The Soul Hunter (34 page)

I’d let myself into the clinic against Helene’s orders once before. And I’d enjoyed a few unauthorized visits into the archived case files over the years. But snooping around uninvited in a colleague’s office—that was another matter entirely. I’d claim shooting rights if anyone did that to me. More than that, it was just the sort of activity that would not only enrage my review committee, but could get me and my milkmaid thighs hauled off to the Dean’s office quicker than you can say “mandatory suspension without pay.”

I suppose I should have called Jackson and McKnight and let them handle it. Or maybe Martinez. But honestly, the thought didn’t even occur to me. Sometimes my impatience blinds me to simple, commonsense realities. It’s another one of my Top Ten Terrible Traits. One I intended to start working on real soon. Right after I finished breaking into John Mulvaney’s office.

The clinic building was dark, locked up for the night. I let myself in with my key, turned off the alarm system, and then locked the door and reset the alarm behind me. Marci is (quite
appropriately) paranoid about people snooping through her desk, so she locks it up before she leaves at night and takes the only set of keys with her. Inside her desk, though, was the master key to the office. I had to get in there or I was a duck out of luck.

I looked through the stuff on her desk, eyeing the kitty-cat pencils and Garfield sticky notes, trying to remember what I’d seen in movies about jimmying locks. I tried a couple of paper clips first. That trick doesn’t work, just so you know. I tried a nail file. I thought about trying a bobby pin I found on the floor, like in that movie Misery, but of course, I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. The thought of touching, even vicariously, Marci’s nest of greasy grey hair was too much for me. I finally scored with a letter opener. It was just the right shape and size to slide into the keyhole, and with a gentle turn, achieved the click I was waiting for. The drawer slid open. I grabbed the key, shut the drawer and locked it, replaced the letter opener, and walked down the hall to John’s office.

I knocked first, just to be sure, and then let myself in, shutting and locking the door behind me. I closed the blinds. No need to announce my criminal and unethical behavior to the whole campus. The place was lit with a bluish light, just enough to permit a thorough snoop.

The light came from a few aquariums that had been fitted with fluorescents. I guess John was subjecting those poor rats to sleep deprivation experiments or something. Funny how I’d developed so much empathy for them.

I started with John’s desk, which revealed far more about the man than I could tolerate without a fresh bottle of Mylanta and some club soda. It took a few tries to crack his computer password, but eventually I remembered the Wisconsin sticker on his Honda (I’d forgotten he drove a Honda) and came up with Bucky Badger, the Wisconsin mascot, which opened John’s sick inner world right up to me.

The desktop image on John’s computer was my first clue. It was one of those dance photos they take at school events. The ones you wish your parents would just throw away. It’s photos like this that remind most of us we should never run for office or become movie stars, to hedge against the off chance they’ll surface in a magazine someday.

High school John was pimply and lumpy, his pale blue tux tight and his expression tighter. His pants were too short. His socks were white and his shoes were brown. Thick glasses sat askew on his stubby nose, and he held his date’s hand awkwardly, smiling at the camera as though he’d just been caught pilfering his mother’s panty drawer.

His date was equally homely, with a greasy brown Dorothy Hamill hairdo, a long yellow dress that looked like it had come from the costume room on the
Little House on the Prairie
set, and the same thick glasses. Her stiff, crooked smile revealed a mouthful of braces. They were a sad pair. And they both knew it.

The fact that this shy, pseudo-event remained significant to John after all these years seemed pitiful to me. It was probably his one date ever. And I was guessing he still looked at this photograph as the single thin shred of evidence of his citizenship in a club whose doors remained, all these years later, stubbornly closed to him.

John’s computer screen faces the window and is angled away from the door. I’d never noticed before, but now that I thought about it, John always managed to stand between the screen and whoever was in his office, making sure no one could see what was on there. As I wound my way through his Internet files, I found out why.

John’s computer was infested with pornography, mostly photographs and short film clips of women in humiliating sexual situations and men enjoying their misery. They weren’t violent images, per se, just angry

The images suggested to me a psychology of isolation, which I knew mirrored John’s psyche with disturbing accuracy.

We’d had an entire seminar about pornography in graduate school. It was one of the more noxious courses in the long, rather unpleasant crucible of my graduate education, to be sure, but it had served to desensitize me to images like this. Though I found them disgusting, I muscled myself into a clinical mindset, stuck them in a mental file with John Mulvaney’s name on it, and moved on.

The rest of his computer files were interesting for one reason and one reason only. They became chaotic and disorganized the Monday after Drew’s murder. Up until that moment, John had kept immaculate records. That made sense, given his straight-line, scientific approach to life. John could turn an afternoon walk down the campus into a dizzying maze of procedural events without even realizing he was doing it. In fact, he was completely incapable of experiencing anything else about the journey—trees, sky, familiar faces. That his rigid, linear behavior had decompensated entirely after Drew’s murder was telling, I thought.

I poked around some more, going through desk drawers systematically, top to bottom. I found nothing of note until I got to the bottom right-hand drawer. The locked one.

His keys were hidden in a cup full of pens on his desk. I fished them out and opened it up. It was like Halloween in there. Sugar Babies, Milk Duds, Three Musketeers, Hershey’s chocolate in every possible permutation, Starburst, Sweet Tarts, Skittles. The drawer was a cyclone of disarray. Opened bags of candy were stored on top of dozens of empty wrappers, as though he were saving trophies or something. Some of the wrappers looked like they’d been licked clean.

I thought back to the day I’d run into him at the mall. I realized now that he had been on a massive food binge. It’s a pattern my eating disordered patients are painfully familiar with. Usually it
begins with a triggering event of some kind, which leads to extreme emotional discomfort.

