Blinded (35 page)

It was a night of front porches.

Diane and I have an ancient oak swing on the porch of our building, and from half a block away I could see that it was moving to and fro in a tight arc. A solitary person sat smack in the middle of the seat.

I was guessing it was a homeless man. I pulled five bucks from my wallet, remembered what day it was, and replaced the five with a twenty. I held the bill folded in my hand. In my Thanksgiving fantasy the man would use the money to sit at a nice table in a nice restaurant and treat himself to a bountiful plate of turkey and stuffing.

The porch was in shadows. From the end of the driveway I couldn’t make out the age or gender of the visitor.

Nor did I recognize the voice when he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight. You should be home with your family. I know I wish I was.”

I stopped walking. “Excuse me. Who are you? Do I know you?”

The swing stopped moving, and the man stood. He was still in the shadows, but I could tell that he wasn’t tall. “I brought you something. An explanation.” He waved some paper at me. An envelope, maybe. “I thought it might help save somebody. I was just going to stuff it through the mail slot when I saw your car. Felt the engine; it was warm. I thought I’d take a chance that you’d be coming back.”

“I still don’t know who you are.” I hadn’t moved. I remained right where I’d been on the narrow driveway. Ten yards of drought-starved lawn and a border of unhappy euonymus separated me from the stranger on the porch.

He moved forward inch by inch, and with each inch the light from the streetlamps seemed to crawl up his body like water rising in a flood.

As the light moved up from his shoulders and began to paint his face, I said, “Oh my God.”

“Hi,” Sterling Storey said. “What a week it’s been, huh?”

What did I think?

I thought,
Catch me
.

At first, Holly didn’t even notice the woman with the covered dish. The chaos associated with the arrival of her oldest sister’s family for Thanksgiving dinner was demanding all of her attention. The woman with the dark hair and the perfect skin and the casserole waited patiently through a procession of hugs and kisses, waited until no one remained on the porch but the two of them.

“Holly?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Remember your friend from church? From the basilica?”

Holly hesitated.
Could she mean…?

“He said to mention the organ.”

She could.
“Uh, yes. I remember.”

“He’s around the corner. Right this minute. He’d like to see you again.”

She stammered, “I have guests.”

“He knows. He wants to see you while they’re here. In your house. He thinks it will be fun. Especially fun.”

Holly took the woman’s elbow and guided her a little farther from the door.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Holly emphasized “you.”

“I want to watch. That’s what I want.”

“Watch?”

“At Notre Dame I was the woman in the purple suit. Remember me?”

Holly remembered. “My family… what-“

“Move them into the living room for a picture. Everybody. He and I will come in the back, go down into the basement. We’ll know when, because you’ll turn off the kitchen lights.”

“And then… what?”

“Before dinner you excuse yourself, say you’re going to take a bath. He’ll be waiting downstairs. Me too.”

At that moment Holly felt an explosion of anticipation. She felt it as she might feel the wind, or an ocean wave. It washed over her, covered her completely, engulfed her.

“Take this,” the woman said, handing over the casserole.

“What is it?”

“Some music. Some directions. Put it on, and turn it on as soon as you get to the basement. I should go. Someone may be watching us.”

Holly could barely breathe through the moist heat of expectation. She watched the woman go down the sidewalk and chanced a glance at the Cherokee with Colorado plates on the next block.

She went back inside. Fear?

Hardly.

Anticipation.

She peeked inside the casserole and saw the Walkman.

Her pulse shot way north of normal.

Once again she was off on an adventure. She was about to dash across the Brad Pitt line, again.

The family picture was a fiasco. Holly turned off the kitchen lights and herded everyone into the living room. Getting the ten children in place was like trying to get a bunch of houseflies to soar in formation.

Photos taken, Holly pulled the turkey from the oven, asked her oldest sister to remove the stuffing, and excused herself for a quick bath.

Instead of going into the bathroom, though, she scurried down the stairs, stopping halfway down to pull the headphones on and to hit the button on the Walkman marked “play.”

Her voice, not his. The music in the background? Chant. Gregorian chant.

Nice.

“Bottom step? See the duct tape? Wrap a long strip around your head, covering your mouth. Good. Now do another. We’re in the laundry room. Before you join us, take another strip of tape and bind your wrists. It’s not easy to do, but I’ve done it. You can do it, too.” Pause. “It’s what he wants. What do you want?”

A few moments of silence, then:

“Are you ready, Holly? When you’re ready, open the door to the laundry room. And come on in.”

I expected worse.

