Cassia, p.23
CASSIA, page 23
He had tricked Amy into believing it. What Jack had done was more insane than anything Lillian had seen at St. Vincent’s. Funny, she thought, but when shrinks go off the deep end, they go really, really deep.
“What did you do to her?” Lillian hissed.
Jack ignored her. He trudged to the dining room. He still wore his boots, muddying the floor, making a mess. He returned with his physician’s bag and dug into it, casually at first, then frantically. He dumped the contents on a coffee table and sorted through it. Panic grew in his eyes.
“Looking for these?” Lillian held out the last two vials of Kyronane.
When Jack had staggered from the cabin to chase after Amy, Lillian had quickly grabbed the vials and stuffed them in her own coat pocket. One was still full. The other was nearly full but not quite, since Jack had tried to inject some of it into Amy, before she turned the needle on him, then ran.
“Give me those!” Jack lurched at Lillian.
She dodged him and darted behind Amy. Jack tried again to grab her, but Lillian nimbly kept Amy between the two of them.
You go girl! The mischievous voice inside Lillian exclaimed with glee.
“For the last time, Dr. Temple. What did you do to her?”
“Just give me the blue shit.”
Blue shit? Lillian figured he meant the drug. “This poor girl has been pumped full of enough drugs to last a lifetime.”
“It will bring my wife back.”
“What is this nonsense about your wife? She’s dead. You know that.”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but I used the drug to transfer Wendy’s mind into this body. She’s in there, somewhere. She’s drowning.”
Amy Kester was drowning in there, Lillian knew. No one else. Her mind, though, flashed back to how the girl had so perfectly mimicked Jack’s wife. Lillian had met Wendy at the St. Vincent’s year-end holiday party. As they’d spoken, Wendy had absentmindedly run her hand through her short brunette hair. Amy made the exact same motion earlier. No! Impossible.
“Jack,” Lillian began calmly. “The reason I didn’t call the police earlier today—the only reason—was to give you a chance to explain. I look up to you. With what happened to your wife, the dreadful car accident, I felt you deserved that chance.” She waved the vials at him. “This is your explanation? Kyronane transfers souls? You expect me to believe that?”
“As a wise man once told me, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe. Give me the damn drug!” He lunged again for the vials, but she darted away, keeping her distance from him.
“Jack, you need help. Let me call Dr. Fielding.”
“The drug will bring Wendy back. I know it.”
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “Your wife is dead. Accept it.”
“You spoke to her.”
“I don’t know who that was. Amy has all these personalities. Separate identities. You must have somehow convinced one she was your wife.”
“Wendy is in there. She’s drowning. The drug might bring her back to the surface before it’s too late.” Jack was sobbing now.
Lillian was stunned by the depth of his desperation, the pain etched on his face, the way he so desperately clung to his dead loved one, trying to keep her voice alive, trying to keep the voice from ever slipping away.
What if he’s right, Lil? The world is weirder than we can ever know.
Memories of Tamara’s death stung Lillian. Tears blurred her own eyes. Suddenly, Jack had her thin forearm locked in his fist. He was manically strong. Lillian gasped as he pried the vials from her hand. She slumped to the floor at Amy’s feet, nursing a bruised wrist. She watched with resignation as Jack filled a medical syringe with the blue drug.
“Trust me,” he told her. “This will bring her back. I know it. This will bring my wife to the surface again.”
Jack injected the shimmering blue drug into Amy’s forearm, just above her scars. There was no reaction. She continued to whisper as before. He then withdrew even more of the drug, now draining the vial completely, and injected that extra portion into Amy. Still no reaction.
Jack slumped onto the couch, head in hands. “She must have built up some sort of tolerance.”
Lillian now sat beside him, put a hand on his shoulder.
“Jack, it’s over. We’ll take her to St. Vincent’s where she’ll be safe. We still need to sort out all her personalities. So we can finally help her. We’ll use the parsing system I built—”
“The what?”
