Chat - A Novel Part 29

Joe saw her husband's brow furrow. He imagined what was going on inside the man's brain. The psychologist battling with the spouse and fellow mourner-one wis.h.i.+ng to counsel and soothe, the other urging to argue and fight for turf.

Joe was having some of the same problem. Intrigued as he was with the direction this was taking, his right arm, as slowly as a minute hand, was also moving to where he could casually drop it into his lap-and closer to his holstered gun.

"You could get your revenge," she was saying. "Putting all those men in jail. I had nothing. I had to put on a brave face for Wendy, keep running my office, listen to all my patients complaining, even encourage you as you bragged about how you nailed this guy or the other. I wanted to find some relief, too. But no one was listening."

The husband in Leppman slipped out for a moment. "You never told me."

"You never asked. You never looked. John, we left our home on your recommendation, to 'leave it all behind us,' you said. We were supposed to get a fresh start in Vermont. Well, I tried that, but you didn't. You started right up with all this Internet police work. That wasn't leaving it all behind. You were the only one of us who never even tried."

She suddenly straightened in her chair. "My G.o.d, John, you planted the seeds of all this. Remember that night you went riding around with your cop friends? You came home with a Taser-like it was a talisman you'd found on the edge of Gwennie's grave, instead of something you'd stolen. What were you thinking? That d.a.m.n thing took on a life of its own. You moved on-forgot all about it. But I kept thinking about it, wondering how a Taser had so cleverly worked its way into our home."

Leppman's brow furrowed. "My G.o.d," he said. "I didn't know. I stole it from impulse, because of what it represented. I never thought . . ." He rubbed his eyes. "Maybe, subliminally . . ." He lapsed into silence.

Joe watched them both-highly schooled, well spoken, respectfully mannered-their emotions m.u.f.fled under the careful professional language of their a.n.a.lytical training. Still, what they were saying didn't differ from what he'd heard between the down-and-out of his experience. People made a.s.sumptions, took one another for granted, behaved selfishly, maybe even acted to correct the wrongs the other refused to address.

He wondered if, given the mood, that last point might not be broached, the half-forgotten gun notwithstanding.

"Dr. Gartner," he began, "what made you focus on these two? Were they like the man who went after Gwennie?"

"I thought so," she agreed. "They were so quick to a.s.sume . . ."

She paused. He waited a couple of seconds and then tried a slightly different approach. "What made you go online in the first place?"

That seemed to help. Her face became more animated, the latent researcher brought to life. "I wanted to find out what the appeal was. I wanted to understand what Gwennie was looking for. It was amazing. I only read the exchanges at first, people going back and forth. Some of it was like eavesdropping on any conversation-even most of it, I guess. But there was this undertone. Maybe I was looking for it, too, reading into the comments. But I began to see where a lot of the chats were leading. I could see how seductive so many of the men were, and how willing the girls were to follow them-the total anonymity breeding a lack of inhibition."

She stopped again, still staring at the floor, but neither man interrupted. They could instinctively tell she was gathering her memories, putting them in order to get them out at long last.

"I began to get angry," she continued. "All the sadness, the loss. Everything we'd gone through was brought together in my head. It was like a laser beam gathering light. I began to fantasize putting an end to it all. It made me feel better."

Joe glanced at John Leppman, trying to read his mind. His face was slack with remorse and guilt-his closest and most valued patient had been overlooked or, perhaps worse, dismissed.

"I don't know why I chose those two," Sandy said. "Something clicked with the first one's name. Gwennie loved the Rocky movies, and I always loved Norman Rockwell. Maybe that was it. And he was so horrible, too. When I started chatting as Mandi, he came on like a boy in high school, all awful one-liners and disgusting innuendos. He thought he was such a Don Juan."

Her cheeks had colored as she spoke, and her voice grew in strength. The growing rage she was describing hardly needed better ill.u.s.tration.

"I began fantasizing about him-what I would do if I ever got him into a room alone." She laughed once, very quietly, almost a sob. "I came up with plan after plan, each time making it more real. The Taser had to be a part of it-the same thing that pig had used on Gwennie. That seemed only fair."

"You got Wendy to steal the cartridge without her dad knowing?" Joe asked.

She looked up at him, a sad smile on her face. "Poor Wendy. I didn't ask her to do that . . ." She stopped in mid-thought, reconsidering. "Not directly, but I suppose I did. I'd been telling her of my fantasies."

Her husband groaned next to her, barely audibly. Her head jerked in his direction, and Joe thought she'd break from her monologue to give him a tongue-las.h.i.+ng. But she stopped at the last second and merely stared at him for a moment.

