Delirious (27 page)

His singular mission was to retrace his steps that day. Perhaps some memory of his committing the crime would come back to him. At least that would bring proof of his guilt and provide some closure
to this nightmare. Living with doubt, he now believed, was a far worse fate than confronting the truth.

“I came back to this house after my brother, Joe, showed me a note,” Charlie began.

“What note?” Goodkin asked.

“You didn’t tell me about a note, Charlie,” Randal said.

“Doesn’t matter now,” Charlie said. “The note Joe showed me said, ‘One down. Three to go.’ It was in my handwriting.”

“What does that mean?” Goodkin asked.

“At the time I believed it meant that Rudy Gomes was dead and that the others on this kill list that I found in my brother’s house would soon follow,” Charlie explained.

“Kill list?” Randal asked.

Charlie nodded. “Apparently I wrote a list, which I titled ‘My Kill List.’ On it, I put the names of the people who fired me from Solu-Cent. Rudy was one. My boss, Simon Mackenzie, another. And the CEO himself, Leon Yardley, the third.”

“Apparently?” Randal asked. “You don’t remember writing that list?”

“There’s a lot I don’t remember these days, Randal,” Charlie said.

“But you said there were four names,” Goodkin said. “Who’s the fourth?”

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. The note just said that it’s a surprise.”

They had stopped at the entrance to the apartment. Goodkin kept his focus on Charlie, looking for signs of deceit.

“But you wrote the list,” Goodkin said. “So you tell me. Who is the surprise victim?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie answered. “Like I said, I don’t even remember writing the list.”

“Where is the list?” Goodkin asked.

Charlie paused. He stared at the door to the apartment. All he wanted to do was to get inside and end this charade once and for all. If he was a monster, as the evidence seemed to indicate, then the author of the list, let alone its whereabouts, was of little consequence.

“I don’t know where the list is anymore,” Charlie said. He made no attempt to avoid being recorded. “But it doesn’t matter, does it?”
he asked. “I wrote it. It was penned in my hand, and Rudy’s dead. What else is there?”

“The evidence,” Randal said, almost to himself.

“Okay then,” Goodkin said. “Let’s go have a look at this body.”

Goodkin nodded to an officer standing behind him. The officer moved toward the door. Using a set of tools Charlie had never seen before, the entry specialist had the door open in seconds. Goodkin slipped on a set of gloves to protect the crime scene and pushed open the door with his hands.

“Don’t touch a thing. Got it?” Goodkin said. “Now, talk to me.”

“I came here in the morning,” Charlie began.

“Time?”

“Eleven o’clock. Thereabouts,” Charlie said. “The door was open.”

“How is it locked now?”

At this Charlie paused. “I … I don’t know,” he said.

They entered the hallway. The apartment was dark, until Goodkin turned on a hallway light.

“What next?”

“I first looked into the living room,” Charlie said. His mind was racing to retrace his steps from that day.

“Any sign of struggle?” Goodkin asked. “Did you see anything unusual?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Then what?” Goodkin prodded.

“Then I walked down the hall toward the bedroom. The layout was familiar to me. It’s similar to a lot of the homes in Waltham. Old two-story houses. Like the one I grew up in,” Charlie said.

“And?”

“And I stopped at the bathroom door. I heard running water. I opened the door to look inside.”

Randal and Goodkin followed close behind as Charlie made his way down the narrow hallway, stopping in front of the bathroom door, halfway to the bedroom at the other end of the hall.

“What next?” Goodkin asked, keeping the recorder close to Charlie.

“I opened the bathroom door. Steam spilled out into the hallway,” Charlie answered, covering his eyes with his hands to better visualize every detail. “I went inside the bathroom. It took a moment for the
steam to clear. The shower was running. I pulled back the shower curtain, and that’s when I saw the body.”

Goodkin pushed open the bathroom door and stepped inside. The room was dark, and Goodkin fumbled a moment for the light switch on the inside wall.

Entering the bathroom, the first thing Charlie noticed was what wasn’t there. There was no moisture and no smell of decay. He had never turned off the water. It should have been running, same as he had left it.

