“I can’t believe this is happening,” Bree said.
“Makes me wonder what I did to deserve this.”
“No self-pity. What do we do?”
“No self-pity, and we move to protect you, Nana, and the kids,” I said. “I can’t have you all being punished for something you didn’t do.”
The next morning, after church, we went down to my basement office, shut the door, and made a list of things that would have to be done if I was convicted. Transfer my personal bank account to Bree. Find a trustee to step in to oversee my grandmother’s philanthropic foundation. Transfer sole medical authority for Jannie and Ali to Bree. Transfer authority on the kids’ college funds to her. Ask Nana Mama if she still wanted me as the executor of her living will. Make Bree my executor should I die in prison.
“I feel like we’re getting ready for a funeral,” Bree said.
There was a knock on my office door.
“Dad?” Jannie said.
“We’re busy, sweetheart,” I said.
“There’s someone here to see you.”
I closed my eyes. When did people stop believing in Sundays?
“Tell them to come back tomorrow.”
Nana Mama said, “I think you’ll want to come out.”
Throwing up my hands in surrender, I went over, opened the door, and found Sampson and my father, Peter Drummond, a big, robust black man in his late sixties, standing there in the hall. Drummond had a face almost devoid of expression due to nerve damage associated with a large burn scar that began beneath his right eye and spread down much of his cheek to his jaw.
“Dad?” I said.
“I came to provide some moral support,” Drummond said and he gave me a hug and a clap on the back. “John picked me up at National.”
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Nana Mama said.
“It is a surprise,” I said. “It’s … good. Is Alicia here too?”
“Indisposed, but sends her prayers,” Drummond said.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Nana Mama said. “I’ll make a big breakfast.”
Afterward, my dad, Bree, Sampson, and I took a walk. My father asked a lot of questions. Drummond knew as much about murder as we did and more about enduring tough times than we could imagine. He’d worked sheriff’s homicide in Palm Beach County, Florida, for thirty-two years. Before that he’d served in the first Gulf War, where he was caught in an oil-well explosion that burned his face.
After we’d walked several miles and I’d brought him up to speed on everything, he said, “I know your case looks bleak, son, but you can’t lose hope. I’m living proof of that. I lost hope of ever seeing you or Nana or your children, and then there you were down in my neck of the woods, looking for Reverend Maya. Miracles happen every day.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Sampson said, and he checked the time. “I’ve got to go. Promised Billie I’d watch the Redskins game with her.”
“Any progress with the blondes?” I asked. “Anything from that latest video of Gretchen Lindel? The one showing her hanged?”
Sampson glanced at Bree and then shook his head. “I haven’t heard about that one. But on my end, it feels like I’m banging my head against a brick wall.”
“And the new partner?”
“She’s the brick wall.”
“John,” Bree said, but she couldn’t hide a smile. “It’s not that bad.”
“If you say so, Chief,” he said. Then he gave us a salute and walked away.
CHAPTER
67
AT FOUR THIRTY the next afternoon, a Monday, there was a knock at the basement door. Closing my laptop, I got up, happy for the new client and grateful to have something beyond my own fate to think about.
I opened the door to find a tall and very attractive woman in her early thirties. Her hair was long, luxurious, and black, her skin mocha and flawless, and her exotic chocolate eyes were wide and turned up at the outer corners. She wore a tight black skirt, stiletto heels, a chic white blouse, and a simple strand of pearls beneath a black leather jacket. Lots of other jewelry. No wedding ring.
“Ms. Cassidy?”
Annie Cassidy smiled weakly, adjusted the cuff of her jacket, and said, “It’s so good of you to see me on such short notice, Dr. Cross.”
“Any friend of Father Fiore is always welcome,” I said. “Please come in.”
I stood aside, and she looked at me uncertainly before coming down the stairs. As she passed, she glanced up shyly before continuing on into my office, leaving the faintest smell of her perfume.
After I closed the door, I found her on my couch, fiddling with her iPhone.
“Just making sure no bells,” Cassidy said.
“I appreciate it,” I said, taking a seat across from her.
She set the phone facedown on the table beside her and then took a big breath and blew it out. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Just so you know: There are no judgments here. Ever. And nothing you say will ever leave this room.”
“Okay. Don’t I have to fill out forms or whatever?”
“You’ll do it electronically. I’ll give you the information after we decide if we can work together.”
Cassidy thought about that, said, “Fair enough.”
“So,” I said, picking up a notepad and a pen. “How can I help?”
She hesitated, squinted, said, “Are you a sleepwalker, Dr. Cross?”
“Is that what you’re having trouble with? If so, I can refer you to an excellent sleep specialist.”
Cassidy made a show of crossing her legs. “I’m not a sleepwalker myself, but I’m wondering if you are so I can understand you before I try to explain.”
It seemed like an odd and convoluted reason for the request, but I said, “I don’t think I have sleepwalked since I was a child.”
“Or since you were married,” she said, her head tilted in deference.
“I’m afraid I’m not following.”
“Of course not,” Cassidy said, and she smiled. “Sleepwalker.”