She returned to Joe, ignoring Leppman. "She was feeling as I was. Dangling. She needed an outlet, too. She wanted to help, and when she was with him him on that tour of the police department and she suddenly saw the cartridge we needed, she took it." on that tour of the police department and she suddenly saw the cartridge we needed, she took it."

By now Leppman had slumped into his chair, his hands in his lap, his eyes unfocused, all energy seemingly drained from his body.

"She also helped you drop his body into the river," Joe suggested.

She shook her head but answered affirmatively, "That was wrong. I shouldn't have involved her so much. But I believed she wanted to. She told me the two of us had to do everything together, every step of the way. I went along because I wanted the company. And she was so enthusiastic." She said this with emphasis, her eyes bright.

Joe stoked the mood of the moment. "You were like sisters," he suggested.

She nodded. "After we dropped him into the water, we hugged and laughed. It was the best I'd felt in years."

Joe knew he should probably get as much detail as possible-the gap between using the Taser in the motel and subsequently drowning Metz miles away suggested a horrifying picture of many repeated electrical impulses in order to keep the man subdued. But he wasn't sure how much longer this moment would last. It had come about spontaneously, and could just as quickly vaporize. These kinds of confessions were tricky enough in the best-planned environments, let alone something like this.

He forged ahead to get as much as he could. "But by the second time, things had changed."

Her face fell. "Yes," she conceded. "That's when I realized how wrong I'd been. Such a fool. I should have thought of that. We planned it together, worked out all the details. But when it came down to actually doing it, Wendy balked."

Joe was watching her every gesture, every shadow that crossed her face. She was discussing this as if she'd chosen the wrong dress for her daughter's coming-out party-an important glitch in an otherwise well planned event. The fact that they were discussing a double homicide had slipped into irrelevance.

Not that Joe was outwardly behaving much more rationally. Since Sandy Gartner had brought herself to this level of reality, Joe wasn't about to disabuse her.

He glanced quickly at Leppman, who seemed almost catatonic by now. "So, you had to act on your own," Joe suggested helpfully. "Is that why you left him in the motel room instead of taking him somewhere else, like you did the first guy?"

Gartner nodded. "Yes. It all happened at the last minute. Wendy came with me, but then she wouldn't get out of the car. She was supposed to open the man's door, carrying the cookies. She's so much prettier than I am-and younger, of course, which was the whole point. Fortunately, that part didn't matter. He was so hot and bothered, I could have talked him into anything."

"What did you say to him?" Joe asked. "He was expecting a fourteen-year-old."

She looked straight at him and smiled sadly, her head slightly tilted to one side, as if mystified by every aspect of her own tale. "I offered him one-I showed him Gwennie's picture and told him she was waiting for him." She paused and leaned forward in her chair, her body language seeking confirmation. "And she was, wasn't she?"

He was hard-pressed to argue, while at the same time wondering how many people might have seen her ploy as victimizing Gwennie all over again. It wasn't lost on him that at the very same moment, Wendy had sat in the car, traumatized and guilty, feeling that she had let mother and sister down, alike. "I guess so-as things turned out."

John Leppman, however, was having no more of it. Mirroring the apparent family tradition of impulsive rashness, he suddenly stirred from his torpor, pushed himself up from his chair, and launched onto his wife, flailing with both fists and knocking them both onto the floor in a struggling heap.

Gunther pushed backward in surprise, smacking against the wall behind him, and scrambled to his feet, trying to circle his desk to intervene.

Almost predictably, the gun went off as he was halfway there. There was a startled cry from Leppman, and he rolled off his wife, clutching his left upper arm, just as Joe arrived over them both.

Sandy Gartner, her eyes wide, focused suddenly on Joe and brought her gun to bear on him next. He struck out with his right foot and caught her straight on the wrist, sending the pistol skittering across the floor.

With a yelp of pain, she curled into a ball, striking a curious counterpoint to her husband, who was doing much the same thing a few feet away.

His adrenaline pumping and his own gun out by now, Joe stared at them both for a few moments, wondering what might happen next, even glancing at the door once to see if their one remaining daughter might not be standing there with a shotgun.

But all was finally at rest.

"Jesus" was all he could summon up in the end, reaching for the phone. "What a bunch."

JMAN: hey Mandi144 u out ther? hey Mandi144 u out ther?LoneleeG: don't no Mandi, but im here don't no Mandi, but im hereJMAN: kool. ASL kool. ASLLoneleeG: 15/f/Burlington 15/f/BurlingtonJMAN: Vermont? Wurks 4 me Vermont? Wurks 4 me

Chapter 27.

Joe switched off the table saw and examined the edge of the board he'd just pushed through the blade.

"No blood?" a voice asked from behind him. "I would've thought by now you'd be missing a thumb at least."

Joe put the board down and dusted his abdomen free of sawdust. "Hey, w.i.l.l.y. Slumming in the neighborhood?"

