The tape snapped from Alice Folger’s face. Jeremy Ridgecliff plucked the washcloth from her mouth. She gagged, then accepted the water he dribbled across her lips. She was in a bed, canopied with red velvet. She was tied tight, but with a pillow beneath her head. Ridgecliff had lifted her from the wooden box; it must have taken tremendous strength. Where did he store it in that lanky body?
She heard another rumble of thunder outside. It would rain until the leading edge of the incoming high-pressure ridge pushed the low out to sea. The rain would dissipate tomorrow afternoon. She’d at least like to die on a sunny day.
Ridgecliff said, “Do you need to drain?”
“Food?”
She shook her head. Her last meal had been bits of leftover duck scented with cognac. He’d allowed bathroom visits in both locations, all carefully controlled. So far he hadn’t hurt her.
He started to replace the tape. She shook her head. “Wait …I can help you in this unfortunate situation, Mr Ridgecliff, We have a friend in common, a Mobile detective named Carson Ryder. You used to speak to him when you were at the Institute. He speaks highly of you, says you’re exceptionally intelligent. In fact, he thinks –”
“Are you fucking him?”
“What?”
“Are you fucking Ryder? You’d be attractive to him and he’d love to swim the ol’ weenie around in you. Are you fucking him? It’s a charitable thing to do.”
“I don’t think we should discuss my personal life, Mr Ridgecliff, not when there’s so much to talk about –”
Ridgecliff began chanting like a schoolboy. “Heard it, heard it, heard it in your voi-eece. You’ve been fucking Ry-der.”
“Mr Ridgecliff …”
“I hear these days women will fuck anything without a second thought: other women, Dalmatians, pumpkins, Carson Ryder …”
“I won’t lie to you Mr Ridgecliff. You’re in trouble. There’s a chance you could get hurt –”
“Do tell.”
“I’d like for you to consider me a friend. Someone who can help you get to safety and –”
“STOP TRYING TO HUMANIZE YOURSELF! I’VE FORGOTTEN MORE OF THAT FRESHMAN-LEVEL PSYCHOBABBLE THAN YOU’LL EVER KNOW.”
It was the most terrifying voice she’d ever heard. That it was coming from a plump man in eye liner and shag wig made it more frightening, like a kitten opening its mouth and having a cobra’s fangs.
“I’m …sorry Mr Ridgecliff. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“DON’T GET ON MY UNHAPPY SIDE.”
“It was a mistake. I learned from it. I’m sorry.”
“Your contrition is accepted, Miss Alice. Unless you misbehave, I have no plans to hurt you.”
It took several seconds for his words to register. “Wait, what? You don’t plan to …kill me?”
“It’s messy and I wouldn’t get my deposit back on the house.”
“Then why did you abduct me, Mr Ridgecliff?”
“To protect you.”
“Protect me?” Folger asked. “From what?”
He pushed the tape over her mouth. Started away, but turned. He put his lips beside Folger’s ear, his breath warm and wet.
“My past.”
In the morning I met Waltz for breakfast in a coffee joint three blocks from the cop shop. The last of the storm was blowing through and all the vendors on the street had magically produced boxes of umbrellas in two color choices: black and blacker. I closed my new black umbrella and went inside, saw Waltz at a lone table by the window, staring blankly into rain plummeting over a multihued sea of traffic.
I bought coffee and a bialy and we huddled close across the small table. We had both walked out on to a tightrope no wider than a thread. We didn’t know where it went. All we knew was that any fall would be long and irreparably damaging.
“What are we going to do?” he asked. “We didn’t discuss much of that last night.”
“We have to operate on the assumption that Vangie brought Jeremy here to find a madman. That finding the madman would avert a disaster. If the investigation starts closing in on Jeremy, we, we …”
“We fuck it up, temporarily,” Waltz growled. “If that’s going to keep Folger safe, that’s what we do.”
“I’ve got to redirect my investigation toward Vangie. Try and figure out what she fell into.”
“How will you start?”
“By changing my entire mind-set, Shelly. Inverting my prime assumption: that Jeremy is decompensating.”
“He is. You said it a dozen times.”
“Maybe. But the new assumption has to be that Jeremy is as bizarrely rational as always. Though he may not be making sense to us, he’s making perfect sense in his world.”
“I wonder how much sense he made to Evangeline?”
I shrugged. It hit me that now might be the time to ask something that had been on my mind since last night.
“Shelly, the Evangeline Prowse I knew never wanted anyone to call her anything but Vangie, was almost strident about it. She didn’t care for Evangeline. Yet that’s what you call her.”
