Nowhere Girl (16 page)

Later that night, we lay in bed, listening to the rain on the roof, watching it fall in rivulets down the windowpane. “You awake?” she'd asked.

“Yeah.”

She hadn't unpacked her bag, and it was on the floor at the bottom of her bed, a hulking shape that for some reason scared me in the dark. “I hate being pent up in this house. Obeying all their rules.” She'd turned her head, and in the glow from the night-light, she appeared featureless, a silhouette. “I'd run away if I could.” She turned back to the window. “I'm not afraid.”

I'd said nothing, just kept my eyes on that constant rain. But I'd felt stung, knowing she didn't mean to bring me with her. She'd run away by herself. I hated that she would ever think about leaving me like that. When she'd packed her bag, she hadn't asked me to come. She'd known I wouldn't. I was too good.

“Look where it got you, Savannah banana,” I said, now holding that picture of us on our first day of high school. “Maybe being good wasn't such a bad idea, after all.”

 

CHAPTER

19

That week, I didn't work on
Devils.
I read everything I could find on Larry Cauchek, because although what I had said to Brady had sounded brave, I was actually terrified to sit face-to-face with a serial killer, and I thought knowing as much as I could about him might help. Patrick called the day after I met him and Jon at the police station and assured me of two things: Savannah's killer's MO didn't fit Cauchek's, and meeting with the notorious murderer was a spectacularly bad idea. Despite Patrick's warning and his almost begging me not to do this, I still insisted to Brady that I needed to meet this man. The time frame and location fit. Patrick couldn't tell me with absolute certainty that Cauchek hadn't killed my sister. So maybe he had.

I met Brady at Starbucks on Wednesday morning so he could brief me. He was wearing his prison guard uniform and looking sleepy and uniquely beautiful.

“You okay?” he asked. He had a gentle, deep voice that made me want to crawl inside of it and take a nap.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm fine.”

He watched me. I couldn't meet his eyes, because I was lying. I was not fine. I was shaking inside. I studied his strong hands curled around his coffee cup.

“Don't say anything personal,” he said.

“I'll try not to.”

“Cady.” He touched my hand.

“What?”

“Do
not
reveal anything personal.” His hand was warm, and I wanted to hold it forever.

“Okay,” I said.

*   *   *

Later, standing outside the door of a basement room with a guard whose name tag read Jacobs, waiting for Brady to lock Larry Cauchek's handcuffs to the table, I felt feverish, sweaty, like I get right before I'm going to throw up. Jacobs was bald with an uneven head and straight teeth, which I thought might be veneers. On our way in, he'd told me he was going to stand right outside the door. I didn't want him. I wanted Brady to be on watch, but there were a bunch of prison protocols I didn't understand. Brady opened the door. “You ready?”

“Yes.” My voice sounded small, even to me.

Brady stared at me, and I didn't think I'd ever seen him like that. It was the same as when my father had taken the training wheels off our bikes. Like maybe we were going to flip over the handlebars and smack our faces, and he would have been a major part of making it happen.

“I'm fine,” I said. I stepped in and heard the door close behind us.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in the room was that it was entirely one color, gray, and it was surveyed by a video camera in the upper-left corner. The barred window framed a patch of crabgrass and mud. Larry Cauchek was tethered to the far side of a steel table, more like the leader of the Young Republicans than a serial killer.

“Ms. Bernard,” Brady said formally, as if we weren't friends. “Larry Cauchek.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Jacobs will be on the other side of the door. If you'd like him to stay inside, please let us know.”

That stage fright feeling had arrived, the one I used to get before I cut myself, that feeling I was being strangled, suffocated. I fought it as best I could and said calmly, “I'm okay, thank you.”

It occurred to me I'd get more out of Larry if I had him alone. His feet and arms were shackled, and he was far enough away so he couldn't bite me. Brady backed away, and as I watched him, I could feel Larry's eyes on me. I wasn't ready yet. I needed a few more seconds to steady my breathing.

