I search to remember what I have told her about my past.
“You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age,” she continues. “Most of your childhood you lived with your father’s dying.”
The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. Anna slips mitts over her hands and slides sourdough rolls out of the oven. She serves hot bread on small plates with butter and honey. “It seems to be your karma to return to the scene, so to speak, over and over,” she analyzes. “The scene of your father’s death, of that original loss. As if somehow you will undo it. But all you do is repeat it. The oldest pattern in human nature. I see it daily.”
“This isn’t about my father.” I pick up my spoon. “This isn’t about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood.”
“It is about not feeling.” She pulls out her chair and sits back down. “About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel.” The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. “When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down.”
“Sometimes you have to do that.”
“It is never good to do that.” She shakes her head.
“Sometimes it’s survival to do that,” I disagree.
“Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark’s death. Then last year, Benton’s murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses.”
The pain from Benton’s murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hollowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.
“A pattern like this,” Anna comments, “if it isn’t arrested, takes on an unstoppable energy and sucks everything into its black hole.”
I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don’t deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. “It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door,” I tell her, referring again to Chandonne, whom I can scarcely bear to call by name. “That somehow I set everything into motion to bring a killer to my house. If that’s what I hear you saying. If that is what you’re saying.”
“It is what I am asking.” She butters a roll. “It is what I am asking you, Kay,” she somberly repeats.
“Anna, how in God’s name can you think I would somehow bring about my own murder?”
“Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious.”
“Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously,” I claim.
“There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like,” Anna tosses Nietzsche’s quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.
“I didn’t will him to come to my house,” I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chandonne’s name because I don’t want to give him the power of being a real person to me.
“How did he know where you live?” Anna continues her questioning.
“It’s been in the news numerous times over the years, unfortunately,” I conjecture. “I don’t know how he knew.”
“What? He went to the library and looked up your address on microfilm? This creature so hideously deformed who rarely went out in the light of day? This dog-faced congenital anomaly, almost every inch of his face, his body covered with long lanugo hair, pale baby-fine hair? He went to the public library?” She lets the absurdity of this hover over us.
“I don’t know how he knew,” I repeat. “Where he was hiding isn’t far from my house.” I am getting upset. “Don’t blame me. No one has a right to blame me for what he did. Why are you blaming me?”
“We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple, Kay,” she answers me.
“I can’t believe you think for a minute I wanted him coming after me. I, of all people.” An image of Kim Luong flashes. I remember fractured facial bones crunching beneath my latex-gloved fingers. I remember the pungent sweet odor of coagulating blood in the airless, hot storeroom where Chandonne dragged her dying body so he could release his frenzied lust, beating and biting and smearing her blood. “Those women didn’t bring this upon themselves, either,” I say with emotion.
“I did not know those women,” Anna says. “I cannot speak to what they did or did not do.”
An image of Diane Bray flashes, her arrogant beauty savaged, destroyed and crudely displayed on the bare mattress inside her bedroom. She was completely unrecognizable by the time he finished with her, seeming to hate her more completely than he did Kim Luong—more completely than the women we believe he murdered in Paris before he came to Richmond. I wonder out loud to Anna if Chandonne recognized himself in Bray and it excited his self-hate to its highest level. Diane Bray was cunning and cold. She was cruel and abused power as readily as she breathed air.
“You had every good reason to hate her,” is Anna’s reply.
This stops me in my mental tracks. I don’t respond right away. I try to remember if I have ever said I hate someone, or worse, if I have actually been guilty of it. To hate another person is wrong. It is never right. Hate is a crime of the spirit that leads to crimes of the flesh. Hate is what brings so many of my patients to my door. I tell Anna that I didn’t hate Diane Bray, even though she made it her mission to overpower me and almost succeeded in getting me fired. Bray was pathologically jealous and ambitious. But no, I tell Anna, I didn’t hate Diane Bray. She was evil, I conclude. But she didn’t deserve what he did to her. Certainly, she didn’t invite it.
“You don’t think so?” Anna questions all of it. “You do not think he did to her, symbolically, what she was doing to you? Obsession. Forcing her way into your life when you were vulnerable. Attacking, degrading, destroying—an overpowering that aroused her, perhaps even sexually. What is it you have told me so many times? People die the way they lived.”
“Many of them do.”
“Did she?”
“Symbolically, as you put it?” I reply. “Maybe.”
“And you, Kay? Did you almost die the way you lived?”
“I didn’t die, Anna.”
“But you almost did,” she says again. “And before he came to your door, you had almost given up. You almost stopped living when Benton did.”
Tears touch my eyes.
“What do you think might have happened to you had Diane Bray not died?” Anna then asks.
