Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (28 page)

And to hell with my self-pity. What about Carlo? Carlo married a woman who could best him at arm wrestling. Now he was going to find himself married to a woman with a disease so debilitating he would have to push her around in a wheelchair. I thought of Owen with poor Mallory. Poor Carlo, people would say. Seven years ago he lost his first wife to cancer. Now he’d lose his second wife to some slow wasting neurological disease. He hadn’t signed up for this gig.

Would Carlo take care of me the way Mallory took care of Owen? Would I want him to?

I thought about how only a few hours ago I had been angry with Mallory for telling Carlo that I was afraid I had Parkinson’s. She had her own problems, and she had done what she did out of love. So get over it, Quinn.

It’s funny how I now had both a husband and a friend, and yet until now I had never felt quite so lonely. I wanted Carlo and Gemma-Kate to come home. At the same time I was cheered by imagining her fallen off a cliff, her skull crushed against the rocks below. Maybe there was something to it, that death drive.

I thought about the fury that she had inspired in me, the chaos she had brought into my world, with seeming purpose. I thought about looking into those eyes and seeing nothing, or worse.

But I had no evidence. I needed evidence. Evidence. I sat there repeating the word again and again, my fingers still resting on the keyboard. And then I almost laughed because it was right there in front of me. Looking through her room and all the cupboards in the kitchen was a waste of time. Gemma-Kate had been using my computer. All I had to do was look at the browsing history to find the evidence. When I did, I saw all the words she had searched on.

Bufotenine. The toad poison. Of course.

Some random selections, sibutramine, chloral hydrate, sodium disulfide. Ketamine.

Neurotoxins.

Ah, ethylene glycol. Antifreeze.

I thought again about the pile of books I’d seen in Gemma-Kate’s room. Now I exited from the browsing history I’d found and went back in there, knelt before the pile that she hadn’t bothered to hide. Sure, there was Carlo’s
Man and Superman.
I’d never read it, but I could see from the author’s name that Gemma-Kate had quoted it. Yeah, Gemma-Kate would think she’s superman, all right, and the rest of us were some inferior race. I brushed that book and a couple other philosophy titles aside, and hit the good stuff.

Karch,
Pathology of Drug Abuse

Dean and Powers,
Forensic Toxicology

Jain,
Drug-Induced Neurological Disorders

Caligiuri and Mohammed,
The Neuroscience of Handwriting

What was I, another home experiment like the Pug? Or had I inadvertently done something to make her angry? Was I on my way to becoming another victim? She might have slowed me down, but she hadn’t stopped me yet. It was time to call Sigmund.

Forty–three

Sigmund isn’t his real name. It’s David, David Weiss. But like all of us in law enforcement he had a nickname that said something about him. In his case, he was a psychologist, a behavioral profiler who helped start the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the eighties. We had been chums for as long as I could remember, part of the same training class. I think once or twice we had had sex, which tells you something about how memorable it was, and what was the true nature of our relationship. I loved him, and I love him still. Feelings are not all neat and compartmentalized that way. I wouldn’t like to think about Carlo having the feelings for another woman that I have for this man.

I was always called Stinger. Some may surmise it’s because I’m small but hurt like hell, but it’s less clever than that. When we graduated from the academy we all got drunk, I on that drink popular at the time, made of crème de menthe and brandy. The thought of them still makes me queasy. They were called Stingers, and Stinger stuck.

So that’s how the conversation always started.

“Sig.”

“Stinger.”

No
how are you;
Sigmund is practically one hundred percent cerebral, like talking to Mr. Spock on a boring day.

Sigmund said, “Skype me.”

“Why?”

“There’s something in your voice I can’t quite read. I want to see what you look like.”

And all I had said was his name. The guy knows me. I touched my face and felt the roughness of the scabs peppering the bridge of my nose and forehead. “I can just tell you, I’m not looking too good,” I said.

There was stubborn silence on his end of the line, so with a “You asked for it,” I clicked on the icon and then the little green phone to call him. As I did so, I noted that Peter Salazar’s number was already on the contact list, but I didn’t think much on it because Sig’s face popped onto my screen.