As I readjusted my position in my chair, I was thinking that I might have someone mentally unstable on my hands.
She straightened her legs and then crossed them the other way. “To be plain: I’m an addict, Dr. Cross, and I need your help.”
“Opioids?” I said with a sigh. “If so, there are better—”
“No, not opioids.”
“What then?”
“How does that old Robert Palmer song go?” Cassidy asked, smiled, and then sang quietly, “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’”
Her happiness vanished. “That’s the long and short of what’s wrong with me, Dr. Cross. I’m a straight-up, strung-out, love junkie if ever there was one.”
CHAPTER
68
I’D HEARD AND encountered pathological love stories before, especially when unrequited desire and obsession were motives for murder. But in the hour that followed, Annie Cassidy gave me a crash course in the little-studied, rarely discussed world of love junkies and so-called sleepwalkers like me.
Cassidy told me she was like most of the love junkies she knew in that, as a little girl, she’d bought hook, line, and tiara into the myth of the fairy-tale princess. Cassidy’s mother dressed her up as a princess when she was young. She entered Cassidy in beauty pageants. And every night before bed, she read her daughter fairy tales where Prince Charming always appeared to scoop the princess out of her poor Cinderella life and ride her into the happily ever after on the back of his valiant white steed.
As I listened, I realized this story was a variation of the princess story the computer geek at Catholic University had told me as a way of explaining the minds of blond women, but I kept my mouth shut and kept an open mind.
“All my life, I dreamed of happily ever after,” Cassidy said wistfully as she sat back on the couch. “When Kevin appeared in my life, senior year at NYU, I was sure he was my Prince Cha
rming. I’d never felt like that with anyone before. Breathless. Sick when we were apart. And when we were together, I could hold his hand, feel his love coursing through me, and tell him every dark secret in my heart. Is that what falling in love was like for you, Dr. Cross?”
I thought of Bree and me in our early days, how smitten I’d been by her, breathless and tongue-tied after our first kiss, and how euphoric we were to be together after we’d been apart.
“Yes,” I said. “We couldn’t get enough of each other.”
“Roughly two years of that, right? Like there’s no one else in the world who matters?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“That’s because when you fall in love, there’s a chemical cocktail mixing in your brain. First it’s norepinephrine, and then the serotonins kick in, give you wild energy. It’s like bathing your brain in cocaine.”
“I think that’s right,” I said.
“You would do almost anything for that feeling once you have it. You might do crazy things that no sane person would do. Like abdicate a throne. Or walk away from your family, your life, just to be with your new love.”
Cassidy said she and Kevin fell into that kind of passionate love. They married after college and were still living the romance two years later.
Their third year together, however, Kevin began working longer hours, and when he was home, he was too tired to do much beyond sit in front of the television with his computer in his lap. He gained weight. He lost interest in her.
She grew more frustrated, in part because, while the chemicals of falling in love carry with them the rush of amphetamines, the chemicals of long-term love are more like a gentle opioid calming the brain, sedating it, in a sense.
“In retrospect, there was that, for sure,” Cassidy said. “I felt groggy all the time, like a sleepwalker. Even through the haze, I could see that I’d screwed up. I realized I hadn’t married the Prince Charming in my fairy tale. I’d married the frog.”
That crushed Cassidy. She felt like she’d settled for less than the perfect love and the beautiful life she’d been promised. Shortly afterward, she met Chet, a man who came to work at her real estate firm. Chet was handsome and funny. They flirted. He listened to her. The chemicals of new love trickled in her brain.
“I came awake, alive again,” Cassidy said. “But I did the right thing.”
She said that many women raised in the traditions of the princess myth will ask for a separation from the frog, hinting that they might be willing to recommit at a later date. They string the frog out for years, punishing him with hopes of reconciliation dashed, unwarranted restraining orders, and false charges of abuse and neglect.
“It’s all done out of spite,” she said. “They feel cheated. The fairy tale is not true, so they take their rage out on the husband while getting some love chemicals on the side.
“But I absolutely did not do that. I did not play torture-the-frog just because Kevin was not Prince C. He could have easily turned out to be an ogre, am I right? The point is that as soon as I had a commitment from Chet, I told Kevin to his face that I had to be free to love and that I wanted a divorce.”
Cassidy moved in with Chet until the chemical attraction wore off, about two years later. Chet’s place in her heart was soon occupied by Steven. Twenty-six months later, she met Carlos, a deep sleepwalker, who was ten years into his marriage.
“I woke Carlos up,” Cassidy said, and she chuckled. “In a big way.”
I glanced at the clock. “Our hour’s almost up, but I have a quick question.”
Cassidy said, “Okay.”
“What do you want out of our sessions? If we go on, I mean.”
She sighed, studied the ceiling, and said, “I’ve been eighteen months with Carlos. He’s a stand-up guy. He divorced his wife for me, and I really do love him. Not only that, I genuinely like him. He’s my best friend ever. But I know what’s coming in six months, a year at the outside, and I … I guess I want to learn how to be a sleepwalker and stay with someone forever.”
I smiled. “That’s a good goal.”
