Blind Rage (40 page)

“Someplace warm during Christmas break,” said the doctor. “Come the summer, a big family vacation. France. Scotland. Denmark. We went to Ireland three times.”

“Four times,” his younger brother corrected him. He looked from one agent to the other. “Can I have a drink? I could really use a drink.”

Garcia shook his head and addressed the doctor. “What went wrong?”

“Time. There was just no time,” said Luke, dragging his hand across his face. “My parents were busy. Father worked sixty hours a week. Mother had her volunteer work. Her charities and antiquing. They didn’t have time for traditional discipline. They were older and less patient, I suppose. They’d waited to have a family. With three high-spirited children, they took the quickest, most effective route to taming them. It was humane, in a sense. It left no marks. The worst you could accuse them of is—I don’t know—lazy parenting.”

“They weren’t sane,” said Matthew. “You of all people should be able to see that now.”

“Shut the hell up,” snapped the doctor.

Matthew turned to Bernadette. “Why would two otherwise fine people resort to water torture as a form of child discipline? They had to be
crazy
.” He looked at his brother with that last word, a term a psychiatrist would find vulgar, and repeated it with a smirk.
“Crazy.”

“How did your parents do it?” asked Garcia.

“It was very civilized,” Luke said flatly. “Everyone had their role. Mother would fill the tub with cold water. Why waste hot water, right? Father was the judge, jury, and executioner. He determined who would receive the dunking and who of the other children would witness it.”

“Witness it?” Garcia asked. “Why a witness?”

Matthew shrugged. “I suppose to lend some sort of validity to it, a modicum of ceremony and propriety.”

“We offenders would put our hands behind us and lean over the side of the tub,” Luke continued. “Our sister usually tied her hair back herself, when she was the one being punished. Then Father would hold our heads under. The length of time we were held, the number of dunkings—all of that was up to Father. The more serious the offense, the worse the punishment. When we were toddlers, I imagine the length of time we were held in the water was minimal. As we got older—”

“Everyone was okay with this?” Garcia interrupted. “I can’t believe your mother went along.”

“Mother had experienced this sort of discipline at the hands of her parents,” said Luke. “She had no lasting physical damage and saw nothing wrong with using it on her own children.”

“You kids didn’t fight back?” asked Bernadette. “Why didn’t you run away or tell someone? You could have gone to a teacher. Another relative. A neighbor.”

Matthew sighed. “It had been a part of the fabric of our family for so long, we thought it was normal. We tolerated the dunkings the way other children accepted spankings or time-outs or getting grounded.”

Bernadette’s eyes narrowed as she addressed her next question to the doctor. “Have you used this on your kids?”

“Never,” he shot back. “I now recognize it as perverted. Abusive.”

“That revelation comes too late to help your sister,” said Garcia.

“You think we don’t beat ourselves up with that thought every day?” Matthew asked.

“Every minute of every day,” said Luke, his voice cracking. He dropped his head and his shoulders started vibrating.

Bernadette ripped a paper towel off a roll and tossed it to the weeping man.

“Save the boohoos for the jury,” said Garcia.

Bernadette shot a curious look at her boss.

“They’re leaving something out of this sob story.” Garcia tipped his head toward the doctor. “Tell her. Go ahead.”

Luke stayed silent.

“One of them killed their father,” Garcia explained. “Pushed him down the stairs. Told the cops the old guy fell.”

Bernadette, leaning her back against the counter, kept her gun on the pair. “Which one did it?”

Luke wiped his eyes while his younger sibling slouched in his seat. Neither man volunteered an answer.

“They’re fighting over who gets credit,” said Garcia.

She smiled tightly. “Sibling rivalry.”

“I did it,” Matthew blurted.

“He’s lying,” said his older brother, bunching the paper towel between his cuffed hands. “It was my call. He’d had a stroke…and I…wanted to put him out of his misery.”

Garcia said, “Who are you kidding? You hated his guts.”

Bernadette walked back and forth between the counter and the table. “Who raised his hand first?”

“Matthew confessed first,” said Garcia.

Bernadette studied the younger brother’s face. He’d never expressed the understanding of his parents’ behavior that his older brother had voiced. “Matthew did it, and the doc stepped in after Little Brother blabbed.”

Luke shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

“We’ll see who passes the polygraph and who doesn’t down at the police station,” said Garcia.

“That brotherly love thing again,” she said. “It’s serving them well—all the way to the jailhouse.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Garcia, seeing lights flashing across the kitchen windows.

Bernadette dropped her gun into her jacket pocket, went to the back door, and opened it. She held up her ID for two uniformed officers planted on the back stoop. “Can you give us a few minutes before you load them?”

The bigger cop looked into the kitchen and saw the two handcuffed men seated at the kitchen table. “Sure. This is your deal.” He glanced over at Garcia and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” said Garcia.

“You’re Ed’s cousin, right?” asked the cop. “Ed in Homicide?”

“You betcha,” said Garcia. “Tell him I’m sending him a package.”

The officer gave Garcia a crooked grin. “We’ll hang out on the back steps.”

“Appreciate it,” said Bernadette, closing the kitchen door.

Seeing the officers jolted Matthew awake, and he was suddenly twitching in his seat. “Kyra Klein and the drownings in the river, we had nothing to do with those.” He nodded toward Garcia. “He says we did, but we didn’t.”

The horrific family history that the brothers had recounted at the kitchen table, paired with the April death of their sister, had to have some association with the murders. There was too much to be a coincidence. “Even if you didn’t do it, you know who did,” Bernadette told Matthew.

