Blinded Read online

  “Revisiting” was a Lucy word. “This swamp-a good place to dump a body?”

  “That’s what I hear. Alligators live there.”

  “Yuck. What about West Point?”

  “Progress there, too. Previously unsolved murder. But the pieces are fitting the Sterling Storey puzzle.”

  “Nothing actually ties any of this to Storey, does it, Luce?”

  “Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. Records from his network show that he was in the right place the day each woman disappeared. What are the odds of that, Sam? The same guy being in each town when the vics go missing? Those are bad facts, come on.”

  “Yeah? What else?”

  “Means is easy. I bet we can end up proving he knew these women, you know, carnally. And motive? As far as I’m concerned, the motive for serial killers is always just smoke.”

  “Evidence, though? Back when I was a real cop, convictions tended to take evidence.”

  “Everybody’s only been on this for a little more than a day. It’ll develop. You’re not going to be of any help to anybody in Indiana, Sammy. The local cops and the feds are all over these cases. You’re not going to get anywhere close to the principals. Come on home.”

  “Georgia cops find Sterling’s body?”

  “No. In fact, they called off the search yesterday afternoon. A searcher found a hat with his network logo about a mile downstream. For all intents, he’s presumed dead.”

  “That’s convenient. Cops all over the country get to close old cases and blame it all on a Good Samaritan who disappears in a river in Georgia. No trials, no appeals. Everybody ends up looking good. This is fairy-tale stuff. I smell a documentary cooking on this one.”

  “Don’t be snide. It’s not good for your heart. One more interesting thing, though. Brian Miles-remember him? Sterling’s friend in Albany, Georgia? The one he was on his way to visit? FBI went by to interview him again. Gone. Neighbors are baby-sitting his dogs. He apparently didn’t tell anybody where he was going.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Coincidence?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Sammy, come home.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  What I was really thinking was that Rochester, Minnesota-which was where my son and his grandfather were hanging with my sullen wife-was closer to Indianapolis than Boulder was. Sherry wouldn’t be thrilled to see me, but Simon would. We could watch the Lions’ Thanksgiving game together on TV.

  “Heard anything from Reynoso? Is she bagging it and going home to California or what?”

  “I haven’t heard anything since I heard she was going to Georgia. But I don’t think I would, necessarily. I’ll ask a few questions and let you know next time we talk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You feeling okay, Sam?”

  “Like a million bucks, Lucy.”

  “That means what-I shouldn’t ask? I’m worried about you. You should be home resting, watching football, getting ready for your turkey dinner. You shouldn’t be out there alone.”

  “It’s true, I’m fine. Maybe a little tired. But I got another call coming in, so I have to go.”

  “Call me when you know what you’re going to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m serious. Promise me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sam-”

  I killed the call. Lucy was sweet, and her heart was in the right place, but nobody knew what I should do next. Not her. Not me. Nobody. Anyway, the truth was, my pager was going off again. Another 911: Alan.

  I was really tempted just to get right back on the highway and find my way to Rochester and ignore his call. But if I did, I’d ruin Angus’s Thanksgiving for sure. And Simon would have to watch his mom use all her willpower not to kill me for showing up uninvited.

  So I didn’t. Although I doubted that whatever Alan wanted warranted a 911, there was always the possibility that Lauren had gotten worse, or something bad had happened to somebody, you know? So I called. Within seconds I wished I hadn’t.

  “Sam?” he said.

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “I’m at work, and, uh… I’m here with a woman-she’s a security specialist-who just swept my office for listening devices…”

  I thoughtThat’s pretty goofy. Alan had paused at that point like he was thinking that I was supposed to take over from there or something. I wasn’t feeling terribly cooperative, so I just waited him out.

  “… and it turns out she found one.”

  He paused again once he’d succeeded in getting the entire sentence out of his mouth. It was becoming apparent that he was planning on telling his story in fits and starts. Me? I was standing in a highway rest area next to a bunch of old ladies who had set up a card table outside their motor home to play bridge. At that moment they were finding something hilarious about diamonds and the women’s rest room across the way.

  Although I was mildly curious about the odd fact that my friend had a bug in his office, I wasn’t feeling particularly patient with his storytelling pace. I didn’t know what help he wanted from me, but I hoped he got around to asking for it before moms and grandmoms all over America started taking turkeys out of their ovens.

  “Sam, did you put that bug in my office?” he asked.

  I screamed, “What?”

  The old ladies scattered away from the little card table. They were moving so fast, I was afraid one of them was going to fall down and break a hip.

  “What the hell are you accusing me of?” I yelled, even louder.

  The women reacted to my outburst by scrambling back into their Winnebago clone as though they were thirty years younger.

  “I just asked a question,” Alan said, smug as shit.

  Yeah, right.“You’re lucky you’re a thousand miles away from my fist.”

  “I take it that’s a no.”

  “I don’t believe you, Alan.”

  “I guess the feeling’s contagious,” he said.

  I hung up on him.

