Thr3e (30 page)
But this didn’t feel like a soft spot. She actually found him appealing, with his ragged hair and his charming smile. And those eyes. That wasn’t empathy, was it?
She closed her eyes and swallowed.
God forbid, Jennifer. And when was the last time you dated a man, anyway? Two years ago? That hillbilly from Arkansas who came from good stock, so says Mom?
She’d never known the full meaning of boring until then. She would prefer a man with a goatee who rode a Harley and winked frequently.
Jennifer opened her eyes. Kevin was seated on the concrete, cross-legged, head in his hands. The man never ceased to surprise her.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure where all that came from,” she said.
He lifted his head, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “Please, don’t be sorry. That was the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.” His eyes fluttered open, as if he’d just heard himself. “Maybe
nicest
is the wrong word choice. It was . . . I think you’re right. He’s trying to pull me back, isn’t he? That’s his objective. So who is he? Balinda?”
Jennifer sat down beside him and folded her legs to the side. Her skirt wasn’t exactly dress of choice for concrete sitting, but she didn’t care.
“I need to tell you something, Kevin. But I don’t want it to upset you.”
He stared ahead and then turned to her. “You went to the house, didn’t you?”
“Yes. This morning. It took a few threats to convince Balinda to let me in, but I saw the place and I met Eugene and Bob.”
Kevin lowered his head again.
“I know it’s hard, but I need to know what happened in that house, Kevin. For all we know, Slater could be someone Balinda hired. That would fit the profile. She wants to change you. But without knowing the whole story, I’m floundering here.”
“You’re asking me to tell you something no one knows. Not because it’s so horrible—I know I’m not the only one who’s had a few challenges along the way. But it’s dead and buried. You want me to bring it back to life? Isn’t that what Slater’s trying to do?”
“I’m not Slater. And frankly, it doesn’t sound dead and buried to me.”
“And you really think this whole game has to do with my past?”
She nodded. “I’m assuming that Slater has an objective that is tied to your past, yes.”
Kevin remained quiet. The silence stretched, and Jennifer sat beside him feeling his tension, hearing his breathing. She wondered if it would be appropriate to put a hand on his arm but immediately decided it wouldn’t.
He suddenly groaned and rocked. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You can’t slay the dragon without luring it out of its hole. I want to help you, Kevin. I need to know.”
For a long time he just sat there rocking. Then he stilled and his breathing slowed. Maybe it was too much too fast. He’d faced more than most could stomach these last three days and she was pushing him even further. He needed sleep. But she was running out of time. Slater was escalating.
She was about to suggest that they get some rest and consider it in the morning when he turned his face to the night sky.
“I don’t think Balinda’s intentions were necessarily evil.” He spoke in a soft monotone. “She wanted a good playmate for Bob. He was eight when they adopted me; I was one. But Bob was retarded. I wasn’t, and Balinda couldn’t accept that reality.”
He paused and took several deep breaths. Jennifer shifted and leaned on her arm so that she could watch his face. His eyes were closed.
“Tell me about Balinda.”
“I don’t know her story, but Balinda creates her own reality. We all do, but Balinda only knows absolutes. She decides what part of the world is real and what part isn’t. If something isn’t real, she makes it go away. She manipulates everything around her to create an acceptable reality.”
He stopped. Jennifer waited a full thirty seconds before prodding him. “Tell me what it was like to be her son.”
“I don’t know it yet, because I’m too young, but my mom doesn’t want me to be smarter than my brother. So she decides to make me retarded too because she’s already tried to make Bob smarter but she can’t.”
Another stall. He was switching tenses, dipping into the past. Jennifer felt her stomach turn.
“How does she do that? Does she hurt you?”
“No. Hurting is evil in Balinda’s world. She won’t let me out of the house because the world outside isn’t real. The only real world is the one she makes inside the house. She is the princess. She needs me to read so that she can shape my mind with what she makes me read, but she cuts up stories and makes me read only things she decides are real. I’m nine years old before I know there are animals called cats because Princess thinks cats are evil. I don’t even know there is evil until I’m eleven. There’s only real and unreal. Everything real is good and everything good comes from Princess. I don’t do anything bad; I only do things that aren’t real. She makes the things that aren’t real go away by starving me of them. She never punishes me; she only helps me.”
