Serial (20 page)

She seemed to have a lot of those.

Hogart, 2005

As the days passed, the weight of Beth’s guilt became heavier. Wayne Westerley had told her where Salas was living, in a rundown trailer park fifty miles up the highway, near Lorenton. He wasn’t working, as far as Westerley knew.

So what was Salas doing? That’s what Beth wondered. Was he simply lying around hating her, blaming her, having good reason to think she’d ruined his life?

That was what Beth couldn’t stand, not knowing what Salas thought of this entire tragedy. Of the mistake—if he thought it
was
a mistake—that had cost him his reputation and some of his best years.

As she sat on her porch, in a wooden rocking chair Westerley had bought for her at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, Beth’s mind would dart like a trapped insect in a bottle with a cork, where there was no way out, but there was nothing to do but keep trying.

As she sat rocking, gripping the chair’s armrests so tightly her fingers whitened, she heard Sheriff Westerley’s big SUV turn into the drive. She recognized the sound of its powerful engine and the underlying whine when it switched gears to negotiate the rutted drive beyond the copse of maple trees.

It was sundown, and she was expecting him this evening. She sat quietly, rocking gently back and forth in her chair.

Westerley flashed her a smile from behind the steering wheel and then parked the big vehicle where he usually did, near the back of the house where it wasn’t visible from the road.

She heard the SUV’s door slam shut, then Westerley’s boots crunching on gravel.

Beth smiled as he stepped up onto the porch. He came over and leaned down, and she scrunched up her toes to stop the rocker momentarily while he leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“What were you thinking?” he asked, as she let up with her feet and the rocker resumed its slow rhythm.

“You don’t wanna know, Wayne.”

“Guess not,” he said, looking more closely at her.

She looked toward the orange ball of the sun dropping ever so gradually toward a distant line of pines.

“Eddie around?” Westerley asked.

“I thought I told you the other day, he’s visiting his great aunt in St. Louis.”

“You did tell me,” Westerley said.

He entered the house and came out a few minutes later with a beer can in his hand, letting the screen door slam behind him. “Sip?”

“No, thanks.” She rocked. The chair’s runners made a soft creaking sound on the porch planks.

“You don’t have to worry about Salas,” Westerley said. “I got that straight with him the day after he was released. He won’t harm you, Beth.”

“Did he say he forgave me?”

“I can’t tell you that. He wouldn’t discuss his feelings toward you. I think he’s so busy hating the state of Missouri, he’s got no room to hate anything else. He thinks they owe him.”

“I think so, too.”

“Well, that’s not for us to decide, except maybe on election days.”

She rocked silently for a while.

“Still and all,” Westerley said, “with Eddie away and you alone here, I get uneasy.”

“I’m fine here,” Beth said. Why tell him about the nightmares she lived in as an alternate world, and the guilt that lay on her like one of those lead aprons that dentists use to x-ray?

“Sun’s almost down,” Westerley said. “We should drive up the highway and get us something to eat.”

“Then come back here?”

“That was my thinking.” He smiled at her. “Yours, too?”

“No need to drive anyplace. I thawed out some steaks,” she said. “I can make a salad while you’re cooking them on the grill out back.”

“Yours is the best plan,” Westerley said.

He moved close to her again, leaned over her, and kissed her once more in the dying light.

When Beth woke the next morning to a jay raising a ruckus outside her bedroom window, Westerley was already gone. The edges of the shades were illuminated by the brightness of the day. She couldn’t remember dreaming, but she must have. Her palms were red and sore where she’d dug her fingernails into them.

What she did remember vividly was last night before she’d slept. She absently reached over to where Westerley had lain and her fingertips explored cool linen.

If only her life had begun last night, instead of—

Just like that, her memories of Westerley’s touch, his warm breath in her ear, everything… dissipated. Her mood immediately darkened.

Salas. She seemed unable to go fifteen consecutive minutes without thinking about Vincent Salas, and what she had done to him. Nothing—not even Westerley—could change that. She wore the past like chains, and she couldn’t find a way to break free.

