"Harry never found out until Claire's last year in grad school," Eileen Racano had said. "It was a shock. The poor thing, carrying around that burden."
"How did she bring it up?"
"It was during the time she was working on the final draft of her dissertation.
That's always a stressful period, but Claire seemed to be having an especially hard time. Writing didn't come easily to her, and she was a perfectionist, drafting and redrafting. She told Harry she was worried she wouldn't pass her orals."
"Was that a possibility?" I said.
"Her grades were excellent and her research was solid."
I let the unspoken "but" hang in the air.
"Back then, personality issues couldn't be considered," she said.
"So your husband had reservations about Claire's temperament."
"He thought she was a sweet young woman, but... too closed off. And to grow up under a shadow like that... Harry felt she hadn't dealt with it. That it might cause her problems later on."
"How exactly did he find out?" I said.
"One morning he came in to the lab and found Claire there. She looked awful; it was obvious she'd been working all night. Harry asked her why she was driving herself so hard and she said she had no choice, she just had to pass, it was everything she'd lived for. Harry said something to the effect that there was life beyond grad school, and Claire fell apart- sobbing, telling Harry he didn't understand, that becoming a psychologist was all that mattered, she had to do it, she wasn't like other students. Harry asked in what way, and that's when it all came out. Afterward,
Claire just curled up on the chair, shivering. Harry gave her his jacket and stayed with her until she calmed down. After that, we reached out more to Claire, invited her over for dinner. Harry was a wonderful man. His students all loved him. Years after he went emeritus, we'd still get letters and cards and visits. Not from
Claire, though. After that one episode, she closed up, refused to talk about it.
Harry couldn't demand that she receive therapy, but he suggested it strongly. Claire promised she would, but she never confirmed that she had."
"So she passed her exams, received her doctorate, and went her own way."
"Believe me," she said, "it troubled Harry. He even debated holding her up-he was in real conflict, Dr. Delaware. But ethically, he knew he couldn't. Claire had fulfilled all the requirements for graduation, and he felt she'd never trust anyone again if he went public with her story. The funny thing was, at her orals, she was the picture of confidence. Charming, in control, as if nothing had ever happened.
Harry chose to take that as a sign that she'd gotten help. But once she had her degree in hand, she shut us out completely. Even after she received the fellowship right here at Case Medical School we never heard from her. A year later, we heard she got a job in Los Angeles. Harry said, 'Claire's going off to the Wild West.' The whole incident bothered him. He wondered if he should've been more forceful in
getting her to deal with the guilt."
"She felt guilty about what her brother had done?"
"Unjustified guilt, but yes, that's the way Harry saw it, and his insights were almost always correct. He saw neuropsy-chology as an escape for Claire. Testing, numbers, lab work, no need to get into feelings. He wondered if she'd ever leave the field, and now you tell me she did."
"Her brother died of a seizure," I said. "Did your husband wonder if Claire's career choice might have been related to her seeking an organic basis for Denton's crimes?"
"That, too. But he worried that someday that defense would crumble. Because she wouldn't find any simple answers, might grow disillusioned. Harry was a neuropsycholo-gist himself, but he was also a master psychotherapist. Along with his alcoholism research, he worked with MADD, treating the families of drunk-driving victims. He tried to teach his students the value of maintaining emotional balance."
"Claire didn't get the message."
"The Claire we knew didn't. She was such a... distant girl. Seemed to be punishing herself."
"In what way?"
"All work, no play, never attending department functions, no friendships with the other students. I'd bet the dinners at our home were her main social contacts. Even the way she furnished her room, Dr. Delaware. Student housing's never gorgeous, but most students try to do something with what the university gives them. One night it was especially cold, and Harry and I drove her home. The way she lived shocked us.
All she had was a bed, a desk, and a chair. I told Harry it looked like a jail cell.
He wondered if she might be trying, symbolically, to share her brother's fate."
Now I knew why Claire had refused to talk about her family to Joe Stargill.
Now I understood Rob Ray and Ernestine's willingness to let Claire shut them out of her life: monumental shame.
No matter what was happening around her...
I'd wondered about family chaos, but my imagination hadn't stretched far enough.
Like so many people who enter the helping fields, Claire had been trying to heal herself. Approaching it from a distance, at first, as she hid behind hard data and lab work. Working for Myron Theobold, a man who'd abandoned psychoanalysis for a
Ph.D. in biochemistry. I see myself as a humane administrator.... I don't get involved in their personal lives. I'm not out to parent anyone.
Staying with Theobold all those years because he allowed her to remain a stranger.
Then something changed.
Professor Racano had suspected professional escape wouldn't work forever, and he'd been right. Last year, Claire had gone looking for answers-going about it with characteristic academic detachment, scanning library files for rampages similar to her brother's.
Why at that point in her life? Perhaps something had weakened her defenses.... The only thing that came to mind was the divorce. Because marrying Joe Stargill had been another sad stab at normalcy, and it had failed.
I thought of how she and Stargill had met. That afternoon in the Marriott bar, impulsive, just like the Reno wedding. Yet ultimately, Claire's motivation for pairing up with Stargill had been anything but hasty, most probably unconscious.
She'd preserved the secrecy with which she'd encrusted herself since adolescence by selecting a self-absorbed child of alcoholics who could be counted upon to concentrate on his own problems and keep his nose out of hers.
