Depraved Heart

  “Desi has a new talent,” she’s saying lightly and with a smile. “Throwing rocks. Marino is teaching him to skip them across the water.”

  “If the FBI gets hold of this, it will undermine everything you’ve said in your statements to them, to the police.” Lucy is going to lecture me now. “Do you see that? Because it’s the most important point I’m making and the real reason for showing this to you.”

  “Lucy’s right I’m afraid,” Donoghue agrees. “No matter how we got the recording or who might have had it first, what’s on it now is a problem for you, Kay. Let’s play through it again, paying close attention to the moment when you were attacked. Tell me everything you remember.”

  “I saw her bleeding into the water.” I know I did. “I saw it after I swung the knife at her.”

  “You saw your own blood,” Lucy replies. “When you swung at her, you jerked the spear in your thigh and you bled more.”

  “It wasn’t my blood. I know what I saw.”

  “I’m going to show you what happened,” she says. “Watch very closely.”

  A SUDDEN MOVEMENT around the hulk of the wreck, and a shape becomes a sleek person in a hooded camouflage dive skin the tawny colors of a reef, moving aerodynamically like a squid.

  That’s what I see in my mind but it’s not what’s in the video. Carrie Grethen isn’t recognizable in what I’m watching. It’s not possible to tell if the murky figure is male or female or what type of dive skin he or she has on. Lucy hits PAUSE.

  “What do you see?” she asks me.

  I stare for the longest time, touching the display to enlarge the image, then making it small again to sharpen the poor resolution. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, groping for the slightest additional detail of what I remember or thought I did.

  “Admittedly it’s poor quality because there was so little light—so little that there was no color, just murky shades of brown and black. Admittedly I can’t tell who it is and it could be a male for that matter.” My face is turned up toward the ceiling, my eyes still shut.

  “Troy Rosado,” Lucy says to Donoghue. “I just want to toss that out there because someone will suggest he could be who Aunt Kay was seeing. Nineteen years old, five-nine, a hundred and forty pounds. He’d disappeared with Carrie, was definitely in Florida, was definitely in the area and probably was complicit in the murder of his own father and on the family yacht when it happened. Then he and Carrie vanished.”

  “That’s not who shot me. It wasn’t Troy Rosado,” I reply.

  “You would swear to that under oath?” Donoghue asks.

  “I’m positive the person I saw wasn’t him.”

  “You’d met him before?” Donoghue asks.

  “No. But I’d seen photographs and it doesn’t matter because I recognized Carrie. But I wish what I remember is clearer. What I see in my mind now isn’t as distinct as it was at first. The images have been overlaid by what I’ve found out since, and by the trauma.”

  “Do you think being shot and its aftermath changed what you remember about your encounter?” Janet asks.

  “I don’t know because I’ve never been shot before,” I reply.

  “I have,” she says. “When I was just getting started with the Bureau and hadn’t been out of the Academy even a year. One night I walked into a 7-Eleven to buy a soda. I have the cooler door open, figuring out what I want. I bent down to reach for a Diet Dr Pepper when this guy comes in with a gun and proceeds to rob the place. I took care of it but got wounded. Nothing serious. Except later when I saw the security video, the kid in it didn’t look like the one I saw.”

  “You’re suggesting that trauma changes your perceived reality,” Donoghue says.

  “It did for me. I knew the guy I killed was the one who robbed the store and shot me, but it’s really weird that what I remember I saw and what I really saw weren’t the same thing. I swore his eyes were dark when in fact they were blue. I remembered his skin as light brown with pimples when in fact it was white with peach fuzz. I described a teardrop tattoo on his face and in fact it was a mole. I thought he was in his twenties and it turned out he was thirteen.”

  “That had to be hard,” Donoghue says.

  “Not really. He might have been a kid but he had a very grown-up Taurus nine mil and two extra magazines in his pocket.”

  “Would you have picked him in a lineup?” Donoghue asks.

