Dark Lie (9781101607084) (19 page)

Gerardo grinned. “Well, not without profanity.”

“I bet he didn't call it profiling.”

“No. But I do. I would be interested to hear any insights you can offer into our unsub.”

“Unsub,” she remembered, meant unidentified subject. This man was cautious. All he could be sure of was that Dorrie White long ago had a boyfriend named Blake.

Sissy said, “Discounting the love letters, just looking at what's written on that wall”—with her chin she pointed toward the painted scrawl—“you can see he's unstable. His slant's all over the place, although predominantly it's toppling to the right. That indicates how emotional and impulsive he is. See the
d
at the end of ‘laid,' how it's falling off the word? And how it's kind of bloated to look almost exactly like he's giving you the finger?”

“Son of a—”

“Or not you, exactly,” Sissy quickly amended. “The whole world. Attitude.”

“That's uncanny. How could I not see that before?” Agent Gerardo studied the offending letter. “Do you think it's conscious on his part?”

“No way of telling. It's a common trait in the handwriting of felons, like the distorted descenders—the hooked tail on the
g
and
y
. Aside from rebelling against the natural flow of handwriting, they're in the lower zone, making them sexually kinky.”

Gerardo let this pass, seeming better able to deal with the deformed
d
. “Just from the handwriting, would you say he's dangerous?”

Sissy paused to consider, noticing how all the background noise, all the babble, came from behind her, from the civilians in the crowd and the cops restraining them. Loudest was Walker bellowing for Sam White to come over here: “Get your butt over here!” Sam White, who arguably had the best right of anybody to scream his head off, completely ignored Walker while searching the parking lot for some reason, quite silent. Just as silently the Weimaraner-colored van sat abandoned in the middle of the gravel, while beyond it, on the far side of the lot, the “CANDY GOT LAID HERE” building gave off no fireworks, no gunshots, no fiery explosions, but stood as still and silent as death. Waiting.

Sissy Chappell replied with care. “Yes, I think he's dangerous. The sick kind of dangerous, if you know what I mean, like this guy probably had a horrific childhood and is terribly screwed up.”

“Another common trait among felons.”

“True. I don't see any clubbed strokes—that would indicate a brutal sort of cruelty—but there's a disturbing deformity in his writing. It's not only very angular—that's common among aggressive men—but the angularity is habitually recurved to form shapes kind of like the point of a saber. I think this guy might have an affinity for knives.”

“Interesting.”

“Just a self-educated guess.”

“You mean you didn't go to school for this?” Gerardo grinned. “Make me another self-educated guess. Do you think it's Blake Roman's handwriting we're looking at?”

“I personally think so, yes, although there's no proof. Just facts that fit. He's from Appletree. Only a couple of years older than Mrs. White. He could have known her in school. He could be the one who called her Candy. You know her real first name is Candor.”

“No, I didn't know that. Stick around, would you?” Gerardo turned away abruptly, looking for someone. “Walker! Where's Captain Walker?”

“Right here.” The man walked up to stand directly in front of Sissy but facing Gerardo. Somehow even in obedience he managed to look belligerent. He asked no questions, just stood there.

“Walker, what do you know about anybody surnamed Roman who used to live in Appletree?”

“Somebody by that name does still live here.” Walker spit on the ground. “But you'd have to ask Bert.”

THIRTEEN

“B
ert! Get over here!”

Bert heard, and without looking knew the bellowing voice to be that of Captain Walker, and pretended he hadn't heard. He knew all too well what Walker and the FBI wanted to ask him, and he wasn't ready to answer. Sheltering himself from view behind the van, he tried to feel darkly amused by the whole thing, Sam White snubbing Walker while looking at the gravel as if he hoped to find his wife there.

Bert recalled having a wife once, but she'd been gone so long he barely remembered. . . . Why couldn't he remember his sweet, sensible Lillian nearly as vividly as he recalled his son's slut of a wife, Pandora?

That bitch.

The way Pandora ran things, her regulars got their kicks from screwing her in front of her crippled husband—that was what she called him to his face,
crippled
. She and the client would lift Randall Roman out of his wheelchair, park him wherever they wanted him, tie his hands, do their thing, and enjoy it while he cursed them and cried. The more sadistic johns were likely to give Randall a bloody nose or a split lip if he called them the wrong name. For this, rumor had it, they were charged extra.

Anyway, Randall Roman had killed himself. Slit his wrists.

Or that was the common view.

Maybe even true.

What made it hard to figure was that Pandora Roman was found dead in the bed with her husband. Wrists slit. Both of them naked.

It was the kid, their boy, who had found them that way the next morning. Kid was fifteen years old at the time. Found the bodies all bled out, called 911. Dead calm on the digital recording. Kind of wooden. Numb. In shock.

Understandable. Kid couldn't have loved his dad or his mom all that much. There'd been rumors that she had been known to make him watch too.

Or let him watch. Whichever.

So there lay Penny and Randall Roman dead in what looked like a double suicide, like they'd made a pact and done it together, like in their own sick way they'd really loved each other.

