Turtle Island (11 page)

‘And by now Detective Montoya... you will be looking for
Stephen England, or maybe even...someone else...’

At first nobody saw the photographs that were carefully placed
behind Max Dalton, it was only on the third viewing that Agent
O’Neil noticed them, the camera briefly but purposefully focused on
them for no more than a second before the tape ended. The
unmistakable images of Jo-Lynn Montoya and Ray. Photographs taken
of Jo-Lynn kissing Ray goodbye in the morning, as his nanny was
about to take him to school. The images were sharp, though taken
with a telephoto lens, probably from a car parked nearby. The
screen finally went blank, fading to black. Georgina let the tape
run as her mind tried to absorb the information. As she leaned
forward to turn the cassette off another piece of the puzzle
revealed itself.

The killer’s voice rasped. ‘Tell Detective Montoya, I’m
changing the rules of the game.’

‘You know, I feel very, very wicked.’ Karen Fuller smiled. She
leaned across the car seat and kissed Charles Fleisher slowly,
passionately on the lips. Her tongue parted his lips and entered
his mouth, probing searching, tasting, licking. Charles responded
equally passionately, sucking, biting, savouring. They had parked
outside one of the properties that Charles was letting and knew to
be unoccupied but lavishly furnished.

Karen pulled at the front of her loose fitting dress, exposing
her delicately small but pert, tanned breasts. ‘It gets so hot,
sometimes it’s hard to breathe. Don’t you think?’ Her southern
drawl tried to excuse her actions on the weather but Charles knew
better. ‘This does not look like the home of a real estate agent.
Are you going to seduce me, Mr Fleisher?’ Karen kissed Charles
again, this time she let her hand fall on to Charles groin, where
she felt his already hardened penis.

‘No, I’m going to fuck you, Miss Fuller.’

‘Why Mr Fleisher, what would Harley say?’

Charles knew the answer to that, but somehow thought that the
teacher wouldn’t understand about his relationship with his
daughter, instead he put his hand on her breast and whispered ‘I
want to fuck you.’ He said it with such passion that it didn’t even
sound crude; to Karen’s ears it somehow sounded romantic, and it
was just what she wanted to hear. Charles put his hand into his
jacket pocket and withdrew a set of keys.

‘Charles, I’m going to give you a night to remember.’ Karen
flicked her head back just as the main beam of a passing car
exposed her cool beauty.

On the journey back to the motel Georgina thought over the
developments of the day. She was tired and her head was beginning
to pound. The bright lights from the oncoming traffic did nothing
to soothe her pain and she was regretting not taking a couple of
Advil tablets to ease the sharpness of the constant ache when she
had the opportunity. She tried to think of brighter things, maybe
she would phone her father when she got in and question him about
the case, or take that bath like she had promised herself. As
tomorrow was Saturday and one of the few foreseeable days where
they might be able to sneak a little free time, Rick had invited
her to his house for a barbeque.

‘Jo-Lynn wants to meet you, accept a little southern
hospitality. It’s more of a barbeque actually, I hope you eat
meat?’

She gratefully accepted, the prospect of another fast food
meal and her stomach would surely rebel? With the afternoon off it
would be a great opportunity to get to know the other side of the
detectives, the private world of real people. Rick invited Leroy
and Lia too. Georgina looked at the illuminated clock on the
dashboard. 10-58pm. She briefly envied the girls in the typing pool
with their 'nine to fives', briefly. Her job infringed on many
aspects of her life, too many, the social part being the greatest
intrusion. It was three months since she had been on any sort of a
date, she could not remember the last time that she had made love
to anyone but herself. She kept telling herself the sacrifice was
worth it; that it would pay off with promotion. She laughed to
herself in the car, wondering who she was trying to fool. Younger,
less experienced men gained promotion above her; she stared at the
soles of their shoes through the glass ceiling. If she complained
she knew that was be a one way ticket to obscurity, relocation to
some god-awful field office. Georgina knew the options, tough it
out and be so much better than the rest so that they had no option
to ignore her, or loose ambition and stay in the field, eating
shit, taking shit and having shit fired at her from every
angle.