“My video system. I told you how it isolates individual identities and —”
“That’s it!” Jack leapt up, fire in his eyes. “I’ll prove Wendy’s in there.”
“Jack, enough!” Lillian pleaded.
“The system of yours, where is it?”
“No, Jack, we’ll call Dr. Fielding. We’ll get an ambulance up here.”
“Lillian, just give me one chance to run your system on her. If she’s still in there, and I know she is, the system will find Wendy’s voice within her whispers. That’s what it does, right? Then she can talk to us. It’ll prove she’s in there.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“If she’s not still there.” Jack looked away. “It means she’s been pushed out. It means Wendy really is gone.”
He looked heartbroken. He pinned Lillian with his desperate eyes.
“I need to know,” he told her. “One way or the other.”
Lillian shook her head no. “This is hopeless, Jack.”
“Lillian, I know you had a sister once. I know she took her own life.”
Lillian was hurt he would bring Tamara up now. She expected her inner voice to howl with protest. The voice inside said nothing. It left her in silence. Alone now.
“What if you had a chance to bring your sister back?” Jack asked. “Just for a while. A day. An hour. To talk to her once more. Wouldn’t you do it?” His voice cracked. “Even if just to say goodbye?”
The voice inside Lillian still said nothing. It remained frustratingly silent. It made its point.
Lillian finally nodded. “The laptop system is in my car, but we’ll need a dozen TV screens to make it work. Where will we find enough? We can’t return to St. Vincent’s. There’s no way we’re going to my parents’ home.”
Jack grinned. “I know the perfect place.” He grabbed the kitchen phone, dialed a number and waited. “Andrew. Yeah, it’s me. Jack Temple.”
Lillian heard a frantic squawk from the phone.
“Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just listen.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Detective Tate roared up in a squad car with Agent Sykes riding shotgun. A half dozen police cars were already in front of Clifford Smolik’s rural home, lights flashing. As Tate and Sykes climbed from the squad car, deputies strode forward to meet them.
“Looks like we missed him,” one of the deputies announced.
“Damn!” Tate barked. “Start canvassing the neighborhood.”
Tate and Sykes ducked under a strand of yellow police tape tied across the sagging porch and entered the house. Inside, it was a mess like the Temple household. Crushed beer cans scattered about, ashtrays overflowing.
“Edmund Lasker never drank or smoked nearly this much before he was incarcerated,” Sykes said. “When he did drink, it was whiskey, right?”
“Sometimes, when you deny a man things he never wanted, he craves them,” Tate replied.
“Still, he’d always been so meticulous. So clean. So careful. That part of an MO rarely changes. It’s part of the underlying personality.”
“Like I said before, the man I tracked down eight years ago has changed. Except for one thing. He still likes to kill young women. He still likes to carve prayers in their flesh. He’s still a twisted mutherfucker.”
Tate kicked some of the beer cans. Years ago, Lasker had indeed been meticulous. It was the right word. It was why Lasker managed to kill so many before he was caught. Psychopaths often got brazen, Tate knew, and taunted the police. Maybe it was part of his religious mania, but Lasker never did that. He saw himself as a humble man, or had, at least.
“He’s getting sloppy,” Tate told Sykes. “A couple of six packs will do that. Cravings for cigarettes can make a man careless too. Paranoid eyes are a detective’s best friend.”
“I don’t follow,” Sykes said.
“During the day, a psycho killer wanted in six states can walk into a mini-mart to buy booze and smokes and not get noticed. At night, those same store clerks are spooked about getting robbed, about getting shot by some desperate punk. The night is full of paranoid eyes.”
Sykes looked skeptical. “So you think we’ll get lucky? Lasker will do something stupid?”
“Listen up,” Tate began, gathering his deputies. “I want you to hit every mini-mart, every gas station selling beer and cigarettes, every one of them. Talk to the clerks. Shove the wanted poster of Lasker down their throats if necessary. Get their attention. Lasker might just get careless enough to walk into one of those places.”