Public opinion wouldn't leave it at that, of course. Randall Roman a suicide, sure, people could believe that, but Penny? It had to have been a murder-suicide. Randall had slit her wrists and then his own.

Except why would she just lie there after her wrists were slit, unless someone forced her to? And how would her no-legs no-balls husband force her to?

There'd never been any official verdict. Death under suspicious circumstances, that was all. Could have been suicide-suicide. Could have been murder-suicide, maybe even with Penny as the murderer. Could have been murder-murder by a third party unknown.

To Bert it looked like murder-murder.

By a third party known.

To him.

And to him only.

Because of something he knew that nobody else alive knew. Except the murderer.

Bert hadn't said anything, but he happened to know that Randall Roman didn't go naked. Ever. At all.

The diaper had to have been removed and Randall cleaned up after he was dead.

And Bert surmised who might have done that. And arranged the bodies to make them look like lovers.

Just a hunch. No real proof. But an old cop learns to trust his hunches.

Anyway, he knew the boy better than most, although he hadn't spent a whole lot of time with the kid. Couldn't stand to, because visiting with the boy meant encountering the mother, and the way Bert loathed her . . . Some of that loathing rubbed off on his feelings toward the youngster too. Unpleasant kid, totally spoiled and messed up. The only child, the youngster was the hub of the household and his parents' whole daytime world, for good or bad. Penny would get so mad at him she'd knock him across the room, and then she'd cry about it, and cuddle him, kiss him all over, buy him anything he wanted—and then, it seemed on purpose, the kid would make her mad again. Bert liked kids as a rule, but something about this brat repelled him, and his revulsion had grown stronger as the boy had grown into a teenager and took to slouching around all martyred and gloomy with black clothes on. Bert knew it was wrong for him to feel the way he did, but feelings don't listen to rules, and his wouldn't let him love the boy the way a grandpa should.

Nevertheless, the kid
was
his grandson.

Just the same, knowing what he knew, Bert hadn't taken young Blake to live under the same roof with him and his wife after the deaths of the boy's parents. He sure as heck didn't want to end up as suicide pact number two, dead in bed with his wife, wrists cut. Her diabetes and all the rest of it, health problems galore, had given her and him excuse enough. They had let the boy go to a foster home.

Bert kind of regretted that now that he was old and alone. Sometimes he thought he had failed in his duty to his family, and wondered whether he could have made a decent human being out of the boy, made a difference. Other times he regretted that he had failed in his duty as an officer of the law, felt the guilt of his silence. Girls had died because of his silence.

One regret pretty much balanced the other, and together they kept his mouth shut.

He wondered whether the kid even realized that he, Bert aka Grandpa, was still alive to tell what he knew.

* * *

“Really?” I breathed in the wispiest voice I could manage with my back against the wall and a knife wound in my arm. It was a good thing I didn't have the strength to give in to the nausea in my gut, or I would have puked. “Blake . . .” I forced my voice to caress the name. “. . . it really happened? Your mother and father died together in a suicide pact?”

“They did it to each other,” he said without any emotion that I could hear or see. “They didn't do it to me.”

What
had
they done to him?

I knew a little bit, but the rest I could only guess. If Juliet was to live at all, and if I lived through the next few minutes, it would be by guesswork and intuition.

I murmured, “But they—they slit each other's wrists? That is so—so unbelievably brave and loving and romantic.”

I was beginning to know what I had to do.

No. Fever was making me think it. Lupus inflaming my mind as well as my body, that plus terror making me think sick things. Sick.

Don't do it.

But I had to.

I had to go ahead and be Candy, the first true Candy, because Blake was still Blake.

I had to try it, to save Juliet.

Do it.

What scared me the most was not that I had given myself permission. What really terrified me was that I had the darkness in me to understand, to empathize, and to act. Knowingly this time, I
could
do it. Go there. Into the wild, warped, vehement world of Blake Roman. It was hard to acknowledge how vulnerable I myself had been in my adolescence, a lonesome, needy loser raised by—face it—parents whose harsh religion verged on sadism. Parents who, even though still technically alive, had in a sense killed each other. Like Blake's.

Not that I fully believed what Blake was saying of his parents, that they had committed mutual suicide. Something about that messy double death rang true, but his tonelessness told me how much was hidden.

Weird intuition of my fevered mind told me what to ask next. “Blake,” I ventured, “your knife . . .” As if acknowledging a third party in the conversation, I nodded to Pandora, mother of all castrating bitches, standing in the clutch of his hand. Reverently I asked, “Is Pandora the same knife they used?”

Something opened in his shuttered face. “Damn straight she is.” His stony eyes actually widened. “Nobody ever . . . How'd you know?”

“Just . . .” I forced myself to smile a rather loony tunes smirk at that awful knife. “Just because of the way you love her.”

“Oh, yeah. Pandora is a goddess.” Something came alive, almost animated, in his face. “Pandora rules the world, you know? Whatever Pandora says, that's what you got to do. You never met such a sweet bitch. Cold like an Italian ice. Call her Mommy, she doesn't even hear. You got to call her Penny or Pandora.”

