Blinded (29 page)

She exhaled, her eyes wide. She dropped her arms to her sides and spread her legs a couple of inches farther apart. “He responded to a revealing picture of an attractive woman who said she likes sex with strangers. It’s not that complicated, Detective. Getting people to respond to my ad wasn’t difficult-isn’t difficult. Finding someone I can feel safe with… that’s a whole different problem.”

I blushed. “How do you-”

“E-mail. I set up temporary Hotmail accounts, and then I e-mail back and forth with the guy until I’m comfortable. If I don’t get comfortable with him, I close the account and start all over with somebody else.”

I didn’t know what a Hotmail account was. Hell. I’d ask Simon when I talked to him later in the day. My kid would probably know. “How long did the process take with Sterling?”

Carmen chose that moment to step into the room. “Smells great in here. You guys making progress?”

“We’re doing great, Carmen. Maybe a few more minutes?” I said. The expression on my face was intended to shout “bad timing.”
Real bad timing.

She backed out.

Holly said, “I don’t like her.”

“Yeah, well. She’s great with your kid. That’s good, right? You were saying how long it took to-”

“Not long.”

“So you met him… where?”

“On campus.”

“And you…?”

“Jesus, Detective. Do you really need to know? Really?”

I said yes. I didn’t feel yes, but I said yes. Some things you want to know even if you don’t want to know them.

This was one of those.

Holly stepped over next to me, lowered her mouth to my ear, and whispered what it was she’d done with Sterling Storey.

Maybe it was the moist heat of her breath, maybe it was what she told me, but I blushed all over again.

This was going to be a first. Holly and her husband had talked about doing something like it a couple of times, but the discussions were always more joke than anything else. But this guy from California? He was serious. Right from the start, she could tell.

Totally serious.

She thought about his proposal overnight. Excitement overcame fear, fear became excitement, and she e-mailed a simple lowercased
yes.

It had been a Saturday afternoon in September a year before. Notre Dame was playing Michigan in Ann Arbor. The date for the date was Holly’s idea. The university campus would be empty. The students and faculty and staff who weren’t in Michigan for the football game would be holed up watching the annual tussle anyplace that had a big screen and plenty of beer.

One-thirty to two-fifteen. That was the window she’d given him. She’d be there by one-thirty. She’d leave by two-fifteen. They had to be gone before Saturday afternoon confessions began.

In between? For Holly, the sweetest of all aphrodisiacs: anticipation.

“What are you going to do while you’re waiting for me?” he asked in one of his e-mails.

He knew all about anticipation. She’d figured he would.

“Pray,” she’d responded.

Some secular universities have chapels; some Catholic universities have elaborate churches. Notre Dame University has a basilica.

Holly was waiting for Sterling opposite the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the vaulting nave of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Ten minutes before two o’clock he knelt in the pew that was right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach. He was the church mouse.

“Don’t turn around,” he whispered. “No, don’t.”

Her lungs felt bottomless. She was breathing so deeply that she had to open her mouth to get enough air.

She already knew from experience that the fire of anticipation consumed immense quantities of oxygen.

She hadn’t spent the time praying. No, she’d been counting the other people in the church. Currently, there were thirteen. One lovely woman in a dreadful purple suit was only a few feet from her in the Chapel of the Reliquaries. Thirteen was just right. Not too many, not too few. Just right.

“Sex in churches shouldn’t be reserved for priests,” he whispered to her in an over-the-top Irish brogue. “Should it, now?”

She’d been thinking that they’d use the confined space of the confessional for their tryst, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be in the dark with him.

Fear? No. That wasn’t it. Not at all.

She wanted to be able to see him.

Without a word Holly stood, walked down the length of the nave, and climbed the stairs toward the pipe organ. Her idea.

A few minutes later he followed.

She knew he would. They always did.

As his footfalls brushed the stairs, one by one, she knew that what she’d been thinking about, fantasizing about, since she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was about to happen.

Holly didn’t actually see his face until they were finished. Until anticipation was nothing but sweat on the cold church floor. When she finally turned toward him and saw the white slash of his Roman collar and the ruby light from the stained glass that limned his profile, his physical beauty almost took her breath away again. She thought,
Mark would have vetoed him for sure.