  “Fortunately I didn’t have to since his body was right there on the floor.”

  “But would you have?”

  “Honestly I don’t know. It depends on who else was in it.”

  “What about a photograph of Carrie? Is there a way for me to see what she looks like? Or what she used to look like?” Donoghue asks.

  Lucy reaches across the table and retrieves the phone. She types on it for a moment, hands it back to Donoghue.

  “When she supposedly was killed in the chopper crash this was the photo on file, her mug shot from when she’d been arrested the year before and locked up in Kirby on Wards Island. Wikipedia, by the way. This photo’s on Wikipedia. Carrie Grethen has her own Wikipedia page.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why would she have a Wikipedia page now, and when did it happen?”

  “Recently,” Lucy answers. “You can look at the history and see the first version of her page was posted six weeks ago. Since then the same person appears to be revising it, and I have no doubt it’s her. Carrie. I’m sure she’s the one who posted her old mug shot and the aerial photo of Kirby Psychiatric Center.”

  “Which as you know is on an island in the East River. She’s the only patient in history to escape from the maximum security forensic unit for the criminally insane,” Janet tells Donoghue. “Somehow she’d managed to hook up on the outside with the psycho we mentioned earlier, Newton Joyce. Turned out he was a serial killer who liked to cut off his victims’ faces to remember them by, and had a big stash in his freezer. He was a pilot, had his own helicopter and landed it on Wards Island and flew off with Carrie. The rest of his story didn’t end so well, at least not for him.”

  “She had herself airlifted out by a serial killer? How could she manage something like that?” Donoghue is impressed.

  “The question is always how she does things,” Lucy says. “And there’s always a long and involved story. Carrie is extremely smart and resourceful. She’s patient. She knows she’ll get what she wants if she takes her time and doesn’t give in to impulses, to cravings and rages.”

  “So this is what she used to look like.” Donoghue moves the phone closer to both of us.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE FACE IS YOUNG AND STRONGLY PRETTY, BUT IT was always the eyes that gave her away. They remind me of pinwheels. They seem to spin as her aberrant thoughts surge behind them, fueling the evil entity that inhabits her soul.

  Carrie Grethen is a cancer. I realize that’s an overused pathological metaphor but it’s the truth in her case. There’s no healthy tissue left, just the malignancy that has consumed her life and completely taken over her psyche. I barely view her as human, and in a way she’s not because she’s missing the major traits that qualify her to be a member of the same race as the rest of us.

  “Well?” Donoghue says to me. “Is that who you saw?”

  “Yes and no,” I reply as my mood sinks deeper to what feels like the bottom of the sea, as deep and dark as where I almost died. “I couldn’t swear to it in court. Not based on this.”

  The person I observed a hundred feet under the water looks like an older Carrie, but the fact is I can’t be positive and probably no jury would convict her based on this recording or what I claim occurred. I don’t know what I expected but I thought the video would be of a higher resolution, a better quality. I thought I’d see my knife cut through the side of her face. It was so real.

  I could have sworn I injured her badly. No one questioned me at the time, not even Benton. The FBI checked local hospitals and doctors based on my certainty that Carrie had a serious wound
to her face that would require plastic surgery. Even so she likely would be disfigured for life, and that would be a terrible fate for her based on what I’ve learned today about her vanity, her fears of becoming old and unattractive. But I don’t see anything to support what I felt sure happened. I’m increasingly frustrated and dejected, and Lucy can tell.

  “It was dark down there and you didn’t have your flashlight directed at what you were filming,” she says to me. “And you were moving a lot. That’s the tough part. You were moving.”

  “What about forensic image processing?” Donoghue asks her.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” Lucy replies. “I’ve spent a lot of time on this.” She doesn’t say when or where.

  “And as I’ve said, what you see is as good as it’s going to get,” she adds. “The camera I installed in her mask was for the purposes of recording evidence recovery, and in those instances Aunt Kay would have her light shining on what she was collecting. I didn’t install a camera thinking she was going to be attacked underwater, that something like this was going to happen.”