I was prepared for a whole mess of blood. I expected to find Holly’s head bashed in-for some reason, that’s how I thought she would be killed-but I was wrong. Holly’s wrist and ankles were bound, and she was gagged. Duct tape. She was sitting on top of the washing machine, not the dryer, and her pose was absurdly proper, significantly less erotic than the laundry room loop that had been playing relentlessly in my brain.

A Walkman hung from the waistband of her skirt, earphones in place on her head.

Gibbs? She sat across the room in an alcove barely large enough for an orange plastic chair that would have been labeled for a buck at a yard sale and would probably have gone unsold at the end of the day. Her legs were crossed, left over right. She was gripping a kitchen knife with a five-inch blade-a good knife, she’d probably brought it from home-in her right hand. A cell phone rested on her lap.

She looked as lovely as she had the first time I met her. But that didn’t matter to me at all this time. Not a lick.

Right.

“Let me go, Sam,” she said. It was as though Carmen and Holly weren’t even in the room.

Gibbs had two handguns pointed at her chest-mine and Carmen’s-and yet she’d managed to make her request sound perfectly mundane, like she and I were out on a date and she was wondering if I’d mind getting her a beer.

“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said. I’d like to say I barked the order. Or yelled it. But I didn’t. I merely said it.

“If you don’t let me go, Sam, I’ll kill myself. I will. I’ll plunge this right into my chest.”

Where did my head go at that moment? For some reason I thought about those crazy people who destroyed art treasures in museums. Like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s
Pietà
. I thought,
Gibbs, no! You can’t!
But I also knew-instantly-that my silent protest wasn’t about Gibbs, the person. It was about Gibbs, the lovely art.

Crazy.

“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said.

She purred, “Come on, Sam. Hey…”

Carmen joined the discussion. She crowed, “Jesus H. Christ,” took a little skip-step into the fray, and swatted the knife out of Gibbs’s hand. The blade clanked against the wall and tumbled to the floor. “Cut herself? Shit! This princess? She wouldn’t even use the wrong eyeliner on herself.”

I kicked the knife even farther from Gibbs. I was feeling kind of stupid.

“So she gets to live,” Gibbs said.

I assumed she meant Holly but didn’t say anything at first. I thought it might be wise to leave the next move to Carmen.

Carmen immediately started the you’re-under-arrest process with Gibbs, cuffing her and searching her and reciting Miranda to her like a bored schoolgirl spitting out the Gettysburg Address to a class full of kids who didn’t really care.

I began the process of gingerly removing the tape from Holly’s mouth. It wasn’t coming off easily.

Miranda complete, I asked, “Why, Gibbs? Why does she get to live?” Part of me cared about the answer, part of me was trying to cover my embarrassment over the knife thing. All of me knew that whatever Gibbs said in reply would just be noise.

“Because you got here first. That’s the only reason. If I had called you five minutes sooner, you would have rushed back to Colorado to save me. You know you would have, Sam. But you came in the house, you came down here… Timing. It was just a problem with timing.” Her voice trailed away. “She wanted Sterling, you know? They all did. That wasn’t the deal. One time only, that was the deal.”

Suddenly I got it. I faced her. “Were you in the basilica that day, Gibbs? At Notre Dame? Up in the choir loft?”

Carmen stopped what she was doing.

I glanced at Holly. Above the duct tape, her eyes were wide.

Gibbs smiled. She actually smiled. “Of course I was.” She looked right at Holly. “Chanel suit? Purple? You remember me? She wanted him to come back again. She e-mailed him
again
. That wasn’t the deal. She knew the deal. She’d agreed to it.”

I got it all. Every bit of it.

“The deal?”

“Yes. The deal.”

That’s what I meant about the noise. My phone rang.

I checked the caller ID. Alan.

“Yeah,” I said.

Alan’s voice was full of rookie-cop wonder. “I’m at my office with Sterling Storey, Sam. You’re not going to believe this: He says he thinks Gibbs has been killing all those women.”

“Just a sec.” I turned to Gibbs. “Guess what? Your husband survived the Ochlockonee. He’s in Boulder, and he just gave you up to your doctor. Is that romantic or what?”

An army of footsteps erupted above my head. The locals had arrived to take over.

The question of which jurisdiction was going to get first dibs on Gibbs would keep a whole lot of county attorneys across the country busy for a while. Other than hoping that Boulder didn’t win that particular lottery, I wasn’t invested in the outcome.

I spent a couple of hours answering questions for the South Bend police, who seemed to have suffered amnesia about their decision not to keep an eye on Holly Malone, and then I prepared to leave Indiana.