The shower curtain was pulled across the tub, but he didn’t remember pulling it closed before he left. Perhaps he had. The uncertainty was more than a little troubling.

“I don’t smell a dead person,” Goodkin said in a mocking singsong tone. He ran his hands across the tiled wall and held his fingers close to his face to examine them. “You said the shower was running when you left?”

“It was,” Charlie said.

“These walls are pretty dry, Giles. Can you explain?”

“No. I can’t.” Charlie looked at the shower curtain. A sinking, consuming fear began roiling inside him.

He watched as Goodkin walked over to the tub. Goodkin grabbed hold of the shower curtain and pulled it away with flair. What they saw stunned everyone in the room. Goodkin stared at the tub for several seconds. He rubbed at the stubble of his nascent beard before turning to Charlie.

“Can you explain this?” he asked.

Charlie stared at the tub. His mouth was dry, sweat beading on his brow, his heart thumping in his chest.

“Charlie, what is happening?” Randal asked through clenched teeth.

“I don’t … I don’t know …,” Charlie said.

Goodkin dropped down to his knees and put his head in the tub. Charlie could hear him take in a deep breath.

“Well, he’s tidy. I’ll give him that,” Goodkin said.

“This makes no sense,” Charlie said. “Rudy was there.”

“Well, from what I’m seeing,” Goodkin said, “this is a tub. Where is the body?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said, with a voice so weak, he might have
been talking to himself. “The body was there. His throat was cut open. I saw it with my own eyes.”

The three stared at the empty tub for what felt like an eternity.

“No body, Charlie. No crime. Crazy is as crazy does, I guess. Marshall!” Goodkin barked.

A young deputy emerged from the hallway and faced his boss. He stood at attention, ready to receive his orders.

“Try to get in touch with the landlord of this place and explain what we’ve done to his home without a warrant,” Goodkin said.

“And what should I say?” Officer Marshall Winters asked.

“I don’t know,” Goodkin said. “Some mental patient is having delusions about his tenant. You figure it out.” Goodkin turned to Randal. “Randal, I’m going to do the best I can to forget about this incident. But it won’t be easy.”

Charlie couldn’t take his eyes off the empty tub. Not a bloodstain was to be found. Goodkin had called for a black light, but Charlie knew it was pointless. The most sensitive light equipment available would show no signs of Rudy Gomes’s death. The tub was empty. There was no body here or anywhere in the apartment.

As the detectives concluded their search of the bathroom, Charlie’s knees buckled under the weight of the moment. The room spun and darkened. Charlie fell onto the cold tile bathroom floor. For an instant, right before he passed out, Charlie felt enveloped by a force so foreign and mysterious to him that he could only interpret it as madness.

C
harlie sat just outside the common area, on a scuffed wooden chair splashed with coffee stains, and waited. It was Sunday morning, and Charlie soon would be legally free to leave Walderman and resume his life. Just thirty-six hours ago Charlie had left Gomes’s place without seeing Gomes’s body. The question on his mind now was if he was really ready to leave.

Charlie’s chair was opposite the main entrance, giving him an unobstructed view of the front door. He cursed the lack of any clocks on the walls and decided it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since he’d last asked a nurse the time.

Where was he? Charlie fretted.

Each second that passed fueled the anxiety growing within. From his perch upon the chair, the only thing that helped take his mind off his friend’s delay was watching Maliek, the reigning board game champion of Walderman, win game after game of checkers and backgammon. Maliek was young, athletic, and constantly grinning. If only he had his Gibson, Charlie lamented. That would kill the time.

A few patients tried to talk to him, but Charlie repaid their friendliness with silence. Unless it was Randal, bringing with him news of Rudy Gomes’s whereabouts, nothing else mattered. As a favor, Randal had promised to dig some into the Gomes mystery using whatever resources were available to him from the FBI. Charlie’s only hope now was that Randal would come up with something that might bring credibility to his original story. The other possibility, equally frightening, was the one Chief Sandy Goodkin had already
concluded to be true. Charles Giles, software entrepreneur and multimillionaire businessman, was clinically insane.

The entrance door buzzer sounded and startled Charlie. Given the frequency with which the buzzer went off, he should have grown accustomed to the sound of the security door unlocking. But it was always jarring—a shocking reminder of his current situation.