“Detective,” Sykes said. “I don’t think it’ll be that easy.”
Through the front window, Tate saw TV news vans squeal to a stop out on the street in front of the house. “It never is,” Tate sighed.
#
When Clifford awoke from his netherworld again, the sun had already set, darkness gathering. Edmund Lasker was jimmying the front door of another ground-floor apartment. Clifford had vague recollections of the last few hours, elusive memories that seeped into his tinkertoy prison.
They had hot-wired an old Chevy they found parked down the road, then ditched it in town before heading off on foot, a big hoodie they found in the truck hiding their face. How convenient, Clifford thought, that the “gangster” fashions teens often wore favored real criminals. In the past, someone so obviously hiding under a sweatshirt hood would be suspected, people would be wary. Now, no one looked twice. He liked having insights like that, though he knew they weren’t his own. Lasker was the clever one.
Soon, they were inside the apartment. It was the sort of modest place someone fresh from college might rent. A tablet computer sat on a desk in a corner. There was a mess of papers scattered about, transcripts of some sort, maybe a work project. The TV had been left on, probably to trick prowlers into thinking someone was home. On the walls, artsy pictures of some chick named Sylvia Plath and a marquee poster of an old movie called St. Elmo’s Fire. He didn’t recall it, but it must have been about a group of arrogant young snots, judging from the grinning brats featured on the poster. It was definitely some chick’s place. Girly clothes in the closets, perfume on the nightstand, panties in the hamper.
Clifford was both horrified and aroused. He was the ultimate Peeping Tom. He could spy on the victim and the perp at the same time. He felt himself stiffening, felt his breathing deepen. Clifford knew he wasn’t getting aroused, not really. It was that prick Lasker, but he felt the same pang of anticipation and obscene desire. He couldn’t shut himself off from that. He hoped he could drift back to his tinkertoys when the time came so he wouldn’t have to watch like last time. He didn’t want to feel his hands on the knife again, warm blood spilling across his fingers again.
He didn’t want to hear his mouth utter those defiled prayers.
Together he and Lasker found some photos on a dresser in the bedroom. Pictures of two chicks, sisters probably, smiling at the camera. Clifford gasped when he recognized the younger girl. He wanted to run and he wanted to yell and he wanted to put a stop to this, but he was paralyzed. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He’d found her apartment.
Clifford hated himself for adoring Lillian because Lasker had seized on that. Lasker was torturing him just as he would torture her. Clifford had been so careful not to think of her, not to give Lasker any reason to choose her over some random victim. But how do you not think of someone you’re trying not to think of? Clifford prayed Lillian would not return that night, that she was far away. He knew, though, even if she somehow escaped Lasker this evening, it would just make the man more determined. He would stalk her until he finished the job. He’d find her. He’d make him watch. Clifford understood his own innocent desire for her had become fused with Lasker’s bloodlust, the two inseparable now.
“The fucker turned me in,” he heard Edmund Lasker growl.
Clifford hadn’t been paying attention to the TV that flickered in silence, but he now saw that a live news report was being broadcast. It showed his own damned house in the background. Lasker turned up the volume. On screen, microphones were thrust into a detective’s face as he emerged from the house, a large black man who furrowed his brow, let his heavy jowls swing back and forth, and said “no comment” a lot.
Clifford felt a pang of regret. He could never go home again. The place wasn’t much, little more than a worn-down cottage, but he always felt comfortable there. Evicted from his own body. Now, evicted from his home. Happens all the time. He wondered if he’d soon be evicted from Lasker’s body too. He worried he was already losing his grip on the man.
Maybe not, he realized, as he listened to the fury in Lasker’s voice.
“He betrayed me,” Lasker sputtered.
Clifford wondered why Lasker would be so furious at Jack Temple. Temple hadn’t betrayed Lasker, he betrayed Clifford. It was one thing for Lasker to figure out Temple must have called the cops and given them Clifford’s name so they’d search his house, but that wasn’t the important part. What was important, Clifford knew, was Lasker felt so damned angry about it. He took it personally, but it wasn’t a betrayal against him at all. I’m the one who’s angry, Clifford thought. So, part of me is still being heard.