She felt her face stiffen and begin to contort. Unexpected and uncontrollable weeping threatened. It never lasted more than a minute or two, but it was becoming more frequent. She drew and held a deep breath, keeping it inside her until she felt her sanity return. The impulse to weep receded. She knew she had to do something about this. It might occur in public. She couldn’t let that happen.

Face your fears
.

That’s what she’d been told by the state-assigned psychologist who’d been so much help to her after Salas had—after the rape.

That’s what Beth decided to do this morning, face her fears and her regrets, in the person of Vincent Salas. She and Salas both knew that nothing could heal the damage done because of Beth’s mistaken allegation; the only course left was for Beth to let him know how terrible she felt about what had happened—no, what she’d done. It hadn’t simply
happened
like a brief summer shower. She would apologize to him. It was the least she could do for him. Even if he refused to accept her apology, maybe she’d feel less of a weight on her during her days, and during her nights when sleep wouldn’t come.

So am I doing this for me?

Maybe. Or maybe for both of us. It might help to put what happened behind us.

She took a quick shower, dressed hurriedly, and brushed her hair. It seemed that more individual hairs than usual were caught in the brush’s bristles. Were fear and remorse causing her to lose her hair? She’d seen that happen before, to an abused woman who used to own the beauty salon in Hogart.

Though she wasn’t hungry, she forced down a hasty breakfast of toast and coffee. Before leaving the house, she took a long look at herself in the mirror. The woman staring back at her appeared haggard and older than Beth remembered, as if she were being consumed from the inside. In a way that was happening. Guilt like acid was eating her alive.

Well, it was time to act. To do
something
.

She locked the front door behind her and then left the porch and walked around to the garage. Its wide wooden doors opened to the side, and as she swung the second one on its rusty hinges something buzzed past close to her ear, making her flinch. Hornets had built a nest in the garage, just as guilt had claimed a home in her mind.

When Roy had left he’d taken their late-model Ford pickup truck. Beth was left with the old Plymouth. She still drove it, even though there were over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. The old car had some rattles, but it still looked okay, and except for a persistent squealing sound coming from inside the dashboard—Westerley had told her not to worry, it was probably a fan motor with a loose bearing—it ran well.

Beth pulled the garage door all the way open, got in the car, and was relieved but not surprised when it started right up. She let it idle motionless for a few minutes and then backed it out of the garage. Though the morning was clear, you never knew about the weather this time of year. Clouds and rain could develop quickly. She got out of the car and closed the garage doors so water wouldn’t run in if a sudden shower did blow through while she was gone.

On the road she felt better. It wasn’t going to rain. The morning was going to remain glorious. And she and Vincent Salas would have a civilized conversation and come to an understanding.

Once she turned onto the Interstate, she reached Lorenton in less than an hour. It was already almost ten o’clock, so Salas should be awake. Westerley had mentioned where Salas lived in the trailer court—third trailer on the left after you go though the entrance, gray with blue trim.
Pile of crap
, Westerley had called the trailer. Which was about what you could afford, Beth thought, if you recently got out of prison. She wondered if Salas had a job. If not, maybe she could help. She could offer her help, anyway.

There was a lot of making up to do. A lot to talk about.

As the Honda sailed smoothly over the blacktop highway, Beth’s thoughts wandered. She created a conversation in her mind, thinking on ways to steer their talk in the right directions.

In a sad kind of way, she and Salas needed each other. He could use her help to find a way up in the world, and she could use his forgiveness.

He shouldn’t mind that kind of trade.

After she made the turnoff to Lorenton, Beth had no trouble finding the trailer court. Oak Tree Estates, it was called. Which sounded pretty ritzy.

But it wasn’t ritzy. And Beth saw only a few big pin oaks. Most of the other trees were scraggly-looking maples. The gate Beth drove through wasn’t an actual gate but a rusty iron archway with broken curlicues and some weedy-looking vines growing halfway up each leg.

There was the trailer, dirty gray with faded blue trim. It had wooden latticework concealing the wheels and tires. The same kind of vine that was growing up the entrance arch was laced into the lattice. Two wooden steps led up to a screen door. The trailer’s windows were all tinted, or blocked with shades or drapes. It looked deserted.