“When you do something that’s not real, how does she punish you?”
He hesitated. “She locks me in my room to learn about the real world or makes me sleep so I’ll forget the unreal world. She takes away food and water. That’s how animals learn, she says, and we are the best animals. I can remember the first time because it made me confused. I was four. My brother and I are playing servant, folding dishtowels for Princess. We have to fold them over and over until they’re perfect. Sometimes it takes all day. We don’t have toys because toys aren’t real. Bob asks me what one plus one is because he wants to give me two towels, but he doesn’t know what to call it. I tell him that I think one plus one is two and Princess overhears me. She locks me in my room for two days. Two towels, two days. If Bob doesn’t know how to add, then I can’t either, because it isn’t real. She wants me to be dumb like Bob.”
An image of Balinda seated under a stack of clipped newspapers filled Jennifer’s mind and she shivered.
Kevin sighed and changed tenses again. “She never held me. She hardly even touched me unless it was by mistake. Sometimes I went without food for days. Once a whole week. Sometimes we couldn’t wear clothes if we did unreal things. She deprived us both of anything she thought might feed our minds. Mostly me, because Bob was retarded and he didn’t do as many things that weren’t real. No school. No games. Sometimes no talking for days. Sometimes she made me stay in bed all day. Other times she made me sit in the bathtub in cold water so I couldn’t sleep all night. I could never ask her why, because that wasn’t real. Princess was real, and if she decided to do something, anything else was unreal and couldn’t be talked about. So we couldn’t ask questions. Even questions about real things, because that would question their reality, which was unreal.”
Jennifer filled in the blanks. The abuse wasn’t primarily physical, not necessarily even emotional, although there was some of both of those. It was primarily psychological. She watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall. She desperately wanted to reach out to him. She could see the boy, sitting alone in a bathtub of cold water, shivering in the dark, wondering how to make sense of his horrible world that he’d been brainwashed to think was good.
She fought back tears.
Kevin, dear Kevin, I’m so sorry!
She reached out her hand and put it on his arm. Who could do such terrible things to a little boy? There was more, details, stories that could undoubtedly fill a book to be studied by universities across the country. But she didn’t want to hear more. If she could only make it all go away. She might be able to stop Slater, but Kevin would live with this past until the day he died.
A brief absurd image of her lying down beside him and holding him gently in her arms ran through her mind.
Kevin suddenly groaned and then chuckled. “She’s a twisted, demented lunatic.”
Jennifer cleared her throat. “Agreed.”
“But you know what?”
“What?”
“Telling you about it makes me feel . . . good. I’ve never told anyone.”
“Not even Samantha?”
“No.”
“Sometimes talking about abuse helps us deal with it. Our tendency is to hide it, and that’s understandable. I’m glad you’re telling me. None of it was your fault, Kevin. It’s not your sin.”
He pushed himself up. His eyes were clearer. “You’re right. That old goat did everything in her power to hold me back.”
“When did you first realize that Balinda’s world wasn’t the only one?”
“When I met Samantha. She came to my window one night and helped me sneak out. But I was trapped, you know. I mean mentally. For a long time I couldn’t accept that Balinda was anything but a loving princess. When Samantha left to study law, she begged me to go with her. Or at least somewhere away from Balinda, but I couldn’t leave. I was twenty-three before I finally worked up the courage to leave. Balinda went ballistic.”
“And you’ve done all this in five years?”
He nodded and grinned softly. “Turns out that I was fairly intelligent. It only took me a year to get my general education papers, and four years to graduate from college.”
It occurred to Jennifer that she was treating him like a patient with these short, probing questions, but he seemed to want it now.
“Which is when you decided to become a minister,” she said.