Brady pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then to Cauchek's face.
I'm watching you
. And I understood now that Jacobs would stand guard at the door, but Brady would view by video. I busied myself opening my notebook to a page with a list of questions and peeked at him: short, clean cut, his dark-blond hair combed neatly and parted on the side. I hated him, purely and thoroughly. Digging my favorite pen out of the bottom of my briefcase, I thought again of how he'd begun killing in Philly in the early '90s and worked his way up the East Coast until he was caught in 2000. He'd been convicted of seven murders, but the police believed there could have been more.

I finally lifted my gaze from the notebook. His black eyes bled like ink into the pupils, and he was staring, with unwavering concentration, at my throat.

“I know why you're here.” The intensity of his tone unnerved me.

“Tell me.” Patrick had said Cauchek would try to psych me out, pretend to know things about me.

He was sitting very straight, as though some phantom drill sergeant had brought him to attention. He blew air out of his nose the way a horse would. “I've read your books. I understand why you write them. I. Know. Your. Secret.”

I put down my pen. My chest felt like there was a terrified bird trapped in it, frantic to get out. “You do?”

The flower tattoo on his wrist had seven petals. In each one was a letter. “First initial of each of his victims,” Brady had told me. After I'd said I was set on interviewing Cauchek, he'd called me three times, relaying more information he'd learned from Cauchek's cellmate and two informants.

“You want to find the man who murdered your sister.” Larry's voice was level, like a math teacher reciting equations. “Your books, your bestselling ‘novels'”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“they're a front.”

I stared at him. I felt naked. We'd been in there two minutes, and he'd seen straight through me to something even my psychiatrist husband couldn't recognize.

“You don't write because you love it.” He laid his hands on the table. His nails were perfectly trimmed, filed, buffed. “You do it because it's going to help you find the man who squeezed your sister until the light went out in her eyes.” His eyes went to my neck again. “Without your books, you'd just be a grief-stricken sister playing amateur detective.”

My breath was rushing out of me, but not in fear. It was exhilaration, some kind of odd freedom. No one had ever known why I really did this. He leaned forward, and I willed myself not to move away. His voice was robotic, a little hypnotizing.

“So what have you learned? In all this time, have you gotten any closer?” This animal whose expression never changed when the judge sentenced him to seven consecutive life sentences had exposed my biggest failure.

“Survivors blame themselves for dressing provocatively or staying out late. And offenders fall into two categories. Those who are sorry—”

He cut me off and lowered his gaze. “And those of us who aren't.”

I'd heard of sociopaths, of people who had no conscience, but they'd been only vague shapes in my imagination like the devil, a concept to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow. I leaned back in my chair. “So here I am, interviewing Lucifer.”

He smiled, a welcome and a warning. “Don't be afraid, love. The devil was just a fallen angel. We all started out good, once.” His voice was mesmerizing. His milky skin. I understood how those girls trusted him when they answered his ads. He'd been a child model and then acted as an agent of beautiful girls. He could have killed my sister. Larry loved beauty. Savannah had been beautiful.

“Even—”

He tried to put up a hand to stop me, but the metal chains jerked against his skin. “Even the man who delivered Savannah home.” He finished my sentence.

“Is that what you did? Delivered those girls
home
?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I sliced them open from shoulder to opposite hip, just to see what was inside.”

He showed me the tips of his teeth, and I saw they were slightly yellowed. That must have bothered him, having that imperfection.

“Too bad you got caught by a profiler.” I said the last word like it was dirty. “Just when you thought you were going to get away with it.”

“You're a live one. I like that.” He leaned back, closing his eyes. A smile spread across his face, and I had the sickening feeling he was reliving his kills. “Let's play a game, shall we?” He opened his eyes wide.

“Truth or dare?”

“I was thinking something along the lines of you show me yours and I'll show you mine.” He reminded me of Anthony Hopkins's character in
Silence of the Lambs.