He was a heavy, bearded man whose aging face had shocked me when last year I saw him for the first time in a while. I had grown accustomed to this older version then, and saw that the smaller inset of my own face on the screen was faring much worse than his if you took into account the black and blue patches and scabs.

He said, “That’s better. I’ve never liked phones. There’s always a piece of the other person missing.” He took a few moments to examine my face. “You’re right, you look like hell.”

I felt the first smile of the day tug at the corners of my bruised lips and didn’t mind that it reopened a little cut on the bottom one. Sig could do that to me at the worst of times, and if you told him he was funny he would deny it. I gave him a brief description of the accident so he wouldn’t worry.

“Why did you call?” he asked.

“To hear the voice of sanity,” I admitted.

He stared at me without response, looking like a cross between Freud and Winnie-the-Pooh, waiting until I was ready to talk.

“I need to talk to you about psychopathy,” I said.

“Have you been worried again about where you fall on the empathy scale? I told you if you stopped working you’d start to brood.”

“It’s my niece, Gemma-Kate. Todd and Marylin’s girl. She’s come to stay with us.”

“And how is the bad seed?” Sig knew all about my family from many talks over the years.

“I don’t think we were joking. I think she’s really a psychopath,” I said.

“They’re calling it Antisocial Personality Disorder now.”

“When are they going to get the name right and call it Piece of Shit Syndrome?”

“I admit the term takes away all the mustache-twirling sadism. You have to excuse the psychologists who write the diagnostic manual. They make up these terms because ‘crazy’ lacks elegance. Why, have you been reading again?”

“Don’t fuckin’ patronize me, Sig.”

“It’s just that this business comes in and out of fashion. A couple of years ago every novel had a psychopathic character.”

“Look, I haven’t forgiven you for not trusting my instincts when I told you that agent was abducted. And I was right, wasn’t I? I’m making connections here, Sig, so when I tell you this kid creeps me, pay attention.”

“What has she done?” he asked.

I wasn’t ready to share my suspicions about the dead guy at church, but I told him about my symptoms, and about finding the browsing history on my computer for all kinds of substances I myself hadn’t searched for.

“And you’re certain there’s a link between the browsing and your symptoms?”

“Yes. Because she definitely poisoned one of the Pugs. And the poisons she searched? The substance she used on the Pug was one of them.”

He hitched around in his chair some, a huge reaction for Sigmund. “Well, that is significant. Give me the details.”

“That’s much better, thanks.” I told him how it happened, how I discovered where she had buried the toad, and how she denied it.

“Unmotivated cruelty.” He nodded. “How old is she now?”

“Going on eighteen.”

“It may have taken a longer time than one would assume, but of course this may only be the incident we know of.”

“And then when she was forced to admit it she tried to turn it so that all the trouble was my fault, for what she called overreacting.”

“Fascinating,” Sigmund said.

“I’m glad you think so.”

“The idea of your overreacting, I mean,” he said with a straight face. When I didn’t laugh he went on. “I remember your talking about Gemma-Kate from time to time. Her father was detached from her rearing, her mother too sick to give her much attention. Her grandparents would have been in denial or as a result of their own pathologies wouldn’t see anything wrong with her. And there’s nothing you nor I can do about it. It can be frightening. You say she’s functioning well?”

“Apparently she got her GED early and was getting good enough grades at the community college in Florida so she didn’t have any trouble getting into the university here.”

He nodded again. “Elevated IQ, but lacking empathy. As children, they slip under the radar because we aren’t born empathetic. You don’t expect a small child to feel from another’s point of view. We’re born thinking the whole universe revolves around us. One big lump of egocentricity in the crib. Then, hopefully, we grow and learn to realize it’s not so.”

He went off into his own head again. I tapped on the screen as if it would get his attention back. “Gemma-Kate,” I reminded him.

He was half back with me. “Ah yes. If Gemma-Kate has Antisocial Personality Disorder, and that is a very hesitant if—a psychologist doesn’t make this sort of judgment without even seeing the person suspected, let alone delivering a battery of tests—”

“Just say it, Sigmund, we’re losing daylight.”