Charlie’s hopes dimmed the moment Randal entered the room. The grave expression on Randal’s face said it all. He didn’t bother to greet Charlie with a perfunctory embrace or even a handshake hello. His head shake was almost imperceptible, but it felt like a punch to Charlie’s gut.

“Where can we go to talk?” he asked.

Can this get worse?
Charlie thought.

“Follow me,” Charlie said.

He led Randal through a door next to the nurses’ station and into the large meeting room where days before Charlie had attended his first group therapy session. The chairs were set up in a semicircle for the next session, but that wouldn’t be for hours, usually an hour or two after lunch. Randal sat in one of the chairs, his hands folded in his lap. Charlie was far too nervous to sit and opted instead to pace.

“Rudy Gomes resigned from SoluCent three days ago,” Randal began.

“Resigned? What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

“I mean he quit. He sent a letter of resignation via e-mail. The day you allegedly say you saw him dead.”

“Don’t be patronizing, Randal. I don’t need that right now. I know what I saw in that apartment. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

“I agree. Especially since his e-mail came hours after you discovered his body in the bathtub.”

“But I know Rudy. I know his work ethic and what that job meant to him. He wouldn’t just do that. Especially not by e-mail. That wasn’t his style.”

“Well, according to our computer forensic guys, it was. We traced the e-mail message back to Rudy’s home computer. Your IT guy was cooperative as well.”

“Lawrence?”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “Lawrence. That sounds familiar.”

Charlie thought back to the day he had asked Lawrence for a report on any missing badges in exchange for Red Sox tickets. For a moment he wondered what, if anything, that trace would have unearthed. Perhaps enough to free him—or perhaps, as Randal’s expression suggested, nothing.

“How can you be certain it was him?”

“We ran a trace on the IP and had it verified with Verizon. The e-mail came from Randal’s apartment. He has a static Internet address, so we’re sure of it.”

“But that doesn’t prove anything,” Charlie said. “Anyone could have done that.”

“True. But not anyone could buy a ticket to the Bahamas. And stay at a Club Med, and use their credit cards to buy
mojitos
and lingerie.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying your man Rudy Gomes is alive and well and vacationing at Club Med.”

“But how do you know it’s him?”

“We have airport records that show tickets purchased by him and verified by flight security through ID checks. There are credit card receipts for a bunch of mundane purchases, water, newspapers, a cheeseburger at the airport T.G.I. Friday’s, all leaving a trail that takes him from Logan Airport to Bimini.” Randal looked at the floor in defeat and softly added, “It’s time you started to face this, Charlie.”

“Face what? I know what I saw, Randal,” Charlie said. “I mean, someone could have broken into his apartment, stolen his wallet. The same person who killed him!”

“Don’t make me do this, Charlie.”

“Do what?”

Randal reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a small tape recorder, similar to the one Goodkin had shoved in his face the night before.

“What’s that for?” Charlie asked.

“I called the Club Med resort where Gomes is registered. I did it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me even after giving you this mountain of proof. How well do you know Rudy Gomes?” Randal asked.

“I know him well enough. Why?”

“Would you recognize his voice?”

“I suppose,” Charlie said.

Randal pressed PLAY on the recorder. A soft hiss preceded Randal’s taped voice.

“This is Special Agent Randal Egan with the FBI, Boston field office. Who am I speaking with?”

“What’s this about?”

A chill shot down Charlie’s spine. The voice was unmistakable.

“I’m investigating a disappearance of an individual from Arlington, Massachusetts. Do you know a Mr. Rudy Gomes?”

The tape recording was distorted from a chortling laugh.

“Know him? Yeah, I know him,” the voice said.

Charlie had now taken a seat and was listening dejectedly to the tape, his face buried in his hands, his body convulsing as he tried to slow his breathing and keep from hyperventilating. The recording continued to play.

“Sir, do you mind my asking how you know Mr. Gomes and if you have seen him lately?”

“Not a problem, Agent Egan,” the voice said. “I just look in a mirror and see him. In fact, I’m looking in a mirror right now and seeing him right now.”

“How is that?” Randal’s recorded voice asked.