  The old ladies were peering at me through the windows of the motor home. They had fear in their eyes. One of them had tossed her cards in the air before she ran for the safety of the RV. I picked the cards up, dusted them off, scanned them, and placed them back on the card table. She’d had a damn good hand. I smiled up at the women and mouthed, “Four spades.”

  Then I took my pulse. One-twenty. Too high.

  I reminded myself that I had choices.

  I considered heading to Albany, Georgia, to have a chat with Brian Miles, but that felt like a dead end. And I admit I was briefly tempted to find my way back to Ochlockonee for a holiday date with a pair of twins and a turducken. I even thought about a long drive to Colorado to be with Gibbs. But the strongest pull? The due north on my emotional compass?

  Simon.

  I climbed back into the Cherokee.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ALAN

  Maybe I didn’t handle things well with Sam.

  When I heard the yeah-whaddya-want tone in his voice on the phone, I immediately figured I’d tracked him down in one of his infamous constipated moods. The way I was feeling I just didn’t have the patience for it. In retrospect, I immediately topped that miscalculation with another serious mistake: When he returned my call, I wasn’t allowing for the possibility that Sam was not the person responsible for planting the bug in my office.

  The truth is that I actually didn’t get around to seriously entertaining that likelihood until long after I’d talked to him. In fact, I was halfway through my one-thirty appointment, later that afternoon.

  My one-thirty was an elderly woman with severe posttraumatic stress syndrome from the unlikeliest of causes. She was perhaps the sweetest, kindest, most genteel person who had ever come to see me for treatment. Ironically, both she and I were currently obsessed with bugs. Hers were the microscopic kind that make people sick. By her account, she had barely lived to be able to tell me the tale of her atrocious treatment on board a bug
-infested Caribbean cruise the previous fall.

  Her story, which she insisted on recounting in excruciating detail, was now in its fifth weekly installment. The ship she was on the previous November had aborted its scheduled island-hopping itinerary and rushed back to Miami after suffering its second sailing in a row plagued with an epidemic of Norwalk virus, a severe gastrointestinal malady not uncommon in North America. According to my patient, the cruise line had known about the epidemic-which had also infected a huge percentage of passengers and crew on the previous sailing of the same ship-for over a week and had made a corporate decision, despite the severity of the outbreak, to disinfect the ship and immediately sail again. That decision had put a whole new group of twelve hundred passengers, including my patient, at risk of exposure. She maintained that none of the passengers on board the second doomed sailing had been forewarned about the ongoing epidemic until moments before boarding. Certainly my patient hadn’t been forewarned before she’d made the thousand-mile-plus trip to the dock in Miami.

  “Why?” she kept asking me. “Why? What did I do to them that they would risk putting an eighty-year-old woman in the toilet for most of a week? Why? Don’t they know what they did to me? Why?”

  She answered her own question. “Greed,” she said. “They made me sick as a rabid dog and they almost killed me because they’re greedy bastards. They care about money, not about people. That’s what I think.”

  If I had to guess, I would have guessed that she hadn’t actually used the word “bastards” before in her eighty-two years.

  My poor patient was at the part of her story where a fellow passenger threw up on her in the elevator-“and I was at least five feet away from him.”

  Her seagoing tales of explosive emesis, institutional rudeness, and Olympic-size lack of compassion by cruise line employees had just begun, I knew. The excruciating story had thus far only progressed to cover day three of her voyage; she and I had three additional long, long days at sea ahead of us. Covering them at our current pace would take us a month of weekly appointments.

  “I don’t blame them for the virus,” she said. “I blame them for just about everything else they did.” She’d said that before. I was certain she would say it again. And again.

  “Greedy bastards,” she repeated. “Do you know what they offered me for compensation? Do you?”

  I did. But I also knew she’d tell me again anyway.

  “They’d let me do the same darn death cruise a second time, and then they’d let me do another one at twenty-five percent off. That’s it. That’s the going rate for almost killing an old woman.”

  It was at that interlude in her session that I had the wisdom to cut Sam some slack. The thought I was allowing to ferment was:Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe he was telling the truth about the bug.

  But if Sam didn’t plant the damn device in my office in order to find out what Gibbs knew about her husband’s murderous tendencies, who did? And why?

  My dear patient, I knew, would have gladly blamed the whole fiasco on the greedy bastards from the cruise line.

  The truth, I guessed, was not going to be so simple. Who had planted the device in my couch pillow? I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t know until I figured out why it had been placed. Knowing why meant discerning exactly what one of my patients might have had to say in the confines of therapy that was worth committing a felony to overhear.

  I spent some time mentally reviewing my roster of patients, imagining which of their secrets, mostly mundane to me, was so prized by someone else. Although Jim Zebid’s accusation about Judge Heller’s husband selling cocaine was intriguing, and Sharon Lewis’s identity would have certainly caused a tabloidish stir, Gibbs’s story was the one that definitely had the most universal allure.

  That’s what led me to thinking that the culprit was the cops, and to Sam. The police would certainly have some interest in what Gibbs said to me.