Kunkle shrugged, looking around the small barn that his boss had converted into a woodworking shop attached to his house. "Something like that."

"You stand a cup of coffee?" Joe asked. "I made it an hour ago, and I'm having some anyhow."

"Sure," w.i.l.l.y answered, pointing at the table saw with his chin. "What're you making?"

Joe laughed, removing the thick ap.r.o.n he wore. "If I'm lucky, an end table for Lyn's daughter, Coryn. Her apartment is supposedly like a sixties college museum of stacked bricks and orange crates."

They left the shop for the living room next door and the kitchen beyond. Joe lived in what might have been a gatehouse had it not been stuck onto the back of a Victorian monstrosity fronting the street. In any case, it was also inexplicably and oddly proportioned, so that anyone taller than five and a half feet looked shoehorned into the place.

"You two still tight?" w.i.l.l.y asked.

"With Lyn?" Joe responded, taking out a mug. "So far, so good. I take it you're asking because Sam just threw you out."

"f.u.c.k you," w.i.l.l.y said without emphasis. He watched Joe pour out the coffee in silence. Only after he accepted the mug did he add, "We just had a fight. I left. She wanted to talk-as usual."

Joe poured his own mug and sat on a stool near the counter. "You do talk sometimes, though, right?"

w.i.l.l.y took a sip and answered, "Yeah, Mom. We talk. I wasn't in the mood this time."

"It's tough," Joe commented vaguely, knowing his audience. "The price we have to pay for companions.h.i.+p. Still worth it to you?"

w.i.l.l.y stared a moment into the depths of the mug. "I guess."

A thumbs-up, given the man, Joe thought.

"How's your brother doin'?" w.i.l.l.y asked, changing the subject.

"Close to good as new. Using a cane only, driving on his own. He's even back at work half days."

"That was a weird deal."

"You mean Dan Griffis going after him?" Joe asked. "Yeah. I never thanked you properly for doing what you did, by the way, getting close to E. T. In the long run, that probably saved all our bacon the night Dan came hunting for me and mine."

w.i.l.l.y nodded. "No sweat. Got me to hang out in a bar again. I always liked bars, even if what they had in them didn't like me."

Or liked him too much, Joe thought.

"E. T. was a good enough guy, though," w.i.l.l.y continued unexpectedly. "A f.u.c.ked-up dad, maybe, but okay in the end. Did you ever get together with him after?"

Joe shook his head. "The night he called, I could tell it was about all he had left in him. The local scuttleb.u.t.t has it he hasn't left his house since-not to see Dan in jail, not to run the business, not even to have a drink. From what I hear, the lawyers are gathering to figure out all his businesses."

w.i.l.l.y laughed. "Any lawyers left over after the Leppman-Gartner clan got through hiring?"

"Good point," Joe agreed.

w.i.l.l.y put his coffee down and gazed at his host. Joe had rarely seen him in such a contemplative mood. "This family s.h.i.+t is so weird."

Joe smiled at him. "How so?"

"I don't know. Getting ticked off at Sam tonight and driving around, I got to thinking. Seems like all we do is p.i.s.s and moan about breaking up or sticking together, and when we're not doing that, it's family, family, family. I mean, what do you get out of that whole deal with Gartner using the death of one daughter to screw up the other? Or E. T., for that matter? He puts Andy in jail to spare Dan and then has to drop the dime on Dan because the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's about to kill a cop and his entire family. How messed up is that? How wrong can you get it?"

Joe absorbed all this, knowing that an answer wasn't requested. But it did make him think of Lyn and her family, half destroyed by the sea; of his own mother and brother, almost lost through capricious malice; and of how fragile and tenuous even the best of bonds could become, through no fault of one's own.

None of which considered the other, more willful human dynamics that w.i.l.l.y was talking about: divorce and abandonment, revenge and paranoia, murder and mayhem.

"How bad is it with you and Sam?" he asked.

w.i.l.l.y made a dismissive face. "Just a p.i.s.sing match. No big deal."

Joe nodded and gazed out the darkened window for a while in silence. "I guess we just do the best we can," he finally said, "and keep our fingers crossed."

w.i.l.l.y took a final sip, put his mug down, and slipped off his stool. "Okay, Obi-Wan. I'll go home now. Thanks for the java, if not the bulls.h.i.+t."

Joe nodded. "Take care, w.i.l.l.y. I'll see you tomorrow."

Other books by Archer Mayor

THE SECOND MOUSE.

ST. ALBANS FIRE.

THE SURROGATE THIEF.

GATEKEEPER.

THE SNIPER'S WIFE TUCKER PEAK.

THE MARBLE MASK.

OCCAM'S RAZOR THE DISPOSABLE MAN.