Rage Against the Dying

Fifty-four





By not immediately reporting his suspicions about me, Max had already crossed the line. With any luck he’d stay there. Now that I was certain he was safe, it was time to save my own skin. I’d remind him again later that if he had believed me when I said Coleman had been abducted, he wouldn’t have gotten himself shot. Like I told him, it was his own damn fault. I’d also point out the noise I made by kicking out the door distracted both Emery and him, so Max turned and the shot was off. And I’d remind him I killed Emery to save his life. Okay, so that last part wasn’t quite the truth; at the time I thought he was dead and I was only taking the blame to save Coleman’s career and atone for some of my own mistakes. But if the lie could do double duty I wasn’t about to stop it.

The only thing that remained was getting through the rest of the afternoon with Carlo, going through the motions of preparing dinner, eating, reading, as if life would go on the same. But after the Pugs’ evening walk, at the time when we would slip into our bathrobes and have some warm milk and a bit of boring television to quiet down, the mood turned edgy. He took the car keys from the hook by the door that led to the garage and said, “Come on, it’s time to take a ride.”

A giggle leaked out of me, the kind you hear with a rising hysteria. “Holy Jesus, that’s what they say when they’re going to whack you.”

With more sadness than anger Carlo said, “Please put down your defenses, dear. Our marriage hangs in the balance,” and opened the door for me to go first.

I got into Carlo’s Volvo without appearing overly meek. We drove in silence down Golder Ranch Road, and he turned south on Oracle, and I thought, no, he couldn’t let me hang around the house all day and now dump me back at Coleman’s place.

And he didn’t. Just after passing the Oro Valley Marketplace on Oracle and Tangerine, Carlo suddenly turned left, toward the mountains, into the darkness of Catalina State Park. It was where we had hiked before, and where I had been shot at, but this was the first time I’d been in the park at night. I didn’t even know you could get in after sunset.

Without switching to his brights Carlo drove slowly along the winding black mile to the parking lot, from where, if it were daylight, we could have seen all the trails leading off from the single trailhead. As it was, the last thing I saw was a spider as big as your hand crawl through the headlight’s beam just before he turned them off.

We sat in the total dark for a while, the blackness obscuring us from each other. If this was his show, let him talk. I was too depressed and tired to help him. As I waited, my eyes adjusted to the dark, and, while I still couldn’t see Carlo’s profile, I started to pick up the outline of the mountains in the east, appearing only as a starless silhouette. I noticed for the first time there was no moon yet tonight, or it had come and gone. Then, as if it was seeping through the dark, a pale gray smear appeared from left to right across the sky, what Carlo had once told me was the Milky Way. That’s how the Milky Way is; you can’t see individual stars so much. It’s a big-picture kind of thing.

“It’s hard to begin,” Carlo finally began.

“You’ll be kind. You can’t help it.”

“What I mean to say is, when you’ve lived with lies for so long, it’s hard to know how to express things so that they can be trusted. It’s hard to know what the truth is.”

Nobody knew that better than I. “I have to tell you I’m very tired, and still achy, and not thinking clearly.”

“Yes,” Carlo said. “I’m well aware of that. It’s why we’re doing this tonight, while it’s dark and your façade is still down. It may be the only time in our relationship that I’ve had the upper hand, and don’t think I’m proud of it.”

“You never wanted to know,” I said, hating the whine in my voice. “I just did what you wanted me to do.”

He sounded aggrieved, too. “It wasn’t what you might have talked about that bothered me. It was you.”

For the time being I nodded, just to keep him talking. As I proved with Emery, when your life is threatened, as long as you keep the other person talking you have a chance of survival. Most people can’t talk and kill at precisely the same time. Think about it. You close your mouth before you pull the trigger. I was prepared to keep the Perfesser in lecture mode just as long as he wanted, until I figured out what the rest of my life looked like.

Only then he pulled the trigger.

“That time I talked to Max? He didn’t actually give me all the details of your past.”

“He didn’t know all that much,” I said.

“I asked him about you. You know, you.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Like you say, not much. He gave me the phone number of someone at FBI headquarters in Washington. A psychologist friend of yours, he said. David Weiss.”

At first I hardly knew I was shot. There was that numbness that comes before the pain, when everything drains out of you in your shock. There was no telling what Carlo knew about me.

“Weiss?” I said, and heard it as kind of a squeak. Knowing in advance that I was dead, I said, “I told you I was going to tell you everything. Didn’t you trust me?”

“No. Yes. I couldn’t wait.”

I was suddenly so not tired. “He told you all about me killing the guy, didn’t he? Not the last one, the other one when I was still with the Bureau. Sig knows more than anyone.”

