Parrish made a gurgling noise.
“You remember it that well?” I asked.
“Sure. It wasn’t that long.” She recited it almost word for word.
“Amazing. You know, it never ran in the Express.”
“No?”
“No. That’s why I was so surprised when Nick here quoted some of it to me last night. How could he have known what was in that column, if he never saw it?”
Gillian finally looked away from Parrish. “It must have been someone else — that lawyer they were looking for—”
I shook my head. “You, Gillian. You.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said quickly. “Why would I have anything to do with Nick Parrish?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. But then again, maybe I do. Maybe I should have listened to what Jason said about that, too. That you’re cold. That you genuinely hated your mother.”
She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. The look in her eyes was one of pure malice. “Nicholas Parrish said this, Jason said that. You say you never showed that article to anyone else, but I don’t believe you.”
“They’ve searched the garage beneath your apartment, Gillian. Frank got a warrant. The dogs were there while you were at work this morning. Even before they went inside, Bingle and Bool and a bloodhound named Beau were alerting to the presence of remains.”
She went back to looking afraid.
“They were right, of course,” I said. “There were remains there. Pieces that match up with the femurs of the woman from Oregon.”
“Femurs?”
“Leg bones.”
“You mean Nicholas Parrish had the nerve to use my own garage—”
“You won’t be able to bluster your way out of this,” I said. “They found your toolbox.”
“What toolbox?”
“The one the dogs refused to bother with when commanded to search for Nicholas Parrish’s scent. You were at the SAR training sessions, so you know how this works. Two bloodhounds were given one of Nicky’s dirty socks, then asked to find him. They alerted all over your garage, even up in your apartment. But they weren’t interested in the toolbox. The one that has the helicopter drain plugs in it — the plugs with your fingerprints all over them.”
She started crying.
“If I thought those tears were for anyone other than yourself, I might be moved by them. Your own mother, Gillian!”
“You don’t understand!” she said.
“God knows I want to!” I said. “You’ve got a reason? Just let me know it.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“My own father never believed me, why should you?”
I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding.
“Your father,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “doesn’t like unpleasantness, does he?”
“Unpleasantness?” she mocked. “No, he doesn’t like to know about anything that’s unpleasant. And my mother controlled him. She tried to control everyone. Jason, my dad — but not me — you understand? Not me! She tried — and tried — and tried — but I won! I did.”
“How did she try?”
“How do you think?” she sneered.
I didn’t answer.
“You think this is the first time I’ve been in this place?” she asked. “You should ask my dad about how ‘accident prone’ I was before Jason was born.”
“But I thought hospitals—”
She gave me a pitying look. “Maybe it was all the time my mother spent chairing the Las Piernas General Hospital Auxiliary — you think? We didn’t come to St. Anne’s very often, but I knew what a nun was before I was five, and we sure as shit weren’t Catholics.”
“So you weren’t always treated by the same doctor?”
Her lips curved into a cold smile. “You’d be surprised how far we had to drive sometimes to get to a hospital.”
“Jason didn’t know about it?”
“I’m not really close to my little brother, you know? I mean, we didn’t have the same childhood — get it? He wasn’t around for the scaldings, the fall down the stairs, things like that. I don’t remember all of it. I was little. After Jason came along, she learned to work it so that I didn’t have to see doctors — didn’t leave marks. He just heard what she said — ‘Gillian’s bad. Gillian disobeys. Gillian’s out of control.’ Out of her control, all right.”
“If you were—”
“If. You see? Why believe me, right?”
“I was going to say, if you were a friend of David’s—”
“I wasn’t, all right? I just wanted to learn about the dogs. What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry to say. So your father never saw her mistreat you?” I asked.
“Oh no. She was careful about that.”
“And he wouldn’t believe you?”
“No.” She smiled again. “He said he didn’t.”
“Mmmmaah,” came a sound from the bed.
“Nick Parrish believed you, didn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded, looking over at him again. “Same thing happened in his house when he was a kid. Except his old lady went after him, left his little sister alone.”
“So you went down to Mr. Parrish’s house and told him what was happening?”
She shook her head.
“No?”
“No. I really didn’t know him then. It wasn’t until later, when I saw him watching the house. He remembered my mother, because she looked like his mom, but she was too young. He came back to see her when she was a little older.”
“Mmmmaah!” he said.
“He was so good to me. And he had such . . . such power! He understood me. I knew it from the first time I saw him watching the house — before that night Jason told you about. I saw him. I was the only one who had ever been smart enough to see him before he knew he was being watched. No one had ever been able to sneak up on him. He was impressed.”
“Mmmaaah,” he said again.
“He was ready to make his move to fame. I helped him. It was exciting.”
All day, in my thoughts of her, I had tried to see her as she was, not the way I wanted her to be. Not to see her as the victim she had been in my mind for so many years, but as the killer’s helper. “How could she lend her aid to him?” I had asked myself again and again, thinking of Parrish’s victims, their grieving families and friends — not just her own mother, but her younger brother among them. That she had been abused might explain her anger toward Julia and a great deal more, but with that one phrase, “it was exciting,” she once again became alien to me. Whatever pity I felt for the child she had been, the young woman was someone I could not begin to truly understand.
I stepped back from her.
“How did you help him?” I asked.
“I told him where she was going that afternoon.”
“And you were there when he killed her?”
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t let me watch that one. But he showed me photos, later, after he saw that I was worthy.”
“Worthy?” She didn’t seem to hear or care about my revulsion.
“He’s never had another disciple,” she said proudly. “I’m the first. I told him I would make sure the world would know about him.”
“With my unwitting help,” I said bitterly.
“He made the plans, of course, but who would have known about him without me? I was the one who kept everyone afraid, who made them want to go to the mountains.”
“So that we could see the trophies of his kills.”
“You never would have known about him if we hadn’t planned for you to write about my mother’s death, would you?”
“Maybe not,” I said, suddenly tired.
“That’s why he buried her in her own place. I’ve seen it.”
“What on earth would attract you to someone like him? Knowing what he was capable of doing—”
“Exactly! I knew what he was capable of. I could see his power. Even now — can’t you see? He will get stronger. He’ll be back. That’s what he’s trying to tell me. That I’m his moth, that the flame still burns.”