The motel came within sight, its garish neon illumination
buzzing quietly, proudly, to the world, praising its very
existence. Insects battered off the windscreen in a kamikaze duel,
harbingers of another muggy night. For another twenty bucks a night
she could have rented a hotel room with air conditioning, instead
it was another night listening to the vibrating swirl of the fan
blades as they fought valiantly to redistribute the humid, heavy
air and the noisy lovemaking of the hookers in room 22. She pulled
the rented Lincoln to a halt outside number 24, turned the lights
off and sat alone in the dark for a few moments. Letting her mind
start to unwind a little, she closed her eyes and saw the hammer
swinging toward her. Her eyes snapped open. Relaxing tonight was
going to be a little more difficult than normal.

Narla needed the drink. She had slumped from the settee to the
floor. Physically and mentally she could not reach a lower point.
The images that bombarded her eyes were such a shock that she had
to stop the tape on three occasions because she could no longer see
the television through her tear streaming eyes. Her husband, the
man she had vowed to love until parted by death, was stripping
their daughter naked, even though she was crying and obviously
distressed. He kept forcing her. She could hear his voice on the
tape. ‘Mummy wants you to love Daddy, you do love me don’t
you.’

The confused child nods. ‘You have to kiss Daddy to show him
how much you love him...Kiss me.’

Harley sobbing leans forward and gently kisses her father
cheek, the innocent way a child would kiss her father. ‘NO!..I TOLD
YOU...’ Charles raises his voice. ‘On the lips.’

Narla stopped the tape, unable to watch further. The date on
the corner of the tape made it over four years old. She scrambled
through some of the other tapes retrieved from the summerhouse and
found the latest tape. Six days old. She put it in the VCR. The
image that appeared on the screen reviled Narla. Charles had
obviously progressed in his corruption of their daughter. Straddled
across her father, both of them naked smiling, laughing as though
they were partaking in an innocent game. Narla hung her head and
vomited on to the floor, she pushed away the tapes at the last
moment. Totally drained of every emotion, Narla slumped backwards
and lay there, listening to her daughter being raped by her
husband, listening to Harley’s soft whispers, listening to Charles
low moaning. The sound of his breathing becoming laboured. The
grunting noise she knew all too well, the noise that he always made
just before he comes. The noises mingled in her head, mixing, and
growing louder and louder, until they were a spinning cacophony, a
crashing symphony of defilement. Narla started to scream to make
the noise go away, above it all she could hear Charles breathing
and Harley saying ‘Yes, I love you Daddy.’ Narla needed to get away
from the television. She placed her hands over her ears and
continued to scream at the top of her voice until it echoed inside
her head. She couldn’t hear the doorbell ringing. Life outside her
head no longer made sense. All that made sense was the screaming
white noise inside her head. She staggered forward and fell against
the television set. Tumbling over it, pushing it backwards. Just
before passing out Narla thought she saw someone standing in the
room with her.

Leroy opened the door gently, trying not to wake Lia. He crept
in the front room and noticed that there was no sign of
her,

‘Must have gone to bed.’ he said to himself.

Not that he blamed her, waiting up night after night with no
promise of when he’d be home was not what he would call fun. Leroy
hit the remote control lying in the chair and flopped exhausted on
to the seat. He lowered the volume of the TV set and scanned the
channels thinking to himself how Bruce Springfield had got it right
when he declared ‘fifty-nine channels and nothing on’. The shopping
channel tried its best to sell Leroy a singing Marvin Gaye memorial
doll, Leroy tried his best to stay awake, both failed. Sleep swept
over him without protestation, Leroy kicked back on the reclining
mechanism and within seconds succumbed. The faint drone of the ever
present shopping channel salesperson receded and all was silent in
Leroy’s world, save for the approach of dreams.

SATURDAY

‘Uh...What the …’

Someone was screaming. Leroy woke with a start, confused,
disorientated. He looked around, trying to obtain his bearings,
trying to fix on the noise. It wasn’t screaming. It was loud, very
loud talking.

‘AREN’T THESE DOLLS BEAUTIFUL. GET THEM WHILE YOU CAN, THESE
BABIES ARE GOING TO BE WORTH TRIPLE WHAT YOU PAY FOR THEM NOW IN
JUST THREE YEARS TIME. ISN’T THAT RIGHT KIRSTIN?’