Clifford worked to get the fury to boil inside him. He called up images of Jack Temple’s smug face, the way he bossed him around at St. Vincent’s, the way he blocked him every time he tried to chat with Lillian. It was innocent chitchat, but Temple would always butt in. Temple would stick his fat fuck face in the way. Clifford stoked the fires of his anger, whipping them into a frenzy. He now wanted to destroy something, anything.
He grabbed the TV and held it high above his head, then brought it down hard on the coffee table. The tabletop splintered, the TV shattered, sparks flew. The lights in the room flickered. He kicked the broken TV and it skittered across the floor. It felt damned good, and not just because he imagined the TV was Jack Temple’s head, his smug face bashed in. It felt so good because it was his own rage that drove the beast. It was Clifford Smolik who had finally gotten a few words in edgewise.
“I will kill the fucker,” he heard himself growl.
It felt good to say it, and mean it. Temple had been so very wrong about him. “You might be a weaselly little shit,” Temple had told him. “But I know one thing for certain. I know you’re not the killing type.”
“Wrong, motherfucker.” Clifford chortled. “I am the killing type.”
We are the killing type.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Jack hunkered low in the passenger seat as Lillian drove them back into Taverton under evening darkness. There wasn’t much room to crouch in her small vehicle, but he squeezed down anyway. He didn’t want a passing headlight to catch his face. Some driver might recognize him from the news and call the state police. It would be hard explaining the blonde tied up under the blanket in the back seat, the one whispering like mad.
He hated having to restrain her but felt he had to. Otherwise, she might try to climb from the moving car, or scream at a busy intersection. The sight of the torn sheets binding her wrists and the gag in her mouth hurt Jack more than it seemed to bother her. She didn’t even appear to notice. Maybe she found comfort in being bound. Perhaps she felt at home in straitjackets and padded cells.
He worried though for Wendy, trapped inside. He wondered if she could still see or hear. He winced at the cruel irony of it. He had fought to keep Wendy from that fate—the vegetative state she might have wound up in from open skull surgery. Now here she was, trapped inside Cassia, or Amy Kester, or whoever the hell she was. Just a different type of shut in state. It was better than the alternative, Jack knew.
The alternative was Wendy was gone.
It was pointless to obsess over it. Once they got to Andrew O’Connell’s loft, Lillian could run her video system. Then they’d know for sure if Wendy was still there. So he forced himself to focus on the file Lillian had brought from St. Vincent’s. He sorted through it. There were photos of the girl, Amy Kester, from when she was ten, and snapshots of her parents, both junkies. There were pictures of the sick priest who had preyed on them, exploiting their weakness, their addiction, their desperation. Jack knew all about desperation. He knew exactly what a man could do when despair took over. A man could strangle his own wife.
“The priest gave them drugs?” Jack asked, shaking off his inner turmoil.
“Detective Tate said he had sought out junkies. Ones who were weak-willed and desperate,” Lillian explained. “He doled out drugs to feed their cravings, reeling them deeper into his cult with each ‘prescription.’ Then he told them their addiction was a demon that could be exorcised.”
“Sick bastard.”
“He kept blending in more and more drugs, different kinds, some off the street, some from pharmacies, some cooked in his own lab. He told them it was chemotherapy for the soul. Their bodies could handle the cocktail of drugs but demons couldn’t, so it would drive them away.”
“Each new injection would just get them more addicted,” Jack reasoned. “They’d become even more beholden to him. Until they’d do anything. Even take their own lives.”
Lillian nodded. “Eventually, he told them the only way to be truly free was to leave this plane of existence. To travel to some other world.”
“Where the demons couldn’t follow, right?”
“With his final cocktail of drugs, he told them they’d leave our world and be free of all addiction. Free of all worldly problems. All pain.”
