He falls on the bed and thinks of Kat. She had them all fooled. They saw her as a sweet girl who could never be part of something evil. He remembers tears-his own tears-falling on her face as she stared up at him. She almost made him believe, too.
Two years it took them-twenty-three months and seven days-because he kept count on the wall. Two years of staring into a black door, communicating with fellow inmates by talking into the toilet bowl, down the piping to another cell. Two years of conjuring up ways to get up the wall to the single lightbulb in the ceiling to light a cigarette stub. Two years before they discovered he was right, before the men in the blue piping came for him.
He closes his eyes, feels the exhaustion sweep over him, his eyes sinking beneath the shade of his eyelids.
But then the lightning strike in the stomach, the burning acid. He springs into a ball, the hamstring again, too, he can’t relax, can’t sleep, not until he’s done, and he’s not done, not after Evelyn, it has to be tonight, and he doesn’t even know where Brandon Mitchum lives yet, lot of work to do, because it has to be tonight-
Leo gets off the bed and heads for the door.
ONCE WE’RE OFF THE INTERSTATE, Shelly reads me the written instructions from Betty. I follow a couple of county roads before I get to the point of intersection between Gwendolyn’s house and the diner that bears her name. As it’s nearing two-thirty, I call the diner. The woman who answers says Gwendolyn’s not around, so I decide to go to her house.
“Fresh,” Stoletti had said about interviewing witnesses. No notice. It makes sense. I’d just as soon pop in on Gwendolyn and see what I can find out.
The roads are wide and largely unmarked. I pass trees and various lakes, a blur of dark browns, greens, and blues. The sky is clouding up, but it’s still bright, anyway. Living and working among high-rises, I don’t get a lot of this. This is what Shelly, who grew up downstate, was talking about, how much brighter and cleaner it is away from the city. It’s not like I’ve never left the city limits, but, despite the money I have, I’ve never owned a second home, or even vacationed much. The law is my job and my hobby. I suppose that says something about me.
Soon the roads are no longer paved and the signage becomes scarce. Following the turns, I find myself in what a city boy like me would describe as a subdivision, a cluster of log and wood cabins spaced well apart, little kids running around in swimsuits, dogs chasing after them.
Hoping I have the right place, I pull onto a gravel driveway and stop my Cadillac, the wheels sliding over crunched stone. The house is nothing special, a rustic pine cabin of modest size, heavily shaded with trees. The smell of freshly cut grass mixes with the airy, lake scent. I stretch my legs before we move toward the cabin. Shelly looks around with a serene expression. I look down the sloping backyard to the lake, and to a woman standing by a green canopy on a dock, her eyes shaded by her hand, staring back at me.
Natalia and Mia Lake’s mother was a ballerina in Russia, a beautiful woman named Nikita Kiri-something-or-other. Nikita met Conrad Lake, the heir to the Lake mining fortune in West Virginia who had settled in the Midwest in the forties. The story went that Conrad saw Nikita, then eighteen years old, at the Russian ballet and immediately began to court her, eventually marrying her and bringing her back to the States, supposedly spreading plenty of money among the Soviet politburo to let him remove her from the country. Their daughters, Mia and Natalia, inherited all of their money and much of their mother’s beauty; they, in turn, passed their exquisite features down to their daughters, Gwendolyn and Cassandra. I’m more confident of that assessment with regard to Cassie, having seen a number of photos of her over time; I’d seen one picture of Gwendolyn back then, when she would have been a teenager, which I struggle to recall now. She looked like a Lake, I remember that much, much like Cassie and Natalia and probably Mia, a brunette with a slim build and a hint of the Russian heritage in her long jaw and nose, overall glamorous features. I might have imagined her sixteen years later as something of a beauty, the pieces coming together in maturity and helped along with the finest hairdressers and accessories.
The woman who approaches from the dock fits a different bill. She has a more rounded, likable face, generous red hair that drapes lazily past her shoulders. She’s dressed simply in a long shirt, cutoff denim shorts, and sandals. But even through her horn-rimmed glasses, I can see a glimpse of the beautiful party girl in her eyes, oval and piercing green, though any glamour is overcome by an extra twenty pounds and the granola look. More of a quiet, peaceful beauty about her now-the polar opposite of her former glitz. More my speed, actually.
I introduce Shelly and myself as attorneys from the city, and after an initial look of concern-“Is Nat okay?” she asks, referring to her aunt Natalia-her expression changes to one that tells me she has put the city well behind her, and is glad to have done so.
“How-exactly how did you find me?” she wonders.
Why? I want to ask. You didn’t want to be found?
“If I had time to call you and set something up, I would have. I’m sorry. This is very important, and we won’t take up much of your time.”
She takes a moment for internal debate, and I pray this whole thing hasn’t been a waste of time. Then again, if she shuts me out completely, that will tell me something, too.
“There’s a thought,” I say, “that someone is following the song lyrics again. Some people have been murdered.”
That does the trick. Her eyes widen, the expression softening. She points back behind her, to the dock. “I was just about to take a boat ride,” she says.
29
McDERMOTT only briefly glances at the glossies of the victim. He already knows the details-the wound to the right temple, then the massive beating she took to the top of her skull, multiple blows rained down on her. Whoever did this had no compunction about what he was doing, no hesitation whatsoever.
That’s all he needs to see, and more than he wants to.
Stoletti scoops the photos off his desk and looks through them. She’s been partnered with him long enough; she knows he has a problem with female murder victims. She’s smart enough to know why, too, though the two of them have never discussed it.
It hasn’t gotten easier. He figured he needed time after Joyce’s death, after finding her lying dead in the bathroom, before he could look at another dead body without effect. But it’s been four goddamn years, and, still, at least with women, he cringes every time. It’s about a forty-sixty mix of female-to-male victims. That’s a lot of crime scenes you don’t want to handle, a lot of photographs you can’t bear to study.
He can push out the images at night. He can push them out in the sunlight or in the heat of a busy day. Something about the crime scenes themselves, the smell and feel of death so prominent, that brings it back more vividly than his imagination otherwise permits: The vacant stare of her eyes, the awkward posturing of her body-her legs crossed in rigor mortis, her body toppled to the right like a statute knocked on its side-the pool of blood leading all the way to the bathtub, where little Gracie sat motionless, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands over her ears, her body gently rocking.