Compulsion (44 page)

Authors: Keith Ablow

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense

BOOK: Compulsion

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He climbed on top of me and drive the knife downward, toward my chest. I caught hold of his wrist again. He was even stronger than I had imagined. The tip of the blade was getting closer.

"
Those that I fight I do not hate
," he said, pushing even harder on the knife. "Yeats. My favorite." His lip curled. "You had no business moving in on us, in the first place. If you had just left us alone..." He put everything he had behind the knife.

The tip came within a foot of my chest. There was only one move I could think to make. If I suddenly stopped struggling, Garret’s momentum would carry him toward me. I could invert his wrist as he fell and bring him down on the blade. I didn’t want to kill him, was horrified by the realization that I would be left the victor in a grotesque Oedipal tale, but I had no choice.

I felt myself getting weaker. The blade couldn’t have been more than six inches from my chest. I had to act. I pushed with everything I had left against Garret, moving the blade a few inches further away, priming him for the fall. I looked into his eyes, reviewing the split-second move that would bury the blade in his chest, severing his aorta.

Just as I was about to let my arms give way, I heard a dull thud. Garret collapsed on the ground, moaning.

I looked up to find Billy standing over me, holding a bat. His face was a mixture of confusion and anger. I wasn't certain whether he was even conscious of what he was doing. He raised the bat over his head, his eyes thinning with rage as he stared back at me. I thought he was about to make sure I didn’t send him off to any psych ward. But then his gaze shifted to Garret. He took a deep breath and reared back.

"Don’t," I yelled. "It’s not his fault."

Billy froze, the bat still cocked over his head.

I saw that his pupils had constricted to pinpoints. A rivulet of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. Adrenaline had to be coursing through his blood vessels. This was the Billy I would have seen the moment he broke into a stranger’s home, set fire to the Bishop estate, or strangled a cat. This was the Billy who had attacked Jason Sanderson’s bullies. He was at one with his demons. "You’re not a killer," I said. "Put the bat down."

He didn’t respond.

I wasn’t even sure he heard me. I pulled my Browning Baby from the front pocket of my jeans. "Billy," I said, my voice shaking. "Put it down. Now."

He took a deep breath and arched his back.

I flicked the gun’s safety to the off position, ready to fire. But I wasn’t ready. Even as Billy snapped his wrists forward, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.

The bat sailed past me and Garret, bounced off a couple trees, landing in some leaves. Billy looked straight at me. "You got to trust someone," he said. Then he reached down and held out his hand for me.

* * *

As Candace comforted Julia, who was heaving with very real tears, the police took Garret away in cuffs.

The officers took some evidence along with them — things I’d found in Garret’s closet before they arrived. Part of that evidence was an album filled with photographs of Julia. She didn’t seem to be modeling, even though she looked model-perfect in every one. It seemed that Garret had taken the pictures without her knowledge. Some of them were benign; Julia walking around the grounds of the Nantucket estate, hailing a cab in Manhattan, riding a horse. Others were provocative: Julia sunbathing and swimming laps in a revealing bikini, pulling off a sweatshirt to reveal a see-through ribbed T-shirt, nursing Brooke. Still others crossed the line into the erotic: Julia sleeping naked, only half-covered by a white sheet. Julia in silhouette behind a steamed shower door. Julia topless, shot through a window of the family’s Manhattan penthouse. Julia locked in an embrace with North Anderson. And this last image, which still sends shivers up my spine and a pang of guilt through my heart: Julia and me kissing, inside my room at the Breakers.

The officers also took a stack of letters hidden deep in Garret’s closet, each smelling of Julia’s perfume, and each on the same heavy stock as the letter Claire Buckley had turned over to North Anderson and me. Garret’s name, written across the front of the envelopes, was in the same delicate script.

The first of the letters I had opened was one from the middle of the stack. It had helped me see how blatantly Julia had romanced her own adoptive son:

Garret,

No one should have to bear what you went through with Darwin today. His insistence that you leave your room and spend hours outdoors shows that he misses the fact that you have great gifts — your poetry chief among them. Even though we are all afraid of Darwin, you should know he is more afraid of you, though he would never admit it. You are becoming the man he could never be — strong, sensitive, intelligent. He sees it. So do I. Women dream about making a life with someone like you. I once did.

Your favorite, Yeats, said it better:

“But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears
.”