Bray ran the Richmond police department and fooled people who mattered. In a very short time, she made a name for herself throughout Virginia, and ironically, her narcissism, her lust for power and recognition, it appears, may be what lured Chandonne to her. I wonder if he stalked her first. I wonder if he stalked me, and suppose the answer to both questions is that he must have.
“Do you think you’d still be the chief medical examiner if Diane Bray were alive?” Anna’s stare is unwavering.
“I wouldn’t have let her win.” I taste my soup and my stomach flops. “I don’t care how diabolical she was, I wouldn’t have allowed it. My life is up to me. It was never up to her. My life is mine to make or ruin.”
“Perhaps you are glad s
he is dead,” Anna says.
“The world’s better off without her.” I push the place mat and everything on it well away from me. “That’s the truth. The world is better off without people like her. The world would be better off without him.”
“Better off without Chandonne?”
I nod.
“Then perhaps you wish Lucy had killed him after all?” she quietly suggests, and Anna has a way of demanding truth without being aggressive or judging. “Maybe you would pull the switch, as they say?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I would not pull the switch on anyone. I can’t eat. I’m sorry you went to so much trouble. I hope I’m not coming down with something.”
“We have talked enough for now.” Anna is suddenly the parent deciding it is time for bed. “Tomorrow is Sunday, a good day to stay in and be quiet and rest. I am clearing my calendar, canceling all my appointments for Monday. And then I’ll cancel Tuesday and Wednesday and the rest of the week, if need be.”
I try to object but she won’t hear it.
“The good thing about being my age is I can do whatever the hell I want,” she adds. “I am on call for emergencies. But that is all. And right now, you are my biggest emergency, Kay.”
“I’m not an emergency.” I get up from the table.
Anna helps me with my luggage and takes me down a long hallway that leads to the west wing of her majestic home. The guest room where I am to stay for an undetermined period of time is dominated by a large yew wood bed that, like much of the furniture in her house, is pale gold Biedermeier. Her decor is restrained, with straight and simple lines, but cumulus down-filled duvets and pillows and heavy draperies that flow in champagne silk waterfalls to the hardwood floor hint at her true nature. Anna’s motivation in life is the comfort of others, to heal and to banish pain and celebrate pure beauty.
“What else do you need?” She hangs up my clothes.
I help put away other items in dresser drawers and realize I am trembling again.
“Do you need something to sleep?” She lines up my shoes on the closet floor.
Taking an Ativan or some other sedative is a tempting proposition that I resist. “I’ve always been afraid to make it a habit,” I vaguely respond. “You can see how I am with cigarettes. I can’t be trusted.”
Anna looks at me. “It is very important you get sleep, Kay. No better friend to depression.”
I am not sure what she is saying, but I know what she means. I am depressed. I am probably going to be depressed, and sleep deprivation makes everything so much worse. Throughout my life, insomnia has flared up like arthritis, and when I became a physician I had to resist the easy habit of indulging in one’s own candy store. Prescription drugs have always been there. I have always stayed away from them.
Anna leaves me and I sit up in bed with the lights off, staring into the dark, halfway believing that when morning comes, I will find what has happened is just another one of my bad dreams, another horror that crept out from my deeper layers when I was not quite conscious. My rational voice probes my interior like a flashlight but dispels nothing. I can’t illuminate any meaning to my almost being mutilated and killed and how that fact will affect the rest of my life. I can’t feel it. I can’t make sense of it. God, help me. I turn over on my side and shut my eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, my mother used to pray with me, but I always thought the words were really more for my father in his sickbed down the hall. Sometimes when my mother would leave my room I would insert masculine pronouns into the verses. If he should die before he wakes, I pray the Lord his soul to take, and I would cry myself to sleep.
CHAPTER 3
I WAKE UP the following morning to voices in the house and have the unsettling sensation that the telephone rang all night. I am not sure if I dreamed it. For an awful moment I have no idea where I am, then it comes to me in a sick, fearful wave. I work my way up against pillows and am still for a moment. I can tell through drawn curtains that the sun is aloof again, offering nothing but gray.
I help myself to a thick terry-cloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and put on a pair of socks before venturing out to see who else is in the house. I hope the visitor is Lucy, and it is. She and Anna are in the kitchen. Small snowflakes sprinkle down past expansive windows overlooking the backyard and the flat pewter river. Bare trees etched darkly against the day move slightly in the wind, and wood smoke rises from the house of the nearest neighbor. Lucy has on a faded warm-up suit left over from when she took computer and robotics courses at MIT. It appears she has styled her short auburn hair with her fingers, and she seems unusually grim and has a glassy-eyed, bloodshot look that I associate with too much booze the night before.