Whether or not Carlo was keeping up with the death toll, he only scoffed. “Forget that. Tell me about this Paul fellow.”

Again my reality tilted and I felt like I was slipping toward the abyss, going into emotional free fall. But sitting there, both of us facing the windshield as if in a confessional, and having no choice, I told him everything. I told him how every person I was close to, family and friends, was a cop in one form or another. I told him how I suspected myself of driving away every civilian I’d known. I told him how I had been half-afraid of driving him away and half-afraid I couldn’t. I told him so much more than I’d ever told Sigmund, including how Paul was nothing like Dad, and how that meant he must be good.

I told Carlo I was terrified that he would leave me if he knew who I really was.

When I was finished, Carlo stayed silent, as if I’d been talking too fast and he needed to catch up. Then he said, “What an a*shole.”

Stunned, stricken by his response, I turned my head away. “Maybe you had to be there,” I managed.

“Not you,” Carlo said. “I mean Paul. Paul sounds like a real a*shole.”

I sat blinking, processing that, wondering why it didn’t sound like either absolution or penance. One perfect man in my life calling the other perfect man an a*shole. I didn’t know what to think anymore.

“And you thought I was like him,” Carlo said. I could feel him humphing mildly on his side of the car. “I did part of my pastoral training as a prison chaplain, for Christ’s sake. I’ve given last rites to someone who was shanked in the ear. I’ve walked someone to their execution when they still used the electric chair and stayed to watch his body melt. What do you take me for, some kind of pansy-assed cleric with Communion wine where his spinal fluid should be?”

“No?” Only I was careful to remove the question mark.

“F*ckin’ A. Because that would be offensive.”

I still had my doubts. “Wait, this isn’t one of those stooping-to-conquer maneuvers, is it?” I asked.

He ignored that. “I can’t understand why you’ve withheld so much of yourself from me.”

That pissed me off. “You didn’t want to know! Remember our first date? You told me that story about the man with the mask. Your message was loud and clear.”

“What did you think I was saying?”

“Whether you knew it or not, you were saying that you were good and I was bad.” Peasil’s body flashed into my head, probably not for the last time. “That I needed to hide all the things I’d seen, all the things I’d done, and pretend to be as good as you.”

“Good Lord, you thought I didn’t imagine what you might have witnessed? I’ve got a PhD and a doctor of divinity, O’Hari, and I’m not stupid. You’re just going to have to, what do you call it, come clean with me.”

“Please don’t make me tell you the truth, Perfesser. It never turns out well. You won’t like me afterwards.”

“Well that’s a chance you’re going to have to take, because I don’t see any other option.”

“Do you think there’s a chance you won’t dump me?”

Carlo knew better than to simply reassure me, knowing how anyone can lie. “This is not a healthy relationship.”

“I’m beginning to see that, but in my defense, I’ve never had any other kind.”

“Maybe with a lot of honesty I think there’s a strong probability that I will not leave you, yes.”

“Before I start a major confession, would you tell me first everything Sigmund told you?”

He paused to consider before shaking his head. “Listen, we can go slowly on this, but for starters—and forgive the aphorism, but for the past twenty-four hours I haven’t been able to come up with a different way to say it—you have to trust the people you love. And you have to trust their love for you. And just to set the record straight, I might add that when I told you the story of the man with the mask I was talking about myself.”

In that moment I had a glimpse of all the men that Carlo had been, all the masks he had worn. I liked this Carlo who was talking now, this powerful man who met me on my own ground. Maybe that’s why I had married him, because I saw this version that first day in his classroom. Until now all the rest between us had just been trying on different people. Maybe we do that at any age.

“Daphne,” I blurted.

“What?”

“My name isn’t really Brigid. I was baptized Daphne, but I changed it when I joined the Bureau so the guys wouldn’t tease me.”

“That’s a start.” Carlo put his hand on mine, the touch throbbing in my viscera. I had not realized until the touch how dangerous the moment had been. His grip tightened and he pulled me closer to him with an aggression that showed me I had underestimated so many things about him. I was close enough now to see his face even in the darkness.

“Now come kiss me, wench,” he said.

I did.

And then so seriously, in some low register I didn’t know he could reach, almost baring his teeth as he said it, “I love you, Brigid.”

He said my name. He hadn’t until now been calling me by name. The raw exposure of a man in love is frightening, even to me. I trembled and pulled back and felt my eyelashes dampen. “Why?” I managed to say, still doubtful, still fearing the intimacy.

He knew. Seriousness put aside as suddenly as it had flashed upon him, his old light touch returning, Carlo beamed at me and shrugged, “Damned if I know.”