  “Do you think Carrie anticipated that Kay might be recording the dive and the attack could end up filmed?”

  “That’s the point of the camouflage, the hood, the gloves,” Lucy says. “She blends with her surroundings in poor visibility and to answer your question, yes. Carrie knew exactly what she was doing and would have recognized the camera mounted on the mask. Carrie for sure would have anticipated that someone might be filming that dive. She knows us.”

  “Maybe better than we know ourselves,” Janet adds.

  “What else?” Donoghue gives me her complete attention again.

  “I remember rapidly backing away from the bodies, from the two dead divers inside the hull.” I pick up the story where I left off. “Obviously someone had just been there with a spear gun, and this person intended to kill all of us. That was my instant reaction. Benton was searching the ocean floor with a light maybe fifty feet from me, and I swam to him and tapped his tank with my dive knife to get his attention. Then I saw her come around the side of the wreck.”

  “You saw someone come around the side of the wreck,” Donoghue corrects me.

  “I saw her pointing the spear gun at me,” I repeat adamantly. “I spun around, giving her my back as I heard a spitting sound, then a clank.”

  “Your spinning around to protect yourself is why the first spear hit your tank,” Donoghue infers.

  “No,” Lucy answers for me. “The first spear hit her tank because that was Carrie’s intention.”

  “Why do you say that?” I ask. “How can you possibly know her intention?”

  “You saw what happened when Rosado’s tank was hit while he was waiting on the surface as his wife filmed him from the stern of their yacht,” Lucy replies. “Compressed air blasted out like a rocket, propelling him into the air and spinning him around, and it’s all on film. If he hadn’t already been dead, he probably would have died of a broken neck or drowned.”

  “His tank was struck by a bullet not a spear,” I reply.

  “This is psychological,” Lucy says. “Carrie would know you saw the video of Rosado spinning in the air. Clank! She hits your tank and you’re going to make the connection. Maybe the same thing could happen to you. Only worse. You’re a hundred feet down and your tank gets perforated and compressed air blasts out?”

  “A spear couldn’t have perforated my steel tank.”

  “Did you know that the second it happened?”

  “That wouldn’t have been possible,” I reply. “I didn’t really know anything when it happened.”

  “Did you even know it was a spear?”

  “What I recall is an overwhelming impulse to take off my BCD, to get out of it as fast as I could.” I remember that vividly. “Maybe that’s why. Maybe after watching Rosado’s murder on video I was afraid my tank was going to explode the same way his did.”

  “Then the second shot hits you in the leg,” Lucy says. “And that too was an intentional target. Just as it was intentional that the spear was attached to a float. Carrie rigged it up so the float was going to start pulling you along with the current. She was treating you like a speared fish.”

  I think back to what Benton said after it happened. Carrie loves to degrade and humiliate. She batted me around like a catnip mouse and is probably still laughing about it. He explains when she looks at me what she really sees is herself and her eventual response. Will she run? Or will she rip me open? Was the plan to weaken me first? And finish me off later?

  “What I want you to look at carefully is the image of her when you could see her pointing the spear gun.” Lucy reaches for the phone. “I’m sorry I can’t put this up on a big screen. But you’re going to see what I’m talking about. A very important detail that’s not noticeable in the video before I cleaned it up.”

  She returns the phone to us, and in the display is the blurry shape of Carrie when I first saw her come around the side of the wreck. I remember her looking me in the eye as she lifted the spear gun and fired. SPIT. And then a CLANK as I whirred around and the spear hit my tank. Lucy looks over my shoulder and points.

  “There. Take a good look at the spear gun. Do you see what I do?” she asks me.

  “I don’t know. It just looks like a spear gun.”

  “It’s actually a railgun, a long one, at least three and a half feet and intended for big game.” She touches the screen with two fingers, enlarging the image. “But look what else. Watch her cock the gun. You can barely make it out but watch her arms, her hands pulling back toward her chest.”

