Empties (21 page)

She wondered whether Benek’s claim that there might be unrelated others should make her afraid; but there had been no fear in the dream, so she would not fear now.
 

She watched as a police black-and-white appeared around a ruined corner and pulled up in front of the fence. A tall man got out, saw her, and raised his hand as he came through the ragged hole in the chain link. He was dressed in a brown blazer, with matching slacks, and a white shirt with no tie.
 

“Are you Dierdre Matera?” he called out as he picked his way toward her, and she felt a menstrual cramp creeping up on her. She tensed, ready to core him, but his casual, unthreatening manner stopped her.
 

“Yes!” she shouted back, feeling a second twinge begin, then ebb away.
 

“Want to ask you a question,” he said as he came up to her. “I’m Police Captain Joseph Reddy.” He showed her his badge. “What are you doing here?”
 

“Checking my property,” she replied firmly, watching him closely, ready to reach out and empty him if necessary.
 

He looked up at the building, and shook his head. “Doesn’t seem worth owning.”
 

His comment angered her, but she restrained herself. “You may be right, Captain, but this is the first I’ve been out here in a long time.”
 

“It’s not safe—the building or the neighborhood.”
 

“I’ll probably be selling it soon,” she said, trying to sound pleasant. “Why are you here, Captain?”
 

“It’s about Detective William Benek. You know him, I think.”
 

“Yes, what about him?”
 

The man was embarrassed, she noticed. “Well, he’s made some pretty strange statements about you.”
 

“Oh?” she said, smiling as another cramp clutched at her insides.
 

“I was wondering if you could come down to the precinct, say tomorrow, and make a formal statement. It would help clear up a few things. He’s been a good cop.”
 

The fool, she thought, the stupid fool. But they didn’t believe him, as she had expected. Another cramp locked, held, then started to fade away. Tomorrow, she knew, the discomfort would be worse and she would need a painkiller. “What is this about? I can tell you
 

anything you want to know right now.”
 

“You went out with Detective Benek?”
 

“Yes. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
 

“Maybe not. What about the room in your basement, with the bed and manacles?”
 

She smiled at him and tried to look worldly and unconcerned. “Fun and games, Captain. Not against the law between consenting adults.”
 

“And the grave?”
 

“Grave? Oh, you mean the hole in the back room. Bill dug it for me. I need to run a drain in there. He saved me some money. He seemed to want the exercise. It was very nice of him. Now I can call in the plumbers to connect the pipe to the sewer in the street. When I can afford it.”
 

The captain shook his head and smiled. “I thought it was maybe something like that.”
 

“Is there anything else, Captain? Bill is a good man.”
 

“Nothing at all. Would you still come in and make a statement?”
 

“But why?”
 

“Detective Benek is a little... unwell. It would help him to have someone speak up for him more formally. He doesn’t have any family.”
 

She smiled and looked into the captain’s blue eyes, knowing exactly how to play him. “Of course. I guess he didn’t take breaking up very well. We didn’t last very long, I’m afraid.”
 

“You broke up?”
 

“Yes,” she said, sighing for his benefit. She felt a hot flash, then a moment of weakness.
 

“Well, thanks for your help,” he said and turned to make his way back toward his car.
 

She watched him go. As he reached the fence, she called out, “Oh, Captain Reddy!”
 

He turned and looked at her.
 

“Did you say tomorrow?”
 

He nodded and turned away, then bent down and went out through the hole in the fence. She felt another cramp coming. Soon she would be aching in her back and feeling pains in her legs, and the cramps would crowd into her and stay, varying in intensity. They were preparing her for childbirth, she told herself, when she would feel like pushing because there would be something for her to push out.
 

Something she no longer wanted.
 

On the following afternoon, Benek came into Reddy’s office, as the captain had asked him to do, and sat down in the wooden chair before the desk. Reddy looked at him and pushed over a single piece of paper. “Bill, that’s Dierdre Matera’s statement of this morning. Please read it.”
 

Benek tensed at this repeated use of his nickname, and saw it as still another sign that the captain was not taking him seriously, but wanted to sound kind. He picked up the sheet and read it through, and the last hope that Reddy might still believe him died.
 

“Well,” Reddy said. “What do you say?”
 

“Don’t you see, Captain?” Benek said, standing up.
 

“See what, Bill?”
 

“It’s all a lie. She’s just covering her tracks, so no one will ever know. Her biggest mistake was revealing herself to anyone.”
 

“Only to you, Bill.”
 

“Yeah. What did you find in the bag?”
 

“Nothing. I guess you’d say she cleaned it out thoroughly.”
 

“What about Gibney?”
 

“He was cremated, as he wished. Bill, everything you’ve claimed has come up empty, with perfectly ordinary explanations. You had a falling out with this woman, and somehow you jumbled that up into the case you and Gibney talked about. You’re not well. As far I can tell, you’ve imagined all the evidence.”
 

“So I’m hallucinating?” Benek asked, feeling himself shake slightly. “What about the autopsy on the wino?”
 

“Gibney did say in his notes that he suspected a hoax. Somehow, it got you going in this direction. Don’t you see, Bill? This just can’t be. You’ve got it all jumbled together, like a bad dream.”
 

“Check the body again,” Benek said determinedly. “That’ll show you that the brain couldn’t have been easily removed. Check the priest.”
 