While the younger brother had touched back down to reality, his older sibling was drifting off. Drumming his fingers on top of the kitchen table, the doctor said in an eerily mechanical voice, “This is an early Victorian mahogany dining table. The piece is supported on beautifully proportioned fluted legs and came with two extra leaves, allowing it to extend to a length of nearly ten feet. It came with eight matching chairs, all but one with the original upholstery. I remember the day she picked up the set, at a well-attended auction outside of Chicago.”

“Your mother?” asked Garcia.

“The instant she laid her eyes on it, she had to have it. She called home so excited. She beat out two other bidders.” Luke meshed his fingers together, as if praying. “That same day my sister suffered a fall at the nursing home. Someone had dropped her during a bed transfer, breaking both her legs. When we told our mother, she acted as if we’d bothered her with some minor annoyance. We’d chipped a vase. The neighbor’s dog had excavated one of her rosebushes.”

“Doctor, please,” said Bernadette. “We need your help.”

“How?” asked Matthew. “How can he help? Tell us.”

The younger brother sounded sincere. Bernadette pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from the pair. “I believe someone close to your sister snapped when she died. He’s drowning these girls as some sort of—I don’t know—reenactment or something.”

“An old boyfriend?” asked Garcia.

Luke shook his head.

“Could I have a drink…of water at least,” Matthew croaked.

Bernadette got up, took down a glass from a cupboard, and went to the refrigerator. As she pressed the glass into the water dispenser, she scrutinized the Catholic mosaic decorating the front of the refrigerator. Handmade magnets in the shapes of crosses and flowers, undoubtedly produced by the doctor’s young daughters, held up church bulletins, fall fest raffle tickets, and Sunday school artwork.

Bernadette eyed one of the rare magnets not fabricated by a child’s fingers. “What’s this number?”

“What?” asked Luke.

She pulled the glass out of the dispenser and plucked the red octagon off the fridge. She set the water in front of Matthew and the magnet in front of his brother.

“My Suicide Stop Line,” Luke mumbled.

“You call if you have thoughts of suicide?” she asked.

“Yes.” He lifted his head. “Why?”

“Professor Wakefielder has been passing similar stickers out. A couple of the dead girls had this number. There’s the intersection between the prof and Dr. VonHader.” She walked around the kitchen table. “Who staffs the hotline?”

“Volunteers,” Matthew answered. “I’ve done it a few times.”

“Who else?”

“A slew of people,” answered Luke.

Garcia asked, “Where are you going with this?”

Bernadette said, “Do any of the volunteers also work in your office?”

“Several,” said Luke, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“Do any know the real story behind your sister’s institutionalization?”

“What?” Matthew blurted.

“It would have to be someone who knew how she first landed in the nursing home,” said Bernadette. “Who else knew about the…water discipline?”

“No one else,” said Matthew. “She was taking a bath by herself. Somehow went under. That was the story. We stuck to it all those years, even after Mother and Father passed away. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t the truth, we’d been saying it for so long.”

“You never told anyone else?” asked Garcia.

“We confided in no one,” Luke offered. “We trusted no one. It was only the two of us, and…Ruth.”

Bernadette noticed it was the first time anyone in the kitchen had uttered the dead woman’s name, and the word seemed to hang in the air like a cloud left behind by a smoker.
Ruth.
She was dead, as were so many other women. Shelby. Kyra. Corrine. Monica. Alice. Judith. Laurel. Heidi. She had no idea if Zoe belonged on the same list. Now another one was out there, waiting to be rescued—or buried. Regina.

“Think,” Bernadette said impatiently. “Perhaps someone overheard the two of you talking about Ruth. Someone at your office who also worked on the help line. Maybe you didn’t know they heard, but this person took a sudden interest in your sister. Asked questions. Even started visiting her in the nursing home.”

“Oh, God,” blurted Luke.

“What?” Garcia and Bernadette asked in unison.

“He had a crush on her,” Luke said. “Always had a crush on her, since they were kids.”

“Who?” Bernadette asked.

“But he never saw or heard anything,” Matthew said to his older brother.

Luke, his voice tremulous, added: “I caught him in the hall once, after one of her punishments. A bad one. He’d come into the kitchen and wandered upstairs. I didn’t think he saw anything. But his face, it was euphoric.”

“Is that when he started coming over more?” Matthew asked him.

“Yes,” Luke said numbly.

Garcia frowned at Bernadette. “Who are they—”

She held up her hand to silence her boss. The brothers were immersed in a trancelike exchange with each other. An outsider interrupting with a question might break the spell. Make them clam up.

Matthew, nodding slowly, said, “I remember. Suddenly, he was hanging around more. Our new best friend. Always walking in like he owned the place.”

Luke replied, “Mother and Father didn’t mind because both his parents were patients. Some sort of post-loss depression. They went to our church, too. Nice family.”

“Bullshit,” said Matthew. “The Araignees were as fucked up as our parents. Don’t you remember how they beat him? He’d come over with welts and bruises.”

“He got work as an aide at the nursing home,” said Luke. “He was always hanging around her room, even on his days off. I thought he was being a friend. After she died, he lost interest in the job. Came to work in my office.”

“Told you there was something wrong with him, but you trusted him because he plays golf and listens to public radio.” Matthew sneered at his older sibling. “You had him answering your phones, talking to those needy women, working on your precious suicide line.”

“I didn’t know,” Luke rasped.

Matthew snarled into his brother’s ear: “You’ve been his goddamn dating service.”

“Oh my God,” said Bernadette. It made sense.

“What?” asked Garcia, looking from Bernadette to the two handcuffed men. “Who are they talking about?”

“Wasn’t enough you hooked him up with the women in town here,” Matthew sneered. “You had to send him across state lines, to those classes in Wisconsin. How many girls there do you suppose he—”