  So, I imagined, would Sterling. Had he somehow gained access to my office and planted the device before he left for Florida to cover the football game in Tallahassee? If he had-considering the likelihood that his corpse was caught on some debris beneath the surface of the Ochlockonee River-I’d probably never know. But at least everyone’s secrets would be safe.

  But I was overlooking something important: a possibility that I had to rule out. I phoned home. Lauren answered. I checked in on her battle with Solumedrol and commiserated as she reluctantly shared the details of her travails.

  Then I asked, “Do you have time for a work question?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said.

  Her voice was pressured, as though her vocal cords were too taut. I asked, “Is there any way the police could get a warrant to put a listening device in my office?”

  “What?”

  “Is there any way-”

  “I heard you. You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “No? No way?”

  “No, no way.”

  “I just had one removed. A listening device was hidden inside a pillow on my sofa.”

  “If this isn’t your idea of a joke, I can assure you that it wasn’t the Boulder police who put it there.”

  “Thanks, I needed to hear that. I have to go.”

  “You’ll fill me in on all this later?”

  “Yeah. Love you.”

  If I could have answered the who and why questions, I might have been able to predict the complications that were to develop over the next few hours.

  But I couldn’t, and I didn’t.

  FORTY-SIX

  SAM

  Sometimes momentum rules. I’d been pointing toward Indiana’s bull’s-eye, so I kept going that way. I had some lunch in a Shoney’s by a gas station, went and saw the Speedway just for the hell of it, and then backtracked downtown so I could be near the RCA Dome. I parked the car in a motel lot a few blocks away, checked in for one night, and started strolling over toward the immense sports stadium, waiting for some inspiration from the dead woman who had worked there. What was her name? Julie Franconia. Yeah.

  But I got no inspiration.

  Nothing. Julie wasn’t talking.

  My pager vibrated once again against my hip.

  I knew it was him. I walked another hundred yards or so before I bothered to look at the screen.

  It was him. Another faux 911.

  First I kept my promise to Lucy, called her, and told her where I was spending the night. She didn’t have anything new for me. Then I called Alan.

  The second the phone started ringing, I was already regretting phoning him back. “What?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I was still walking. It turned out that the Dome butted right up against downtown Indianapolis. I liked that. Sports should be part of things, part of a city’s life, not some suburban reverse-doughnut thing where the arena is surrounded by acres of open space that are used to park a gazillion cars twenty times a year. There was even a nice green park with a big fountain outside the front door of the RCA Dome.

  Cool.

  “I’m sorry,” Alan said again.

  By then I’d walked around the corner, ducked under a sky bridge that linked the stadium with a garage, and stopped in front of a nice old church with twin copper steeples. I sat on the steps.

  “I’m in a church,” I said to Alan, lying. “I’m hoping it will make me be nice to you.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “You said that. Next.”

  “If that was being nice to me because you’re sitting in a church, I’m glad you’re not sitting in a topless bar.”

  I laughed. It was a good comeback. “A titty bar would be way too much stress on my heart. Truth is, I’m actually on the stoop of the church. Not inside. God may be occupied with the folks who made it all the way inside, so be careful.”

  “I shouldn’t have accused you.”

  “Accused me? You shouldn’t have even considered me. I play hard, but I do
n’t play dirty. I might be tricky, but I don’t cheat.”

  “I know. I was wrong.”

  “Is that it? I got to go.”

  “Where?”

  It was actually another good comeback, although Alan probably didn’t realize it.

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking of going up north and seeing Simon.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Seeing my kid? It’s always a good idea. Always.”

  He didn’t skip a beat. He asked, “You want to tell me what’s going on with Sherry?”

  “Nope.”

  My pager vibrated again. I was about to turn the damn thing off. I lifted it off my hip and held it at full arm’s length from my eyes. Even that far away I could barely read it. I said, “Gibbs is paging me. Now I do have to go.”

  “What does she want? Call me back.”

  “Right.”

  “Detective Purdy? I’m scared.”

  Her voice did something to me.

  It was something unfamiliar. I stood and moved two steps higher on the church stoop. That didn’t feel quite right, so I moved back down and settled my fat ass one step lower than when I had started. I wasn’t sure precisely what I wanted God’s help doing at that moment, but I was aware that it might be something He wouldn’t be eager to assist me with.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think he’s alive. I do.”

  I assumed we were chatting about Sterling. “You think he’d come after you?”

  She said, “No, not really. But maybe, I guess. God, what a thing to say.”

  As she implored the deity, I craned my neck upward toward the pointy ends of the steeples.

  “Where are you, Gibbs? Are you at home?”

  “No, I checked into a hotel.”

  I guessed she would be at the Boulderado. I saw her standing near one of the tall windows in the new wing of the downtown hotel, her body softer than soft behind the gauzy curtains. “Which one?”

  “The Boulderado,” she said.

  Arguably Boulder’s finest, and the first place Sterling would look for her after he determined she wasn’t at home. The very first. Gibbs’s judgment was impaired. That wasn’t news. A lot of experience had convinced me that all battered spouses have impaired judgment.