“If Gemma-Kate is what you say, you have no more importance than a wet Kleenex. To her you are one of three things: an amusement, useful, or in the way.”

“What are the stats on likely outcomes? Is there any hope for her?”

“Chances are, you’re completely wrong. Or she’s so far on one end of the scale she’ll never go any further than putting back her seat in coach. Maybe she’ll just be annoying in a hundred different little ways that show she thinks the world is hers. You already know that it is the rare confluence of nature, nurture, intelligence, and opportunity that turns Jeffrey Dahmer into a cannibalistic serial killer. More often you get a Bernie Madoff. Or a politician.”

“What should I do?”

“If you’re convinced you’re being harmed, you already know. You do whatever it takes to get her out of the house as quickly as possible.”

“What, thrust her on an unsuspecting world? Hasn’t anyone developed programs for treatment? Carlo would say we should help her, that we’re responsible.”

“The lions count on that from us.”

“What lions?”

Sig sighed with the heaviness of the life we both had known. “Someone once said if a lion could talk we still could not understand him. There would be no words in our language he could use to express his lion-ness. Understanding a psychopath is like talking to a lion. They are untreatable because they’re unable to understand that they are different.

“Stinger, there are creatures that not even your priest can redeem.”

I agreed and made my decision.

Forty–four

Immediately after I disconnected from Sig, Jacquie called, as if she had been waiting in line. Cell phones have made confidential conversations so much easier. She was out of the house, wandering around Sears at the Tucson Mall, which sounded like a depressing thing for a rich woman to do. I told her I knew little more, only that Joe had apparently bragged to Mallory about playing the Choking Game.

“When?” she demanded. It was definitely a demanding kind of “when.” “When did he tell Mallory?”

“I don’t know. One day when he was over reading to Owen.”

“I can’t believe Joe would have told Mallory something and not me.”

“Oh, you know how Mallory is.”

“No. I don’t. How is she?”

“She has a way of eliciting information. I’m sure Joe couldn’t help himself. Besides,” and here I tried to say it so Jacquie wouldn’t get upset, “at a certain age, children tend to start keeping secrets from their parents.”

“Not Joey. Not from me.” Her voice trembled like a woman who’d been cheated on, one part enraged and one part stricken. “I’ve been thinking. You said Joey had alcohol in his system when he died. Who do you think gave it to him?”

“There’s no way to tell that.”

“Do you think it was Mallory Hollinger?”

“No,” I said. “I’m certain she did not.”

“I’m going to go over there and ask her myself.” Something in her voice, something vengeful as that of a woman scorned, made me regret sharing the information with her.

“Just stay out of this and let me keep working.” I wanted to placate her. “I think you’ve been right all along. I think there’s more to discover.” I hoped the affirmation of her suspicions would ease her for the time being until I was able to find out everything.

I had just hung up the phone when the back door opened and Carlo and Gemma-Kate came in, both looking a little flushed from being out in the afternoon heat. The remaining Pug frisked around Carlo, sniffing for her mate but settling for the aroma of the great outdoors. After my sanity check with Weiss, I found myself able to appear relatively calm. “How did it go?” I asked.

“The petroglyphs were still there,” he said. “I think Gemma-Kate was not impressed by ancient graffiti.”

Gemma-Kate didn’t comment. “Can I borrow your computer?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said, pretending to offer the olive branch when what I really thought was that this was one way I could find out what she was up to. The little biologist wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, I thought.

She went into my office.

“How did it go?” I asked again, this time expecting a real answer.

“More importantly, how are you?” Carlo asked.

“So so. I worked a little, and that makes me feel better. Did you have a nice hike and talk? Did you find out how crazy I am? How crazy my family is?”

“We talked some, yes.”

“Are you going to tell me or do you want me to keep asking you questions?”

“We talked about you, actually. She was worried about your thinking you’ve been poisoned, and she asked me what I knew. She said she’s noticed some odd things lately about your behavior, that she found you wandering in the yard in the middle of the night, disoriented. You didn’t tell me about that.”