Reddy took a deep breath. “Not easily removed, sure, but it was removed. The body has been disposed of, and the priest is in hallowed ground, so you have nothing. It’s clear to me that you need a rest, so I’m suspending you indefinitely, even though I badly need you on the job. Get some help right away, and have the doctor send me an evaluation. If you refuse, I’ll start the proceedings to fire you, and I don’t care what it costs.”
 

Benek was silent, trying to see the impracticality of sticking to his story.
 

“Well, Bill, what do you say?”
 

Benek knew that Reddy didn’t want to lose a detective; it would leave the precinct short for a while.
 

“Do you know what really gets me?” Reddy continued. “Your cases haven’t been tough enough to unbalance you. All I can think is that you never seemed to have anyone, no close pals, no women I can remember you mentioning. So you meet one, it goes wrong, and you develop this incredible delusion. Makes me think you were always a bit nutty. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you’ve been taking something.”
 

Reddy was sympathetic, and not just thinking of the precinct, but there was no way to convince him, it seemed.
 

“Exhume the priest,” Benek said. “This is all exactly what I told you. She’s covering her tracks and wants me to come after her so she can kill me. If I disappear, or if you find my body, have my skull carefully checked.”
 

“I warn you, Bill, leave her alone,” Reddy said calmly. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you this much, since it can’t do any good if your problems are extreme, but I have this idea that maybe I can get through to you. Tell me I’m right. Tell me you’ll get over her.”
 

“I won’t go near her,” Benek said, realizing what he had to do. He should never have told Reddy anything.
 

“What’s happened to you, Bill?”
 

“Bad dreams maybe,” he said.
 

“Let’s hope so. Do you see how extreme a story you’ve been telling me?”
 

“I won’t go near her,” Benek said again. He had to say the words just to get out of the building.
 

Reddy looked at him hopefully, and Benek realized that the captain had never been a hard ass. Way down deep he was a naive good man, wanting to believe the best about people. It seemed impossible that he had made captain of police. He couldn’t be on the take, either, which is how it was with the honest, or the stupid.
 

Benek nodded slowly. “Maybe I do need some rest,” he said, realizing that he was alone in this now, that he couldn’t rely on anyone to help him, that in order to stay free he had to patch it up with Reddy even if it meant making it easier for Dierdre. To try to talk anybody into helping him now would only add to the number of people who would think he was nuts and whose lives would be put in danger. Reddy might lock him up and there would be no one to stop Dierdre.
 

19

Stalk and kill her. Hardest of all would be to imprison her. It seemed to him that she had to see her victim as she cored him, so it might be safest to observe her through one-way glass. But if she looked at anyone, brains would come out.
 

Trying to convince Reddy had been useless, but it was not the captain’s fault. She was an insult to reason, to the organ of pride. What had made her? Did she just happen? Ironically, humankind had never needed her skill, having always had enough to account for all the evil in the world, while blaming it on devils. Knowledge and its tools had only magnified humankind’s dark inner freedom, which warred with nature and with itself. Some cosmic joke, blind to its own humor, had thrown Dierdre into the mix, but she was an unnecessary insult to humanity’s endless self-injury. Had Dierdre’s power grown out of that old darkness? Was it some form of self-inflicted punishment? Was she the first of her kind, or were there others? Better she had remained a folktale.
 

There had to be a physical explanation for what she did, some simple topological snap, nothing supernatural but enough to do the deed. It had always been there, billowing in the quantum substructure’s chaos, ready to tear at the more orderly overworld.
 
Might as well be magic, he thought, hating the idea of forces transcending human intellect, with no supporting explanation, standing outside of reality. He could not face an infinite perversity, if it existed. There could be no truce with it. Proliferate Dierdre’s power, and the streets would steam with dispossessed brains, bodies rotting where they fell, a world emptied of all mind, beyond all the horrors of the past.
 

She had to die.
 

She had killed Frank Gibney, a priest, the old drunk on the bench, a few innocent people in a restaurant, and now threatened him. Leave them out, and would he care who she destroyed, or what luxury and power she accumulated? It was no worse an ambition than was achieved every day by many others, who had long ago exceeded Dierdre’s cruelty without her means. But from a police perspective, her killings, if she had used a gun, would have earned a shoot on sight all points alarm.
 

He was startled by the realization that he cared about his own wretched kind. Cop training, he told himself, had no place for self-loathing. Was Dierdre capable of self-hatred, of suicide? Could she turn her strength on herself? Would the action start and stop as the guiding instrument was severed from the body?
 

There was a loud knock on his door, and he jumped to his feet from the sofa. Slowly, he went to the door, peered through the peephole, and saw the unshaven face of his upstairs neighbor grinning at him.
 

DeSapio shouted, “Got something for you!”
 

Benek twisted the two locks, shot back the one big bolt, and opened the door.
 

“Here,” the man said, thrusting a box toward him. “You can toss that old clunker that’s been ringing like crazy when you’re not here. Don’t worry, my dumb kid brother gave me this phone, when I’ve got two already. Figure my nerves are worth giving you a present. Hook it up for you?”
 

Benek let out a deep breath, and was almost glad to see him. “I’ll do it, thanks. Sure you want to give me this?”