I stiffened my spine. “What do you want to know?”

“Did you see her? While she lay dying?”

I opened my mouth to say how much I hated him, what filth he was, when I realized that's what he wanted. He'd taunted the police, sending them photos of his victims, clues printed out on a label maker. He was baiting me now.

“No. I told the officer where to find her and that she was still alive, but I couldn't make myself see her like that.”

“By
officer,
you mean Patrick.” It hadn't occurred to me that he'd researched me too.

“My turn. What made you think you were smarter than Agent Walters?”

“Ah, the beautiful Samantha Walters. Profiler extraordinaire. I knew she'd catch me. I just didn't think it'd be till I was done. I never did get to finish.” He made a carving motion with an imaginary blade.

“What do you mean, till you were done?”

“Eight is the perfect number. According to the Epistle of Barnabas, on the eighth day, Christ rose from the dead. Eight people were saved from the floods on Noah's ark. There are eighty-eight constellations and eight planets.”

“So there was one more. Who was she?”

“Does that matter? They were all the same to me, begging for their lives, promising they wouldn't tell.” He tapped the table with his pretty fingers. “The banality of it all kind of took the fun out of it.”

For once, I was thankful for Greg and his ridiculous breathing techniques. Inhale through the nose, push it out through the mouth, count to ten. “How banal was it when they tricked you into coming to the police station?”

“Ah yes, the story they planted was pure brilliance. Too bad that reporter didn't live long enough to enjoy his stardom.”

I wished they'd let me bring my phone, I would have pulled it out and Googled the reporter's name. See if Cauchek was bluffing. I hadn't slept since Brady had told me about him reading all my books. I'd been too busy studying every article and interview I could find. I didn't remember seeing anything about Aaron Markson dying.

“You walked right into Agent Walters's trap.”

He rolled his eyes. “That was rather amateurish of me, I'm afraid. But to be called mentally ill in the press was an insult. I couldn't have my girls' families believing that some drooling ninny who heard voices took their daughters, their sisters, their nieces from them. I had to set the record straight.”

“Fuck the record,” I said with confidence I didn't feel. “You had to take credit for your work, the meticulousness of your crimes, the forethought that went into the planning and execution, the exactness of the cleanup, how you never left any physical evidence.”

Cauchek had no way of knowing the story had been a plant to draw him out.

“It was a spectacular sight. The entire task force: nine detectives, two undercover officers, another six plainclothes cops, Agent Walters, and three of her assistants were all waiting for me when I opened the glass doors of their precious police station.”

“Did you know that she predicted you'd arrive at the precinct between two and three
P.M.
, the time between getting off work and waiting for your kids to get off the bus?”

He lowered his eyes. An admission of defeat. Was he aware that Samantha Walters's uncanny ability to know things about criminals like him must have made it impossible for her to ever get a good night's sleep?

“Did you also know that when the surveillance team alerted the task force that your Dodge minivan, the exact vehicle Agent Walters had surmised the perp would drive, had pulled into the lot, a cheer erupted from within the station?”

“As soon as I stepped into the foyer and realized all the officers had their hands on their weapons, I knew I'd been beat.”

“What were you going to do there if they hadn't been waiting for you?”

He drummed his fingers on the metal table, slowly, rhythmically. “What was it like? Touching your dead sister? You did touch her, didn't you?”

There was no question in the tone. Was he guessing that I needed to feel my sister's skin one more time before we buried her, or had he been there? I had been alone in the morgue and could hear my mother crying outside the door when I'd finally convinced Dr. Bassett to let me in the room with her. Savannah's skin was perfect, like unspoiled cream.

“I wanted to crawl inside her and die.” I had to give him what he wanted. An overweight, sad novelist was no match for a sociopath.

He seemed satisfied. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out the one question I told myself not to ask. “Why?” There was no answer he could give that would make me understand how he could take seven lives and destroy so many others, but I asked it, anyway. “Why'd you do it?”