First I kept my promise and called Lucy, letting her know what had transpired in South Bend. She was astonished at the developments. She had some news for me, too, though: The feds had finally tracked down Brian Miles. They’d found him in a big suite at a fancy hotel in the Bahamas where he was on vacation.

Not surprisingly, Carmen had learned more about what had really happened than I had.

When I found her after my interview, she told me that it had indeed been Gibbs, in disguise, who had delivered the Walkman and the duct tape to Holly in the covered dish on the front porch of the Craftsman bungalow. Gibbs’s pitch? She had promised Holly a visit by Sterling, who was offering a carnal encounter in the basement while the turkey was resting on the kitchen counter upstairs. Gibbs instructed Holly to wear the Walkman and follow all the instructions she heard to the letter, which included directions on binding and gagging herself with the tape.

Wow.

I told Carmen I was leaving town and offered her a ride as far as O’Hare in Chicago. She declined. She was determined to stay in South Bend in case there were any loose ends to tie up. What else? She didn’t say so, but I think she still wanted to find that South Bend detective who had called her “ma’am” and then blown her off about Holly’s peril. She wanted to help Orange County win the Gibbs Storey lottery. And she made me promise to tell her what really happened that day between Gibbs and Sterling in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame.

Carmen and I ended up saying good-bye on the sidewalk outside the South Bend PD in one of those poignant moments that I haven’t had many of in my life since I left college. I admit it crossed my mind that had I lingered a little longer in South Bend, Carmen and I might have had only one room that night at the Days Inn, not two.

That was the main reason for staying.

It was also one of the two main reasons for leaving.

The other?

Simon.

I filled the tank in the Cherokee and pointed it toward Minnesota.

I napped away most of the next morning in Angus’s den, and then Simon and I spent a wonderful Friday afternoon arguing whether having turkey and cranberry sandwiches while watching college football the day after Thanksgiving was almost as good as having turkey and stuffing while watching the Lions lose on Thanksgiving.

I lost the argument. I didn’t care.

Sherry and I talked after Simon was in bed for the night. We said what we had to say to each other in about five minutes. I gave Angus a big hug, declined his offer of a bed, and headed south on Interstate 35. I ended up spending the night in a Super 8 in Mason City, Iowa.

Things were feeling a whole lot clearer.

It was my first trip to Omaha, ever. Given that it was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend and given that I was flying standby, I felt lucky to get there at all.

A taxi took me to Sam, who was flat on his back in the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A Puerto Rican nurse named Yashira was being much nicer to him than he deserved. She was refusing to even try to find his “lost” car keys unless he arranged for somebody to drive him back to Colorado.

The somebody was me.

“It felt just like the heart attack. Maybe worse.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

The day before, around lunchtime, Sam had started passing a gallstone he didn’t even know he possessed and had driven himself to the emergency room in Omaha thinking he was having another MI. Two hours of agony in the ER provided enough time for the stone to move on, a one-night stay in the hospital for observation convinced the docs that Sam’s heart was stable, and my presence in Nebraska motivated Yashira to search a little bit harder for his missing car keys.

While I was still trying to find my way out of Omaha, I summed up the obvious. “Kidney stones, gallstones, and heart disease. You’re a picture of health, my friend.”

“Stress might have something to do with it,” he said.

“You think?” I replied.

“That, and the fact I’m fat. Though I might have lost a few pounds. Can you tell?”

Before I found the westbound entrance to I-80, we’d talked a little about Sam’s day-after-Thanksgiving trip up to Minnesota, and I’d answered all his questions about Lauren’s health and the long-term efficacy of Emily’s paw umbrella. The Gibbs and Sterling Storey saga was a little more complicated, though; covering that ground took us almost all the way to Lincoln.

Sterling’s story didn’t surprise Sam. I’d started, of course, at the river in Georgia with Sterling’s contention that he was washed downstream maybe a quarter of a mile before he pulled himself out.

“The Ochlockonee,” Sam had said. “Tell me something. Did he really go down there to help that woman in the minivan?”

“He says he did, but who knows? I don’t think Sterling exactly found God over the past week, Sam. He’s still the same guy he was when he was flying around the country having extramarital sex with strange women.”

“Not just extramarital: recreational. Hell, not just recreational: extreme.”

“Yeah?” I was curious but decided to proceed without the details. “Anyway, an old man with a semi full of chickens gave Sterling a ride as far as Montgomery. He had enough cash with him to make his way back to Colorado to talk to Gibbs.”

