Burn 2 (3 page)

He pauses to contemplate this. “Yes, very.”

“What happened next?”

His Adam’s apple moves
like a mouse down his long throat. He has a very graceful neck, she notices.

“
She asked me to enter the playroom. And so I did. I was naked by then.”

“Completely naked?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Are you sure?”

“What difference does it make whether or not I’m completely naked?”

Pat regards his stormy green eyes. “Because
the police found a bracelet on the floor of the corridor outside the playroom. It is made out of little shells. Is it yours?”

He flinches for a moment. His complexion goes deathly pale.

“Yes,” he whispers.

Good. At least he is not attempting to lie, she thinks.

So far.

“Is that how they fingered me?” he demands. “It could be anyone’s bracelet. It was a gift from Abby. It doesn’t have my initials on it or anything.”

“You are right. It could be anyone’s bracelet. But the doorman noticed you wearing it when you came in.”

The dawning of realization spreads across his face.

“That damned doorman,” he says with feeling.

“He was also the one who told the police that you were the only visitor
on the book for Rachel Krieg that night.”

Devon frowns.
“The elevator security codes were out of commission. Horsch had to punch me in with an override code.”

That could be significant, Pat thinks as she makes a notation in her case files.

“What did you do in the playroom?”

He squirms. “You want details?”

“Details can be important.” She is not going to spare him over this, particularly since he will be grilled by the police later in this very room.

“She strung me on one of her racks.
Then she spanked me.”

“On your ass?”

He flushes with the intimate questioning. “Yes.”

“With what?”

“A paddle.”

“Do you still have the marks on your ass cheeks?”

“They are fading, I think. I don’t know. I haven’t looked.”

“Did the police strip search you when you came in?”

“Only for sharp objects and such. They confiscated everything in my pockets.”

“You will be subject to a medical examination later on.”

He nods tersely. “Abby saw the marks.”

“Good. At least if they are no longer there, she can corroborate with this.”

“Is this significant?”

“It may be.
Someone left those marks on you, and it may show that Rachel was alive when you went up to her apartment. Then again, it could be a motive for you to kill her.”

He is aghast. “Kill her? For beating me? It is part of the sex play.”

“The police don’t always see things in black and white. To them, getting spanked is a good motive as any for you to kill Rachel Krieg.”

He shudders. “I didn’t kill her.”

“Then it’s up to us to prove that you didn’t. So what happened after the spanking?”

“She
unshackled me from the rack . . . and then we had sex.”

“Where?”

“In her bedroom. On the bed.”

“Did you use a condom?”

“Yes. I always use a condom.”

“What happened after?”

His eyes glaze over a bit. She stares at him.

He says, “S-she
asked me to go.”

“Go?”

“Yes. Our session was over. So I had to leave.”

“Did she say anything else? Did she pay you?”

“She always pays me upfront.” He racks his brains to think. “No, she didn’t say anything else. She just wanted me to leave.”

“Do you always leave after a session with her or do you spend the night?”

“Sometimes I spend the night, and other times I don’t. That night was one of the times that I didn’t.”

“Why did she want you to leave?”
Pat senses there is something more to the fact that Rachel Krieg wanted Devon to leave.

Devon does not say anything.

“Devon, you have to tell me everything, as difficult as it may be.”

He sighs.
“She wanted . . . something of me that I wasn’t ready to give.”

This is huge, Pat suspects.

“What is it?”

“I don’t want you to tell the police. Or Abby either.”

Pat raises her eyebrows.

Abby’s gaze keeps going to the doorway.
When she sees Devon coming through it together with Patricia Chalmers, she leaps to her feet. Unmindful of all the police officers and their arrested perps around her, she throws herself into Devon’s arms.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he exclaims,
hugging her tightly back. He buries his face in her hair and smells her neck. “I missed you.”

“I missed you so much,” she says.

“Did you bail me out?”

“Yeah.”

Pat stands there patiently, waiting for them to get their reunion over and done with. Abby finally lets go of Devon and turns to her.

“Thank you,” she says simply.

“It isn’t over. Far from it,” Pat says. “We just posted bail, but there’s a lot more to come.”

“I know.”

“How much was the bail?” Devon says to Abby. “I don’t know how long it will take, but I’ll pay you back.”

You can’t pay me back, she thinks. It’s too much.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Don’t think about it. We’ll concentrate on proving you innocent.”

“I thought the police were working on it.”

I don’t trust the police to do their best for you, Abby wants to say, but she doesn’t think it would be a good idea to say it out loud in this place.

“Come on,” she says, putting her arm around Devon’s waist. “Let’s get you home.”

Home is like the arms of an old friend. His easels and canvasses greet him, buffed with the slightly aromatic smell of paints and turpentine. He inhales it sharply, reveling in it. He is just so glad he can come home again. There were times in that cell when he thought he would never be able to step outside on a sidewalk and be free again to come and go as he pleases.

Once they
close the door on the curious neighbors, who are once more gathering at their doorways to watch the now famous criminal come back to his abode, Abby puts her hand on Devon’s cheek. She peers into his eyes.

