If Looks Could Kill (41 page)

Mac heaved another sigh. "Count on her lawyer," he suggested. "My job is to conduct an impartial investigation."

"But you know she couldn't have done it!"

Mac stared her down on that one. "No one knows that, Sue. Find me some way somebody else could have gotten in that house without JayCee seeing them, and I'll be right at the barricades with the rest of you rebels."

Still Sue didn't move. "Come on, Mac," she pleaded, eyes wide and moist. "Tell me you don't believe what she's saying."

Mac considered the little woman before him. Loyal to a fault, pragmatic and fierce. He wanted to be able to agree with her. More than he'd ever have thought only a week ago. Shit, he'd come to Pyrite for some peace and quiet, and one gawky, opinionated, bull-headed woman had kept him awake for the last three nights. And he didn't see how the hell he was going to get to sleep any time soon.

"I don't want to," was all he was able to admit. "I don't know what else to tell you."

Sue hadn't been witness to that harrowing scene in the jail. She hadn't seen Chris Jackson screaming and spitting. She hadn't read the disjointed, rambling fifteen-year-old story on those crumpled yellow pages. But then, Mac had, and he still wanted to give Chris the benefit of the doubt. Go figure.

* * *

"God, I hate those tests," Chris admitted, munching on an apple. "They're a pain in the ass. And, considering the fact that I have a psych minor and know how to administer every one, kind of worthless."

Mac sat across the table from her in the nurse's conference room, the recorder between them and John lounging on a chair by the door leafing through
American Journal of Nursing.

"Are you saying you skewed the results?" Mac asked.

Chris shot him a grin and hoped it didn't look quite as out of control as she felt. She was ready to explode, to run screaming down the halls. Hours of innocuous questions from the bland, passive psychiatrist ("How do you feel about that, Ms. Jackson?" "Go with that, Ms. Jackson") whose specialty was alcohol abuse, suffering every test from the Minnesota Multiple Personality to good old Rorschach, blander food, and four immobile, intractable walls had not improved her mood. Chris had lived this life once. She just couldn't do it again.

Her only victory had been convincing Tom to prevent anybody from ordering sedation for her. That would have been the last straw. The staff still tiptoed around her, and the guards, most of whom she'd researched with, had smiled uncomfortably.

And Chris had spent her time staring at the arc of the sun and washing her hands to get Dinah's blood off. To get all the blood off.

"I have a question," she said, apple in hand. She didn't see the crescents her nails made in the wine-red skin or the tremor in her hands. "You read it?" She made a vague motion to the envelope that sat alongside the recorder.

"I read it."

She overcame an urge to waste a look on John. This wasn't something she could share. Chris knew John, though. No one in town would hear from him.

They'd hear from the trial.

She fought a new surge of nausea.

"The murder happened the same way, didn't it?"

Mac was too professional to hedge the question. "As the one in the old story? It mimicked the scene the writer was doing at that moment. Yeah."

Chris nodded, the certainty crowding her throat, suffocating her. "Then I must have done it."

"Why?"

She looked up at him, not sure what to expect. Chris saw the consummate cop, the man who'd tried four times to convince her to get Brenda here for the interview, who'd brought John with him because he'd trusted John's discretion. The man who was giving her more chances than she was herself.

"Because I've kept that story locked away in safe deposit boxes since I wrote it. I'm the only one who's ever seen it."

"You're sure."

That brought her to the point of the interview. The truth she'd never shared with a soul since changing her name so long ago.

"I think so. I wrote that story as therapy when I was incarcerated in Fulton Hospital. Since then it's been locked away." She tried to flash a grin, but she knew how frightened it looked. "Kind of a personal talisman, ya know? The end and the beginning. Death and resurrection. I didn't consider it as any part of the pattern, because it wasn't a book. I'd never had it anywhere around where somebody could have seen it. But then, I found myself missing things, seeing things and... and hearing things.... And then, Dinah. Just like in that story."

"You said you didn't think anyone else had ever seen that story. You're not sure?"

Chris kept her gaze on the chipped imitation wood surface of the table. Somebody had actually scratched, "For a good time and a better enema, call 454-4444." She sucked in a deep breath to quell the fires of panic. To hold herself together long enough to admit the truth. She refused to look up for a reaction to her words.

"The treatment of choice at that time in history was drugs and electroshock therapy. Cure whatever ails you and all that. Problem was, it also destroyed short-term memory. I... I can only remember scattered images of my time at Fulton."

"What images?"

He was peeking into her soul now, into places Chris had never wanted anyone to see. She clutched onto that apple so tightly it began to weep juice. "Darkness, leather restraints. Voices. Constant babbling and crying. People wandering around, kind of like slow-motion bumper cars. Emotions, mostly. Fear, loneliness, confusion. A feeling of being smothered. One person."

"One person?"

She looked up then, surprised at her own words. At the words she hadn't expected to come up with. "I don't know. Someone... staring. Watching. Maybe a nurse. I can't really remember. I just have this vague... image of them, always in the periphery. I just thought of them as The Watcher. I hadn't thought about it in a long time." Chris felt herself curl in tighter and tighter, her arms wrapped around the bright blue-and-green sweatsuit they'd let her wear. "I think The Watcher was real. I'm not sure."

"What was the treatment for?" Mac asked, his voice unaccountably gentle for a cop in interrogation.