Beth got out of the car and walked over hard dusty earth to the steps. There was a clutter of cigarette butts on the ground near the bottom step, as if someone habitually sat there and smoked. She felt the lump of guilt in her gut suddenly turn to fear. Was she out of her mind coming here? This man had every reason to hate her, to harm her.

She might have turned around and gotten back in the car, but a woman’s voice said, “He’s in there.”

Beth turned and saw a heavyset woman with scraggly gray hair walking toward her. She was moving slowly, as if her feet hurt, carrying an ovular blue metal roaster without a lid out in front of her with both hands.

The woman stopped about twenty feet away and stood as if balancing the roaster so liquid inside wouldn’t spill out. Behind her was the trailer she must have emerged from. Its screen door was hanging open. It had a tattered green awning over the door, and smaller, newer-looking awnings over two of its windows. A rusty tricycle lay on its side near the steps.

“Go ahead an’ knock,” the woman urged Beth. “He’s in there. I heard him come home last night. Couldn’t help but hear.” She shuffled carefully to the side about ten feet and tossed a grayish liquid from the roaster into the weeds. “He’s in there,” she said again, over her shoulder, giving Beth a show of yellowed, jagged teeth. She looked Beth up and down. “He could prob’ly use some company.” The woman headed back toward her trailer, holding the metal roaster in one hand now, letting it dangle at her side.

Determined not to let herself be scared away, Beth climbed up on the first step leading to Salas’s trailer door and pushed a buzzer that almost certainly didn’t work. She knocked three times on the metal frame of the screen door.

There was a faint noise from inside the trailer. Then the door on the other side of the screen door opened inward, and there Salas stood, staring down at her.

He was only a vague shape behind the dark screen, not as big a man as she remembered, but still large. He seemed to have put on weight in the right places while in prison. If he hadn’t been wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, he would have been almost invisible in the dimness behind the screen.

“So what do you want?” he asked, in a hoarse voice that suggested Beth had awakened him.

She fought to find words for the ominous dark form towering over her, gazing down at her with a stillness that suggested great calm and a kind of superiority.
She
was the one who had lied.
She
was the one who had caused all the damage. Even her husband Roy had told her that before leaving her.

Salas made no move to open the door and invite her inside, or to step outside and talk with her. This wasn’t going at all as Beth had planned.

“I’m…” she managed to say.

“I know who you are.”

“I thought we should talk.”

He was silent for several seconds, then: “So talk.”

“I came here to assure you—” Beth said.
God! Did that even make sense?

The shadowy form behind the screen said nothing.

Beth forged ahead. It was why she’d come all this way. “When I identified you in that police lineup, and in court, I would have sworn I was pointing at the right man.”

“You did swear.”

“I don’t know how I could have made such a mistake. And…” She gulped air. “…I sincerely apologize.”

He said nothing. Didn’t move.

“I-I’m genuinely sorry,” Beth said. “I know it can’t mean much to you now, considering what happened, but I just wanted you to know—”

He closed the trailer door and she was standing alone on his bottom step, staring up at the screen with a blank surface behind it.

She stood that way for more than a minute, arms at her sides, head inclined, as if gazing up in search of a god that had forsaken her.

When she backed down off the step, she stumbled and almost fell on the hard baked earth.

Beth barely remembered the drive back to Hogart and home. It seemed that suddenly there she was, in front of her garage with the car’s engine idling.

She realized she was crying.

She knew that nothing had changed, but that everything must.

After parking in the garage and slamming the car’s door behind her, she had to run from the hornets.

New York, the present

The Skinner sat hunched over his chocolate latte at an outside table at Starbucks and stared at the
City Beat
he’d plucked from a neutered vending machine a block away. The giveaway paper was lying on top of several newspapers the Skinner had bought that morning. The headline infuriated him.

What on earth…?

He read on, oblivious to the people streaming past nearby on the sidewalk, the rumble and exhaust fumes of traffic, and the morning sun beginning to shine brighter and hotter on the round metal table. His attention was rapt.

Anonymous sources … Unnamed authorities …removed his victim’s tongues for the purpose of cooking and
consuming…

He felt sick. He pushed his latte across the table and rested his elbows on the warm iron. How could they possibly believe
that
? What right did they have to jump to such a conclusion? To lie about him?

