Garlick’s knee. The thought came that they were stigmata, tangible signs of an unseen power marking her.

She had lied to a man who had treated her with nothing but kindness—hurt him deliberately. In part, she had done it to protect him.

But, mostly she had done it to keep him from interfering. The lifetime of dammed-up emotion that she had only acted out in tawdry, cowardly games, was finally breaking free. This afternoon, with the takedown of John James Garlick, she had sent her own message back to Naia: she was ready.

The quail was growing teeth.

She dried and walked to her bedroom, to where she had hidden the gifts under a pile of unused clothes in a trunk. She took the mask back to the living room, turned down the lights, and sat by the phone like a schoolgirl, gazing into the mirror with the blood-red rings around her own eyes, waiting for a reply.

Late that night the devil came to Monks in shadowy form and offered him a deal: no catch, straight across, quid pro quo.

For Monks, complete oblivion. Annihilation of being. Rest.

The price: that he would be powerless ever again to help anyone he cared about. His children,
Alison, the sick and the wounded: anyone he might ever lay hands on would just have to get along without him from now on.

In his half-sleep, surrounded by cats that seemed strangely alert, he nodded, and reached out to sign the pact. It was the best offer he had ever gotten. Everything he had ever done or could foresee doing amounted to fuck-all anyway.

But caution had been driven into him too hard over the years. His hand pulled back.

Let me think about it.

It’s
a one time offer,
came the warning.
It’s what you want most. You know it and I know it.

I need to think.

When he awoke, it was gone.

A
lison dreamed of water, of drifting along a clear murmuring stream that gathered in the near but unseen distance to a rushing cascade. As she began to wake, she was no longer on the water but in it, swimming her way to the surface, finally breaking into consciousness. For several heartbeats, the part of her mind that was usually in charge, the pilot, stayed missing: off behind a wall, doing something unknowable.

Then, with the instant shock of panic, it was back.

There was water running somewhere in the house.

For seconds longer she lay without moving, straining to hear other sounds over her own quiet, tight breathing. It was deep night, with
only the dim light she had left on in the kitchen when she had given up and gone to bed.

She put on a robe and stepped carefully to her bedroom doorway. As she leaned into the hall the sound jumped louder in her ears: a cheerful steady splashing. It was not from either bathroom. She crossed the hall in slow silent steps and waited. No other noise came, no shadows moved.

The dining area was empty, undisturbed, her purse on the kitchen counter where she had left it. She stepped past and peered around the cabinets to the living room. Fresh sea breeze touched her face. Curtains were blowing gently.

The French doors onto the deck were open wide. The splashing was coming from the Jacuzzi outside.

She stood absolutely still. Two minutes. Three. A sudden buzz made her knees jerk, almost buckling them. It was the refrigerator kicking on.

The switch to the deck’s single light was beside the open doors. She flicked it on, her gaze searching rapidly. There was no one in the Jacuzzi, no crouched figure clinging to the railing. The drop was almost twenty feet to the bluff below.

Then she looked back at what her gaze had at first refused to acknowledge. Perched on the rub’s edge was a silver tray. It held an ice bucket containing a misted bottle of Veuve Clicquot
champagne, two fluted glasses, and a white gift box, eight or ten inches square.

She turned once, staring into the blankness of the house behind her. Then she stepped out and opened the box.

Her fingers parted the tissue inside and looked down at a chalk-white plaster mask of a man’s face. His features were agonized, his teeth clamped in a snarl.

Garlick.

She touched the mask to lift it. Her fingers indented the still soft plaster. Beneath it, they brushed something soft and bristly, like fur. They pulled back of themselves. The touch was not unpleasant: it was wrong. An odd sweetish smell, real or imagined, came to her nostrils. She held her breath, lifted the mask aside, and peered close.

There was just enough light to make out a patch of spiky dark hair, a frayed edge of skin, a bloody mass of paper towels beneath.

Very carefully, Alison replaced the mask over this mortal remnant of John James Garlick, gripper of women’s hair, and backed into the house.

“Are you here?” she said. “Are you listening?”

She turned as she spoke, moving a careful step at a time.

“I can’t accept this gift. Don’t be angry.”

She reached the kitchen counter. Nothing moved. With measured slowness, she picked up her purse, clasped it under her arm, and started toward the front door.

“Please let me go,” she said. “You’re right, I’m a quail. I know now. That’s all I’ll ever be.”

She closed the door quietly behind her and walked, a little more quickly, down the endless path between the thick, shadowed oleanders to her Mercedes.

The car’s inside light came on with the open door. Seats and floor were empty. She slid in, moving fast now. Shaking fingers jammed the key into the ignition. She sobbed with relief when the engine caught, threw the gearshift into reverse, wheeled around to face the black swells of Bolinas Bay, with San Francisco rising like a fairy kingdom of tight as far away as the noon. The road to town was unlit and deserted. The rearview mirror showed only the pale oval of her own reflection.

A sharp curve made her slow down. In the same instant, she became aware of a rustling, leathery sound behind her. Her gaze lifted again to the mirror.

This time, the glittering eyes staring back were not her own.

She jammed on the brake and grabbed for the door handle, but a gloved hand gripped her jaw and the sharp sting of a needle pierced her neck. The hands went to the steering wheel, closing over her own.

The car coasted to the side of the road.

Monks became aware of a heavy weight on his chest, and paws kneading his skin insistently. His
hand found the cat and identified it by touch: Omar, the big blue Persian. He tried to quell its stirring, but Omar was agitated and would not stop.

Then the phone rang. He opened his eyes. His bedroom and the world outside were dark. It was 5:17
A.M.

He groped for the phone and said, “Hello.”

“There’s someone here who’d like to talk to you.” The voice that spoke was high, hollow, eerily childlike. There was a humming, rumbling in the background. Machinery. A moving car.

Monks said, “Who is this?”

“Don’t you know?”

He sat up, aware of a rippling through the hairs on his forearms. Omar jumped clear of him but stayed on the bed, watching him with the solemn round eyes of an owl.

“Who’s the someone?”

“Your little psychologist friend.”

“Put her on.”

“Just a moment,” the voice said with a secretarial air.

Seconds passed. Then he began to hear snuffling sounds of increasing urgency: the phone held close to the face of someone choking. In the background, the high, reedy voice crooned something that sounded like an aria.

Monks shouted,
“What are you doing?”

Abruptly the choking sounds burst open into gasps, the hacking cough of a woman frantically sucking for breath. The singing stopped.

“I’m afraid she’s not at her best right now.”

He stared into the darkness, trying to keep his own breathing calm.

He said, “She’s done no harm, to you or anyone else. She trusts you, cares about you. She knows you’ve been badly hurt.”