“That’s a long story. I suppose because of my strange rearing the subject of good and evil held unusual fascination for me. Naturally I gravitated toward the church. Morality became somewhat of an obsession, I guess. I figured the least I could do was spend my life showing some small corner of the real world the way to true goodness.”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to the false reality we all create for ourselves. Mine was extreme, but it didn’t take me long to see that most people live in their own worlds of delusion. Not so different from Balinda’s, really.”
“Observant.” She smiled. “Sometimes I wonder what my delusions are. Is your faith personal?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. The church is a system, a vehicle for me. I wouldn’t say that I know God personally, no. But my faith in a God is real enough. Without an absolute, moral God, there can be no true morality. It’s the most obvious argument for the existence of God.”
“I grew up Catholic,” she said. “Went through all the forms, never did quite understand it all.”
“Well, don’t tell Father Bill Strong, but I can’t say I do either.”
Sitting next to him now, just a few minutes since his confession, Jennifer had difficulty placing Kevin in the context of his youth. He seemed so normal.
He shook his head. “This is incredible. I still can’t believe I just told you all that.”
“You just needed the right person,” she said.
The sound of feet running on the pavement sounded behind them. Jennifer twisted around. It was Galager.
“Jennifer!”
She stood and brushed her skirt.
“We have another riddle!” Galager said. He held a sheet of notebook paper in his hand. “Mickales just found this on the windshield of Kevin’s car. It’s Slater.”
“My car?” Kevin jumped to his feet.
Jennifer took the note. Yellow pad. The scrawling was black, familiar. The milk jug from Kevin’s refrigerator. She read the note quickly.
3+3 = 6.
Four down, two to go. You know how I like threes, Kevin. Time’s running out. Shame, shame, shame. A simple confession would do, but you force my hand.
Who escapes their prison but is captive still?
I’ll give you a hint: It isn’t you.
6 A.M.
Kevin gripped his hair and turned away.
“Okay,” Jennifer said, turning for the street. “Let’s get moving.”
S
AMANTHA WAS TIRED. The Pakistani had insisted they meet at a Mexican restaurant five miles out of town. The light was too low, the music was too loud, and the place smelled of stale cigarettes. She stared the witness directly in the eye. Chris had sworn that Salman would cooperate and he had. But what he had to say wasn’t exactly what Sam wanted to hear.
“How do you know it was a dagger if you never saw it?”
“He told me it was. I have the tattoo on my back, and he said he had one like it on his forehead.”
“Did you see any scarring or discoloration that might indicate he had the tattoo removed?”
“Perhaps. He wore his hair over his forehead. Didn’t matter—he said he had it removed and I believed him.”
They’d been over all of this at least once; he’d already described the tattooed man with remarkable detail. Salman was a tailor. Tailors notice these things, he said.
“And this was while you were in New York, four months ago. And you saw him five or six times at a bar named Cougars over the course of about a month?”
“That is what I have said. Yes. You may check with the bar owner; he may remember the man as well.”
“So according to you, this man who had a dagger tattoo and who called himself Slater was in New York while the Riddle Killer was killing victims in Sacramento.”
“Yes, definitely. I remember watching the news while I was in New York the very night after I had talked to Slater.”
Salman had spilled enough details in the previous hour to make his testimony credible. Sam had been in New York four months ago. She knew the pub Salman referred to, a low-class joint frequented by your typical mix of unsavory characters. A CIA task force had set up a sting at the joint to flush out an Iranian whom they suspected had ties to a bombing in Egypt. The man had exonerated himself.
“Okay.” She turned to Steve Jules, the agent who’d accompanied her from the Houston office. “I’m done. Thank you for your time, Mr. Salman. It was invaluable.”
“Perhaps I could make you a suit,” he said with a grin. “I have a new shop here. There aren’t so many tailors in Houston as in New York.”
She smiled. “Maybe next time I’m in Houston to escape the heat.”
They left the bar in Steve’s car. This wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. In fact, it was downright dreadful. What if she was right about the rest of it?
Dear God, dear God.
She wanted only one thing now: to be with Kevin. Kevin needed her more now than ever. The despondent look on his face as she sped off to the airport haunted her.