Cannibalism! The sick bastards!

Quinn! This has to be Quinn’s doing. He
knows
it isn’t true. There’s no reason even to imagine such a thing.

It’s so goddamned unfair!

Quinn. He’d somehow gotten the story planted. And this was exactly the kind of reaction he wanted. The idea was to get under his skin.
Under the Skinner’s skin.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not in the way Quinn expected. Not with the desired result.

He was calmer now that he had an understanding, or at least a hypothesis, as to what such a breathtakingly absurd accusation was about. And it was in some ways an effective stratagem. What could he do about it? Sue for defamation of character.
No, Your Honor, I did not consume the tongues of those women!
Would the court break out in laughter or in violence?

He felt himself smile. Good. He had a handle on this now.

This was a demeaning and devious move by Quinn, its aim no doubt to infuriate him and make him careless. But it wouldn’t work. Let the papers print what they wanted. Let the bubble heads on televised news babble. The Skinner knew the truth. Quinn knew the truth. The two of them were locked in a deadly game, and the game board was the city.

So far, the Skinner was way ahead.

He intended to stay ahead.

Now that he had something of a grip on what had happened, he was breathing less raggedly. His rage had turned cold.

So had his latte.

He carried the mug inside and told the acne-scarred kid behind the counter that the latte had been cool when he’d given it to him. The kid listened to his voice, took a look at his face, and promptly made a fresh latte, very hot.

The Skinner returned with it to his table and sat and read newspapers for a while longer. The
Times
and
Post,
the
Daily News,
the
real
newspapers, hadn’t yet picked up on the cannibalism angle. But the Skinner knew they would. It would be irresistible. Then it would be on televised news (if it wasn’t already), and people would be talking about it. Tongues would wag.

The Skinner laughed out loud at his unintentional play on words.

Laughter! Is that what you expected, Quinn?

“Is this true?” Jerry Lido asked Quinn.

They were in the office. The air conditioner hadn’t caught up with the heat. Vitali and Mishkin had just left to interview two more of the thirty-two prospective killers. Quinn was behind his desk. Lido had just come in. He looked neat this morning—for Jerry Lido. He had on a navy blazer, white shirt, and a red, blue, and gray diagonally striped tie that made him appear to have attended some kind of posh British school. Even his pants were pressed.

“That thing about the tongues and the Skinner,” Lido persisted. “Cannibalism. I saw it on TV news.”

Already?
“It might be true,” Quinn said.

“We don’t deal in mights, do we?”

“We try not to.”

“So?”

Quinn gave him a look. “There you are.”

Lido understood. “Hush-hush,” he said, winking. “Shouldn’t have asked.”

“Never hurts to ask,” Quinn said.

“I believed that before I got married.”

“Yeah. Well…”

Lido moved over and sat on the edge of Pearl’s desk. He’d become more and more at home in his position as part of the investigative team. “What about you and Pearl?”

“In what way?” Quinn asked.

“Ever think about marriage?”

“Pearl’s not hot on the idea.”

“How about you?”

Quinn winked as Lido had. “It’s hush-hush.”

“Ah.” Lido glanced around him, as if suddenly surprised to find himself where he was. Quinn knew the look. He knew the sensation, for that matter.

“You had breakfast, Quinn?”

“Sure have.”

“Then it’s not too early to pop around the corner and have a drink.”

“Ten o’clock, Jerry.”

“In
this
time zone.”

Quinn thought about it. Pearl would arrive soon. It might be a good idea if they were gone when she breezed in. That is, if they were going to ignore time zones.

Pearl would disapprove of morning cocktails at ten. She still didn’t like what Quinn was doing with Jerry Lido.
To
Jerry Lido. She had a point, Quinn knew, but not a good enough one. Women had died. More were almost certainly going to die. They wouldn’t be pleasant deaths. Quinn and his team were supposed to stop them from occurring.

Simple as that.

“Why not?” he said. “A drink wouldn’t hurt us.”

“Or two.”