For sure.

Carmen and I left Holly’s house before I had a chance to meet Artie. That disappointed me.

We were out the door and all the way down the porch steps when I thought of something else, told Carmen to go ahead and get in the car, and returned to the screen door. Zach was playing with a pile of those oversized fat Legos in the living room, making something that looked like Frankenstein’s dog.

“Holly,” I said, calling her back to the door. “I’m sorry, one more thing.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You’re not frightened of him? Of Sterling?”

“No, I’m not.”

“The other women he’s suspected of murdering? They don’t-”

“I’m not convinced. Far from it.”

Her expression changed just enough that I guessed that whatever came next was going to be at a different level of intimacy than what had come before. I found myself struggling to tune my antennae.

“Listen,” she told me, “I e-mailed him again a couple of weeks ago. I asked him if he was interested in going to church with me again sometime. That’s how not-frightened of him I am.”

“You would see him again?”

“Before this week and all the news in the papers? Before you and Detective Loves-Kids-Lacks-Social-Graces started trying to scare the bejesus out of me? I would have seen him, yes. We had a great time together.”

Sometimes people ask me why I’m a cop. I don’t usually answer with the public service/public welfare refrain. I answer with the truth: People are endlessly interesting.

Holly Malone was a damn good example.

“Did Sterling respond to your e-mail?”

She shook her head convincingly. Even a little ruefully, I thought.

“I gave you my cell phone number, right? Just in case? You’ll call if you see him around here, or even if you get a feeling?”

“Yes, Detective. You did. And I will.”

I reached into my pocket and handed Holly the crappy photo of Brian Miles. “Him too. Keep it. Call if you see him.”

“You’re not going to tell me who he is, are you?”

“His name is Brian Miles. He’s somebody you should avoid.”

She held the picture loosely in her hand. “I told you, I’m careful. No matter what you think about my lifestyle, I don’t take chances with my safety. You haven’t convinced me that Sterling’s a killer, but you’ve convinced me that seeing him might involve taking an unnecessary risk.”

“Might?”

She smiled at me in a way that seemed full of understanding and wisdom. The wisdom was bearded with just the slightest tease. I found it all quite disarming. Me and women? What a frigging mess.

With my thumb and index finger I spread my mustache away from the center of my lip. Holly was watching me carefully, waiting to see where I was heading next; I thought she knew that I hadn’t come back to her door to ask her about Sterling and Brian Miles and to make sure she had my phone number.

Holly probably knew things about men that I wouldn’t know for the rest of my life.

In the grand scheme that was probably an okay thing.

I said, “You and your husband, you and Mark? Did your, what did you call it before, your ‘imaginative’ sex life-that’s right? I got that? Did it include, you know, other people, other couples? Sexually, I mean. I don’t know if I’m asking that exactly right. But what I’m wanting to know is… well…”

My voice disappeared like stormwater down an open manhole.
Swooosh.

“Is this a professional inquiry?”

“Actually, no, no, it’s not. It’s, um,… it’s personal. It’s something I’m struggling with… myself.”

I watched muscles change in her face. Her mouth softened, and the tendons along her jaw slackened. Fine lines erupted alongside her eyes. She said, “Yes, it did. It included other people sometimes. We were active swingers long before we were married.”

“And it didn’t…” Some questions are harder to ask than others. Those seemed to be the only kind I was asking. Or trying to ask. I wasn’t doing a bang-up job.

“Didn’t what?”

“Cause problems? For the two of you? In your marriage? Fidelity, and trust, you know? Feelings weren’t hurt?”

She shook her head. “Far from it. This may sound funny, but it was all about trust for us. Mark knew every man I was involved with sexually, and vice versa. We each had total veto power over the other’s partners. What we did enriched us.” She glanced back to make sure Zach was still engaged with his Legos. “This is a hard thing to explain. Sex with other people brought us closer.”

“It did?”

“Yes.”

“It helped with trust?”

“No. We had trust going in. Honesty. Respect. That never wavered.”