Whatever had triggered John that day, and whatever feelings had tripped him up, he’d apparently found them intolerable and had resorted to comforting himself with an absurd amount of food. He’d been working on a load of cookies, a milkshake, and a gargantuan soft drink when I saw him. And that might have been just the wind-up. I’ve known binge eaters who could pack in three times that amount in one sitting.

It’s an excruciating way to live, this secret life of self-immolation.

Standing there, sorting through the detritus of John’s sordid little world, I felt a surge of pity for him. And sadness. Plain, ordinary sadness. My sympathy didn’t, extend so far as to excuse what he’d done, of course, but now that I’d seen John in cross-section, the ugly middle actually humanized him for me. I could see the bars, so to speak, of the cage he’d been living in. Candy bars, certainly. And strip bars, I suspected. Both served to cushion the blow of his solitary, pathetic life.

I locked up his desk and put everything back the way I’d found it. I snuggled Eeyore the bunny on my way out. Then I locked the place up, put Marci’s key back in her desk, which I locked with the letter opener, and headed home. I called Detective McKnight on the way. He picked up immediately.

“Great news,” he said, before I got a chance to tell him mine.

“What?”

“Gordon Pryne confessed.”

“He what? That’s impossible!”

“Two hours ago. Broke down bawling and admitted everything.”

“That’s impossible,” I said again.

“Come again?”

“I don’t think he did it.”

“All due respect, Dr. Foster—”

“It’s impossible. It doesn’t fit. Pryne is a serial sexual offender, Detective. Why didn’t he rape her before he killed her? And why did he hide her body? He’s never that careful. Nothing about this crime fits Gordon Pryne’s personality.”

“Except the fact that he did it. Call me crazy, but that seems like a pretty good personality fit to me.”

I told him what I’d found out about John Mulvaney.

“You seriously want me to consider a guy with no record, no history of violence, a respectable job as a professional in the community, and a tie to the victim that is tenuous at best? On the basis of Internet porn and some messy files? When I have a suspect who just signed a confession? All due respect, Dr. Foster—”

“Pryne is innocent, Detective. I’m positive he didn’t do it.”

“Tell that to Gordon Pryne,” he said. “He seems to think he did.”

And he hung up.

G
ordon Pryne himself had shouted the clue at me, amidst ugly invectives and proclamations of innocence—all of which I’d roundly dismissed at the time.
Ask the rats
, he’d yelled.
Ask the rats.
I’d let the remark pass, of course, without seeing it for what it was. But the rats had taken me straight to John Mulvaney’s office. I knew I’d been led there. By whom, I wasn’t sure. Peter Terry, perhaps. I was certain now that he’d been in on this thing from the beginning.

I tossed in my bed most of the night, listening to the rats behind my walls, thinking about John Mulvaney. John’s legendary social ineptitude had doomed him to a life without human companionship. He’d settled instead for a spurious form of stimulation that involved the humiliation of women—not uncommon for social misfits like him, who tend to blame women for their own stunning inability to relate to the opposite sex. I’d seen hints of that the year before when John had gotten so angry at me for having no interest in him socially.

If John’s frustration were ever to escalate to the point of violence, I was certain it would be quick but gory, just as Drew’s murder had been. A single blow to kill quickly and avoid the fight. And multiple blows following, indicating panic, rage—all sorts of complicated, powerful emotions, which he would be unable or unwilling to contain once the dam had broken.

Even the ax made sense. John would have chosen a weapon like that. They’re common as dirt. If Helene owns one, just about everyone does, I was betting. Maybe he’d left the ax on my porch in a panic—not to implicate me, but get rid of it while drawing me into his drama. Or maybe to frighten me. The stalker note I’d received was a taunt, obviously. A jab to remind me he was out there. Watching.

It did dawn on me briefly that I could be jumping to a conclusion. Perhaps John had been connected to the murder, but had not actually committed it. It was possible he had witnessed it, I decided. But if so, why hadn’t he come forward? What motivation would he have to keep silent?

I got up, put on my bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and let Melissa out of her hutch. It was three thirty—time to get up anyway. I’d surely hear from Peter Terry soon, with all the activity going on. He loves this kind of stuff.

I paced the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea, pausing to stare at Drew’s photo on the refrigerator as I reached for a carton of milk.

“What’s the answer?” I said out loud.

She looked back at me silently, her eight-year-old self freckled and wan, with her shaggy hairdo and her crooked smile.

I dug through my notebooks until I found Brigid’s photo and stuck it on the refrigerator next to Drew’s. The daughter was an unblemished, more confident version of the mother, a version of woman that I suspected Brigid had never been and could never hope to be. Perhaps Drew’s anger, rooted in that free-spirited third-grader, had saved her, ultimately, from the strange, half-truth fate Brigid seemed to have found, lying to herself and anyone who would pay her to tell them what they wanted to hear. Drew had a hard life, but she had lived it on her terms. Defiant until the end. Small consolation.

I shut the refrigerator and squinted at the photos. The water
began to boil on the other side of the kitchen. I tuned out the whistle of the kettle and focused on the pictures.

Drew’s eyes were green, her hair a messy black fringe of neglect over eyes that seemed somehow aware of her destiny. She was the lost girl, collar askew, hating every moment of being photographed. Submitting to it out of…what? Not fear, certainly Condescension, perhaps. Had she known that there was no winning? Had the odds, stacked so ominously against her, somehow impressed her, even in that tender, ignorant moment before it all came slamming down around her feet?

Melissa scratched at my ankle urgently, as if to nudge me toward the stove to quiet the kettle, which was screaming now for attention.