He liked her. She liked him. To some degree they counted on each other. What was the definition of a friend anyway? She’d considered the same about Ellen and decided they weren’t really friends, but maybe she was wrong.
But LeDoux? The two of them were acquaintances, she decided. She had a number of those, though she rarely exchanged body fluids with an acquaintance. Getting close to LeDoux had required the extra effort. Her occasional sexual encounter was never with anyone she’d met before and the chosen partner never knew her real name. Telling LeDoux was necessary, wasn’t it?
Did he see the real Joanna Guthrie? The empty shell?
Maybe she was borrowing trouble. She almost smiled at the phrase. Her mother had used that phrase all the time. Yes, Jo was borrowing trouble. Easy to do, spending so much time with a man like LeDoux. Not true, Jo. He wasn’t the problem. She was the problem. This part she knew with complete certainty. She spent 99 percent of her time completely alone and had since she was eighteen years old. How was she supposed to know the intricacies of carrying on a normal conversation much less being a friend? Concern for his niece likely had him off his game or he would have seen through her completely already.
She had a niece and a nephew. She’d never met either one. The boy was twelve, his sister ten. Without question, Ray was a good father. He’d always taken really good care of Jo—until she moved away to college. He’d tried then. He would show up on weekends. Her roommates would get all giddy because a cute older guy smiled at them. Jo had teased her brother relentlessly about it. Eventually, he stopped coming so often. Their mom had told him to let Jo be. She could just hear her. She needs to be making friends, not hanging out with her brother.
Jo had a family. Once. A good one. But then she’d tossed away the life she had known. Why had she thrown them away, too?
She pushed the painful thoughts away and stared out the window at one of the ugliest parts of humanity’s past. The screams and wails of patients echoed through her soul. One of the freshmen had read aloud newspaper articles about the old asylum when they toured the place the second time. The notes from the patient files they had found were right. Children were often kept in cages among the adults. Experimental treatments were the norm.
What sort of desperation did it take to prompt a person to bring a loved one to a place like this and leave him or her? As if you have the right to judge. Hell, she didn’t even trust herself to take care of a cat much less another human. The neighbor at the last place where she lived had offered her a kitten from the unexpected litter her cat had dropped on her. Jo had insisted she traveled too much for a pet. Funny how the lies came so easy after so many years.
She ordered her brain to stay on track. Focus on those fourteen days. If she was held here surely something would feel more deeply familiar. She powered the window down and inhaled the scents of the place. Listened to the sounds.
She remembered the crunch of leaves under their feet as they ran through the woods after they escaped. They’d done what they had to do; the other girl hadn’t made it. It was just the two of them.
They’d done what they had to do.
Jo closed her eyes and silently repeated the words, then she opened them again and stared forward. Bile churned in her stomach. She tried to swallow, to keep the bitterness at bay.
She cleared her throat. “Tell me, Agent LeDoux, is a victim still a victim even when she does whatever it takes to survive?”
He slowed for an intersection at a maze of buildings. Thankfully the security vehicle had turned onto another street. Tony scrutinized her for a moment. “Did you do what you had to do, Joanna?”
“It’s a hypothetical question.” She looked away from him, stared forward. “I think a friend of mine did.”
“Victims do what they have to do to survive,” he agreed. “The survival instinct is strong in most people, unless it has been drummed out by previous bumps in the road.”
“Like drugs or hard luck?”
“That can do it, yes. Abusive parents or spouses can do it, too.”
They rode in silence for half a minute before he said more. Maybe he was considering whether or not he was driving around with a person who’d done something really bad.
“With some people, their will to survive isn’t as strong because they have much less to live for. Maybe they’ve suffered tragic loss. I have a friend, a homicide detective. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama. A serial killer murdered her husband and was responsible for the deaths of her little boy, her partner and a dear friend. She was one of those people who decided she didn’t have anything worth surviving for.”
Jo understood that feeling so damned well. “Did she die?”
He shook his head. “No. She survived so she could find the killer and make sure he paid for what he’d done.”
“Did she?”
Tony braked for another stop. He nodded. “She did. She picked up the pieces and now she’s married again.”
“She’s happy?”
“She is.”
Jo didn’t see how that was possible. “With those kinds of scars to her psyche I don’t see how she could put it behind her and ever be normal.”
“What’s normal?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Go on living life as if nothing happened.”
“You’d have to ask her about that.” He focused on driving.
Jo studied his profile again. “You have a few scars of your own.”
“I spent a lot of years profiling killers. Yeah. I have a few.”
Maybe more than a few. “You tell me your secrets. I’ve told you mine.”
His jaw tightened. Ah, so he was good at telling others how to do it but he couldn’t do it himself.
“What a hypocrite.” She stared out the window once more.
The high fences with their concertina wire tops made her insides tighten. She remembered the buildings that later had been turned to small prisons. At some point in the past half century or so treatment for the mentally ill had changed and so the need for places like this one had waned. Some parts of the property had been repurposed, so to speak. Eventually, even those new purposes became obsolete and were abandoned. The side roads that went off into the woods made her shudder. She hated this place.
“I was very good at my job.”
His voice startled her. She’d thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“So good that the idea of defeat was unthinkable. I made a decision to do whatever necessary to make sure I never failed. There was this one serial killer who remained elusive after years of tracking him. I wanted him so badly I could taste it.”
She waited for him to go on, the sound of his voice making her relax. Or maybe it was the idea that he was admitting his flaws that made her feel more at ease.
“He dropped a body in Montgomery so I rushed there and I met Detective Bobbie Gentry. When I looked at her I was stunned. She was the perfect example of all that this killer craved in a victim.”
Jo watched his throat work in an effort to swallow. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“I used her to bait him. And he came back. He murdered her husband, took her...the things he did to her...”
He drew in a deep breath. “Unimaginable torture. He raped her over and over for weeks. Beat her so badly. Broke her leg and carved up her body. Starved her to the point that she was so weak she could hardly walk. But somehow she got away. Despite the broken bones she walked for miles through the freezing cold.”
Another of those long lapses of silence.
“But she made it,” Jo offered, foolishly needing to hear a happy ending.
“She did, but I did that to her. All I cared about was my career. I lost my marriage and eventually my career because I lost sight of what really mattered. When I realized what I had done, I made it my life’s goal to do whatever necessary to make it right.”
He was preaching to the choir and the sermon was one she knew all too well.
Jo shook her head. “I can’t be like you.”