“He knew she was setting him up?”

“By then, yes. She basically told him when he was in Tallahassee. He says Gibbs is smart, and he figured she’d done a great job of pinning the murders on him. He came back to Boulder to talk with her, try to straighten things out, see if he could get her to admit what she’d done before your colleagues found him. When he couldn’t find her, he came by my office to give me his side of the story, hoping I could help influence her to give herself up. Then he was going to see a lawyer on Friday, turn himself in, and try to get her picked up. That was his plan, anyway. What a mess.”

“Did he know?” Sam asked. “What she’d been doing?”

“He says he didn’t. In fact, with the exception of Louise-the woman in California-he didn’t even know that any of the women he’d… you know, had these things with… were dead. When the women recontacted him to arrange a follow-up sexual encounter, Gibbs took the message. She was always the liaison anyway. That was her role.”

“Her role?”

“She set everything up for him with the other women. And then she watched. She liked to watch.”

Sam sighed deeply, as though he were trying to get something toxic out of his lungs. “She watched? She told you this?”

“I can’t tell you what she told me. What I’m able to talk about I got from Sterling.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Sam said. “After all these years, why did this bust open now?”

“After their move back to Boulder a few months ago, Sterling decided he didn’t want to be married to Gibbs anymore.”

“Ah,” Sam said. “So she was going to lose him anyway. All her efforts at eliminating the competition were for naught.”

“Exactly. She was determined to make sure she didn’t lose him to another woman, though.”

“What was your part?” Sam asked me. “Why’d she bring you in?”

“I’ve been wondering about that. Clinically, I can’t comment. But criminally? I think she needed somebody to help her play the battered wife card. She figured I’d do it.” I sighed. “She figured right. And she wanted someone she could tell things to, somebody who couldn’t tell the cops. And let’s face it, indirectly she used me to get you involved.”

“She needed a channel to the police. I obliged. Gibbs fooled you about where she was the whole time, too, didn’t she?”

“She fooled me about a lot of things, Sam. I was in a better position than anybody to figure out what she was up to, and I didn’t see this coming. I thought she was the victim in that relationship. I was blind to it.”

“Me too,” he said. “She’s good at smoke screens, Gibbs is. She’s so pretty, that’s part of it.” From Sam that constituted quite a confession. I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. He repeated his earlier question. “But she fooled you about where she was?”

“Yeah, I thought she was in Vail.”

“That’s what she told me. You know something? Before cell phones? She never could have pulled it off. Flying to the Midwest while we thought she was in the Colorado mountains? Used to be a phone number meant a place. Doesn’t anymore. Doesn’t mean shit.”

Sam seemed to need a moment to lament some loss of societal innocence. After a mile or so of silence I filled him in on what had really happened with the listening device in my office.

“So it was the lawyer who did it?” was Sam’s reply to my story, as though he’d known it all along.

“Yeah. With his bug in place he’d overheard this other patient of mine-he’s a really vulnerable guy-and then he talked him into doing some of the dirty work, but it was the lawyer who planted the bug and set it all up. He wanted to get even with Lauren for something that happened in court last summer. Figured he had a foolproof scheme.”

“You turn him in?”

“I gave it all to Lucy. She’s been great. I have some fences to mend with my patients, but…”

“You won’t tell me the lawyer’s name, but I’ll see it in the paper, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Will I be surprised?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No, not really.”

“The other guy, the vulnerable one-how’s he?”

I’d visited Craig in the hospital the day before. I said, “He’s not doing too well.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sounded sorry. It made me think about the waitress in Gold Hill, the one whose hand Sam had been holding since her sexual assault in the back of the van on the way to the frat house on the Hill. Maybe Sam was thinking about her, too.

We made it all the way across Nebraska-it’s a wide state-and were paralleling the Platte River on the stretch of Interstate 76 between Ogallala, Nebraska, and Julesburg, Colorado, before we got around to talking about Sherry. The conversation was a little cryptic at first.

“You want to talk about Sherry?” I asked.

“No,” Sam said. “Not really.”

That was the first installment in its entirety.

A hundred and twenty-five miles or so later I cut off I-76 at Hudson for the final westward push into Boulder. I could’ve spent the whole drive beating my head against the wall of Sam’s stubbornness, but all I would have learned is how good it felt when I stopped.

Sam said, “In case you’re wondering, I don’t believe that talking helps.”

I hadn’t been wondering. But I was eager to hear his thoughts on the matter. “Yeah?”