‘
YOU’RE NOT JOKING, BOB. REMEMBER OUR LIBERACE MEMORIAL DOLL,
EIGHTY-FIVE BUCKS TWO FALLS AGO? ONE SOLD AT AUCTION IN MICHIGAN
FOR OVER FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND THAT’S NOT ALL; OUR MARVIN GAYE
MEMORIAL DOLL COMES COMPLETE WITH A CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICATION
AND THIS UNIQUE PRESENTATION BOX. WE ARE CONFIDENT THAT YOU WON’T
BUY A BETTER INVESTMENT THIS YEAR THAN THE MARVIN GAYE MEMORIAL
DOLL.’

Leroy stared at the screen finally comprehending where the
noise was coming from; his arm had fallen asleep and gone numb,
pressing his weight on the remote handset’s volume button. He shook
his arm trying to get some life to return to the dead limb. The
remote fell to the floor as a rush of blood brought pins and
needles along with restored feeling.

He bent down and reduced the volume. He stared at the plastic
facsimile of Marvin Gaye.

‘Brother, you better off dead than seeing this shit.’ Leroy
rose from the armchair. Daylight flashed a tentative eye through
the small gap in the curtains. The clock on the wall told him it
was 7-50, Leroy knew that it must be later than that because the
battery had been running down for the past six weeks, it had been
losing up to five minutes a day, though Lia usually reset it at
least once a week. Leroy had been meaning to buy a new battery but
it was way down a long list of things that he meant to do and never
seemed to get the time to get around to. He ambled to the bathroom
quietly, not wanting to wake Lia up, not just yet. He showered and
shaved and put on his towelling robe, ready to make breakfast.
Breakfast in bed with Lia sounded good to Leroy, and after
breakfast maybe a little love. Leroy certainly felt the need of a
little comfort after the past few days. He stood over the stove,
shuffling the bacon rashers back and forward, trying not to weld
them to the non-stick pan. He flipped the eggs over and let them
rest against the blistering surface for only a minute before
removing them and placing them carefully onto the hot buttered
waffles. As bad a cook as he was, Leroy’s stomach was doing a tango
in anticipation of some sustenance. He poured some orange juice and
two cups of freshly brewed coffee, placed them all on a tray and
walked down the hall to the bedroom. The door was pushed too, as
usual; Leroy opened it with his back while keeping the tray in
front of him.

‘Hey, sleepyhead, time for breakfast.’ Leroy turned and faced
an empty bed. The smile faded from his face. ‘Baby?’ He put the
tray on the bed and moved swiftly down the corridor, knocking open
the second bedroom door, empty. The bathroom, the kitchen, the
lounge, the toilet, all-empty. And it slowly dawned on him that
‘empty’ was the correct adjective. How he didn’t notice until now
baffled him. Even when he was in the bathroom he failed to spot
that all of Lia’s wash things had gone. Leroy went to her wardrobe
and pulled it open. The clanging hangers echoed around the house,
sounding the death knell of a home whose very heart had been
removed. Stuck with sticky tape to a shelf where Lia used to keep
her winter woollens was an envelope marked Leroy. He snatched the
envelope and sat down on the bed scattering the orange juice and
coffee, sending the liquids hurtling together in to an undrinkable
concoction before they finally came to rest on the waffles. Leroy
pushed the tray back toward the centre of the bed, leaving a trail
of orangey-brown fluid on the crisp white sheets. The envelope was
not sealed, the flap springing open almost too obligingly. Leroy
pulled the neatly folded piece of paper out. A waft of Lia’s
perfume, ‘Jewel’, a waft of Lia…a memory.

Leroy,

I have tried to talk to you on many occasions but it seems
that time is our enemy. We just don’t seem to have enough of it to
spend with each other. I know that things will not improve because
you love your work so much, maybe more than me. I know that sounds
harsh but I really believe that you can live without me; I wish the
same could be said about your work. I have waited and waited and
waited; I can see my life passing me by. I need to find life before
it’s too late. I have stocked up on groceries for you and the
freezer is full. Don’t try to find me. I have taken two thousand
dollars from our savings account to get me by. Don’t hold harsh
thoughts about me, my heart is breaking but this is something I
have to do.