—
Julia

April 12, 2001

The tone of every one of the letters was the same. Despondency. Desperation. Seduction.

The officers carried away something else, too. A pair of black, army-style boots. They were the same boots I had glimpsed the night I had fallen outside Mass General, a knife edging toward my portal artery. The heel of the left boot was stained with blue paint that would turn out to match a crosswalk painted near the garage less than an hour before I was attacked.

* * *

The blood types Laura Mossberg had dug up for me supported my theory that Garret and Julia had been lovers and that he was the killer. Julia’s blood type was B negative. The twins’ blood type was O positive. Only a man with A positive or B positive blood could be the father. Billy was A negative. Garret was B positive.

I am certain Garret never realized what genetic testing would later prove conclusively — that Tess and Brooke Bishop were his daughters. But Julia knew it, and that ended her affair with him. She recoiled from him, but kept the children, children she had desperately wanted.

All Garret knew was that Julia had cut him off from her affections after she gave birth to the twins, that her maternal love for them somehow excluded her erotic love for him. Enraged, desperate to restore himself to his rightful place in her life, he became an elegant and opportunistic killer.

Brooke’s murder was simple enough. Billy would be blamed. And when Garret overheard Julia and Darwin arguing about the Nortriptyline, he used the cover of Billy’s break-in to poison Tess, careful not to get his own fingerprints anywhere on the medicine bottle. He had probably already left the photographic negative of North and Julia where his father would find it, look at it, and touch it. then he had retrieved that negative and planted it for us to uncover.

Garret had even given his father an apparent motive — pathological jealousy, the desire for revenge on Julia for cheating with North Anderson. And he had concocted a little physical evidence to go along with it. But the main ingredient in the scheme came as a surprise, even to him. Once Darwin lost control and actually assaulted his wife — no doubt fueled by the double bind of her accusing him of murder, obtaining a restraining order against him, yet carrying on her own affair — he was ripe for the kill. All Garret had to do was offer up eyewitness testimony, then cry a little as daddy went bye-bye. For life.

One thing Garret probably hadn’t expected was my falling for Julia, too. And that, he could not abide. That called for action. A knife in the back. He probably felt like I’d done it to him first.

Epilogue

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Lilly Cunningham’s heroism was, ultimately, her willingness to face her emotional injuries — the pain of being seduced by her grandfather, the self-hatred and hatred of him that it had spawned. Until she could find the courage to do so, she literally reabsorbed her own potential destructiveness, injecting it back into her body — dirtying, infecting, and disfiguring herself, but hurting no one else.

Julia Bishop had no such courage. She failed to confront the feelings of humiliation and worthlessness her father had provoked in her, hiding out behind her beautiful face and beguiling manner, feeding herself erotic conquests. Call it an addiction. Call it sexual sadism. Whatever its label, its effect was to pass on her destructiveness — to Garret.

In the courtroom, after being tried as an adult for murder and attempted murder, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Garret asked for one thing. He wanted Julia to hug him. She did. Now she visits him three times a week at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Cedar Junction.

Julia has never visited Darwin Bishop, but I have. He was sentenced to nine years for Julia’s attempted murder at Mass General. If you believe what he has to say (and I do), he really did think that Billy had killed Brooke. He really did want to bypass the criminal justice system and get him help at Payne Whitney.

Julia still lives with her mother on Martha’s Vineyard. After her relationship with Garret was revealed, she voluntarily surrendered custody of Tess to the Department of Social Services. She was charged with no crime, though Anderson, O’Donnell, and I all believe she suspected Garret was the murderer all along, but kept that suspicion from the police, to keep her secret buried. Proving that she was an accessory after the fact, however, would be nearly impossible. No physical evidence linked her to any crime. And not even District Attorney Harrigan had the stomach for that kind of uphill battle.

As for Claire Buckley, she’s been promoted to Darwin Bishop’s fiancée. She’s waiting for him, in a tidy little Trump Parc studio apartment — all that’s left of Bishop’s wealth. She swears he’ll build a greater fortune than ever when he’s released from prison. She may be right.

It took me three months and calling in a lot of chits, but I finally got Social Services to agree to let Billy crash with me in Chelsea. Permanently. I’m playing single parent now, and liking it, but I don’t have any expectations that Billy will be able to shed all his psychological scars. I do have hope for him, though. And I pray that will help give him enough confidence to walk into the future, instead of the past.

—
THE END
—

Table of Contents

Title page

Chapter 1