Casual pickup, incredible sex. The semblance of physical intimacy, unencumbered by exploration. Stargill had described the marriage as the parallel movement of two busy roommates.
Claire had made a brief stab at decorating her home and her life. After Stargill moved out, she stripped the house bare. Not for serenity. Back to the cell.
Punishing herself, just as Professor Racano had suspected. Trying, once again without consciously realizing it, to replicate Denton Argent's bleak fate in order to bond, somehow, with the brother who'd polluted her formative years.
She'd been twelve when Denton slaughtered the Brown-lees. But maybe much younger when she realized there was something different-maybe dangerously different-about her only sibling. Did she blame herself for not telling someone?
Or was she simply ashamed to be linked genetically to a monster?
I thought of how the Argents had refused to move. Remaining on the same block had to have been wrenching for them. For the entire neighborhood. Had Claire been shunned for the rest of her childhood?
When Denton seized fatally, she'd been seventeen, still living at home. An upbringing capped at both ends by trauma, shame, and loss. Adolescence was hallmarked by the quest for identity. What had happened to Claire's sense of self?
Had she ever visited Denton at the asylum, or had her parents forbidden contact? Had she planned, at some point, to talk to her brother about his crimes? Tried to make sense of events that defied explanation?
If so, Denton's death had killed any hope.
Years later, she decided to look for answers anyway.
Learning about the Ardullo murders must have seemed like salvation.
The parallels between the two cases chilled my blood. I could only imagine how
Claire had felt, spooling microfiche, only to come upon Denton's doppelganger in
Ardis Peake.
First, shock. Then sickening, spreading familiarity, empathy in its worst incarnation.
Finally, a glimmer of reprieve: one last chance to tackle the Big Why.
Now that I knew what I did, Claire's move to Starkweather, her zeroing in on Ardis
Peake, wasn't puzzling at all.
So many madmen, so little time.
Not a choice, really. A psychologically preordained dance backed by the choreography of pain.
A dead certainty.
26.
"No LUCK," SAID Milo.
"On what?"
"Anything. The Corvette, any sort of locale on either Wark or Derrick Crimmins. No
Social Security on Wark, and Crim-mins's last tax filing was ten years ago. In
Florida. Didn't get to take it any further 'cause I was tied up in the courthouse.
Trying to get three separate judges to okay warrants on Peake's mail and his phone calls. No go. Prophecy didn't impress them. The third one laughed me out of chambers and told me to consult a palm reader."
It was nearly five. He'd pulled up in my driveway a few minutes ago. Now he was scrounging in the fridge, bent sharply as he eyed a lower shelf, the ridges and bulges of his service revolver protruding through his too-tight tweed jacket.
"Claire's relationship to Peake didn't matter?" I said.
He shook his head, pulled out mayonnaise, mustard, a packet of corned beef I'd forgotten about, got some corn rye of similar vintage from the bread box. Slapping together a limp-looking sandwich, he sat down, chomped out a semicircle.
" 'Gobbledygook' was the operative word," he said. "And 'psychotic meanderings.'
They all said Peake was, at most, a material witness. If that. Also, his mental state rendered him unlikely to provide significant materiality, so the entire rationale falls apart."
Another chunk of sandwich disappeared. "I didn't do any better on getting into
Wark's B. of A. account. A fictitious person only remotely and theoretically associated with an eight-month-old homicide doesn't cut the evidentiary mustard."
"Mommy," I said, "I wanna be a policeman when I grow up."
His grin was savage. "Now for the happy news: Wendell Pelley is no longer a suspect.
At least not for the Beatty brothers. Wendell Pelley is deceased. For well over a week- before choo choo bang bang. His body showed up in a county garbage dump in
Lennox six days ago. Sheriff's deputy happened to read the wire I put out and called. The dump's organized, so they were able to pinpoint what load Pelley came in on. Commercial container behind an industrial laundry. It was collected three days before he was found, but the maggot feast indicates Pelley could have been in there a while before that. No sign of violence to the corpse. Looks like he fell asleep in the Dumpster and got shipped out with the trash."
"Crushed to death?"
"No, they spotted him before compaction-what was left of him. Cause of death was extreme dehydration and malnutrition. The sonofabitch starved himself. I called the
Korean who runs the halfway house. He said yeah, Pelley hadn't been eating much before he split. Probably weighed a hundred and twenty back then. No, he didn't see that as reason for alarm, Pelley wasn't causing problems."
"Talk about self-punishment," I said. "Pelley made it all the way from Ramparts to
Lennox on foot?"
"He probably walked through alleys in some not-nice neighborhoods, found his final resting place, curled up, and died."
"Not a trace of foul play?"
"Nothing, Alex. They filed it as a definite suicide. I read the report and it's pretty clear. Desiccation, cachexia, low hemoglobin count, something about his liver chemistry that said he hadn't received adequate nutrition for a long time. No wounds, no broken bones; his neck bones were intact, and so was his skull. The only damage was what the maggots had done."
Staring at what was left of the sandwich, he hesitated, gulped it down, wiped his face, got himself a beer.
"Think about that, Alex. Feeling so low that you throw yourself out in the garbage."
"He could still be good for Claire," I said.
"If I could show that he and Claire ever met, maybe. But now that he's dead? Also, given the fact that he's not good for Dada or the Beattys, my enthusiasm for him has faded considerably. I got carried away. Like Mr. Dylan said, too much of nothing."