I started to retort, something like don’t go getting all sappy on me. Instead, I leaned again over the console dividing us and kissed his shoulder so gently I’m sure I didn’t even bend the skin. The feel of my upper lip on his shirt was salvation for the real me, whatever that would be. I allowed the intimacy, whispered bravely his real name. “I love you, too, Carlo.”

Carlo’s gentle fingers reached into my hair and pulled out a pin. A white curl fell down the side of my face where I could see it.

“I’m afraid I’m feeling a little old, darling,” I said.

He nodded. Again, no lies, and I rather liked it. He said, “That comes and goes for me, too, and probably will until we die. But you know what else David Weiss said about you?”

“What?”

“After young men see you they dream dreams without realizing why. A very astute man, your Dr. Weiss.” He put his arm around me and kept it there for a little while.

I knew I wasn’t out of the woods with Carlo yet; there was still a lot of truth to tell, and, to tell you the truth, decisions to be made about how to tell it. I wasn’t sure, for example, how he would react when I told him I might be going to prison for killing Gerald Peasil. No, Max wouldn’t say anything. Would he?

We drove back to the house, where I dropped wearily to the floor with the Pugs. They frisked about me, hesitant, laughing. With that feeling of unreasoning giddiness at being alive and, for the moment, safe with the pack, “Group hug,” I yelled. The Pugs jumped me. I returned their assault with head noogies.

The Pugs got bored and ran off, leaving my jeans studded with pale short hairs, but I stayed on the floor a few more minutes, staring at the living room from this unique angle. The strip of wallpaper with mauve grapes near the ceiling was just as ugly from here, though.

“Jane?” I whispered. “Jane? You here?” It was ten thirty, an hour past our bedtime, and Carlo had gone off to get ready for some long-delayed sleep. Only the sound of the Pugs’ lips smacking at their communal water bowl disturbed the silence. I guessed Jane’s ghost was not in the house. Maybe it never had been. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself from the floor to a standing position. My first stop tomorrow, before the start of my official interrogation, would be at Crate and Barrel—no, make that Pottery Barn. I needed to pick out a new set of dishes with no similarity to antique Bavarian china. And a new bedspread, not pink and not satin.

When I went into the bedroom, I saw Carlo had pulled down the whole bedspread. And I noticed now the dining room chair that had been placed near the foot of the bed, where he must have sat through the night before, keeping vigil.

I needed to begin again, for I had discovered I could have one happy year in my life. What god, no matter how vicious, would deny me a second? I remembered confessing to Carlo in the dark, my emotional free fall into the abyss I’d always dreaded. Only this time there was someone to wait at the edge, wait for me to come back.





Acknowledgments


My gratitude to Helen Heller and Hope Dellon, who are more collaborators than agent and editor. I still can’t believe my good fortune in getting these two magnificent minds on my side.

My apologies for playing fast and loose with Tucson geography, though I tried to stick pretty close to law enforcement procedure and forensics. The following experts gave advice either personally or through their own reference books: Anil Aggrawal (paraphilias), Ronald Beckett (mummies), Diane France (anthropology), Vernon Geberth (serial murder), Harold Hall (psychology), Steven Karch (toxicology), Rory McMahon (investigations), Michael Napier (interrogations), Scott Wagner (pathology), Richard Walton (cold case investigation), and especially James Williamson, retired Tucson detective, who read the manuscript for accuracy, took me through the forensics lab, and showed me how to shoot a gun. Anything that’s incorrect is sheer willfulness on my part.

While adapted for the purpose of the story, NamUs is a real public database that matches missing and unidentified people. I applaud the work of Michael O’Berry and Kevin Lothridge of the National Forensic Science Technology Center who created this concept, and I thank them for giving me permission to use the site in a fictional context.

I thank fellow authors for their gentle critiques: William Bell, Mickey Getty, Frederick J. Masterman, and Pat Mauser McCord.

And finally the intrepid members of the Catalina Mystery Book Club who inspired the character of Brigid Quinn and provided back-up at the Hanging Tree Saloon: Carole Cascio, Jean Cliff, Frema Goldshine, Molly Landi, Ina Mapes, Margaret Parnell, Marilyn Raue, Joan Roberts, Phyllis Smith, and Margaret Thompson.





About the Author


BECKY MASTERMAN, who is the acquisitions editor for a press specializing in medical textbooks for forensic examiners and law enforcement, is nothing like her protagonist Brigid Quinn. For one thing, she is rather tall and not terribly fit. More significantly, she has never killed anyone. Becky Masterman lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband. This is her first thriller.