“Something we can talk about next time?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Cassidy took her iPhone off the table and got up. “Thank you, Dr. Cross.”
“You’re more than welcome. I’ll need an e-mail address to send my forms.”
“Oh,” she said, her brow knitting. “I had a computer virus over the weekend and I’m between e-mails at the moment. I’m opening a new account on Gmail tonight. Can I ping you with it?”
“That works.”
“Thank you for understanding all this.”
“It’s what I do.”
“And you do it well,” she said. She smiled uncertainly and left.
I stood there a few moments, wondering if Bree and I were sleepwalkers, then deciding that if we were, I was more than happy in my semiconscious state of marital bliss.
Remembering I had to take some leaves I’d raked and bagged out front for pickup, I went outside. The light was fading. Drizzle fell. I got the leaf bags, carried them around the house, and put them on the sidewalk.
I happened to look down the block and saw Cassidy getting into a black Nissan Pathfinder. Wondering if her Carlos might be driving, I walked a few yards that way and was in deep shadow near a retaining wall when the Pathfinder came closer, headlights off.
I could see the silhouette of Cassidy sitting sideways, facing the driver, who was just a dark shape until the Pathfinder crossed beneath a street lamp. For a second his face was clearly visible through the windshield.
Recognition stopped me cold. I was confused.
What was Annie Cassidy doing with Alden Lindel?
CHAPTER
69
GRETCHEN LINDEL’S FATHER used to tell her that the brain could be the strongest part of the body, or the most fragile.
“It’s your choice, Gretch,” he’d said not long before she’d been taken captive in the twisted world of sickos.
Lying on her filthy mattress in her plywood cell, holding her left leg so it wouldn’t be irritated any further by the manacle around her ankle, the seventeen-year-old was doing everything she could to keep her mind strong.
I am going to get out of here, Gretchen kept telling herself. I just have to survive long enough to get the chance. I’m going to be like Dad. Nothing they’ve done hurts me in any way. It makes me stronger. This only makes me stronger.
But it had been several days since they’d come for her. Hour upon hour of silence created all sorts of dark voices in her mind.
Doubt crept up on Gretchen and whispered that she’d die there in the box. Fear wormed its way into her stomach and said they’d take her again before that happened. Self-pity wrapped her head and heart, told her she was defeated.
But time and time again, whenever Gretchen realized the voices of despair were taking control of her thoughts, she’d think of her father and everything he’d endured, and she’d take heart.
I will survive. They can’t hurt me. This will only make me—
The dead bolts turned. She closed her eyes, not knowing if this was a meal or another of their twisted games. If it was a game, she was done crying. She was done being scared. They seemed to feed on her fright, and as the door swung open she vowed to give them none.
The big one in black came in carrying a semiautomatic AR rifle. Her father had one just like it.
“It’s time, Gretchen,” he said from behind the paintball mask. “We’re all but done here. Cleanup time now.”
Gretchen said nothing, just stared through him as if he didn’t matter anymore, as if nothing mattered anymore.
Be like Dad, she thought as he went to work on her ankle manacle.
For God’s sake, be like Dad.
CHAPTER
70
HAD THAT BEEN Gretchen Lindel’s father driving the Pathfinder?
I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong, but each time I closed my eyes, I saw Alden Lind
el clearly. But why? And how?
When Annie Cassidy called to set up the appointment, she’d said that Father Fiore had referred her, hadn’t she? Well, now that I thought about it, she hadn’t actually used his name. She’d said she’d gotten my number from “a mutual friend, a priest with challenging problems.”
And Lindel? He’d contacted me directly. No reference that I remembered.
What were the odds of two people who knew each other coming to my office and never mentioning it to me?
I thought about Gretchen Lindel’s mother, Eliza, and how distraught she’d been in the days after her daughter’s kidnapping. Was Annie Cassidy the reason she and her husband separated? Had she used fake names for her lovers? Was Alden Lindel actually Carlos?
I went inside, told my grandmother I was going out, and got the car keys.
By the time I drove into a residential neighborhood west of the Cabin John Parkway, it was pitch-dark and the rain had stopped. I found the address I was looking for and parked the car across the street from a brick-faced Colonial with a big flower bed gone dormant, a crushed-gravel driveway, and a bronze Volvo station wagon. Lights gleamed in the narrow windows that flanked the front door.
I climbed out, smelled wet leaves, and started toward the house, wondering about the reception I’d get, a lone man at night unannounced. My cell phone buzzed. I ignored it, climbed the stoop, and rang the bell.
A dog started barking. A small Jack Russell terrier was soon bouncing and barking an alarm on the other side of the lower right window.
“Tinker!” a woman said. “Get back, girl!”
The dog kept barking and then yelped in protest when the woman grabbed her and held her in her arms. She peered blearily out the window at me. Despite the exhaustion and despair that seemed to hang off her like rags, I recognized her.
“Mrs. Lindel?” I said. “Eliza?”
The terrier in her arms showed her teeth.
She said, “If you’re a reporter, please go away, you’re not helping the situation. No one’s helping the situation here.”