So I loved her purely. We drove in my car, past police and your pitiful ideas of enforcing the law, to a place where we had been before. And after embracing her, I plunged the knife deep into her heart. I felt the flutter of outraged muscle through the blade and in my fingers, heard the sound of sharpened metal parting her. Then I saw it on her face, finally, the surrender, the helplessness, the absolute dependence on me she never had before. If only for a moment! It was the moment I had prepared a lifetime for. It validated everything I had done. It released her forever from your banal torment, Raymond. There was such love in her eyes, such relief, such... splendor!
Robbins’s voice had lowered. Weir’s heart had grown heavier with every line, heavy with the knowledge of Ann’s terror. Raymond sat with his head in his hands. Paris gazed down at the floor. Dennison appeared to be praying. Robbins sighed quietly, and continued.
And still my heart aches for her, Lt. Cruz, for her touch, her laugh, her flesh and spirit. I know that yours does, too, because while you loved her in a small way and loved her imperfectly, to have partaken in Ann was to have touched the heart of all women. I know you loved her. She loved you, too, in her confusion and weakness. She died as she had lived: content in me. In a very real way, I provided for Ann what she had always wanted.
I don’t expect you to comprehend this brief explanation. You are, after all, a simple police officer. Words are such feeble tools for the task of explaining love. It is my sincere desire for you to know that Ann did not die in vain, but that her heart was full for me. Ann was finally complete.
I wrestle with the heaviness of my own heart, with the need to tell the world what I have done. Perhaps it is as humble a thing as guilt, or as simple a thing as pride. And if that day comes, Lt. Cruz, I will deliver myself to you and only you. Because truly,for Ann, there was only us. Truly, everything we did, we did for Ann. We are connected through her, though our battle for her body and soul was conducted with cunning and fury.
With My Understanding and Sympathy,
A kind of roaring silence filled the room, a silence too crowded with emotion to admit anything as insignificant as sound.
Weir felt as if he’d been sucked down into some funnel cloud of insanity, left spinning with it, unable to find balance or escape.
“Brian,” said Robbins, “This sound like Horton Goins to you?”
“I can almost hear his voice,” said Dennison. “It’s perfectly him.”
Robbins turned to Raymond. “Ray?”
“It isn’t him. He’s too young. Mr. Night knew Ann and she knew him. It isn’t Goins.”
“Jim? Your vote?”
“I’m with Raymond. Goins couldn’t have written it.”
“Mike?”
“Brian’s right — it is Goins, right down to the schizophrenic delusions of grandeur. It’s all in his hospital records.”
Robbins sat back, crossed his arms, and looked down again at the letter.
Weir asked him what he thought.
“I’ll keep my opinions to myself for right now,” he said. “We’d do best to focus on the text itself. Let’s take it through, okay? First, rage and sorrow. He’s got a lot on his mind.”
Ray nodded. “He wants to talk about it.”
“Not very much, he doesn’t,” said Dennison. “He wants to obscure.”
“I think Raymond is right,” said Robbins. “It’s half his reason for writing — a need to confess. And the other half?”
“His confidence needs bolstering,” said Weir. “He’s waving the trophy, bragging.”
“That’s my take, too,” said Robbins. “And speaking of trophies, I’ll bet he’s kept something else of hers from that night, besides the flower. He thinks he loved her. According to his definition, maybe he did.”
“Her purse,” said Raymond. “All the personal things — the smells.”
“Her shoe,” said Jim.
Robbins nodded. “Both good bets. Okay, this is what I hear. Educated, middle or upper class. Probably has some kind of job — that stuff about being talented might even be true. Obviously, he’s got access to a word processor and printer, and he knows how to use them. He isn’t delusional, seeing visions, hearing voices. Raymond, I just have to ask you this straight out — what about this affair? Did Ann have a lover?”
“I never suspected,” Ray said quietly. “Until I saw the pictures. Of Ann in the limousine. She was completely discreet about it — if it’s true.”
If it’s true, thought Jim. Raymond buried his faithful wife today, and he’ll keep her faithful to the bitter end.
“If he was really seeing her,” said Dennison. “If his love affair was anything more than sniping her with a camera, following her around the neighborhood. Maybe his trophy was a photograph of what happened.”
Robbins shook his head in disagreement. “That would certainly make our jobs easier. But what good does it do to lie about an affair he never had?”
“Building up his confidence again,” said Dennison.
“Throwing us off the track,” said Paris. “He’s built up this whole romance in his mind. There wasn’t any romance. He followed her; he raped her and killed her. He wants to believe in an affair — that’s why he wrote it down.”
“Maybe,” said Robbins. “He’s got a big ego to keep feeding. The whole letter about a woman he allegedly loved and allegedly killed? It’s about his feelings, his needs, his confusion. He’s arrogant. When they write, there’s always an element of taunting, too. He’s challenging us, rubbing our noses in it. Especially when the man he writes to is a cop.”
The heavy silence hovered in the room, disturbed by nothing but the whirring of the air conditioner.
Raymond spoke next. “Goins wouldn’t be so linear.”
“I wonder,” said Robbins. “I read his file yesterday for the third time this week. The boy — man, I guess — is ineffable. He’s committed for rape and attempted murder at the age of fifteen, and two years later at the state hospital he’s already teaching photography to the chronics. He’s taking correspondence classes in everything from astronomy to genealogy, for goodness sakes. His favorite subjects are the nuns that come through; he takes their portraits and gives them away. Probably the only women he saw. Maybe that’s where he gets his religious bent — himself as God, Ann as an angel. At the time they committed him, he’d had a Stanford-Binet intelligence test in school and tested out at eighty-six. They gave him another one in the hospital four years later and he scored one thirty-nine. Goins is formless. I think he could have written this, but it’s nothing more than a guess at this point.”
Dennison cast a quick, satisfied looked to Weir and Raymond. “I mean, if he was her lover, why rape her anyway? He was... you know... getting it for free.”
“He didn’t,” Weir answered. Certain particulars of Ann’s beating had been bothering him for days. In this new context, something that he had dismissed as improbable suddenly made twisted, brutal sense. “He didn’t. We assumed it was a rape, but it was consensual. Yee found bruising on the mons, but he said it was done close to the time of death, could even have been postmortem. He beat her after they had intercourse, to throw us off, to create a dimension that wasn’t there. He as much as told us that.”
“Dumb,” said Dennison.
“I reached the same conclusion Jim did,” Robbins snapped. “By the third paragraph. Call it what you want, Brian. I don’t think she was raped.”