CHAPTER 16
A young Brookline police officer, male, close-shaved head, round face, escorted Ruby and me up to our apartment. He informed us that the victim was a thirty-two-year-old dental hygienist named Rhonda Jennings. We knew her as someone about to get engaged to her boyfriend, interested in learning yoga, and who was once kind enough to bring us a frozen pie. Rolls of yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the landing directly below where we lived. “Don’t touch anything,” we were instructed. “Keep your hands to your sides.” If our police escort knew my real feelings, he might have said instead: “Don’t get sick in the stairwell. Don’t sweat so much. Don’t pass out, even though you look like you’re about to do just that.”
Before we were allowed back in the building, Officer Teddy Walsh—his name, according to the badge he wore—had us answer some questions on the sidewalk.
“Did you know the woman who lived below you?”
“We met her once,” I said.
“How long have you been living here?”
“A few months,” I said.
“Have you seen anybody suspicious hanging around . . . loiterers, somebody who just looked out of place?”
“No.”
Officer Walsh wrote down my answers in a little white notebook. Meanwhile, all around us strobe lights of every color in the rainbow lit up the night sky. More yellow crime-scene tape dangled from banisters and clung to door frames like macabre streamers. The answers I’d given Officer Walsh were all the truth. Could this be my next test? Round two in Uretsky’s twisted game? So far, I didn’t need to lie to the police; I needed only to keep the truth well concealed. Was that playing the part? I wondered.
I’m going to kill again. . . . Contact with you is all I need to mark them for death.
At that moment, I wanted to tell him everything. Shout out my confessional like he was a faith healer, and I, a man with a broken spirit. I managed to temper my desire, though it boiled inside me.
A criminal thinks things through. . . .
Hadn’t Uretsky said that, or something close to it? Wouldn’t he be prepared for me to talk to the police—to confess everything? No matter what I did, even if I sacrificed my own freedom to admit to all I had done, Uretsky would still make another kill. And the blood of that kill would be on my hands. No question about it. I had to wait this out. Figure out how to “play the part.” For the moment, at least, I was Elliot Uretsky’s hostage, despite my freedom to go where I wanted and do whatever I pleased.
The police officer asked to see our identification, so we showed him our Mass IDs—the ones with the name Uretsky printed on the front. Our names needed to match the labels on the mailbox in the foyer and on the apartment lease. We were Elliot and Tanya Uretsky, at least until the real Uretsky tired of playing his game.
“Are you all right?” Officer Walsh asked Ruby.
Ruby had the dazed look of an accident victim. Her vacant eyes remained downcast, and her answer came out as soft as the flapping of butterfly wings. “Yes . . . I’m fine,” she said. “Just scared and sad for that poor woman.”
“I understand that this is traumatic,” Walsh said. “We have counselors who can help if you need assistance.”
“Thanks,” Ruby said.
I wanted to say, “Nobody can help with what we need.”
Instead, I said nothing.
Ruby sat on the futon, head in her hands. I sat beside her, but she recoiled from my touch.
“I don’t want to be near you,” she said. “I can’t be near you right now.”
“We need to stick together on this,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me exactly what that monster had threatened to do?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Upset me? Really? That was your reason? John, I think you’ve done a hell of a lot more than upset me!”
Ruby’s face contorted into a sort of animal snarl. How many times had I seen Ruby truly irate? The answer: never. Of course she got mad at me, often deservedly so—sometimes, just because—but on those occasions she’d go quiet, like a stealth submarine running silent, running deep. This time, she stood and crossed the room, her arms folded tightly against her chest and her back turned.
“What should I have done?” I asked.
Ruby pivoted in a fluid motion to face me. “Told the truth, for starters!”
“And then what?” I didn’t want to yell, but it was hard to keep my emotions in check. A woman was dead, and if you traced the blame, it originated with the identity that I stole. “What would we have done differently?”
“Maybe gone to the police,” Ruby said. “Maybe then Rhonda would still be alive.”
“And tell them what, Ruby? What? That we stole an identity and our victim is now terrorizing us?”
“What were you thinking, John?”
“I thought he was trying to just scare us. I didn’t think he would do it. . . . I didn’t think he could! He couldn’t have known who we were. How the hell was he going to kill somebody close to us?”
“How did he find out who we are, John? How? You said there was no way to trace our actual address from the post office box,” Ruby yelled from across the room.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out, dammit! You find out!”
Ruby crumpled to the floor like a folded napkin. She wasn’t just crying tears—she was wailing like a woman in mourning. She lay on her side, crying like that, shaking, and struggling to speak. “I’m not strong enough to handle this, John,” she was saying. “I’m not going to be able to make it. I can’t do this. I can’t—”
Her words were halted by another tsunami of tears. I got down on the floor beside Ruby. She wanted me close to her, I could tell, so I tucked her into my arms, spooning her the way I did when it was bedtime, just before sleep found us. I rocked Ruby in my arms in that spooning position, and I knew as the horror sank in that nothing about our relationship would ever be the same.
“I love you, baby. I love you,” I said over and over again.
“We’ve got to tell the police,” Ruby said.
“We can’t,” I said. “He’ll kill again. He’ll do it, and we can’t stop him.”
“You’ve got to make him stop. Please make him stop.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise. All I have to do is play the part. Whatever that means.”
We were still on the floor when the phone rang. Ruby pulled away from me and got into a kneeling position quicker than a cat. The muscles of her jaw tightened; her fingers, knuckles white from the applied force, dug hard against her thighs. I whirled around, glaring at the phone like it was a predator set loose in the apartment.
It rang again.
“Are you going to answer it?”
It rang again.
“What if he hangs up?” she asked. “What if this is our only chance to do what he wants?”
It rang again.
“Answer it, John! Answer it!”
I picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
My voice had the croaky sound of having been roused from a deep slumber.
“Elliot Uretsky?” asked a man.
I didn’t recognize the voice, but I knew it wasn’t the real Elliot Uretsky calling to terrify us again.
“Who is this?” I asked.
The cold bite to my voice was intended to intimidate.
“My name is Henry Dobson,” said the man. “Am I speaking with Elliot Uretsky?”
“You are,” I said, lying.
Play the part. . . .
“Sorry to call so late.”
I closed my eyes and fought to keep down what little was left inside my stomach. I glanced over at Ruby and saw that her hands were covering her mouth, ironically in a gesture not too dissimilar from that of the wise monkey warning against speaking evil. I thought of the woman who lived below us, whose severed fingers were meant to communicate the same.
“What do you want, Mr. Dobson? This isn’t a particularly good time to talk.”
“Then I’ll make it brief,” Dobson said. “I’m a fraud investigator with UniSol Health, and I’m afraid we might have a serious problem with your claim.”