I was perplexed the way I’m perplexed by Stephen Hawking. The words he uses are English, but after one or two paragraphs I feel like I’m reading Armenian. Same thing right then with Holly. The arithmetic of the coupling was simple enough. Two plus two equals four. I shouldn’t have been so mystified by the equation. But I was.

“Trust?” I said again, and then I sighed away some of my exasperation. “I wish I understood it better. I really do. It seems that… with you being… and him… I just don’t quite get it. I’ll think about it some more, though. I will.”

“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you try to understand. Some people don’t. Most people don’t.”

“Artie?” I said.

She laughed. “Artie, indeed. Have a happy Thanksgiving, Detective. I’d invite you to join us for supper, but under the circumstances…”

“Of course, of course. Artie wouldn’t be happy I was there. You, too, Holly, you have a good holiday, too. Don’t let Artie ruin it for everybody.”

I pivoted to leave but stopped and looked over my shoulder. She was still at the door.

“Would Mark have been okay with Sterling? As a sexual partner for you? Just curious.”

The face she made was rueful. “No. No, he wouldn’t. Sterling is… firmly on the wrong side of the Brad Pitt line. That’s where Mark’s comfort level stopped. At the Brad Pitt line.”

She leaned out the door, took a step toward me, and touched her lips to my cheek. That was good-bye.

Carmen waited for me to get settled, pull my seat belt on, and start the engine before she said, “Holly seems like a nice girl. I’m sorry I got off on the wrong foot with her.”

I smiled at the irony. “She is a nice girl. My mother maybe wouldn’t think so, but she is. She’s nice.”

Carmen didn’t want anything to do with my comment about my mother. Wise on her part. “Did you get what we needed?” she asked.

“To decide if Holly’s in danger? I don’t know. How about we’ll decide that together? Let’s go someplace, and I’ll tell you what she said, and we’ll put our heads together and decide if we should spend Thanksgiving hanging around South Bend waiting for Sterling or whether we should spend it doing something else.”

“Do you want to go back to the Days Inn? We can talk there. There’s some kind of coffee shop on the corner.”

“Nah. I don’t think so. Where’s the campus from here? I’d like to see that. That way you can tell your dad you’ve been there, and… anyway, I’ve heard some interesting things about the basilica.”

Dawn broke on Thanksgiving with a cold front blowing furiously over the Divide. The pressure change was preceded by winds that caused the big panes of glass in the living room to hum ominously. I wasted a few minutes standing on the warm side of the humming glass watching the morning sun light up the sky and reflect off the quartz crystals embedded in the granite planes of the Flatirons.

Special.

I’d awakened with a plan. My plan was to make a plan. I tracked down an index card, no lines, and listed all the things I had to do that morning. Most of the items on the list were domestic-
Grace, bath! Dogs, walk
-or culinary-
Turkey, clean amp; dry.
One was fantasy-
Bike ride??
And one was business-
Gibbs?

Although I wasn’t usually a list-making guy, I felt better knowing that I had a battle plan for the day, which promised to be convoluted, and enjoyed a flash of empathy for my old college roommate, who had always carried an index card with a to-do list in his shirt pocket. When each list’s tasks were completed, he would immediately grab a fresh card and scrawl a single line at the bottom:
Start a new list.

With Diane’s admonition about hurdling in my head, I began to leap over the items on my list one by one. I’d made a good head start on the day’s complicated kitchen preparations before Grace announced, loudly, that she was ready for her holiday to begin.

Midmorning Lauren joined Grace and me in the kitchen. Lauren had managed a few hours of sleep after her pool-playing marathon, and her mood was softer than I’d seen since the previous weekend. I could see my wife reemerging from the nefarious cocoon of Solumedrol in which she’d been imprisoned. It felt great. She sipped some juice and coffee and offered a couple of gentle suggestions about my cooking techniques, and our little core-family-size turkey found its way into the oven just about on time.

That’s when my pager informed me that someone had left me a message at the office. I picked up the phone and checked my voicemail.

Gibbs. The number she’d left was for her cell.