“Did you just get here?” I hug her good morning.
“Actually, last night,” she replies, squeezing me tight. “I couldn’t resist. Thought I’d drop by and we’d have a slumber party. But you were down for the count. It’s my fault for getting here so late.”
“Oh no.” I go hollow inside. “You should have gotten me up. Why didn’t you?”
“No way. How’s the arm?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much.” This is not at all true. “You checked out of the Jefferson?”
“Nope, still there.” Lucy’s expression is unreadable. She drops to the floor and pulls off her warm-up pants, revealing bright spandex running tights underneath.
“I am afraid your niece was a bad influence,” Anna says. “She brought over a very nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot and we stayed up much too late. I would not let her drive back downtown.”
I feel a twinge of hurt, or maybe it is jealousy. “Champagne? Are we celebrating something?” I inquire.
Anna replies with a slight shrug. She is preoccupied. I sense she carries very heavy thoughts that she does not want to set down before me, and I wonder if the phone really did ring last night. Lucy unzips her jacket, revealing more bright blue and black nylon that fits her strong, athletic body like paint.
“Yeah. Celebrating,” Lucy says, bitterness lacing her voice. “ATF’s put me on admin leave.”
I can’t believe I heard her right. Administrative leave is the same thing as being suspended. It is the first step in being fired. I glance at Anna for any sign that she already knows about this, but she seems just as surprised as I am.
“They’ve put me on the beach.” ATF slang for suspension. “I’ll get a letter in the next week or so that will cite all my transgressions.” Lucy acts blasé but I know her too well to be fooled. Anger is about all I have seen boiling out of her over recent months and years, and it is there now, molten beneath her many complex layers. “They’ll give me all the reasons I should be terminated and I get to appeal. Unless I decide to just fuck it and quit. Which I might. I don’t need them.”
“Why? What on earth happened? Not because of him.” I mean Chandonne.
With rare exception, when an agent has been in a shooting or some other critical incident, the routine is to immediately involve him in peer support and reassign him to a less stressful job, such as arson investigation instead of the dangerous undercover work Lucy was doing in Miami. If the individual is emotionally unable to cope, he might even be granted traumatic leave time. But administrative leave is another matter. It is punishment, plain and simple.
Lucy looks up at me from her seat on the floor, legs straight out, hands planted behind her back. “It’s the old damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she retorts. “If I’d shot him, I’d have hell to pay. I didn’t shoot him and I have hell to pay.”
“You were in a shoot-out in Miami, then very soon after you come to Richmond and almost shot someone else.” Anna states the truth. It doesn’t matter if the someone else is a serial killer who broke into my house. Lucy has a history of resorting to force that predates even the incident in Miami. Her troubled past presses down heavily in Anna’s kitchen like a low-pressure front.
“I’m the first to admit it,” Lucy replies. “All of us wanted to blow
him away. You don’t think Marino did?” She meets my eyes. “You don’t think every cop, every agent who showed up at your house didn’t want to pull the trigger? They think I’m some kind of soldier of fortune, some psycho who gets off on killing people. At least, that’s what they’re hinting at.”
“You do need time off,” Anna says bluntly. “Maybe it is about that and nothing more.”
“That’s not what this is about. Come on, if one of the guys had done what I did in Miami, he’d be a hero. If one of the guys almost killed Chandonne, the suits in D.C. would be applauding his restraint, not nailing him for almost doing something. How can you punish someone for almost doing something? In fact, how can you even prove someone almost did something?”
“Well, they’ll have to prove it,” the lawyer, the investigator in me tells her. At the same time I am reminded that Chandonne almost did something to me. He didn’t actually do it, no matter his intention, and his eventual legal defense will make a big issue of this fact.
“They can do whatever they want,” Lucy replies, as hurt and outrage swell. “They can fire me. Or bring me back in and park my butt at a desk in some little windowless room somewhere in South Dakota or Alaska. Or bury me in some chicken-shit department like audio-visual.”
“Kay, you haven’t had coffee yet.” Anna attempts to dispel the mounting tension.
“So maybe that’s my problem. Maybe that’s why nothing’s making any sense this morning.” I head to the drip machine near the sink. “Anybody else?”
There are no other takers. I pour a cup as Lucy leans into deep stretches, and it is always amazing to watch her move, liquid and supple, her muscles calling attention to themselves without deliberation or fanfare. Having started life pudgy and slow, she has spent years engineering herself into a machine that will respond the way she demands, very much like the helicopters she flies. Maybe it is her Brazilian blood that adds the dark fire to her beauty, but Lucy is electrifying. People fix their eyes on her wherever she goes, and her reaction is a shrug, at most.