  She replays several seconds of the video to show us. And it’s murky and blurry but I see what she means.

  “There. She has two rubber power bands but is using only one,” Lucy explains. “That makes it easier and quicker to reload. But for a gun this big it’s not enough firepower if she wants the necessary velocity, and you can bet when she shot the two police divers she used both rubber bands. But not with you,” she says to me.

  “She could have killed you and Benton,” Donoghue decides. “She was fast and armed and the two of you were neither. But for some reason she allowed you to live. Is it possible, Kay, that you’ve assumed she won’t kill you? Knowing what you do about her? And after a spate of her horrific murders? And yet you felt it was fine to go diving in that location?”

  “I was simply doing my job.” It’s the only answer I have, and yet I realize it’s not an honest one.

  I wasn’t scared and I should have been. I’m still not scared. Maybe it’s because there’s no point in it. Being afraid of Carrie Grethen serves no useful purpose. It’s possible I gave up that normal human response long years ago and wasn’t really aware of it until now.

  “It’s so frustrating that the figure you’re pointing out isn’t identifiable,” Donoghue is saying. “I can’t even tell it’s a woman. But whoever it was this person allowed you to live.”

  “I wouldn’t say she allowed me to live,” I reply hotly.

  “But she did.” Lucy pauses the video, looking at me. “Whether you like it or not. That’s what happened. Carrie didn’t want you or Benton dead. At least at that very moment she didn’t because it’s not part of her long-term plan.”

  “Be careful saying things like that,” Donoghue reprimands her. “You need to avoid any appearance that you can think Carrie Grethen’s thoughts or predict her behavior.”

  “Well I can,” Lucy says. “I can think like her and predict what she’ll do, and I promise that whatever she’s set in motion is just starting. That’s not speculation. It’s a fact you’re about to witness because it’s already unrolling even as we speak.”

  “Do you think Carrie has something to do with why the FBI is on your property?” Donoghue asks.

  “What do you think.” It’s not a question, and Lucy resumes the video and then backs it up.

  We again watch the hooded figure emerge from around the hulk of the barge, and Lucy
explains that clamped to Carrie’s tank is a diver propulsion vehicle (DPV), a small black plastic cylinder that’s difficult to see. It’s hands free, making it possible for Carrie to maneuver nimbly and quickly underwater while managing a railgun and spears. The sound I heard was the quiet vibration of the battery-powered motor, Lucy says, and it’s the first time I’ve known this. I always thought I heard something strange but I never knew what it was or if I might have imagined it.

  The whining power tool sound came from the sort of underwater scooter Navy SEALs use, Lucy points out, adding that none of us was any match for Carrie Grethen. Not the two divers she murdered. Not Benton. Not me. We didn’t arm ourselves. We didn’t have the advantage of a DPV propelling us at 170 feet per minute. We couldn’t have caught her. We couldn’t have gotten away from her either.

  IT’S PAST NOON when Marino returns with Desi. I hear their feet on the dock. Then they’re walking through the door and shutting it behind them.

  “I’ve been asked to pass it along that you need to move your truck,” Marino says to me. “The K-nine and another unit tried to leave but you’ve got the driveway blocked. They’re waiting by the gate and I’m just warning you they’re pissed.”

  “They were really mad!” Desi says excitedly. “And they had on guns too!”

  “Ohhhhhh no. I’m so scared.” Lucy picks him up and swings him around as he laughs hilariously.

  “I suspect I’ve added to the problem,” Donoghue says to Marino. “I had to leave my car down there for the same reason. I’m sure it must be blocking people.”

  “Yep,” he says. “You’re blocking the truck and the truck’s blocking a couple of assholes.”

  “If you give me your keys I’ll take care of it,” Lucy says to her.

  Donoghue digs them out and hands them over. “Not one word to the FBI, the police, not to anyone. No joking. No deliberately aggravating them. No obscene gestures.” She’s firm with Lucy.