I excused myself from my girls and called Gibbs back from the living room, adopting an office demeanor before I spoke my first words. The wind had quieted to less than gale force, and the glass had ceased humming. The sky was as clear as my daughter’s conscience, and the mountains were close enough to touch. I said, “This is Dr. Gregory.”

“Hi, it’s me. Gibbs. Thanks for calling back. I’m up in Vail.”

At that moment I was gazing vaguely southwest toward Vail. Fifty miles of mountains and one imposing Continental Divide stood in the way, but I was pretty sure I was looking almost exactly in the right direction. Between here and there, cake-batter clouds seemed to be shadowing all the high valleys. “You’re safe?” I asked. It wasn’t a great question, but it was better than my first impulse, which had been to ask “Was it windy up there this morning, too?”

“I wanted someone to know where I was. In case something happens. You know, in case Sterling shows up.”

That thought gave me a chill.

“Safe House is open on holidays, Gibbs. I’m happy to make a call for you.”

“The nice hotels were all sold out. I’m in a crappy place by the highway. Do you hear the noise? The trucks going by? Sterling would never look for me here.” She giggled. “Never.”

Just for the record, I thought it was important to remind myself that crappy hotels in Vail aren’t exactly like crappy hotels in Baltimore or Detroit. I told myself to imagine a cheap cabin on an expensive cruise ship.

“You’re okay?” I said.

“Yes, I am.”

“I appreciate that you checked in with me. We’re set for Monday morning, right? Same time?”

“Sure, yes. I’ll be there. Do you know where Detective Purdy is? Is he coming home for the holiday? I haven’t heard from him. I’d feel much better knowing he was close by.”

The purpose of a psychotherapist is not-is not-to provide information to a patient that is unrelated to her care. The fact that Sam was in South Bend was definitely unrelated to Gibbs’s care.

“I can’t help you with that,” I said.

“If you hear from him, would you ask him to call me? His cell phone isn’t working. I can’t reach him.”

“It’s not an appropriate role for me. To deliver messages to people for you. If I’m going to prove helpful, it’s important to recognize the unique nature of our relationship.” My voice was even, but I was thinking,
I’m not your damned errand boy.

I caught myself. Why was I so annoyed? Was this high school revisited? Was Gibbs playing Teri Reginelli, wondering if I knew where she could find my friend Sean?

And was I reacting now the way I reacted then, by being a spurned fool?

If that’s what was happening, that was countertransference. Textbook countertransference. It was not a pretty picture.

She huffed, “I’m not asking for a big favor, Alan. Just pass along the message, please.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

Clinically, I was standing on solid ground. Communicating with a patient about the location of one of my friends was not an appropriate therapeutic role. But experience had taught me that when countertransference melded perfectly with what appeared to be appropriate treatment, danger often ensued.

“You
won’t
do that,” she corrected.

“Okay, I won’t do that. It’s not an appropriate role for me. That you’re asking me to do it might be important in terms of understanding some of the issues we’ve been discussing in your therapy. We can talk about it more during your appointment on Monday.”

“Am I being dismissed? Is that your way of telling me that you and I are done talking for now?”

“Gibbs, I’m glad you’re safe. But I think anything that is not an emergency can wait until we meet on Monday morning.”

“If Sterling shows up and knocks on my door, I’ll call you. That would be an emergency, right? My murderous husband at my door? You’ll be able to find a couple of minutes to chat about that, right?”

She hung up.

I thought,
That went well.

Forty minutes passed before I realized what I’d missed. I’d completed one basting cycle with the turkey and was about to go back for the second when it hit me out of the blue, even though I hadn’t spent the interim consciously thinking about either Gibbs or her phone call.

The important clinical issue wasn’t that Gibbs wanted my help tracking down Sam, that she apparently wanted to alter the nature of the therapeutic relationship so that my status devolved from helper to mere errand-runner.

No, the issue was that she was so desperate to find Sam at all.

Why?

“Are you going to baste that thing or just stand there letting all the heat out of the oven?”

I turned. Lauren had bathed and put on some makeup, and what was much more important was that she’d put on a smile. She was limping, but she wasn’t carrying the walking stick.

I closed the oven door and said, “Hi.”