Chris wanted to cry, and she hadn't done that in fifteen years. Even when she'd seen Dinah lying on her couch. Even when she'd suspected that it was all coming back again, no matter what the doctors had said.

"Acute psychotic break," she whispered, rocking a little to ease the terrible grief in her chest. The fresh surge of guilt. "My mother said it was my judgment."

"Judgment for what?"

Chris closed her eyes and saw darkness. Even so, she kept them closed. "Becoming pregnant. I was fourteen."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. I can't remember. I can't remember anything of my pregnancy at all. The doctors said I probably never will. That after hearing how evil I was all those years, I evidently set out to prove my parents right. When I was successful, I couldn't cope with my parents' reaction, so I just denied the whole thing. Disassociated from reality. In my mind, nothing was wrong."

"And that's why you were at Fulton?" Mac asked. "For your break?"

Chris knew that John was watching her. She couldn't open her eye on either of them. "Kind of."

"Why, then, Chris?" Mac asked, his voice so calm, so low, the way Chris wished a psychiatrist's voice really sounded. "Fulton is a hospital for the criminally insane."

Chris realized that if she didn't face Mac with the answer, she'd never survive. Even if she'd done what she'd feared. Even if she really was suffering the punishment that never stopped for her sins, for her rebellion and her disobedience to God and father. Even if, in the end, she was condemned to return to Fulton.

So she opened her eyes, and she pulled her arms away, and she straightened. And fought the urge to sob. "For murdering my daughter," she said.

Chapter 18

Somewhere outside the room, the hospital paging system was announcing the end of visiting hours. People passed by, voices and footsteps muffled and their features disguised by the smoky glass in the door. Elevators dinged and a phone rang. Inside the conference room the tape recorder whirred on uselessly. The silence was thick, harsh, echoing with old pain and older outrage. The pages of the magazine rustled as John dropped it in his lap. Chris bent over that apple in her hands as if she were praying over it, a priest about to consecrate the Host. Mac only kept his place because it was what he'd been trained so well to do.

Son of a bitch. Son of a mother-fucking bitch. No wonder Harlan set her off like a Fourth of July rocket. No wonder she adopted every stray in town. No wonder she had so much darkness at the back of those sassy eyes.

It had been a long time since Mac had had to shut down an interrogation in progress simply because he couldn't manage it. He reached over now and punched the Off button, and the tape recorder hissed to a stop.

Chris caught the movement and looked up. Mac had seen insanity. He'd seen disaster and small-minded cruelty. He couldn't ever remember getting a punch in the gut like this.

Which meant that he should be the last person conducting this interrogation. He was far too fucking involved.

He should get the hell out of here and hand this baby over to the patrol. Maybe Garavaglia; he was due back down here to coordinate information. Even John could be more impartial than Mac.

Mac pulled out his cigarettes and lit up. "I'm kinda glad I never had the pleasure of meeting your parents," he mused. His mother had called the night before, worried that she hadn't heard enough from Mac. Invoking Mother's Intuition that she knew he wasn't OK and wanting somehow to help.

Chris never eased her hold on that apple. She laughed, though, a harsh bark of sarcasm. "They had their convictions," she said. "Born again in the Lord, with a clear eye to goodness and evil, and the corporal wages of sin. They were not, evidently, as conversant with the signs of pregnancy."

Mac took a few more drags, eyes still on the top of her head, once again picturing that terrified little girl on her knees in the dark. Now seeing her cuffed and bowed as she stumbled onto a locked ward. The terrorizing of children in the name of God. Old stuff. Mac had been sent to too many homes with that kind of God-fearing parent. More than once, he'd been tempted to let them meet their Savior on the spot. He kind of hoped he'd get the pleasure of making the offer to the lovely Mrs. Evensong in person.

"And you don't remember anything of that time?" he asked.

Chris shook her head, facing him again. "Nothing. I was in the kitchen scrubbing the floor one day and waking up in hell the next."

Mac took a couple of more drags, lazily studying the table, the parking lot out the window, the new bruises along Chris's wrists where they'd had to hold her down yesterday. "Did you commit those murders?" he asked.

Chris damn near flinched from him. "What other possibility do you have?" she demanded. "JayCee didn't see anyone in my house but me."

"I'm not talking about Dinah," he said. "I'm talking about the rest. Would you have done that?"

She took a minute, dipping her head, shuddering, as if in private communication. Mac waited, the silence stretching in the room. Finally she shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted miserably. When she lifted her head, Mac saw the terrible uncertainty there, the child's confusion. "I must have."

"Why?"

"Because I had the opportunity. I knew the books. I spent an awful lot of time in St. Louis just following people, watching them, so I could get the right ones. My story from Fulton is a perfect fit with Dinah's murder, and I'm the only one who knew what was in it."

"You think."

She made a small, chopping motion, as if dismissing the idea. "The point is, whoever's doing this isn't someone I know now. It's someone I knew then. Someone who was there at Fulton. I think the chances of somebody in this town having known me there are pretty damn slim. And, even if they had, nobody but me ever saw evidence that I was being stalked. I must have been getting delusional again."

"I thought I smelled the disinfectant. Was that part of it?"

"But you didn't see the man in my yard. You didn't hear the footsteps, or the baby..." She choked, swallowed a little sob, her eyes widening in defense. "The baby crying at night. You never saw that silver piece."