“Sherry thinks talking about things makes them better. Round and round we go. Me? I don’t think so. Words don’t heal. Time? Maybe. Words? No.”

I thought he was making a veiled editorial comment on my chosen profession, but rather than taking the bait, I waited to see where he’d go next.

I had to wait a while-about twenty miles-until we crossed I-25 at Dacono. We were getting close to home.

Sam said, “Sherry and I are done. I’m moving out.”

“You are?” I didn’t have any trouble keeping the surprise out of my voice.

“Yeah. She’s been seeing somebody.”

“She has?” This time my voice was nothing but surprise.

“I’ve known about it. The affair. A guy came in to buy flowers for his wife, that’s how she met him. He’s a psych professor at the university. I followed him to work one day, that’s how I know.”

He’d emphasized the guy’s profession, as though he wanted to spoil the air with the innuendo that the field of psychology had something to do with his problems. I wondered if I knew the man responsible for making Sam a cuckold. I hoped not.

“Did she know you knew?” I asked.

“No. I thought it was a thing. That it would pass. I still think it will pass. The affair’s not the reason the marriage is over.”

“What is?”

“Ask her? I’m a difficult guy. Ask me? I put up with a lot. Too much. She’d probably say the same, of course. That she put up with a lot from me. But I put up with a ton from her over the last few years. I did.”

I recalled the tense visits I’d witnessed in the hospital. “What are you talking about? Criticism? What?”

His answer took a moment to compose. “There’s a point where criticism stops and something else starts. Something more serious. More demeaning, damaging, you know? Somewhere near there was… us.”

“Are you talking about… abuse, Sam? Sherry… did what?”

“Next topic, Alan. I said what I’m going to say.”

Sometimes friendship means inquisitiveness, sometimes it means silent respect. I had a thousand questions. I asked none of them.

But Sam answered one that wasn’t even on my list. “I almost had an affair, too. Over Thanksgiving.”

I quickly catalogued the likely suspects. “Detective Reynoso?”

“Turns out we get along.”

I glanced over at him. I was checking to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “Why didn’t you?”

“Hadn’t talked to Sherry yet. But… I’ve talked to her now, so who knows? California’s not that far away. I like the beach.”

I didn’t know Sam had ever seen a beach.

“And you like Carmen?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t know how much that means. I loved Sherry. What good did it do?”

I hit the brakes to avoid running up on an old primer-covered Dodge truck that was pulling a long trailer piled high with hay.

“I’m sorry, Sam. About Sherry.”

“Ever feel like you’re playing the same music you were playing as a kid? When girls first became real? Where women are concerned, I don’t know that I’ve progressed much in thirty years.”

Sam’s words transported me back to Teri Reginelli and
¡Dios mío, hay un hacha en mi cabeza!
I knew that the Gibbs Storeys of the world were still capable of capturing my feet in the quicksand of my adolescence, but I desperately wanted to believe that I had developed the maturity to pull myself back out. Before I had a chance to get lost any further in that old swamp, Sam yanked me back to the present.

“You know what? Sherry and me? We had a good thing. And then one day we didn’t. It’s been bad now almost as long as it was good.”

“Simon?”

“We’ll do okay with him. We will. We’re not idiots.”

“You want to run anything by me about his reaction to all this, I’m happy to listen.”

“Yeah, thanks. If the phone doesn’t ring, that’s me.”

I laughed.

“Marriage is a weird thing. Gibbs and Sterling-what was that? All the screwing around they did. And Holly Malone? The good Catholic girl from South Bend? Her and her husband? What were they up to with their shenanigans? You and Lauren seem like you’re rock solid, but I know you’re not. God only knows what sexual perversity the two of you are into.”

I opened my mouth.

He held up his hand. “God knows, Alan-I don’t want to.”

The car lurched and hopped as we crossed two sets of railroad tracks. “You’re allowed to hit the brakes, you know, before you hit the bumps,” Sam said.

Metaphor? With Sam, I could never be quite sure. “I’ll remember that,” I said.

“I know you’re not,” he repeated. “Rock solid, I mean.”

“It’s a challenge, Sam. For us, for everybody.”

“I’m glad we agree on that. Because I don’t really want to talk about it after this.”

I said I was sorry again about him and Sherry. He pretended to ignore it.

He said, “You see the papers? They found that woman who shut down DIA. She’s from Boulder. Figures. I wouldn’t want to be her.”

Thanks to a brilliant moon the mountains were looming large against the night sky. The delta shapes of the Flatirons remained indistinct. It didn’t matter. I could feel Boulder long before I could see it.