Oh, my God.

Blake's voice sank so low I could barely hear him. “A few times I had sex with her.”

Oh, my
God.

But I didn't even blink, just said, “That's wild.”

He grinned. “I like it wild.”

Sick, sick, even sicker than my queasy, dizzy body. But my weakness helped to make it all seem like a fever dream, and anyway, there was no time to think, just blurt out another crazy hunch. “Is that when she cut your arms?”

“Cut me and laughed. It made her happy. Pretty red blood coming out of me. Beautiful bright blood.”

Blood equaled sex equaled knife/mother equaled happy sweet candy equaled cherry red blood, round and round like the vertigo threatening my head. I wondered whether it had to be wrist blood.

“And your wrists?”

“That . . . um, no. That was later.” He glanced downward and to the left, away from me.

I saw guilt in that glance.

Guilt? In Blake Roman? Lying didn't make him look guilty. Seduction, abduction, and rape didn't make him look guilty.
Murder
didn't make him look guilty. What in the name of—

Pandora.

Mother.

I knew where all
my
irrational guilt came from.

“Blake,” I accused gently, almost teasing, “you haven't been doing it the way Mommy wants, have you?”

Instantly his face hardened. “You shut your fat mouth about her!”
Flip
went the mood switch, and he was all rage. “You don't know a freaking thing about her, you dumb fuck. And you lie. You're not—you're not—I don't know you. Fat bitch, you lie like a rug, all you tell me is lies, lies, lies—” Projecting his own guilt onto me, working himself up to a fury, he lifted the knife to lunge at me again.

And I was not afraid.

Because I had flipped a switch in my own exhausted mind, and now I could watch myself do whatever I had to.

I could watch myself be as ruthless as Blake. I could stand aside and watch myself be the Candy he deserved to meet. I had rejoined Blake in his bizarre world where blood was sex was love. I did not know what was going to happen next or whether I would live through this or whether I would ever be the same, but the only thing that frightened me was that I didn't care.

“My name is
Candor
,” I told Blake. “Candor Birch White.” Whether it was the force of my tone or the power of my name, he froze, then lowered his knife and stood like a stone man. “I am not a bitch,” I scolded on, “and I am proud to be fat in normal places, not my head. And I do not lie.”

Or not anymore.

Especially not to Sam. If, please dear God, I ever got to see him again.

I loved Sam. I had grown to love him with a deep, daily love with which no teenage infatuation could compare. I knew that now.

The romantic yearnings I used to have for Blake, my virginal willingness to be swept away by his perverse passions—the best thing I could do now was to recapture that lust unto death and use it.

“My name is Candor,” I repeated more softly. “You used to call me Candy. This affliction is my punishment.” With my hands I indicated the red and white crust of rash on my face, the hamster cheeks, the pinto spots of lost pigment on my bruised arms, the hippo hips. “My punishment for not doing it right, Blake.” My parents had told me this so many times that I almost believed it, although the meaning Blake would take from my words was entirely different from the one my parents had intended. “I have been punished. And you will be punished too, Blake, because you haven't been doing it right either. Have you?”

I could actually see the blood ebb out of his face, leaving it chalky. He stood like white stone, his eyes staring into mine as if I had somehow hypnotized a blind man.

“Have you been doing what Pandora said, Blake?”

Like a wooden puppet's, his mouth cracked open. “I tried.” His voice came out a hoarse whisper.

“But you didn't do it. All those Candies, and each time you didn't do it. You killed the Candies, but you didn't kill yourself.”

“I . . . tried. . . .”

Nothing about his white stone face moved, but water ran down his cheeks. Like condensation dripping. I had gone harder than he was, so I did not perceive that moisture as tears.

“And now you've really messed up,” I went on, relentless. “You've chosen a Candy who is your own daughter. You cannot join with her in blood or you will go to a worse hell than the one you're already living in. You cannot join with her in flesh or you will go to the ultimate hell designed especially for incestuous perverts. You cannot kill her because she is your daughter, and you cannot let her go because you will go to jail. What are you going to do, Blake?”

His wet stone face turned to sodden clay. He sobbed aloud. “Mommy,” he wept, his voice cracking.

“What do you mean, ‘Mommy'? You don't have a mommy. You never had a mommy.”

“Pandora, please . . .”

I pushed myself away from the wall and stood as tall as I could, hardly even swaying, my stare locked onto his wet pebble eyes. I demanded of him, “What is my name?”

He whispered, “Candor.”

I placed the palms of my hands flat on my cheeks, hiding rash and chipmunk cheeks, pushing them up and back. All eyes and lips, I demanded, “What else?”

He choked it out. “Candy . . .”

And as his raining eyes gazed into mine, that scarlet lightning electric connection flew between us again, stronger than ever. I know he saw me as if seventeen years had never happened, because that's the way I saw him, my demented weeping sweetheart, and right on cue I started weeping too.

“Blake,” I cried, all the time watching myself from some disassociated place as if I were an actor on a stage, all the while silently coaching myself,
Good, Dorrie, good. Do whatever it takes.