“Tell me,” she says softly. “T
ell me everything that happened.”

He
hesitates.

“Let’s sit down on the couch,” she urges him.

They seat themselves on the very sofa upon which she has posed upon for him. The familiarity of the soft leather seat allows him to let his guard down.

And so he
plows on. He tells her everything that happened that night with Rachel Krieg, leaving out only one significant detail. An extremely significant detail. But it was important to the memory of Rachel Krieg that he not disclose it.
Yet
. He doesn’t think it’s pertinent to the case.

He tells her about Patricia Chalmers, and the interrogation with the police officers that follow, where he told them everything he knew.
Excepting one.

It was t
he final fight he had with Rachel Krieg.

He doesn’t fight with his clients, but she pushed him over the edge when he said ‘No’ to her.
She called him all sorts of names. One of them was reminiscent of something his mother used to call him when he was a kid.

That was why he flipped.

He remembers that day long ago in the tenements. His mother was bathing in the one bathroom they had. She worked as fryer in a neighborhood restaurant. Not a cook, but a fryer, because that was what she did all day – make fries and fritters and battered fish pieces. Sometimes the oil would spatter her hands, and that was why her hardened skin was full of healed blisters.

“Devon?” The shout came from the bathroom.

He looked up, afraid. He was sketching on his pad, a gift from the kindly old neighbor in the apartment next door because she saw how much he liked to draw. If he didn’t respond fast enough to his mother, she would cuff him in the ear. Or worse. Sometimes, she would take up a ladle and hit him hard.

“Coming!” He tried to make his voice as loud as possible so that she could hear him from behind the locked bathroom door.

He scampered to the bathroom. “I’m here,” he called out.

“
I’m out of shampoo. Go and get me another bottle from the closet in my room.”

Her closet.

He was terrified of what was in her closet. He squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them again. His little body felt flushed and warm, like he was running a fever.

No, not the closet
, he whispered to himself.

“Well, are you getting it?” his mother demanded. “My hair is already wet. Don’t make me come out and
get it myself.”

The warning resounded in his ears. He gulped.

“I won’t, Mom. I’ll get it.”

He raced to her bedroom, and stopped outside the doorway. The bedroom was
untidy. His mother’s clothes were strewn everywhere on the bed and on the floor. Piles of dirty clothing inhabited the overflowing laundry basket. A man’s pants were left on the back of a chair – a vestige of a weekend tryst.

He paused outside the closet. One of the doors was open,
and he could see his mother’s clothes hanging inside. The ones which had fallen down were scattered on the closet floor, and it was dark and musty in there. He knew his fear was irrational, and yet he knew he must not fail his mother. She would cuff him for his irrationality.

The shampoos and soaps were in the other closet. The one whose door was ominously closed. He remembered the nightmares he had about this particular closet. When he was three, his mother shut him in there because he wouldn’
t stop crying. He had screamed and screamed his lungs out inside that dark space where there were spiders and cobwebs and lions and monsters and whatever his overwrought imagination would throw at him. But his mother had gone to work and nobody but the kindly old neighbor had heard him.

And now, he was forced to get the shampoo bottle from
this closet again.

His heart started to
drum a painful staccato against his ribs. He had a very thin chest in those days, hardly sprung at all because he ate so little.

I can do this,
he willed himself.

He had to overcome his demons about the closet and what was in there.

His hand reached for the door knob. He paused, electricity running through his veins at the subtle touch of the knob’s cold metal.

There are monsters in there
.

--
monsters monsters monsters
–

He opened the door.

“Devon?” He could hear his mother’s faint voice calling him. “What’re you doing, you little fucker?”

Oh, oh,
he had to hurry or she would be majorly mad.

The closet space yawned open, its interior dark and forbidding. There was the little crawl space
which was half his current height in which he used to curl himself, sobbing until his throat hurt and his breath was hot and painful in his windpipes. There was the terror of darkness, and the smell of the cheap wooden interior, musty with dust mites and the thick fabric of unused clothes.

And he was petrified. Frozen into a
stillness like the one he was in when he saw his father walk out of the front door for the last time and never come back. He saw shapes in the blackness – thick, ropy, congealed shapes that were darker than dark, reaching out for him with their tentacles, smothering him, choking him –

“What are you doing, you little fucker?”

He swiveled his head in panic. His mother was standing there, dripping in her towel, her wet hair plastered to her scalp. Her eyes shot green fire. She had been a good-looking woman once, but now she was just ravaged by hard work and life.

He cried out as her hand came up and descended –

Little fucker.

“Devon.”

The voice is sweet and steady in his present state. Melodious, and yet oddly commanding.

“Devon, look at me.”

He looks, and sees the dark, whirling eyes of Abby, gazing earnestly at him from their depths. A knot forms in his stomach, and he feels its muscles clench.

“Don’t think so much,” Abby says, her eyes shining with tears.

His heart constricts as he leans over and presses his lips against hers. He tastes her, and she opens her mouth slightly to let his tongue slide in. A few salty tears fall onto his lips.