Quinn left a note for Pearl saying they’d be back soon. He didn’t mention where they’d gone.

Fedderman sneaked up and surprised Penny in Biographies. She seemed pleased to see him. She was wearing a mauve summer dress today that clung to her figure, white pumps with low heels, a thin silver necklace. Fedderman was wearing the suit.

Penny smelled like cinnamon and old books and perfumed shampoo. Fedderman drew a deep breath of that potpourri and committed it to memory.

He kissed her on her forehead. Her flesh was damp with perspiration though it wasn’t all that warm in the library. “I thought the research room was your department.”

“I’m versatile,” Penny said. “We librarians have to be, in the face of technology run rampant.”

“Complaining again?”

“I shouldn’t. I’m employed.” She lightly touched the back of his hand. “And I’ve got a lot to live for. I think we both do.”

“Which is why I came to see you,” Fedderman said.

“Oh?” She looked at him curiously, waiting.

“That’s it,” Fedderman said. “It’s why I’m here.”

Penny laughed. “Well, it seems to me you should have arrived at work a few hours ago.”

“Our hours are flexible.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “I’m flexible, too.”

Penny shook her head. “I keep seeing new sides of you, Feds. Sides I like. That doesn’t mean I like your jokes.” She glanced up and down the aisle and picked up a book from a cart and slid it into its assigned space on a shelf, between Truffaut and Truman. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but is our relationship diverting too much of your attention away from the investigation?”

“The Skinner? I think you’re more important, Penny.”

“I don’t.”

That brought him up short.

“Remember he murdered my sister, Feds.”

Fedderman felt a rush of shame. Of course she was right. So elated was he over their affair that he’d forgotten it had come at the expense of Nora Noon’s life.

“You’re right, Pen. Damn! I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be. It’s just that while I care about you, I don’t want to distract you from your work. Especially since it involves stopping the animal that killed Nora.”

“Do you think about it a lot?” Fedderman asked.

“Only every other minute. And I don’t like knowing the killer is out there walking around free, maybe stalking some other woman. Maybe even me.”

Fedderman gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You can’t believe that, Pen.”

“Why not? He killed my sister.”

“We understand serial killers. They murder compulsively. Their urges are triggered in ways they themselves don’t understand. It would be highly unusual for a serial killer to claim two siblings in two separate murders.”

“You said he acted out of compulsion. If he saw something in Nora that triggered him to kill, maybe he’d see the same thing in me.”

“Pen, tell me you don’t stay awake nights worrying about that.”

“Sometimes I do worry,” Penny said. “I know it might sound crazy….”

He bent over and let his lips brush hers. “No, it doesn’t sound crazy. Only human. Notions like that can get a grip on you. But believe me, Pen, it isn’t likely.”

But Fedderman had to admit she had a point. It was something he’d never considered. He understood how, in her position, grieving for a dead sister, she might consider it.

“It only seems possible late at night, in the dark,” she said.

“Like a lot of things,” Fedderman said, thinking about his own nighttime world between wakefulness and sleep, the violence he’d seen, the blood and the faces of the dead. They came unbidden to him more and more often as the years passed.

Penny gave him a smile that looked as if it wanted to fly from her face. “I don’t want you worrying about me.”

“In a strange kind of way, I want to worry about you.”

She sighed. “Yes, that’s how it works. And I want to worry about you. Love and worry are close companions.”

He tried to kiss her again, but she turned away, grinning.

“I think it’s time for you to go to work, Feds.”

“Do you insist?”

“Common sense insists.”

“That’s been getting in the way all my life.” He looked into her eyes. “I don’t want you walking around scared.”

“I’m not. I’m walking around trying to stay employed.”

He nodded, glad she was joking about it now.

Someone had entered the aisle down near the opposite end of the library, so they didn’t kiss good-bye, merely touched hands.

As Fedderman walked past the front desk toward the exit, Ms. Culver gave him a disapproving look over the rims of her glasses, as she always did on his arrival or departure. He wondered if she meant it. If Ms. Culver really felt that way about him. It kind of bothered Fedderman to have somebody like that so strongly disapprove of him when they’d only recently met.

It suggested that she knew more about him than he did.