Waltz turned away and looked out into the rain. It rippled and shifted down the pane, turning the streetscape into a scene from a kaleidoscope filled with shards of light and broken shadows. His finger touched at the window, like he could change the shapes he saw.
“She loved the name Evangeline, actually. Loved its rhythm and poetry, as did I. But she said from the moment she went to Alabama, she would tell everyone that her preference was Vangie. Only one person would ever again call her Evangeline.”
I started to speak but couldn’t find the words. Waltz turned back to the window and that’s how I left him.
I hustled back to the hotel. The stacks of files and information supplied by the NYPD had grown daily. Pads of paper covered the bed. I had sticky notes on one entire wall and had forbidden the housekeeping staff from entering lest some crumb of note-taking be disturbed.
I arm-shoveled pads to the floor, turned on a muted news channel and stared at the ceiling. Vangie’s reason for bringing Jeremy to New York was to avert a disaster. But had she encountered the threat during a visit to New York? Or in her daily work?
How did this connect to Jeremy’s assertion he and Vangie were …what? He’d never used the word lovers, choosing innuendo and bombast, which he often used to disguise a lie.
Was there any connection to the invisible patient? The confidentiality problem to which Traynor had alluded? The break-in at Vangie’s house?
My mind felt like a myopic eye trying to track a thousand comets through the night sky. Facts swirled across suppositions, names danced around places, theories disappeared down black holes. I’d absorbed too much information and it had jumbled. How to make sense of an onslaught of the senseless? I mulled the thought for two minutes, then called the concierge.
“How fast can you get me a roll of butcher’s paper?”
I was intrigued by Cluff’s methodology. Pour your mind on to a white expanse and study the facts in a spatial setting, adding underscores, arrows, impromptu timelines. Decide what’s wheat and chaff and keep unrolling paper. If an idea goes nowhere, you still have a quarter-mile of thinking ahead.
I sat and poured both fact and supposition on to the paper, crossing out, adding, tearing away paper and starting anew.
I transcribed the duality of voices at Jeremy’s murder scenes. I saw my notes on Harry’s conversations with Dr Traynor at the Institute, how my brother’s underlying motive – primal judgment? Was that what they called it? – had never been ascertained by Vangie. She must have ceaselessly attempted to uncover Jeremy’s “Fire that lights all fires” as Traynor also called the seminal moment of transition to murderer.
My pen paused. Was it irrelevant? Of all the cases presented to Vangie over her career, my brother’s would have been one of the most enigmatic. Apparently, however, he had never confessed his original pinion point: What drove him to kill the first woman?
I heard Vangie pick away at the lock as Jeremy jittered and danced, bobbed and weaved, letting Vangie close, but never in the final door. He would have been irritating, frustrating and angering. A total challenge from the day he entered the Institute.
Challenge.
The word echoed in my mind. Why?
I studied trails of words and arrows on my eight-foot-long mural of death. Where had I seen the word? There, in my longhand notes of Harry’s discoveries. Traynor had told Harry that if Vangie had a private client, he or she would have to pose a tremendous challenge. Saturdays, one to three p.m., Vangie had – according to her neighbor – kept hours with a client. But the neighbor had never seen anyone enter or exit.
Maybe there wasn’t a client. Perhaps it was Vangie’s way of grabbing some quiet time to write or take a nap.
Or …
Could it be because the challenging client couldn’t be there? Except perhaps, as an avatar, a symbolic representation.
A photograph on the door.
Had Vangie been searching for Jeremy’s primal judgment? Had she uncovered a transforming moment in his past that had kindled today’s crimes?
I re-read all police reports, moving backward in time, ending with Officer Jim Day’s notes on my father’s murder scene: clear, precise, insightful, with a concluding judgment that stepped outside objective reportage:
“ …the entire scene was drenched in anger and release. It seems some pivotal mental barrier was broached, a threshold crossed, a major decision acted upon.”
Pivotal mental barrier? Day seemed to have discerned a subtext in my brother’s murderous actions. Had Day noticed anything else? And if he had, would he remember?
Was he even alive?
There was nothing I could do from here. Not with any efficiency. I pulled my phone and called Harry. As I dialed, my eyes drifted to the far-left end of the butcher paper, where I had started by encapsulating the details of my father’s death. The details had been supplied by Officer Jim Day, his name in a wide swathe of black ink.
Day. Where my brother’s records started. Where everything started.
“Nautilus,” my partner answered.
“I need to talk to a guy, Harry. He may be hard to find.”